基于模糊综合评价模型的武器研制技术风险分析

针对舰炮武器系统研制的技术特点和风险分布特征,提出了基于模糊综合评价模型的技术风险分析方法,并结合具体风险因素分析了舰炮武器系统研制技术风险评估的指标和准则。介绍了某型大口径舰炮系统的研制风险分析实例,给出了该舰炮系统研制技术风险的评估结果,验证了该方法的可靠性和有效性。     

Consumer drone evolutions: trends,spaces, temporalities,threats

ABSTRACT

While the drone has become synonymous with the War on Terror, the asymmetric iconography of the battlefield is shifting. Commercially available off-the-shelf (COTS) drones are increasingly prevalent features of global battlefields, employed by non-state actors in both visualising such spaces, and the directing and inflicting of harm. As such usage increases, so too do concerns around their evolving adoption, adaptation, and potential portability into homeland spheres. While cognizant of the range of positive drone applications, it is asserted that drones nonetheless remain simultaneously bound to an inverse potential for exploitation. In examining drone risk, this article approaches the consumer drone through a series of sites and spaces through which it is technically and socially constructed. Reflecting upon industry innovation, community-driven experimentation, and evolving airspace – it calls for greater attention to the drone’s malleability, arguing that understandings of COTS drones must remain attentive to both drone potential and potential drone threat.     

India’s nuclear counter-revolution: nuclear learning and the future of deterrence

ABSTRACT

The India–Pakistan near war of February–March 2019 highlights India’s ongoing evolution in strategic thought and practice since its emergence in 1998 as an overt nuclear-weapon possessor. These changes, involving an increasing willingness to engage in the intentional escalation of conflict with a nuclear-armed rival willing to be the first to use nuclear weapons, challenge certain academic assumptions about the behavior of nuclear-weapon states. In particular, they undermine the expectations of the nuclear-revolution theory—which anticipates nuclear and conventional restraint among nuclear-armed rivals through fear of mutual assured destruction—and the model of nuclear learning which underpins this theory, in which new nuclear-weapon states gradually absorb this restraint through policy-maker learning. This article explores how India’s learning pathway since 1998 has deviated from these expectations. India is instead pursuing its own “revolution,” in the direction of creating capabilities for flexible response and escalation dominance. It concludes by illuminating the similarities between Indian strategic behavior and contemporary practices of other nuclear-armed states, and suggests that New Delhi’s emerging de facto nuclear doctrine and posture is part of a broader empirical challenge to our current conceptions of the nuclear revolution and of nuclear learning.     

Remembering and forgetting Mirambo: Histories of war in modern Africa

ABSTRACT

While the study of organised violence is considered essential to understanding the history of the West, and accordingly imbued with various layers of meaning and remembrance, war is widely regarded as inimical to the modern nation in Africa and stable development more broadly. Using examples drawn from primarily from East Africa, this paper considers the ways in which warfare in the deeper (‘precolonial’) past has been framed and envisioned in recent decades, in particular by governments whose own roots lie in revolutionary armed struggle and who began life as guerrilla movements. While in some cases particular elements of the deeper past were indeed mobilised in pursuit of contemporary political goals, in many other scenarios histories of precolonial violence were beheld as problematic and unworthy of remembrance. This paper highlights the paradox and ambiguity which has attended the memory of key aspects of Africa’s deeper past.     

Defence industry in Iran – between needs and real capabilities

ABSTRACT

The paper’s goal is to analyses the potential of the Iranian defence industry, including both research-and-development and production capabilities. It is argued that, despite official statements about the great power and sophistication of the Iranian defence industry, in reality its capabilities are very limited and cannot meet the operational needs of the Iranian armed forces. At the same time, it is argued that many official releases, which are abundantly available in the Iranian press and often unthinkingly repeated by the Western media, do not present the real and value of military products, but are rather a tool for deception and propaganda.     

Memory,magic and militias: Cora Indian participation in Mexico’s wars,from the reforma to the revolution (1854-1920)

ABSTRACT

Mexico’s Cora Indians have played an outsized role in national history, thanks to their skilful use of guerrilla tactics and success in forging strategic alliances with outside forces in defence of their cultural, territorial and political autonomy. Cora participation in elite struggles between Liberals and Conservatives (1850–73), and subsequently in the Mexican Revolution (1910–20), helped to shape the way that both conflicts played out in Western Mexico. Such participation also allowed Cora communities to keep hold of traditional landholdings in the face of political and economic reform, while sowing the seeds for the foundation of the Mexican state of Nayarit.