An Imperfect Jewel: Military Theory and the Military Profession

This article explores a perennial theme in the literature of strategic studies: the relationship between military theory and the military profession. It begins with a conceptual analysis of this relationship. It then investigates what military theorists themselves have had to say about the utility of their craft. It concludes by assessing the actual influence of military theory on selected individuals and institutions. The individuals are George S. Patton, Jr., and Ulysses S. Grant. The institutions are the United States Army and the United States Air Force in the late twentieth century. The fundamental finding is suggested in the title: military theory can indeed be quite useful in the maturation of military commanders and in the development of martial institutions, but it is not always necessary and by no means perfect. It should thus be studied assiduously but used with caution.     

Civil–Military Relations in India: The China Crisis and After

The pattern of civil–military interaction in India is informed by the notion that civilians should refrain from involvement in operational matters. The emergence of this trend can be traced back to the defeat against China in 1962. In its aftermath, the belief that the debacle occurred because of civilian interference took hold. Thereafter, politicians restricted themselves to giving overall directives, leaving operational matters to the military. The Indian ‘victory’ in the subsequent war with Pakistan was seen as vindicating this arrangement. This essay argues that the conventional reading of the China crisis is at best misleading and at worst erroneous. Further, it contends that the subsequent war with Pakistan actually underscores the problems of civilian non-involvement in operational issues. The historical narrative underpinning the norm of civilian abstention is at the very least dubious.     

Stranglehold: The Context,Conduct and Consequences of an American Naval Blockade of China

The mounting challenge posed by China's military modernization has highlighted the need for the United States to analyze its ability to execute a naval blockade. A blockade strategy is viable, but it would be limited to a narrow context: the United States would have to be engaged in a protracted conflict over vital interests, and it would need the support of key regional powers. The United States would also need to implement a mix between a close and distant blockade in order to avoid imperiling the conflict's strategic context. If enacted, a blockade could exact a ruinous cost on the Chinese economy and state.     

‘Getting COIN’ at the Tactical Level in Afghanistan: Reassessing Counter-Insurgency Adaptation in the British Army

This article reassesses the extent to which the British Army has been able to adapt to the counter-insurgency campaign in Helmand Province, Afghanistan. While adopting Farrell's definition of bottom-up military adaptation, this article contends that the task force/brigade level of analysis adopted by Farrell and Farrell and Gordon has led them to overstate the degree to which innovation arising from processes of bottom-up adaptation has actually ensued. Drawing on lower level tactical unit interviews and other data, this article demonstrates how units have been unable or unwilling to execute non-kinetic population-centric operations due to their lack of understanding of the principles of counter-insurgency warfare.     

Visual-attention gabor filter based online multi-armored target tracking

The multi-armored target tracking (MATT) plays a crucial role in coordinated tracking and strike. The occlusion and insertion among targets and target scale variation is the key problems in MATT. Most state-of-the-art multi-object tracking (MOT) works adopt the tracking-by-detection strategy, which rely on compute-intensive sliding window or anchoring scheme in detection module and neglect the target scale variation in tracking module. In this work, we proposed a more efficient and effective spatial-temporal attention scheme to track multi-armored target in the ground battlefield. By simulating the structure of the retina, a novel visual-attention Gabor filter branch is proposed to enhance detection. By introducing temporal information, some online learned target-specific Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are adopted to address occlusion. More importantly, we built a MOT dataset for armored targets, called Armored Target Tracking dataset (ATTD), based on which several comparable experiments with state-of-the-art methods are conducted. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves outstanding tracking performance and meets the actual application requirements.     

气象卫星的军事应用

为了研究全球气象卫星在军事领域的应用情况,通过对相关国家气象卫星的种类以及军事应用的特点、简要发展史、现状,以及在现代战争中的应用等情况进行了阐述,并重点介绍了气象卫星在伊拉克战争中的应用,结果表明气象卫星作为信息化军队的重要资源之一,对国防建设,尤其是对现代高技术条件下的局部战争具有深远的影响。     

想定驱动的仿真资源发现方法

为解决在云间共享架构的仿真环境下资源的自动发现问题,研究了仿真资源请求的描述方法及相应的资源发现算法,提出了想定驱动的仿真资源发现方法.方法通过扩展的军事想定描述语言表示仿真资源请求,使用双映射三过滤算法实现仿真资源的自动发现.分析表明,仿真想定驱动的资源发现方法可以实现在云间共享架构下仿真运行所需的大量资源的自动发现,并对发现结果具有语用校验功能,对于仿真环境的快速部署具有积极意义.     

美军武装直升机电子战设备的现状与发展趋势

介绍了武装直升机在现代战场上面临的种种威胁,重点介绍了美军武装直升机目前装备的电子战设备和尚处于研制中的新一代综合性电子战设备,分析了美军武装直升机电子战设备的发展趋势。     

地空导弹与弹道导弹的技术融合正在促使这两类导弹产生突破性的发展

地空导弹采用弹道导弹的抛物弹道技术 ,能够实现应用固体推进剂达到低质量远射程的目标。弹道导弹采用地空导弹末段弹道的寻的制导控制技术 ,可以达到降速、增程并实现末段有效制导控制和弹道机动的目标 ,从而大幅度提高命中精度和突防概率。地空导弹和弹道导弹之间的技术融合 ,已经开始并将很快形成这两类导弹的新一轮突破性的发展     

The demand for military expenditure in authoritarian regimes

This paper examines whether there are systematic differences in military spending between different types of autocratic regimes. We view military expenditure as an instrument a dictator can exploit in order to stay in power. How he utilises this instrument depends on the institutional set-up of his regime. We distinguish between military regimes, single party states and personalist regimes, and predict that military regimes should have the highest, whereas personalist dictatorships should have the lowest level of military spending. Using panel data on 64 dictatorships from 1960 to 2000, we find empirical evidence that our hypotheses are not rejected.