Vicarious warfare: The counterproductive consequences of modern American military practice

This article examines contemporary modes of American warfare. It posits the concept of “vicarious warfare” as a means of capturing prominent patterns in warfighting approaches. Although rooted in long-standing traditions of military practice, vicarious warfare is sufficiently novel as to be identifiable as a distinct phenomenon. The precise manifestation or combination of vicarious methods vary according to the specific circumstances and political contexts prevailing in different theaters. However, America’s general preference is to fight its wars by delegating tasks to proxies and limiting exposure of its own military to danger. Where U.S. forces are employed directly, this takes place largely in the shadows. Such approaches have clear attractions, offer undoubted tactical advantages, and permit successive administrations to maintain a persistent tempo of operations that evades rigorous democratic scrutiny. Yet, prominent cases and numerous studies suggest that vicarious warfare has a high potential to generate counterproductive effects and significant strategic harm.     

大地靶场地面散射特性的测试方法

通过对大地靶场地面电磁环境特性的分析,依照大地靶场对武器系统工作状态的影响,提出了大地靶场地面散射特性的测试原理。同时对测量方法、测量系统等,也作了具体的分析论证,这对武器系统的研制、生产、试验等环节及地杂波特性的研究具有重要的意义。     

国外保障性试验与评价的做法与启示

保障性试验与评价是实现装备战备完好性目标、降低装备寿命周期费用和研制风险的重要而有效的决策手段.分别介绍了美、法、德、日等国家在保障性试验与评价方面的组织、结构、管理和实际做法,并得出几点启示,为我国开展保障性试验与评价提供了借鉴和参考.     

Should competing firms reveal their capacity?

In this article, we explore when firms have an incentive to hide (or reveal) their capacity information. We consider two firms that aim to maximize profits over time and face limited capacity. One or both of the firms have private information on their own capacity levels, and they update their beliefs about their rival's capacity based on their observation of the other firm's output. We focus on credible revelation mechanisms—a firm may signal its capacity through overproduction, compared to its myopic production levels. We characterize conditions when high‐capacity firms may have the incentive and capability to signal their capacity levels by overproduction. We show that prior beliefs about capacity play a crucial, and surprisingly complex, role on whether the firm would prefer to reveal its capacity or not. A surprising result is that, despite the fact that it may be best for the high‐capacity firm to overproduce to reveal its capacity when capacity information is private, it may end up with more profits than if all capacity information were public knowledge in the first place. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2013     

履带车辆下长坡液力辅助制动控制策略仿真研究

针对履带车辆下长坡制动过程中不同制动力的分配关系,在液力减速器和整车下坡动力学分析的基础上,研究了基于液力辅助制动的履带车辆下长坡制动控制策略,建立了基于SIMULINK的履带车辆整车动态仿真模型,对液力减速器的持续制动性能和控制策略的有效性进行了仿真．结果表明,车辆下坡持续制动时,适时应用液力减速器,能够有效分流整车制动功率,明显降低机械制动器的工作负荷,满足整车安全恒速下坡的要求．     

装备保障抽组力量物资装载模型

对装备保障抽组力量的物资装载问题进行了数学描述,建立了以实现全部物资尽量分散装载为目标,以同类物资集中装载、车辆承载物资总体积不超过车辆有效容积、车辆承载物资总重量不超过车辆标记载重量、物资必须装载且不被重复装载等为主要约束的数学模型,并进行了求解.最后通过实例解算验证了模型的有效性.     

Efficient distributions of arms‐control inspection effort

A rule that constrains decision‐makers is enforced by an inspector who is supplied with a fixed level of inspection resources—inspection personnel, equipment, or time. How should the inspector distribute its inspection resources over several independent inspectees? What minimum level of resources is required to deter all violations? Optimal enforcement problems occur in many contexts; the motivating application for this study is the role of the International Atomic Energy Agency in support of the Treaty on the Non‐Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. Using game‐theoretic models, the resource level adequate for deterrence is characterized in a two‐inspectee problem with inspections that are imperfect in the sense that violations can be missed. Detection functions, or probabilities of detecting a violation, are assumed to be increasing in inspection resources, permitting optimal allocations over inspectees to be described both in general and in special cases. When detection functions are convex, inspection effort should be concentrated on one inspectee chosen at random, but when they are concave it should be spread deterministicly over the inspectees. Our analysis provides guidance for the design of arms‐control verification operations, and implies that a priori constraints on the distribution of inspection effort can result in significant inefficiencies. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2004.     

电传动履带车辆转向行驶控制策略仿真研究

以双侧电机独立驱动这一典型电传动方案为研究对象,针对转向行驶控制的难题,提出了基于功率-转速复合调节的转向行驶控制策略,对驾驶员操控信号进行了解析,基于Matlab软件和RecurDyn软件建立了电传动车辆的机电一体联合仿真模型,对车辆典型转向工况进行了仿真试验,验证了转向行驶控制策略的有效性。     

Reconciling strategic studies … with itself: a common framework for choosing among strategies

Three distinct, and seemingly irreconcilable, schools of thought are identified within the strategic studies literature. One which searches for “universal principles of war,” a second, “context-dependent,” approach that seeks to embed each instance of warfare within its concurrent social, political, technological milieu and, finally a “paradoxical logic” school, which equates strategy with the generation of uncertainty. The author offers some intuitive concepts from non-cooperative game theory to develop a “dominate-mix” approach to strategy choice. In doing so, he helps to reconcile these disparate approaches and provides a simple framework to assist researchers in framing military decisions as well as to assist planners in choosing among strategies.     

Interchange fee rate,merchant discount rate,and retail price in a credit card network: A game‐theoretic analysis

We consider two game‐theoretic settings to determine the optimal values of an issuer's interchange fee rate, an acquirer's merchant discount rate, and a merchant's retail price in a credit card network. In the first setting, we investigate a two‐stage game problem in which the issuer and the acquirer first negotiate the interchange fee rate, and the acquirer and the retailer then determine their merchant discount rate and retail price, respectively. In the second setting, motivated by the recent US bill “H.R. 2695,” we develop a three‐player cooperative game in which the issuer, the acquirer, and the merchant form a grand coalition and bargain over the interchange fee rate and the merchant discount rate. Following the cooperative game, the retailer makes its retail pricing decision. We derive both the Shapley value‐ and the nucleolus‐characterized, and globally‐optimal unique rates for the grand coalition. Comparing the two game settings, we find that the participation of the merchant in the negotiation process can result in the reduction of both rates. Moreover, the stability of the grand coalition in the cooperative game setting may require that the merchant should delegate the credit card business only to the issuer and the acquirer with sufficiently low operation costs. We also show that the grand coalition is more likely to be stable and the U.S. bill “H.R. 2695” is thus more effective, if the degree of division of labor in the credit card network is higher as the merchant, acquirer, and issuer are more specialized in the retailing, acquiring, and issuing operations, respectively. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2012