The Hungarian experience with Gripen fighter aircraft

The post-communist countries transition from the Warsaw Pact style of platforms and systems to Western-compatible capabilities has never been an easy task or a process without conflicts. This was no different for the Visegrád countries either, in which case the Hungarian Gripen procurement stands out. After much debate, Budapest decided to modernize its fighter fleet with the not battle tested Swedish-made Gripen fighter aircraft. This decision received several critiques due to the lack of transparency in the selection process and the initial lack of NATO-required systems. Subsequently, the fleet has had to operate in a financially demanding environment. Moreover, the air force has lost two aircrafts in accidents. Now that the jets are in the middle of their envisaged life cycle, it is more than appropriate to answer the question if the Gripens can utilize their full combat potential or will they fail the test of time?     

集团军跨域应急作战装备保障能力建设研究

加强应急作战装备保障能力建设,是提高战斗力的重要组成部分。本文针对新体制、新形势下的军队战争形态、使命任务和训练要求,分析了集团军跨域应急作战装备保障的主要特点和当前装备保障存在的不足,并在此基础上,从构建理论体系和装备保障平台、人才队伍建设,装备保障模式以及装备保障实战化训练五个方面给出了集团军跨域应急作战装备保障能力建设和应对措施。     

Improvise,adapt and fail to overcome? Capacity building,culture and exogenous change in Sierra Leone

Military capacity building (MCB) is as problematic as it is ubiquitous, with the British experience in Sierra Leone providing a rare example of ostensible success. This article critiques the dominant conceptualisation of MCB as purely a principal–agent (PA) problem, using military change scholarship to examine the impact of wartime British intervention on the Sierra Leonean armed forces. Here, indigenous military change was both externally driven and fundamentally adaptive in nature, allowing MCB to bypass some of the difficulties predicted by PA models. However, this adaptive approach nonetheless failed to reconcile Western military values with prevailing Sierra Leonean culture, complicating post-war stabilisation efforts.     

Spaghetti: systems thinking and the US Army

In the mid-2000s, the United States Army was embroiled in counterinsurgency missions in Iraq and Afghanistan that required deeper understanding of local social systems. The Army turned to systems thinking and design thinking to model and understand the world, define problems, and develop approaches to strategic and operational challenges. However, the Army’s approach as expressed in publications and doctrine encourages the development of complicated, unsupported, and unfalsifiable hypotheses. The risk is that the Army will act on incorrect assumptions and develop plans that are fragile.     

More military base closure? Considering the alternatives*

Despite multiple base closing rounds, the United States Department of Defense still has excess base capacity, and thus President Trump and high-level Defense Department officials are calling for more base closure through the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process. However, another BRAC may not be the optimal solution, because simple base closure is not an efficient way to reduce surplus base capacity. Thus, Defense Department officials should consider other methods to reduce surplus capacity, including reduction in base size, leasing excess base property, or transferring it to another government agency for a variety of alternative uses. The surplus capacity issue also offers an opportunity to DOD to reassess base utilization, to update base requirements with current and future force structure. While BRAC focuses on American military bases, the process and alternatives also have international applications.     

Implementing defence policy: a benchmark-“lite”

Most countries put significant amounts of time and effort in writing and issuing high-level policy documents. These are supposed to guide subsequent national defence efforts. But do they? And how do countries even try to ensure that they do? This paper reports on a benchmarking effort of how a few “best of breed” small- to medium-sized defence organisations (Australia, Canada, and New Zealand) deal with these issues. We find that most countries fail to link goals to resources and pay limited attention to specific and rigorous ex-ante or post-hoc evaluation, even when compared to their own national government-wide provisions. We do, however, observe a (modest) trend towards putting more specific goals and metrics in these documents that can be – and in a few rare cases were – tracked. The paper identifies 42 concrete policy “nuggets” – both “do’s and don’ts” – that should be of interest to most defence policy planning/analysis communities. It ends with two recommendations that are in line with recent broader (non-defence) scholarship on the policy formulation-policy implementation gap: to put more rigorous emphasis on implementation (especially on achieving desired policy effects), but to do so increasingly in more experiential (“design”) ways, rather than in industrial-age bureaucratic ones (“PPBS”-systems).     

Multi‐item capacitated lot‐sizing problems with setup times and pricing decisions

We study a multi‐item capacitated lot‐sizing problem with setup times and pricing (CLSTP) over a finite and discrete planning horizon. In this class of problems, the demand for each independent item in each time period is affected by pricing decisions. The corresponding demands are then satisfied through production in a single capacitated facility or from inventory, and the goal is to set prices and determine a production plan that maximizes total profit. In contrast with many traditional lot‐sizing problems with fixed demands, we cannot, without loss of generality, restrict ourselves to instances without initial inventories, which greatly complicates the analysis of the CLSTP. We develop two alternative Dantzig–Wolfe decomposition formulations of the problem, and propose to solve their relaxations using column generation and the overall problem using branch‐and‐price. The associated pricing problem is studied under both dynamic and static pricing strategies. Through a computational study, we analyze both the efficacy of our algorithms and the benefits of allowing item prices to vary over time. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2010     

地铁火灾应急预案的制定

介绍地铁火灾发生时的几个主要的特点以及其巨大的危害性,引出了地铁火灾应急预案制定模式的重要性。通过对已有的资料进行研究、分析,同时结合实际,对地铁火灾应急预案制定时所包含的主要内容进行了科学的完善,得出了一个完整的预案制定模式。     

Production planning with resources subject to congestion

A fundamental difficulty in developing effective production planning models has been accurately reflecting the nonlinear dependency between workload and lead times. We develop a mathematical programming model for production planning in multiproduct, single stage systems that captures the nonlinear dependency between workload and lead times. We then use outer linearization of this nonlinear model to obtain a linear programming formulation and extend it to multistage systems. Extensive computational experiments validate the approach and compare its results to conventional models that assume workload‐independent planning lead times. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2009     

无人机电子干扰条件下的路径规划

针对机载预警雷达结合地面雷达对低空突防无人机构成的严重威胁,提出一种基于A*算法的路径规划算法.该算法分析了电子干扰和无人机RCS对雷达探测空间的影响,建立了新的雷达探测空间模型和威胁模型进行路径规划,将A*算法应用于无人机的路径规划过程.在此基础上给出了应用该方法的具体步骤,并进行了MATLAB仿真.仿真结果表明:考虑电子干扰对雷达威胁区域影响的情况下规划的飞行路径飞行器能有效回避威胁,有效提高无人机的低空突防能力.