Military Expenditure,Endogeneity and Economic Growth

Abstract

While not always a concern for the general economic growth literature, the debate over the effects of military spending on growth continues to develop, with no consensus, but a deepening understanding of the limitations of previous work. One important issue that has not been adequately dealt with is the endogeneity of military spending in the growth equation, mainly because of the difficulty of finding any variables that would make adequate instruments. This paper considers this issue, using an endogenous growth model estimated on a large sample of 109 non-high-income countries for the period 1998–2012. The empirical analysis is framed within an instrumental variable setting that exploits the increase in military spending that occurs when unrest in a country escalates to turmoil. The estimation results show that endogeneity arising from reverse causality is a crucial issue, with the instrumental variable estimates providing a larger significant negative effect of military spending on growth than OLS would. This result is found to be robust to different sources of heterogeneity and different time periods.     

Capturing Contemporary Innovation: Studying IDF Innovation against Hamas and Hizballah

The question of what enables some militaries to innovate effectively is of great interest to both scholars and commanders. However, the traditional models of military innovation fail to capture the complex innovation process. This study develops a new analytical framework that examines the pressures on and incentives for military innovation in the international, civil/military, organizational, and cultural planes and uses it to evaluate Israel Defense Forces (IDF) innovation between 2000 and 2009. Based on interviews with Israeli commanders and extensive research in Israel, this work finds that the IDF struggled to innovate before the 2006 war against Hizballah, but innovated effectively after the conflict once military and civilian leaders understood threats similarly. New models are needed to analyze the contemporary multi-dimensional innovative process.     

基于订阅分发机制的军事信息系统知识库协同框架探讨

针对分布在不同军工领域的小型知识库无法发挥跨领域知识按需共享的问题,提出了一种基于订阅/分发机制的分布式知识库协同框架,描述了知识库协同框架的系统结构以及主要的功能组成,通过知识库实例分析说明,阐明了协同框架进行数据交换共享的运行机制。     

军事工程技术院校争取基金项目的实践与思考

本文阐述了军校开展基金项目研究的重要性,论证了军校申报科学基金项目的可行性,探讨了获取基金项目立项工作的基础和有效途径,并针对军校特点,提出了加强基金申报工作的切实可行的措施和策略。     

基于生命周期理论的军事环境安全策略

探讨了军事环境安全概念,并运用生命周期理论对国家军事环境安全的保障措施和宏观策略进行了初步研讨。军事活动一般可分为计划规划、具体实施和事后评价3个阶段。为了在新形势下更加经济、高效地保障国家军事环境安全,首先要加大军事活动环境影响评价力度、采用对环境破坏小的战法并在军购中推行环境准入制,即尽量从源头上控制重大环境问题出现。考虑到战争的特殊性,需要在战前预先储备必要的生态环境修复技术。     

Mission Command in the Information Age: A Normal Accidents Perspective on Networked Military Operations

Theory on the use of information technology in military operations assumes that bringing together units in an information network helps units to work together. Decentralized command systems such as mission command have been proposed for these networks, so that units can adapt to changes in their turbulent working environments. Others have proposed centralized command systems that permit higher organizational levels to closely direct military operations. This article uses Perrow’s (1984, 1999) Normal Accidents Theory to propose that increasing interdependencies between units in information networks places incompatible demands on the design of networked military operations. It is concluded that networked military operations require decentralized command approaches, but only under the condition that interdependencies between modules of networked units are weak rather than tight. This precondition is essential for retaining control over networked military operations.     

War’s Horizon: Soldier-Led Adaptation in Iraq and Vietnam

Wartime adaptation is a process of adjustment from the war you planned for to the one you have. This process of adjustment is done, in part, by the practitioners of war in the theater of conflict–soldier-led adaptation. Drawing upon two case studies of gun truck development in Iraq and Vietnam I argue that soldiers created networks in order to adapt to battlefield challenges and that the pattern of those networks carries implications for the likelihood of formal adoption by the organization. Simply put, the pattern of the flow of ideas, resources, and skills across the battlefield may affect the likelihood of bottom-up adaptation.     

Visual-simulation region proposal and generative adversarial network based ground military target recognition

Ground military target recognition plays a crucial role in unmanned equipment and grasping the battlefield dynamics for military applications, but is disturbed by low-resolution and noisy-representation. In this paper, a recognition method, involving a novel visual attention mechanism-based Gabor region proposal sub-network (Gabor RPN) and improved refinement generative adversarial sub-network (GAN), is proposed. Novel central–peripheral rivalry 3D color Gabor filters are proposed to simulate retinal structures and taken as feature extraction convolutional kernels in low-level layer to improve the recognition accuracy and framework training efficiency in Gabor RPN. Improved refinement GAN is used to solve the problem of blurry target classification, involving a generator to directly generate large high-resolution images from small blurry ones and a discriminator to distinguish not only real images vs. fake images but also the class of targets. A special recognition dataset for ground military target, named Ground Military Target Dataset (GMTD), is constructed. Experiments performed on the GMTD dataset effectively demonstrate that our method can achieve better energy-saving and recognition results when low-resolution and noisy-representation targets are involved, thus ensuring this algorithm a good engineering application prospect.     

伊拉克战争对中东地区乃至世界军品贸易的影响

在分析了伊拉克战争对中东地区军品贸易影响的基础上,重点分析了其对世界军品贸易的深刻影响———加剧军备竞赛、刺激军工技术发展、引起军贸格局及产品结构发生变化、国际军控形势更加严峻。