Book reviews

Red Banner: the Soviet Military System in Peace and War. By Christopher Donnelly. Jane's Information Group, Coulsdon, UK (1988), 288 pp., £35.00

Images of T. E. Lawrence. By S. E. Tabachnick and C. Matheson. Jonathan Cape, London (1988); The Letters of T. E. Lawrence. Edited by Malcolm Brown. Dent, London (1988); T. E. Lawrence. By J. Wilson. National Portrait Gallery Publications, London (1988); Lawrence and the Arab Revolts. By D. Nicolle. Osprey, London (1989)

Liddell Hart and the Weight of History. By John Mearsheimer. Brassey's, London (1989), £15.95

Science and Mythology in the Making of Defence Policy. Edited by Margaret Blunden and Owen Greene. Brassey's, London (1989), £27.50/$44.00

Warfare in the Twentieth Century. Edited by Colin McInnes and G. D. Sheffield. Unwin Hyman, London (1988), 239 pp., £25.00     

Closure properties of the relevation transform*

Sufficient conditions under which the relevation of two probability distributions is (i) NBU, (ii) IFRA, (iii) IFR are derived. The result for case (iii) corrects an error in a previous article by Baxter.     

Weapon acquisition with target uncertainty

This article is concerned with choosing a mix of weapons, subject to constraints, when the targets to be attacked are known imprecisely. It is shown that the correct method for optimizing the mix of weapons involves a pair of nested optimization problems (two-stage optimization). Two methods for optimizing the expected utility of a mix are discussed. The first involves a simultaneous attack model, in which it is implicitly assumed that all weapons are used at once. The second involves a sequential attack model, in which targets appear in random order and are attacked one at a time. Particular attention is given to the question of the appropriate mix of general-purpose and special-purpose weapons.     

An analysis of degeneracy

Degeneracy in linear programming models has been analyzed for its impacts on algorithmic properties. A complementary analysis here is on what the solutions mean. The framework presented is couched in marginal sensitivity analysis, introducing concepts of “compatible bases” and “transition graphs”.