Themes in defence manpower economics and challenges for the future

Raising and maintaining military forces have posed enormous challenges for the United States and its allies. Economists have made significant contributions to understanding of how to recruit and manage such forces. This paper highlights key past contributions and discusses challenges for future research. Rapid changes in the roles and missions of military personnel, technology, and the civilian labor market pose serious challenges for future military manpower policy and will challenge economists to develop new approaches to military recruiting and personnel management. Yet the body of past research can continue to provide insight and guidance in making decisions about defense manpower.     

WARFARE IN A NEW DOMAIN: THE ETHICS OF MILITARY CYBER-OPERATIONS

While most normative evaluations of military cyber-operations have emerged from the legal community, this article assesses the legitimacy of such operations from a philosophical-ethical perspective. After reviewing the relationship between rights forfeiture and the jus ad bellum and jus in bello criteria of the just war tradition, it applies these criteria to several aspects of cyber-operations, including responses to cyber-activities, the use of cyber-capabilities affecting combatants and civilians, and the use of these capabilities by contractors. Finally, it briefly addresses the legitimacy of limiting rights to privacy and anonymity in service of preventing cyber-harm.     

脑机协调控制技术及其军事应用前景

脑机接口技术为人们提供了一种不依赖外周神经和肌肉系统的新的控制和通讯方式。文章以脑机接口技术为基础．以多关节机械臂为控制对象,设计并实现了将大脑直接控制与设备自动控制这两种方式在同一个控制系统中的有机结合,充分发挥人脑的智能与机器的性能,并对脑机协调控制技术的军事应用前景进行了讨论,旨在为通过生物交叉技术显著提升武器装备的使用效率提供参考。     

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。     

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.     

网络中心环境下的军事通信超网络结构模型

网络中心环境下的军事通信网络是一个多重边异构的人工功能网络。为了分析、设计和构建网络中心环境下的军事通信网络,通过扩展、综合Jeff的作战网络模型和Hans的网络兵力参考模型,提出了一种能够清晰描述网络节点功能和链路传输类型的军事通信超网络结构模型,给出了模型的数学描述,并说明基于它可将军事通信网络分解为多个具有军事特征的功能子网或专业通信网。最后通过分析某联合作战部队通信的超网络结构特征,验证了模型的有效性。