信息化条件下鱼雷相关战术技术能力研究

针对信息化海战的特点和对鱼雷的要求,提出了在信息化海战条件下鱼雷应该具备的一些战术和技术能力,如在网络体系中及时可靠获取信息的能力、更强的对抗能力、先进的导航定位能力、远程的水声通信能力等,并对鱼雷航程和航速之间的关系重新进行了分析,以期为新型鱼雷的研制和开发提供一定的参考。     

基于战法仿真综合集成研讨厅的专家行为研究

针对战法仿真实验的复杂性及其仿真可信度要求,结合基于战法仿真实验的综合集成研讨厅平台,分析了专家在战法仿真实验中的地位和作用,研究提出了仿真实验中专家的行为要求和规范,为基于战法仿真综合集成研讨厅的创新应用提供了理论和方法。经应用证明,该方法可以有效地提高战法仿真过程的透明度和仿真实验结果的可信度。具有很强的适应性和实用性。     

信息扩散模型的窗宽优化与鱼雷战术效能实验评估

针对海洋环境对鱼雷等武器装备战术效能影响的试验数据和案例样本匮乏等普遍性问题,引入信息扩和模糊映射思想,并基于遗传算法改进和发展了最优窗宽扩散模型。该方法可从有限的试验样本中客观拟合出数据结构信息,进而实现有限数据样本信息的合理扩散。利用该方法进行了基于小样本案例的潜射鱼雷战术效能的海洋环境影响评估的信息扩散建模和仿真实验和对比分析。结果表明,窗宽优化的信息扩散模型可有效改进常规信息扩散模型的评估效果,对武器装备环境影响评估中普遍存在的小样本或信息不完备困难有一定参考应用意义。     

What is Doctrine?

‘Doctrine’ has been part of military vernacular for at least a century. Nonetheless, it is a concept which is rather under-explored. The aim of this article is thus to break doctrine down into its component parts in order to grasp what a military doctrine actually is. Thereafter, the article points out different ways to utilise doctrine as a military devise. A doctrine cannot be, or rather should not be, all things to all men. On the contrary, doctrine can be a tool of command, tool of education or a tool of change. The main upshot of the article is that the future of doctrine is far brighter than its critics want us to believe.     

How Probable is Cyber War? Bringing IR Theory Back In to the Cyber Conflict Debate

Many well-established explanations for war suggest that cyber weapons have a greater chance of being used offensively than other kinds of military technologies. This response article introduces a research agenda for the study of cyber war, and offers an example – principal-agent problems in cyber operations – to demonstrate how rigorous theoretical and empirical work may proceed.     

Nothing fails like success: The London Ambassadors’ Conference and the coming of the First World War

During the July Crisis Britain’s foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, focused on organising a conference through which differences could be reconciled. After the war, he maintained that Germany’s unwillingness to join this conference was one of the immediate causes of war. This essay disputes Grey’s contention, arguing that his plans for a conference, based on a misleading analogy to the previous Balkan Crises, actually helped facilitate the outbreak of war in 1914 by sanctioning inaction in the first phase of the crisis (28 June–22 July) and by tacitly encouraging Russian mobilisation in the second phase (23 July–4 August).     

The British army,information management and the First World War revolution in military affairs

Information Management (IM) – the systematic ordering, processing and channelling of information within organisations – forms a critical component of modern military command and control systems. As a subject of scholarly enquiry, however, the history of military IM has been relatively poorly served. Employing new and under-utilised archival sources, this article takes the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) of the First World War as its case study and assesses the extent to which its IM system contributed to the emergence of the modern battlefield in 1918. It argues that the demands of fighting a modern war resulted in a general, but not universal, improvement in the BEF’s IM techniques, which in turn laid the groundwork, albeit in embryonic form, for the IM systems of modern armies.     

Just How Important Are ‘Hearts and Minds’ Anyway? Counterinsurgency Goes to the Polls

Despite all the talk of ‘hearts and minds’ being the key to counterinsurgency, local public opinion is rarely studied and when it is, it often yields surprising conclusions. Through analyzing polling data from Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, this article shows that public opinion is less malleable, more of an effect rather than a cause of tactical success, and a poor predictor of strategic victory. As a result, modern counterinsurgency doctrine’s focus on winning popular support may need to be rethought.     

NATO and the broader Middle East, 1949–2007: The history and lessons of controversial encounters

The engagement of the Atlantic Alliance in the Middle East dates back to the founding of the Alliance. With one eye on this history and one eye on current controversies, this article investigates the preconditions for and nature of the allies' engagement in the region in order to assess whether the Middle East today is causing a rupture within the Alliance. The article finds that the Alliance was never likely to engage as one in the region. The Alliance instead guarded its cohesion by either letting the Alliance leader, the United States, take a lead role or by acting as a coalition enabling framework. This latter option has prevailed since the early 1980s. Today, NATO can preserve its cohesion and simultaneously engage in the region if it continues this legacy of coalition-making from within the allied framework. Conversely, an effort to engage collectively in the region will likely set of internal tensions to the extent that the Alliance itself will be at risk.     

‘Stay-Behind’ in France: Much ado about nothing?

Stay-behind networks in France were set up starting in 1948 and were aimed at responding to the possibility of a Soviet armed attack into Western Europe. Participants were identified, and arms and explosives cached, to be activated in case of hostilities. This activity became folded into a multilateral effort under the Allied Coordination Committee (ACC) of NATO. In France, the network was run as a highly compartmented activity under the French external intelligence service (DGSE). As the Soviet threat receded, the stay-behind activity became more and more dormant, and in 1990 it was quietly disbanded, immediately after the P-2 scandal broke in Italy.