Maritime interdiction in Sri Lanka's counterinsurgency

A comprehensive maritime interdiction strategy to attack the insurgent's logistic system was a key element in the defeat of the Tamil Tigers. The campaign of maritime interdiction required the Sri Lankan Navy (SLN) to attack LTTE arms smuggling, sea piracy, and maritime terrorism. The SLN degraded the insurgency's robust maritime logistical network while also devising tactics to engage the maritime insurgents who reacted with swarm and suicide boat tactics. The efforts of the SLN forced the Tamil Tigers to confront the government's final land offensives with diminished resources, thus collapsing a three decades’ old insurgency in a matter of months.     

Comprehensive approaches,diverse coherences: the different levels of policy coherence in the Dutch 3D approach in Afghanistan

Since 2000, international organisations such as the UN, NATO and the EU, but also countries, have started to apply what has been called the comprehensive approach to crisis management. This article unpacks this comprehensive approach implemented by the Dutch in Uruzgan province, Afghanistan. It first borrows and expands a conceptual framework developed by De Coning and Friis. Subsequently, it maps the different sorts of coherence in the mission by applying the framework. It shows how in practice there was not one single comprehensive approach, but many different forms of interaction between a number of organisational units. Each interaction had its own distinct issues and its own level of coherence. The level of coherence differed depending on the level at which the interaction took place – strategic at headquarters level versus operational at field level – and at what point in the mission it happened – in most cases it moved towards more cohesion.     

At war with social theory: Instrumental and communicative action in US military doctrine during the War on Terror

As US counterinsurgency campaigns draw to a close, doctrine for asymmetric warfare written during the War on Terror has come under heavy criticism. While many have argued that this shift to ‘winning hearts and minds’ is evidence that the United States is taking humanitarianism and nation-building seriously, others argue that a wide gap exists between US counterinsurgency doctrine and the protection of civilians afflicted by conflict. In this article, I show that the latter is true by comparing theories of instrumental and communicative action to US doctrine for operational design, stability operations, and counterinsurgency. I argue that these texts treat the people as an object to be manipulated for the achievement of pre-determined self-interested strategic goals rather than members of a community that jointly designs operations to fulfill shared objectives. However, US doctrine does contain communicative elements that, if prioritized, would better support humanitarian and state-building objectives otherwise subordinated in the War on Terror.     

Joint pricing,assortment, and inventory decisions for a retailer's product line

Consider a set of product variants that are differentiated by some secondary attributes such as flavor, color, or size. The retailer's problem is to jointly determine the set of variants to include in her product line (“assortment”), together with their prices and inventory levels, so as to maximize her expected profit. We model the consumer choice process using a multinomial logit choice model and consider a newsvendor type inventory setting. We derive the structure of the optimal assortment for some important special cases, including the case of horizontally differentiated items, and propose a dominance relationship for the general case that simplifies the search for an optimal assortment. We also discuss structural properties of the optimal prices. Finally, motivated by our analytical results, we propose a heuristic solution procedure, which is shown to be quite effective through a numerical study. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2007     

On valuing appreciating human assets in services

This paper derives optimal policies for when to hire, train, and lay off employees in service organizations when worker productivity appreciates deterministically or stochastically under constant, monotonic, and cyclic service demand. The model, an extension of the machine replacement problem from the engineering economy literature, uses infinite horizon linear programming to produce optimal personnel planning strategies and dual prices that characterize the workforce's economic value. The effect of employee attrition is also considered. In its valuation of human assets, unlike pure accounting approaches that only try to measure, this paper proposes an approach to capture the interaction between firm decisions pertaining to human resources and human resource value. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2007     

Impact of tax reduction policies on consumer purchase of new automobiles: An analytical investigation with real data‐based experiments

We investigate and compare the impact of the tax reduction policies implemented in the United States and China to stimulate consumer purchase of new automobiles and improve manufacturers' profits. The U.S. policy provides each qualifying consumer with a federal income tax deduction on state and local sales and excise taxes paid on the purchase price (up to a cutoff level), whereas the Chinese policy reduces the vehicle sales tax rate for consumers. We observe that these policy designs are consistent with the tax management system and the economic environment in the respective country. We analytically determine the effects of the two tax reduction policies on the automobile sales and the manufacturer's and the retailer's profits. Numerical examples are then used to provide insights on the importance of certain factors that influence the effects of the two policies. Finally, a numerical experiment with sensitivity analysis based on real data is conducted to compare the merits and characteristics of the two policies under comparable conditions. We find that the U.S. policy is better than the Chinese policy in stimulating the sales of high‐end automobiles, whereas the Chinese policy is better than the U.S. policy in improving the sales of low‐end automobiles. The U.S. policy is slightly more effective in increasing the profitability of the automobile supply chain; but, in general, the Chinese policy is more cost effective. The methodology developed herein can be used to evaluate other tax reduction policies such as those related to the purchase of energy‐saving vehicles and to serve as a decision model to guide the choice of alternative tax reduction policies. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 61: 577–598, 2014     

Introduction: Exploring the jungle of terminology

When twentieth-century authors wrote about ‘partisan warfare’, they usually meant an insurgency or asymmetric military operations conducted against a superior force by small bands of ideologically driven irregular fighters. By contrast, originally (i.e. before the French Revolution) ‘partisan’ in French, English, and German referred only to the leader of a detachment of special forces (party, partie, Parthey, détachement) which the major European powers used to conduct special operations alongside their regular forces. Such special operations were the classic definition of ‘small war’ (petite guerre) in the late seventeenth and in the eighteenth centuries. The Spanish word ‘la guerrilla’, meaning nothing other than ‘small war’, only acquired an association with rebellion with the Spanish War of Independence against Napoleon. Even after this, however, armies throughout the world have continued to employ special forces. In the late nineteenth century, their operations have still been referred to as prosecuting ‘la guerrilla’ or ‘small war’, which existed side by side with, and was often mixed with, ‘people's war’ or popular uprisings against hated regimes.     

陆军信息对抗行动效果评估研究

信息对抗行动是陆军作战的重要行动之一,对陆军作战进程和结局影响重大。通过对信息进攻、信息防御和信息保障等主要内容的定性与定量分析,建立评估指标体系、评估数学模型,得出综合评估结果,为指挥员和指挥机关筹划后续行动提供可靠依据,使效果评估工作更加合理准确。     

对策理论的防空作战决策级融合模型

随着防空C3I系统的发展,防空作战决策的过程较以往更为自动化,用于生成各种作战辅助决策方案的计算机模型也具备随着作战环境改变所表现出一定的自适应调整的特征.影响防空作战决策结果正确性的因素众多,表现这些因素的信息有些是冲突的,为得到更为准确、有效的决策方案,各类冲突信息的处理成为防空作战的核心问题.构造了一种在冲突信息环境下基于对策理论的融合模型,以对策理论的相关算法实现了融合中心各类信息的交互决策.实践表明,这一融合模型能有效地解决防空作战决策中各类信息的综合处理问题,具有一定的实用价值.     

一体化联合作战装备保障训练内容体系创新研究

从剖析一体化联合作战的基本特点及其装备保障需求入手,阐明了装备保障训练内容体系设计的理论依据和基本原则;结合部队装备保障训练实际,提出了一种基于任务需求、围绕保障活动、面向一体化过程的设计方法,并运用此方法,构建了装备保障训练内容体系结构模型及框架,以期为装备保障训练转型提供理论借鉴。