Logistics and the Chaco War Bolivia versus Paraguay, 1932-1935

This article provides an assessment of how Paraguay, the weaker power, managed to defeat Bolivia in the 1932-35 Chaco War, fought over the disputed and remote Gran Chaco region that separated the two countries. The article argues that Paraguay’s logistical superiority was a decisive factor leading to victory in 1935. It uses a broad definition of logistics to include the acquisition of matériel before the war as well as the establishment of national and international supply lines during the war. Comparing and contrasting Bolivia and Paraguay in the period from the early 1920s to 1935, this article suggests that the preparation and development of an effective logistical infrastructure by Paraguay in the late 1920s and early 1930s were vital for the operational success that it had achieved on the battlefields of the Chaco by late 1933

Terror in Galilee: British-Jewish collaboration and the Special Night Squads in Palestine during the Arab revolt, 1938–39

This essay examines an aspect of British counter-insurgency in Palestine in the 1930s during the Arab revolt there against British colonial rule and Jewish settlement: the pro-British, anti-rebel Palestinian militia “peace bands,” associated with the Palestinian Nashashibi family and raised with British and Jewish military and financial assistance, and with support from the British Consul in Damascus, Gilbert MacKereth. Using Hebrew, Arabic and untapped local British regimental sources, it details how the British helped to raise the peace bands and the bands’ subsequent activities in the field; it assesses the impact of the bands on the course of the Arab revolt; and it sets out the views of the British Army towards those willing to work with them. In doing this, it extends the recent thesis of Hillel Cohen on Palestinian collaboration with Zionists to include the British and it augments the useful but dated work of Yehoshua Porath and Yuval Arnon-Ohanna on the subject. Such a study is significant for our understanding of British methods of imperial pacification methods, especially the British Army’s manipulation during colonial unrest of “turned” insurgents as a “loyalist” force against rebels, an early form of “pseudo” warfare. The collaboration by Palestinians resonates with broader histories of imperial and neo-imperial rule, it extends military histories on colonial pacification methods, and it provides rich, new texture on why colonial subjects resisted and collaborated with the emergency state, using the Palestinians as a case study

A history of violence: The shooting in Jerusalem of British Assistant Police Superintendent Alan Sigrist, 12 June 1936

Copyright @ 2010 The Author. This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below.This article provides a narrative of the shooting in Jerusalem by two Palestinian gunmen — Bahjat Abu Gharbiyah and Sami al-Ansari — in June 1936 during the Arab revolt in Palestine of a British police officer, Alan Edward Sigrist. Abu Gharbiyah and al-Ansari specifically targeted Sigrist because of his violence towards Palestinians — an issue that has not been discussed fully in the literature. This study measures, against the contemporary record, Abu Gharbiyah’s account of why he shot Sigrist, using the shooting as a case study to open up debates on the British use of official and unofficial violence to maintain colonial rule, alongside one on the response of local people to such violence. While recognizing the partisan nature of Abu Gharbiyah’s memory of events in Palestine, the article gives voice to the Palestinians, explaining how and why rebels fighting British rule and Jewish immigration to Palestine used violence. Following the analysis of the shooting of Sigrist, the article details more general torture by British forces as recalled by Abu Gharbiyah, setting this against the extant evidence to test the traditional notion that Britain used ‘minimum force’ in countering colonial disturbances, tying Sigrist’s behaviour to that of British troops and police in Palestine more generally. Thus, while the article is narrow in its focus it has broader implications for contemporary imperial and military history.Marine Corps University Foundation and Mr and Mrs Thomas A. Saunders

From law and order to pacification: Britain's suppression of the Arab revolt in Palestine,1936-39

The official published version of this article can be found at the link below.This article examines British human rights abuses against noncombatants during the 1936–39 Arab Revolt in Palestine, contextualizing brutality in Palestine within British military practice and law for dealing with colonial rebellions in force at the time. It shows that the norms for such operations, and the laws that codified military actions, allowed for some level of systemic, systematic brutality in the form of “collective punishments” and “reprisals” by the British army. The article also details the effects of military actions on Palestinian civilians and rebels and describes torture carried out by the British on Palestinians. Finally, it highlights a methodological problem in examining these sorts of abuses: the paucity of official records and the mismatch between official and unofficial accounts of abuse during counterinsurgency

Fighting for White Rule in Africa: The Central African Federation, Katanga and the Congo Crisis 1958-1965

This article assesses the role of the Central African Federation (CAF) of Southern Rhodesia, Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland in the turmoil surrounding Belgium’s withdrawal from the Congo in June 1960. This is a subject largely ignored in the historiography on the collapse of the Congo and this article seeks to show that the CAF, keen to preserve white-settler rule in southern Africa, supported Belgian settler interests in the Congo, notably in neighbouring mineral-rich Katanga province, that were trying to block the transition to a united independent black Congo. Led by Sir Roy Welensky, the CAF initially pushed for a political union with Katanga province. When this failed, it actively supported the secession of Katanga, led by the pro-Western Congolese leader Moïse Tshombe, with economic, political and military assistance. The help included the extensive deployment of white mercenaries recruited in Southern Rhodesia and South Africa to support white-settler interests in the Congo from 1960 to 1965. This article also touches upon the role of Portuguese Angola and South Africa in the Congo crisis

The Generic Spacecraft Analyst Assistant (gensaa): a Tool for Developing Graphical Expert Systems

During numerous contacts with a satellite each day, spacecraft analysts must closely monitor real-time data. The analysts must watch for combinations of telemetry parameter values, trends, and other indications that may signify a problem or failure. As the satellites become more complex and the number of data items increases, this task is becoming increasingly difficult for humans to perform at acceptable performance levels. At NASA GSFC, fault-isolation expert systems are in operation supporting this data monitoring task. Based on the lessons learned during these initial efforts in expert system automation, a new domain-specific expert system development tool named the Generic Spacecraft Analyst Assistant (GenSAA) is being developed to facilitate the rapid development and reuse of real-time expert systems to serve as fault-isolation assistants for spacecraft analysts. Although initially domain-specific in nature, this powerful tool will readily support the development of highly graphical expert systems for data monitoring purposes throughout the space and commercial industry

Long term care for the elderly : the role for pharmacists

Consultant pharmacy represents a branch of the profession that has almost become synonymous with nursing homes in the USA. This is largely due to the legal framework that surrounds nursing home care in the USA and the requirement for pharmacy review of medication in this setting. However, consultant pharmacy has been in existence for almost 30 years and had its roots in community practice; today, a consultant pharmacist is defined as a practitioner who provides services to long-term care facilities on a contractual basis. This paper provides an overview of this type of pharmacy practice, the current delivery of consultant pharmacy services in the USA and lessons for the international pharmacy profession.peer-reviewe

Theory of disorder-induced multiple coherent scattering in photonic crystal waveguides

We introduce a theoretical formalism to describe disorder-induced extrinsic scattering in slow-light photonic crystal waveguides. This work details and extends the optical scattering theory used in a recent \emph{Physical Review Letter} [M. Patterson \emph{et al.}, \emph{Phys. Rev. Lett.} \textbf{102}, 103901 (2009)] to describe coherent scattering phenomena and successfully explain complex experimental measurements. Our presented theory, that combines Green function and coupled mode methods, allows one to self-consistently account for arbitrary multiple scattering for the propagating electric field and recover experimental features such as resonances near the band edge. The technique is fully three-dimensional and can calculate the effects of disorder on the propagating field over thousands of unit cells. As an application of this theory, we explore various sample lengths and disordered instances, and demonstrate the profound effect of multiple scattering in the waveguide transmission. The spectra yield rich features associated with disorder-induced localization and multiple scattering, which are shown to be exasperated in the slow light propagation regime