‘Mowing the Grass’: Israel’sStrategy for Protracted Intractable Conflict

‘Mowing the Grass’, Israel’s strategy in the twenty-first century against hostile non-state groups, reflects the assumption that Israel finds itself in a protracted intractable conflict. The use of force in such a conflict is not intended to attain impossible political goals, but a strategy of attrition designed primarily to debilitate the enemy capabilities. Only after showing much restraint in its military responses does Israel act forcefully to destroy the capabilities of its foes, hoping that occasional large-scale operations also have a temporary deterrent effect in order to create periods of quiet along its borders. The Israeli approach is substantively different from the current Western strategic thinking on dealing with non-state military challenges.     

Building A New Luftwaffe: The United States Air Force and Bundeswehr Planning for Rearmament, 1950–60

Rearming Germany was a long and complicated process. It was especially difficult to create a new German air force. The army generals who dominated the Bundeswehr cadre did not even want an air force but rather a small arm air corps. Moreover, Adenauer's defense staff failed to adequately budget or plan for a new air force. As rearmament began, US Air Force leaders, working closely with the small Luftwaffe staff in West Germany's shadow Defense Ministry, basically took charge of the process to ensure that the Germans built a new Luftwaffe on the American model – a large, multipurpose force organized as an independent service and fully integrated into NATO. The first Bundesluftwaffe commanders allied themselves to the Americans, often in opposition to their army comrades, to overcome the political problems caused by Adenauer's poor defense planning and create a modern air force on American lines.     

基于混合智能算法的小型通信干扰装备分配优化

如何充分发挥小型通信干扰装备的作战效能是指挥员面临的棘手问题。本文将战术指标——干扰后的通信畅通区覆盖程度作为评估通信干扰装备分配优劣的指标,分别建立了单机和多部干扰时的通信干扰有效压制区和通信畅通区边界的计算模型,并给出了通信干扰有效压制区和通信畅通区面积的计算方法。构建了基于机会约束规划的空域频域通信干扰任务分配模型,并设计了混合蚁群算法和遗传算法的模型求解算法。最后进行了仿真实验,验证分析了模型和算法的合理性。研究成果为通信对抗战术计算和作战运用研究拓展了思路。     

Self-Defense Militias,Death Squads,and State Outsourcing of Violence in India and Turkey

What explains the variation in states’ nonstate partners in civil warfare? States often use nonstate actors to do what their regular military forces cannot do well – navigate the local population. Some of their nonstate partners are ordinary civilians, while others are battle-hardened fighters with a rebellious or criminal past. The choice of proxy carries serious implications for the patterns and effects of violence during civil war, human rights, and international security. This article is the first to disaggregate the nonstate counterinsurgents and offer an explanation for why and how states use each type. It brings together the politics of collaboration with the politics of exploitation. The article shows that the state’s use of nonstate proxies is shaped by the supply of willing collaborators, the state’s ability to exercise control over them, and the trade-offs underlying the use of the different types of nonstate actors. The empirical evidence used to support this argument comes from a novel, comparative study of Turkey’s counterinsurgency campaign against Kurdish separatists and India’s counterinsurgency against Kashmiri separatists. The original data were collected through fieldwork in the disputed territories of each country.     

Effects of material of metallic frame on the penetration resistances of ceramic-metal hybrid structures

The effects of metallic material on the penetration resistances of ceramic-metal hybrid structures against vertical long-rod tungsten projectiles were studied by artillery-launched experiments and numerical simulation. Hybrid structures with rectangular cores in transverse orthogonal arrangement and slide-fitting ceramic inserts of zirconia toughened alumina prisms were fabricated with titanium alloy TC4 (Ti6Al4V), AISI 4340 steel and 7075 aluminum alloy panels, respectively. The results showed that the hybrid structure of Ti6Al4V exhibited the highest penetration resistance, followed by that of 7075 aluminum alloy with the same area density. The penetration resistance of the hybrid structure of AISI 4340 steel was the lowest. The underlying mechanisms showed that the metallic material of a ceramic-metal hybrid structure can directly affect its energy absorption from the impact projectile, which further affects its penetration resistance. Different metallic frames exhibited different failure characteristics, resulting in different constraint conditions or support conditions for ceramic prisms. The high penetration resistance of the Ti6Al4V hybrid structure was due to its stronger back support to ceramic prisms as compared with that of AISI 4340 steel hybrid structure, and better constraint condition for ceramic prisms by metallic webs as compared with that of 7075 aluminum alloy hybrid structure. The results of mass efficiency and thickness efficiency showed that the Ti6Al4V hybrid structure has advantages in reducing both the thickness and the mass of protective structure. In addition, because the ceramic-metal hybrid structures in the present work were heterogeneous, impact position has slight influence on their penetration resistances.     

混合模糊逻辑方法及其在雷达/红外双模制导中的应用

混合模糊逻辑方法就是利用模糊规则和对象输入输出的观测数据来辨识一个模糊逻辑系统。该方法对模糊规则和观测数据进行了预处理,给出系统模型的初始结构和参数。将该方法用于处理雷达/红外双模制导中对目标的跟踪问题。仿真表明该方法是有效的。     

海上维权斗争舆论战对策思考

舆论战作为信息时代一种独立而重要的作战样式,是一种渗透力、攻击力、威慑力很强的特殊武器,是海上维权斗争行动的重要组成部分.文章对开展海上雏权斗争舆论战的紧迫性进行了分析,归纳总结了海上维权斗争舆论战的特点,探索了开展海上维权斗争舆论战的对策.     

An informal framework to aid the analysis and design of military posture

The design of military posture is an exercise in confronting potential enemies’ capabilities within the context of geographic, technological, temporal, political and economic constraints. No formal model is capable of encapsulating the essentials of so complex an environment for closed or simulated analysis, but it is useful to have an informal framework within which to reason interactively within these dimensions.

This paper presents such a scaffolding, patterned on the notion of a military posture as the output of an economic process whose structure reflects important determinants of the characteristics and extents of weaponry and expenditures that are appropriate to the environment within the feasibility set determined by the constraints. The analysis remains at an abstract level, but it does highlight the important shifts toward preparation for littoral warfare, greater reliance on reserve rather than active forces, and necessary changes in missions among military departments.     

Counterinsurgency or irregular warfare? Historiography and the study of ‘small wars’

This article argues that the history of irregular warfare provides a valuable analytical and critical perspective for the study of counterinsurgency campaigns and counterinsurgency doctrine. A focus on the history of irregular warfare highlights the close relationship between warfare in Europe and in the colonies. Moreover, it enables us to identify more exactly the intersection of multiple factors that lead to an escalation of violence in small wars. Finally, it also sheds light on the lack of strategic reflection on the use of irregular auxiliaries that is characteristic for many counterinsurgency campaigns.     

Shifting power,preventive logic,and the response of the target: Germany,Russia, and the First World War

If a declining state has incentives for preventive war, the rising state should have incentives to delay a confrontation until it is stronger. We develop the theoretical paradox and examine the July 1914 crisis. Why did Russia, rising relative to Germany, not adopt a buying-time strategy? We argue that although most Russian leaders hoped to avoid a confrontation, they feared that the failure to support Serbia would lead to a loss of Russian credibility and a significant setback to Russia’s position in the Balkans, one that could not easily be reversed, even with Russia’s expected increase in relative military power.