The Giants of the Naval War College

More than anyone else, Commodore Stephen Bleecker Luce is to be credited for this important step in the development of the naval profession and the rise of American naval power. After a long and distinguished naval career spanning some forty years of active service, Luce was appalled by America\u27s naval weakness in the era following the Civil War known as the Dark Ages of the US Navy

The Future of Precision-Strike Warfare—Strategic Dynamics of Mature Military Revolutions

The precision conventional revolution, which yielded early U.S. military successes, is entering a more mature phase. Future great-power wars could tend toward protracted conflicts as superpowers seek to coerce each other without escalating to nuclear warfare. The proliferation and massing of precision conventional weapons may worsen such conventional military stalemates, with each side eviscerating the other’s power-projection capabilities

Fuel and the Battle Fleet: Coal, Oil, and American Naval Strategy, 1898-1925

Logistics considerations always influence strategy and fuel may be the chief of those considerations. Fuel requirements must alway be satisfied. A critical quarter­century of American experience is discussed here

Antecedents of Job Burnout Among Small Company Presidents

Several studies suggest that small business presidents  may be especially susceptible  to job burnout because of their personality traits  and the unique  organizational demands of their position. This issue  has not been directly tested in small business research, however. This exploratory study examined the relationship of several personal, work, and environmental characteristics to job burnout among  2 I 5 small company presidents. A series of regression analyses found that five variables explained 44 percent of the variation in burnout levels among small business presidents. Each of the five predictor variables was individually significantly related to burnout. The results of this study suggest that effective  coping strategies for job burnout among small company presidents may be both individual- and situation-specific

A Synthetic Study to Assess the Applicability of Full-Waveform Inversion to Infer Snow Stratigraphy from Upward-Looking Ground-Penetrating Radar Data

Snow stratigraphy and liquid water content are key contributing factors to avalanche formation. Upward-looking ground penetrating radar (upGPR) systems allow nondestructive monitoring of the snowpack, but deriving density and liquid water content profiles is not yet possible based on the direct analysis of the reflection response. We have investigated the feasibility of deducing these quantities using full-waveform inversion (FWI) techniques applied to upGPR data. For that purpose, we have developed a frequency-domain FWI algorithm in which we additionally took advantage of time-domain features such as the arrival times of reflected waves. Our results indicated that FWI applied to upGPR data is generally feasible. More specifically, we could show that in the case of a dry snowpack, it is possible to derive snow densities and layer thicknesses if sufficient a priori information is available. In case of a wet snowpack, in which it also needs to be inverted for the liquid water content, the algorithm might fail, even if sufficient a priori information is available, particularly in the presence of realistic noise. Finally, we have investigated the capability of FWI to resolve thin layers that play a key role in snow stability evaluation. Our simulations indicate that layers with thicknesses well below the GPR wavelengths can be identified, but in the presence of significant liquid water, the thin-layer properties may be prone to inaccuracies. These results are encouraging and motivate applications to field data, but significant issues remain to be resolved, such as the determination of the generally unknown upGPR source function and identifying the optimal number of layers in the inversion models. Furthermore, a relatively high level of prior knowledge is required to let the algorithm converge. However, we feel these are not insurmountable and the new technology has significant potential to improve field data analysis