Mandated defence offsets: can they ever deliver?

Defence offsets are elements of defence procurement deals additional to the primary content. Offsets are usually expected to yield technological or industrial benefits to the purchasing country (e.g. countertrade, technology transfers, or additional jobs) and military buyers often require suppliers to make offsets available “cost-free.” The authors argued previously that such strategies achieve little of value to buyers that lack market power and are unnecessary otherwise, since purchasers with the market power to extract more value for money from foreign suppliers can do so anyway. This article also focuses on the supply side of offset deals. The USA is the world's largest defence offsets supplier but the US government opposes offsets demands as economically inefficient and trade distorting. Even if offsets are inefficient and trade distorting, they may still benefit a materiel-exporting country such as the USA as they may induce exports and create associated benefits for the offsets provider.     

On the nature and scope of defence economics

Defence economics uses the tools of economics to study the defence sector and its domestic and international implications. Simple models require careful application in defence economics, since indirect effects may have counterintuitive impacts. For example, while certain arms races can lead to the outbreak of war, others may have the counterintuitive effect of discouraging the outbreak of war owing to mutual deterrence.

The world is now multipolar rather than bipolar, analogous to an oligopoly situation. This multipolar world can be analyzed by a qualitative characteristic function, where the formation of a potential coalition allows study of the shift from conflict to cooperation in international relations. Some new issues to be considered in this framework include accidental nuclear war, potential arms races and conflicts in the third world, and the proliferation of chemical weapons and missiles.     

Building the next nuclear community

This viewpoint takes stock of the changes in the strategic nuclear landscape in recent decades and reflects on its consequences on the policy community. It finds that the number and scope of issues have expanded considerably; they have manifested themselves in many more regions of the world; and they have become deeply politicized and polarized. The consequences have been twofold: the nuclear policy field has seen the development of an increasingly diverse expert community composed of highly specialized functionalists and regionalists, and it has become ever more divided into two entirely separate ideological camps—one that believes in deterrence, the other in disarmament. The stove-piping of expertise and the widening gap between deterrence and disarmament ideologies are immensely problematic because, in different ways, they stand in the way of the emergence of a better and safer nuclear future. Looking ahead, it is critical to “bust the silos of expertise” and to build bridges between the deterrence and disarmament ideological camps. Only such a community-building effort will help solve today’s and tomorrow’s nuclear challenges.     

STRATEGY FOR A NEW NUCLEAR AGE

Current U.S. nuclear weapons strategy, force structure, and doctrine contribute to the threat of nuclear terrorism in several ways. First, the U.S. nuclear stockpile presents opportunities for nuclear terrorists to seize the materials they need. Second, U.S. nuclear forces remain a key justification for Russia's maintenance of similar nuclear forces that are less well protected. Third, America's continued embrace of nuclear weapons encourages and legitimizes other states to seek nuclear weapons that they will have difficulty securing from terrorists. The national security interests of the United States would be better served by a strategy to shrink the global footprint of nuclear weapons and provide the highest possible levels of security for the most minimal possible deterrent forces. Given the inability to secure nuclear weapons and materials perfectly or to eliminate terrorism in the foreseeable future, reducing the global inventory of nuclear weapons and materials is the most reliable way to reduce the chances of nuclear terrorism.     

A German High Tournament Saddle in the Royal Armouries,Leeds

The Royal Armouries of Leeds preserves a rare example of an early fifteenth-century German tournament high saddle that is also one of the earliest complete western medieval saddles preserved. It bears witness to an extreme form of tournament which stood very far from the real practice of war: the Hohenzeuggestech. Impact marks of lances and swords, visible on the saddle, reveal the violence of the blows exchanged during these meetings, a violence often hard to observe in the contemporary but conventional representations of jousters and tourneyers. Thus, by the means of its excellent state of preservation, the Leeds high saddle sheds some light on the jousts and tourneys on high saddles, once so popular and plentiful in what remains of the civilian iconography of the late fourteenth- and the fifteenth-century Germanic world.     

美国退出《中导条约》与俄美关系发展走向

2018年10月,美国宣布单方面退出《中导条约》。《中导条约》是美苏两国在冷战后期达成的,并得到了切实执行的条约,对于维护冷战后全球战略平衡发挥了至关重要的作用。冷战后,俄美曾经企图将《中导条约》多边化,构建俄美新型战略关系,但最终反目成仇,使得俄美关系严重倒退,并迈入新的相互战略遏制的时代。     

基于打击链的智能武器风险分析与控制方法研究

打击链是分析武器和系统等作战要素有效性的一种方法.针对当前智能武器概念缺乏一致定义的问题,本文提出了基于打击链作战方式的智能武器判定方法.针对智能武器认定困难引发的军控措施争论,分析了智能武器两方面的失控风险:人失去对自主武器的控制权与自主武器本身存在不可控因素和缺陷;以及智能武器的问责困境:如何在指挥者、编程者与智能...     

全气动步兵武器表层自动喷涂机设计

分析目前步兵武器零件表层喷涂技术现状,提出全气动自动喷涂机设计方案,根据步兵武器零件结构特点,规划自动喷涂轨迹,设计全气动自动化喷涂专用设备．该设备具有本质安全性,适于部队条件下使用．     

Brothers in arms,yet again? Twenty-first century Sino-Russian strategic collaboration in the realm of defence and security

2014–2015 were years of turmoil for strategic relations, with Sino-Russian relations emerging as a particularly interesting set of ties to observe. This article asks whether recurrent Sino-Russian exhortations of friendship are mirrored by their strategic alignment in the defence and security realm, half a century after the end of the Sino-Soviet pact during the communist era. We examine the arms trade between the two countries and with regional partners, but also the recent pattern of bilateral and multilateral military exercises, as a combined test of the security and defence relationship. We are able to show that the image of friendship that both Moscow and Beijing like to promote, while apparent at the UN Security Council and within the BRICS group, remains constrained by rivalry in high-tech segments of the arms industry and by lingering concerns about the prospects of peer interference in their shared regional vicinity.     

Evaluating state willingness to pursue space weapons

Many studies exist which evaluate the domain of space from a political perspective in order to advocate for a certain position regarding what states ought to do or not do in space. Few studies exist which address how states actually behave with regard to outer space. In an attempt to fill this gap in the literature, the present study evaluates the determinants of state space behavior. The results identify a blend of the realist pursuit of power and liberal normative restrains acting on state space behavior.