Modeling short-range ballistic missile defense and Israel's Iron Dome system

This paper develops a model of short-range ballistic missile defense and uses it to study the performance of Israel’s Iron Dome system. The deterministic base model allows for inaccurate missiles, unsuccessful interceptions, and civil defense. Model enhancements consider the trade-offs in attacking the interception system, the difficulties faced by militants in assembling large salvos, and the effects of imperfect missile classification by the defender. A stochastic model is also developed. Analysis shows that system performance can be highly sensitive to the missile salvo size, and that systems with higher interception rates are more “fragile” when overloaded. The model is calibrated using publically available data about Iron Dome’s use during Operation Pillar of Defense in November 2012. If the systems performed as claimed, they saved Israel an estimated 1778 casualties and $80 million in property damage, and thereby made preemptive strikes on Gaza about 8 times less valuable to Israel. Gaza militants could have inflicted far more damage by grouping their rockets into large salvos, but this may have been difficult given Israel’s suppression efforts. Counter-battery fire by the militants is unlikely to be worthwhile unless they can obtain much more accurate missiles.Fulbright Canada, Norwich Universit

The Effectiveness of Rocket Attacks and Defenses in Israel

This empirical article studies rocket attacks and defenses in Israel during operations Protective Edge, Pillar of Defense, and Cast Lead, and also during the Second Lebanon War. It analyzes publicly available counts of rockets fired, fatalities, casualties, and property damage. The estimates suggest that interceptor deployment and civil defense improvements both reduced Israel’s losses slightly during Pillar of Defense and substantially during Protective Edge. They also imply that interceptor performance during Pillar of Defense may have been overstated. Ground offensives were the most expensive way to prevent rocket casualties. Interceptors were at least as cost-effective as military offensives, and their advantage improved over time.Without its countermeasures, Israel’s rocket casualties could have been more than fifty times higher during Operation Protective Edge. These results imply that Israel’s rocket concerns were more justified than critics admit, but its military operations were less worthwhile than intended

Heterogeneous Air Defense Battery Location: A Game Theoretic Approach

The Unites States and its allies confront a persistent and evolving threat from missile attacks as nations around the world continue to invest and advance their current capabilities. Within the air defense context of a missile-and-interceptor engagement, a challenge for the defender is that surface to air interceptor missile batteries often must be located to protect high-value targets dispersed over a vast area, subject to an attacker observing the disposition of batteries prior to developing and implementing an attack plan. To model this scenario, we formulate a two-player, three-stage, perfect information, sequential move, zero-sum game that accounts for, respectively, a defender\u27s location of batteries, an attacker\u27s launch of missiles against targets, and a defender\u27s assignment of interceptors to incoming missiles. The resulting trilevel math programming formulation cannot be solved via direct optimization and it is not suitable to solve via full enumeration for realistically-sized instances. We instead utilize the game tree search technique Double Oracle, within which we embed alternative heuristics to solve an important subproblem for the attacker. We test and compare these solution methods to solve a designed set of 26 instances of parametric variation, from which we derive insights regarding the nature of the underlying problem. Whereas full enumeration required up to 8.6 hours to solve the largest instance considered, our superlative implementation of Double Oracle terminates in a maximum of 3.39 seconds over the set of instances, with an average termination time of less than one second. Double Oracle also properly identifies the optimal SPNE strategies in 75% of our test instances and, regarding those instances for which Double Oracle failed, we note that the relative deviation is less than 2.5% from optimal, on average, yielding promise as a solution method to solve realistically-sized instances

Red Perimeter Defeated: U.S. Naval Supremacy, Competitive Adaptation, and the Third Battle of the Atlantic, 1946-1981

This dissertation examines the long-term military competition between the U.S. and Soviet navies during 1946-81. It investigates the dynamics of naval posture change by integrating insights from military innovation theory with in-depth process tracing, thus providing a much-improved understanding of the Cold War at sea during the most decisive phases of the 'Third Battle of the Atlantic'

Fallout: a historian reflects on America's half-century encounter with nuclear weapons

(print) xix, 280 p.Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- I. Early responses -- 1. The day America first heard the news. p.5 -- 2. How Americans imagined the bomb they dropped. p.9 -- 3. President Truman, the American people, and the atomic bomb. p.17 -- 4. Diplomats and strategists confront the bomb. p.41 -- II. Nuclear culture in the Cold War's high tide -- 5. The American medical profession and the threat of nuclear war. p.61 -- 6. Edward Teller and Project Chariot. p.87 -- 7. Dr. Strangelove: Stanley Kubrick presents the apocalypse. p.95 -- III. Going underground: nuclear America, 1963-1980 -- 8. From the test ban treaty to Three Mile Island. p.107 -- 9. Nuclear war in the writings of Bible-prophecy popularizers. p.129 -- IV. The Reagan era: the freeze campaign and after -- 10. The battle for public opinion in the 1940's and the 1980's. p.167 -- 11. Star Wars: the cultural implications of Reagan's strategic defense initiative. p.175 -- 12. Another cycle of nuclear activism ends. p.182 -- 13. "You must keep reminding us:" post-Cold War college students contemplate nuclear issues. p.187 -- V. The view from the nineties -- 14. Nuclear menace in the mass culture of the late Cold War era and beyond. p.199 -- 15. Hiroshima in American memory. p.226 -- 16. The Enola Gay controversy and the perils of "historical revisionism". p.246 -- Index. p.26

The assertive presidency – understanding preemptive executive pressure on foreign policy legislation in the US

The specter of an increasingly uneven distribution of power between the Executive Branch and Congress looms large in scholarship on the separation of powers in American government. This is particularly evident in the design and exercise of foreign policy. While the presidents’ use of legislative powers like the veto has been studied extensively, I argue that preemptive presidential interventions during the process of lawmaking are a subtler and less politically costly tool that is more important than scholars realized. This project focuses on American foreign policy lawmaking and examines the extent to which it is characterized by presidential assertiveness communicated to Congress through a hitherto understudies tool of executive intervention. Specifically, I seek to understand how contemporary presidents use Statements of Administration Policy (SAPs), a relatively new class of executive communications designed to preemptively intervene in key legislation as it is drafted in Congress. Delivered at a crucial intervention point along the legislative process, these communications provide a key opportunity for presidents to challenge specific provisions. Embedded in the broader discourse on struggling congressional checks on the executive, this project fills a gap in the understanding of the dynamics that shape the balance of power between Congress and the president. I find that interbranch confrontations increased significantly after the critical juncture of 9/11 and that Congress gradually expanded the use of its authorization leverage over time. In addition, two contextual predictors of increasing presidential assertiveness in preemptive messages to Congress stand out: divided government and presidential election years. My results indicate that presidents still cannot achieve many of their foreign policy goal without negotiating with Congress within contested bargaining procedures. Overall, my dissertation makes three principal contributions to the ongoing research on domestic underpinnings of US foreign policy: First, my findings quality the image of unchecked presidential discretion and highlight the continuous relevance of interbranch contestation in foreign policy. Second, I show that the mechanisms of change as laid out by historical institutionalism are useful for explaining long-term shifts in interbranch dynamics. Third, I introduce a novel assertiveness-score based on a relatively new source of presidential position language, which can be adapted for other research purposes

1995 BRAC Commission

Base Closure Cleanup Seminar December 1993. File 2 of 4. Box 72, IA-008