Innovation Inhibitors in War: Overcoming Obstacles in the Pursuit of Military Effectiveness

What explains the pace at which militaries adopt new technology? We argue that the hierarchical structure and unique expertise requirements of military organizations combine to empower select individuals as ‘gatekeepers’ of innovation. These individuals acquire beliefs throughout their military careers regarding the nature and means of warfare that act to shape their attitudes towards new military innovations. By filtering, sidelining, and ignoring competing sources of advice and information, these officers actively inhibit the adoption of new, often advantageous, innovations. We develop this argument through the analysis of two cases: the delayed acquisition of breech-loading and repeating rifles by the Union Army during the American Civil War, and the failure of the US Army to adopt an adequate heavy-type tank in World War II.     

Military Maladaptation: Counterinsurgency and the Politics of Failure

Tactical learning is critical to battlefield success, especially in a counterinsurgency. This article tests the existing model of military adaption against a ‘most-likely’ case: the British Army’s counterinsurgency in the Southern Cameroons (1960–61). Despite meeting all preconditions thought to enable adaptation – decentralization, leadership turnover, supportive leadership, poor organizational memory, feedback loops, and a clear threat – the British still failed to adapt. Archival evidence suggests politicians subverted bottom-up adaptation, because winning came at too high a price in terms of Britain’s broader strategic imperatives. Our finding identifies an important gap in the extant adaptation literature: it ignores politics.     

Military Expenditures,Income Inequality,Welfare and Political Regimes: A Dynamic Panel Data Analysis

The goal of this paper is to investigate the relationship between type of welfare regimes and military expenditures. There is a sizeable empirical literature on the development of the welfare state and on the typology of the welfare regimes. There appear to be, however, no empirical studies that examine welfare regimes with special attention to military spending. This study aims at providing a comprehensive analysis on the topic by considering several different welfare regime typologies. To do so, we use dynamic panel data analysis for 37 countries for the period of 1988–2003 by considering a wide range of control variables such as inequality measures, number of terrorist events, and size of the armed forces. We also replicate the same analyses for the political regimes. Our findings, in line with the literature, show that there is a positive relationship between income inequality and share of military expenditures in the central government budget, and that the number of terrorist events is a significant factor that affects both the level of military expenditure and inequality. Also, the paper reveals a significant negative relationship between social democratic welfare regimes and military expenditures.     

Foreign aid fungibility and military spending: The case of North Cyprus

The present article examines if the foreign aid to North Cyprus is fungible and if it is in a long-run equilibrium relationship with military spending using the Autoregressive Distributed Lag bounds testing procedure from 1977 to 2007. The results suggest that neither tax revenues nor public expenditures are in a long-run equilibrium relationship with foreign aid. However, strong evidence emerges that defence expenditures are in a long-run equilibrium relationship with foreign aid, and that the latter seem to cause the former.     

军事通信领域上下文本体建模及不确定性推理

为支持军事通信业务的智能化,研究了军事通信业务上下文信息的表示和推理,提出了一种表示业务上下文信息的语法结构、语义以及上下文元信息的本体建模方法。并利用贝叶斯网络理论,提出了一种支持不确定性推理的业务上下文认知模型的构建方法,最后通过案例分析验证了模型和结论的合理性。     

Using Indigenous Forces in Counterinsurgency Operations: The French in Algeria, 1954–1962

While the importance of indigenous forces for successful counterinsurgency operations has long been recognized by great powers fighting local insurgencies, the factors that determine the performance of such forces have attracted relatively little scholarly attention. This paper aims to contribute to our understanding of those determinants through an examination of the role and performance of auxiliary indigenous units in French counterinsurgency operations during the Algerian War (1954–62). The findings presented here suggest some important lessons for those seeking to recruit and deploy effective indigenous forces in counterinsurgency operations.     

仿真教学优化《现代生物技术概论》课程教学模式的探讨

本文在分析现代生物技术课程特点和多媒体仿真教学及优点的基础上,阐述了利用仿真教学法在《现代生物技术概论》课程教学的优化模式,通过实践证明仿真软件在教学上具有实际应用价值。     

Country survey XVI the defence sector in the economy of a declining superpower: Soviet Union and Russia, 1965-2001

The Soviet Union was able to develop a large military-industrial complex and become the world's second superpower despite deficiencies in its centrally planned economy because defence was given high priority status and special planning, rationing and administrative mechanisms were used to attain national security objectives. However, in the period 1976-85 the effectiveness of priority protection diminished and defence institutions experienced more of the problems typical of the shortage economic system. The heavy defence burden also created growing difficulties for the civilian economy. The attempts by the Gorbachev government to reform the defence sector and improve defence-economic relationships during perestroika (1985-91) uniformly failed. For most of the transition period, the Russian military-industrial complex has been adversely affected by its low priority status, cuts in defence spending, instability of the hybrid politico-economic system, and negative growth of the economy. The armed forces and defence industry have been reduced in size and their outputs of military services and equipment have fallen to low levels. Nevertheless, the Russian armed forces still have over one million troops, significant stocks of sophisticated conventional weapons, and a large nuclear arsenal. The government of President Putin has raised the priority of the defence sector, increased real defence spending, and adopted ambitious plans to revive Russian military power. It is likely, though, that tight resource constraints will hamper efforts to reform the armed forces and to upgrade weapons. By 2010 Russia will be an important, but not dominant, military power in Eurasia.     

Research communication security in the 90s: A view from the UK

This paper develops a methodology for measuring the capital value of military assets in monetary terms. We distinguish between two military capital measures. One measure, called the value of military capital (services) summarizes the value of military defense assets during a particular year. A comparison of the capital‐services value of U.S. and Soviet tactical combat aircraft is provided for the period 1970–1984.

One feature of the capital‐services measure that makes it particularly interesting is that its size can be compared with such military expenditures as operating and support. While these latter expenditures reflect the readiness of a defense establishment, the relevant capital‐services measure reflects force structure and modernization.

A second measure, called the value of military capital (wealth), summarizes the military benefits obtained from defense assets over the remainder of their service lives. This measure depreciates the capital as it ages, and is useful for comparing military wealth with other types of wealth in the economy. We provide this measure for the U.S. military capital stock for 1925–1984.