The market and the military profession: competition and change in the case of Sweden

The rise of private military and security companies (PMSCs) challenges our notion of military professionals. PMSCs bring new claims to professional status and legitimacy outside military institutions and represent an increasing diffusion of - and competition over - military and security expertise. In light of this development, understanding the formation of professional identities in military and private security organisations is as an important undertaking. This paper contributes to this endeavour by analysing professional self-images in the Swedish Armed Forces and how these relate to PMSCs. The study is based on data collected from official documents, semi-structured interviews and a small-scale survey among senior military officers. Focusing on military understandings of PMSCs and contractors, the analysis provides much-needed insight into relational aspects of professional identity formation outside the US context. Furthermore, it points to discrepancies in organisational and group levels in understandings of commercial security actors, and paves the way for future research.     

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.     

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).     

改革军事高科技培训质量评价办法的思考

文章通过梳理20年来开展军事高科技培训质量评价工作的情况,分析了取得的成绩和存在的不足,指出要将培训效果和课程体系的整体质量评价与具体课程的教学质量评价相结合,构建完善的评价体系。提出了改革军事高科技培训质量评价体系的基本原则,并结合培训工作的主要环节和特点,借鉴柯氏模型提出了一种军事高科技培训质量评价体系的主要结构。最后给出了构建质量评价体系和提高评价实效的有关思考。     

The military as a learning organisation: establishing the fundamentals of best-practice in lessons-learned

The post-Cold War era has witnessed the rapid expansion of organisational learning initiatives within NATO militaries, especially formal “lessons-learned” processes. The effectiveness of national lessons-learned processes in recalibrating military activity to the demands of ongoing operations has been highly-differentiated. However, the academic literature on military change and practitioner guidance has been slow to investigate the key features of best-practice in military learning. This article breaks new ground by drawing upon the literature on dynamic organisational capabilities to explore the fundamental organisational processes and activities which are necessary to implement successful lessons-learned. It examines, in particular, the organisational features which facilitate “knowledge transformation”: the effective combination of new knowledge gained from intra- and inter-organisational learning with existing organisational knowledge. The article concludes by highlighting several potential future empirical and theoretical research agendas in military learning and the importance of engagement between lessons-learned practitioners and organisational learning scholars.     

美军试验鉴定技术发展研究

众所周知,美军的装备试验鉴定技术一直处于世界领先地位,对其进行深入研究有利于试验鉴定的发展。本文主要对美军试验鉴定的管理部门、类型、发展历程以及技术领域进行详细研究,系统梳理美军试验鉴定的整个过程,在此基础上,结合我试验鉴定的发展现状,取其精华,去其糟粕,为试验鉴定的发展提出了几点思考和建议。     

The one‐warehouse multiretailer problem with an order‐up‐to level inventory policy

We consider a two‐level system in which a warehouse manages the inventories of multiple retailers. Each retailer employs an order‐up‐to level inventory policy over T periods and faces an external demand which is dynamic and known. A retailer's inventory should be raised to its maximum limit when replenished. The problem is to jointly decide on replenishment times and quantities of warehouse and retailers so as to minimize the total costs in the system. Unlike the case in the single level lot‐sizing problem, we cannot assume that the initial inventory will be zero without loss of generality. We propose a strong mixed integer program formulation for the problem with zero and nonzero initial inventories at the warehouse. The strong formulation for the zero initial inventory case has only T binary variables and represents the convex hull of the feasible region of the problem when there is only one retailer. Computational results with a state‐of‐the art solver reveal that our formulations are very effective in solving large‐size instances to optimality. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2010     

谈部队出租房的消防安全问题与治理对策

分析了目前部队出租房消防管理存在的问题,提出了要把部队出租房纳入审批范畴,加强源头控制;明确工作职责,建立协作监管机制;提高思想认识,重视消防安全管理;落实各级责任,部门齐抓共管;健全监管机制,加强督促检查;加强宣传教育,把握舆论导向;坚持依法管理,提升服务水平。     

刑法修正案（七）中军用标志犯罪立法完善研究

《刑法修正案（七）》对原刑法规定的侵犯军用标志的犯罪进行了修正,但其规定还存在一些立法疏漏和缺陷,有必要予以改进。《刑法修正案（七）》中的罪名应立法化,由立法机关确定;增设非法生产、伪造、变造、盗窃、抢劫、抢夺、破坏、侮辱武装部队专用标志的行为和伪造、变造、盗窃、非法提供、使用、非法出租、出借、赠送武装部队制式服装的行为;犯罪对象应包括制式服装的标志服饰、军服专用材料和军服仿制品;刑罚种类应增加剥夺政治权利;增加非法生产、买卖武装部队制式服装罪的情节加重犯的法定刑。     

我国军事权的宪法规制

在我国,军事权是国家权力体系中一项独立的权力,它是中央军事委员会及其所属各级军事机关依照宪法授权而享有的对武装力量进行统率和管理的一切支配力的总和。我国历史上出现过的十几部宪法或宪法性文件均对其作出了规定。现行的＂八二宪法＂更是对军事权的权力来源、权力主体、权力范围、权力结构、启动程序和行使结果进行了较为完善的规制。在这些宪法规制的框架下,我们寻求着军事权的＂增强＂与＂节制＂这对二律背反的精妙平衡。