Perspectives for the development of key industrial capabilities for Canada’s defence sector

With the Canada First Defence Strategy, Canada has put forth a major opportunity to reconcile national security imperatives and industrial policy. The Jenkins Report (2013) set out to examine ways to use that procurement effort to foster key industrial capabilities (KICs) that would put the Canadian defence industry at an advantage both nationally and internationally. The Canadian defence industry should then develop highly focused capabilities with a view to moving up global value chains. As such, KICs that hold the best potential should be selected. They should be sustained through a range of strategies that are however contingent on the elimination of policy gaps. This leads to a balancing act between the need to control intellectual property assets versus accessing them in a world where national boundaries are eroded. Canada’s industry should target opportunities outside North America while continuing to focus on better integration with the North American industry.     

Sharing security in an era of international cooperation: unmanned aerial vehicles and the United States’ Air Force

The United States’ Air Force (USAF) has developed and used unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology to monitor and assassinate dangerous terrorists in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen. Currently, there are few countries that possess armed UAV and since the US created much of this technology, the USAF is usually part of the training that automatically accompanies the purchase of its UAVs. The research question this article attempts to answer is, “What is the extent of the United States’ Air Force assistance in the training and proliferation of UAV technology to foreign militaries?”     

How to Last Alone at the Top: US Strategic Planning for the Unipolar Era

This article investigates how key actors within the US defence policy community realigned their interests to forge a new consensus on the redirection of US defence strategy following the ‘peace shock’ they faced with the collapse of bipolarity. This consensus centred on the idea that achieving US security in the ‘age of uncertainty’ demanded overwhelming US military power, which was widely interpreted as necessitating military capabilities to fight multiple major theatre wars simultaneously against regional ‘Third World’ adversaries. This helped to preserve many of the principal pillars of US Cold War defence policy through deflecting calls for more radical organisational changes and deeper cuts to defence budgets.     

Optimal nonmyopic gambling strategy for the generalized Kelly criterion

We consider the optimal wagers to be made by a gambler who starts with a given initial wealth. The gambler faces a sequence of two-outcome games, i.e., “win” vs. “lose,” and wishes to maximize the expected value of his terminal utility. It has been shown by Kelly, Bellman, and others that if the terminal utility is of the form log x, where x is the terminal wealth, then the optimal policy is myopic, i.e., the optimal wager is always to bet a constant fraction of the wealth provided that the probability of winning exceeds the probability of losing. In this paper we provide a critique of the simple logarithmic assumption for the utility of terminal wealth and solve the problem with a more general utility function. We show that in the general case, the optimal policy is not myopic, and we provide analytic expressions for optimal wager decisions in terms of the problem parameters. We also provide conditions under which the optimal policy reduces to the simple myopic case. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 44: 639–654, 1997     

Prospect theory and foreign policy decision-making: Underexposed issues,advancements, and ways forward

How much mileage can we get out of prospect theory to explain foreign policy decision-making? To answer this question, we first argue that risk as outcome uncertainty is the appropriate definition in prospect-theoretical applications. Then, we indicate that probability weighting—a crucial component of prospect theory—is typically ignored in such applications. We argue why this is problematic and suggest how to move forward. Next, we discuss how to establish the reference point in the face of outcomes in multiple dimensions, as is typically the case in foreign policy decision-making. Finally, we discuss what we have learnt regarding prospect theory’s scope conditions and the differences across individuals in the theory’s applicability. Overall, our contribution lies in identifying several underexposed or neglected issues (e.g., the definition of risk and probability weighting), in examining the advancements regarding prospect theory’s scope conditions, and in discussing avenues for further research.     

Is human trafficking the dark side of economic freedom?

Economic freedom has increased living standards worldwide. Concurrent with such gains are rising concerns about potential human costs associated with free markets. This paper uses data on human trafficking and anti-trafficking policies, in conjunction with a measure of economic freedom, to examine whether free markets exacerbate or attenuate the incidence of human trafficking and policies designed to combat it. We do not find evidence suggesting that economic freedom is associated with human trafficking. In addition, our results suggest that economically free countries are more likely to enact and enforce policies to fight human trafficking.     

The Serbian defence institution: the need for clear policy guidance to improve the Serbian defence planning,management, and command processes

ABSTRACT

The uncritical layering of western liberal defence governance norms and concepts on top of existing legacy concepts has impeded achieving coherent military capabilities and capacities when Serbia’s political and military leadership tried to reform the defence system using Western benchmarking principles and Western countries’ best practices. The process of this change has been more valuable than its actual output, as defined by increased capabilities. Such outcomes should be reflective of policy guidance, and can be thought of as closing the trinity loop of a defence planning system: plans, money and execution. This article addresses two key functional areas of the Serbian defence institution. First, it assesses the current state of defence planning to discern its strengths and weaknesses to ascertain if plans are tied to financial decision-making. Second, a full examination of current Serbian defence management is conducted to discern whether weaknesses exist that distract from producing operational capabilities. Both areas are analyzed thoroughly and some solutions for change are proposed. Also, the article analyzes the appearance of two negative phenomena in the planning process – economization and managerialism.     

宽严相济刑事政策及其所折射出的中国刑事政策走向

宽严相济刑事政策是我国当前控制犯罪的基本刑事政策。在宽严相济政策的基础上,我国刑事政策将会进一步体现中国传统文化,更好地尊重与保护公民的基本人权,进一步影响刑事立法、司法活动,进一步体现刑事司法活动的预防、教育功能。     

谈奥巴马时代美国的联合国政策

奥巴马对联合国政策的调整,反映出奥巴马政府全球外交和安全战略的需要,体现了实用主义外交风格。较之于其前任,奥巴马将更加重视联合国维和行动,并让联合国更多地参与解决包括伊拉克和阿富汗在内的热点问题。奥巴马的联合国政策面临挑战,联合国仅仅是奥巴马实现美国国家利益的手段之一。     

Revenue maximization in two-station tandem queueing systems

We study optimal pricing for tandem queueing systems with finite buffers. The service provider dynamically quotes prices to incoming price sensitive customers to maximize the long-run average revenue. We present a Markov decision process model for the optimization problem. For systems with two stations, general-sized buffers, and two or more prices, we describe the structure of the optimal dynamic pricing policy and develop tailored policy iteration algorithms to find an optimal pricing policy. For systems with two stations but no intermediate buffer, we characterize conditions under which quoting either a high or a low price to all customers is optimal and provide an easy-to-implement algorithm to solve the problem. Numerical experiments are conducted to compare the developed algorithms with the regular policy iteration algorithm. The work also discusses possible extensions of the obtained results to both three-station systems and two-station systems with price and congestion sensitive customers using numerical analysis.