Insurgency and Violent Extremism in Pakistan

Pakistan has an uneven history of dealing with insurgencies and extremism. This article identifies the various campaigns and policies employed to defeat militants and deal with violent extremism. It describes the major anti-state groups and how Pakistan’s military and civilian leaders, relying on the related strategies of selectivity, gradualism and containment, have allowed militancy and terrorism to thrive. This article finds that while the elites and the public may have belatedly come to appreciate the existential internal threats these groups pose to the country, there are strong reasons to doubt the state’s full commitment to its promises to take meaningful action.     

Single‐commodity stochastic network design under demand and topological uncertainties with insufficient data

Stochastic network design is fundamental to transportation and logistic problems in practice, yet faces new modeling and computational challenges resulted from heterogeneous sources of uncertainties and their unknown distributions given limited data. In this article, we design arcs in a network to optimize the cost of single‐commodity flows under random demand and arc disruptions. We minimize the network design cost plus cost associated with network performance under uncertainty evaluated by two schemes. The first scheme restricts demand and arc capacities in budgeted uncertainty sets and minimizes the worst‐case cost of supply generation and network flows for any possible realizations. The second scheme generates a finite set of samples from statistical information (e.g., moments) of data and minimizes the expected cost of supplies and flows, for which we bound the worst‐case cost using budgeted uncertainty sets. We develop cutting‐plane algorithms for solving the mixed‐integer nonlinear programming reformulations of the problem under the two schemes. We compare the computational efficacy of different approaches and analyze the results by testing diverse instances of random and real‐world networks. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 64: 154–173, 2017     

“小机构”的“大智慧”——美国高能激光技术联合办公室

美国国防部在世纪伊始成立的高能激光技术联合办公室专职人员不到10人,却能高效调动创新体系中所有创新单元,长期保持战略先导地位。本文全面介绍联合办公室的使命职能、编制组成、运行方式、科研项目、代表性成果以及重要决策,旨在为技术创新和管理创新提供参考和借鉴。     

基于改进GM(1,1)模型的导弹贮存可靠性预测方法

针对导弹系统技术复杂、贮存样本量受限、测试数据波动性较大等特点,结合装备的具体情况提出了基于改进GM(1,1)模型的导弹贮存可靠性预测方法。该方法首先利用"对数-幂函数变换"对导弹的历史可靠性数据进行处理,提高数据光滑度,然后依据GM(1,1)模型计算得到可靠性预测值和残差,再利用残差建立残差修正模型,得到残差修正值,减少残差对结果的影响,最后利用残差修正值修正可靠性预测值并还原,求得可靠性最终预测值。实例表明,该改进模型对导弹系统可靠性变化的描述比传统模型更加准确有效,预测结果精度更高,为导弹贮存可靠性预测分析提供了一种有效的改进方法,其算法设计推广性强,可作为其他装备寿命预估的重要工具。     

基于改进ACO算法的多UAV协同航路规划

针对无人机(Unmanned Aerial Vehicle,UAV)在执行任务过程中遇到的诸如敌方防空火力、地形障碍及恶略天气等各类威胁源,采用威胁源概率分布的方法进行威胁的量化处理,构建任务空间的威胁概率密度分布图,有效消除了威胁源的差异性。根据UAV在任务飞行过程中的性能约束与时、空协同约束,同时考虑任务过程中UAV的损毁概率最小、任务航程最短,构建了相应的综合任务航路代价最优化目标函数。结合传统蚁群优化算法(Ant Colony Optimization,ACO)在解决此类问题中的不足,给出了相应的改进策略,提出采用协同多种群ACO进化策略来实现多UAV在满足时、空协同约束下的协同航路规划。通过相应的仿真计算表明,改进后的ACO协同多种群进化策略算法更适用于多UAV协同任务航路规划问题,具有一定的实用性。从而为多UAV协同任务航路规划问题的求解提供了科学的决策依据。     

MONEY IN SOUTHERN AFRICAN POLITICS

“Lack of money is the root of all evil”

George Bernard Shaw

In a environment where party financing, private funding in particular, is generally a laissez-faire business, as in most Southern African countries, there is the real risk that interest groups and wealthy individuals will buy influence in political parties and in so doing erode public confidence in the political system. Because they are neither open to public scrutiny nor subject to any legislative restraints, huge private donations can, and often do, come with strings attached. This lack of transparency and openness, as well as mechanisms to prevent it, provides ample ground for influence peddling, where those who pay the piper call the tune. Left unchecked, this party funding scenario will continue to be a serious indictment of the region's democratisation projects, crippling democracy and stunting economic development. This article consid     

The Long and Winding Road: The US Army Managerial Approach to Command and the Adoption of Mission Command (Auftragstaktik)

The purpose of the current paper is to examine the adoption and adaptation process of mission command (Auftragstaktik) in the US Army. This concept, developed by the Prussians, denotes a decentralized command approach wherein superiors dictate their intent and allow subordinates to formulate their operational plans independently and change it according to the emerging situation. The paper examines the US command approach prior to the adoption of mission command. It argues that it was heavily influenced by corporate management practices which inherently contradict mission command approach. It continues and investigates how the US Army endeavored to emulate the approach in its doctrine and in major operations.

While it has officially incorporated mission command into its doctrine, it has been less successful in utilizing it in operational situations. This state of affairs has to do with the cultural legacy of the managerial approach to command that still persist. Despite the partial success, the US Army has recently reaffirmed its commitment to this approach.     

Insights from a Database of Lashkar-e-Taiba and Hizb-ul-Mujahideen Militants

This article uses a novel database of 1,625 posthumously published biographies of members of two Islamist militant organizations (Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Hizb-ul-Mujahideen (HM)), all of whom were killed in the course of carrying out militant attacks. In general, each biography provides data on the militant’s birthplace, education, recruitment, and training. The number of observations in this database is a full order of magnitude larger than those of previous databases assembled from militant biographies. While the sample of militants in this database is the product of multiple selection effects, analysis of the database undermines many common myths about Pakistani militants and casts doubt on current policy approaches to mitigating Islamist militancy in Pakistan.     

三相逆变器新型积分控制加状态反馈控制

三相逆变器在实际运行中,不平衡负载工况较为常见,原因是传统积分控制加状态反馈控制无法实现三相输出电压的对称性。针对该问题提出了不平衡负载条件下三相逆变器新型积分控制加状态反馈控制策略,并通过仿真和实验验证了该策略能有效降低不平衡负载时三相逆变器输出电压的不平衡度,从而获得对称的三相输出电压波形。     

环管型燃烧室喷雾燃烧DES模拟

为研究燃气轮机燃烧室内复杂的两相三维湍流燃烧问题,采用基于Realizable k-ε模型的分离涡模拟(DES)方法对环管型燃烧室进行喷雾燃烧数值模拟.数值模拟结果表明:DES模拟在燃烧区发挥出大涡模拟(LES)的作用,能获取结构复杂的流场、温度场和涡量场,其对流场内涡结构的捕捉和分辨能力明显强于传统的RANS(雷诺时均N-S方法)模拟.与实验数据对比发现,DES模拟所得燃烧产物含量和燃烧室出口温度分布更符合.因此,DES方法可用于复杂形状燃烧室的燃烧数值模拟,能够避免RANS模型对湍流脉动进行平均处理导致耗散过大、抹平涡结构的缺点,从而可获取更准确的计算结果.