Thesis (M.S. in Management)--Naval Postgraduate School, December 2002. / Thesis advisor(s): David F. Matthews, Keebom Kang. Includes bibliographical references (p. 113-116). Also available online.

The main aim of the study is to document the development of US Fleet Ballistic Missile technology from its mid-1950s beginnings through to Trident II D5. This historical documentation is framed by a perspective which seeks to understand how technology evolves and what the relationship is between, to put it simply, technology and strategy, or technology and politics. Of particular interest in this case study is the relationship between technology and nuclear strategy. It is a commonplace assertion that technology is a dominant, determining factor in the arms race, that indeed there is a technological imperative. In particular there are many who argue that improvements in missile accuracies have driven changes in nuclear strategy away from counter-city retaliatory deterrence to war-fighting counter-force postures. Tracing the history of FBM development from Polaris, considered by many the archetypal counter-city deterrent, to Trident II, with hard-target kill capability comparable to MX, helps our understanding of this issue. In considering this central theme, the development of FBM technology is analysed in the social constructionist terms of the 'new' sociology of technology. This approach argues that technical change must be explained impartially and symmetrically, and that the success of a particular technology is not sufficient explanation in itself, but is rather exactly what needs to be explained. Technology is considered to be underdetermined by the physical world, and thus to be fundamentally shaped by the social world. The extreme characterizations of the relationship between technology and politics - either that technology is simply the tool of political will or that technology is out-of-control (as in the view that accuracy improvements have driven strategy) - are found to be inadequate in this study. Instead it is found that the 'bureaucratic politics' approach captures much of the rich complexity of the process of technological change. Yet even this approach fails fully to capture the complex inter-relatedness of 'technology' and 'politics', nor does it take into account the importance of the physical production of technology.

see document / Master of Science

A ramjet inlet duct structure has been designed using nonlinear structural analysis to allow local plastic deformations which result in structural weight reduction. To establish the feasibility of reduced shell thickness, the Lower-Bound Theorem of limit analysis has been applied using an existing finite element analysis computer code intended for elastic analysis. The results of the analysis were verified by structural testing. Predicted stresses and deflections showed good correlation with measured values up to the point of failure. This work was supported by the U.S. Air Force Aero Propulsion Laboratory, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, under Contract No. F33615-72-C-1366.

Thesis -- University of Adelaide, 1966. / [Typescript].

Thesis (M.S.) -- University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 2006. / Title from title page screen (viewed on June 1, 2006). Thesis advisor: Richard J. Ranaudo. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

The method of singular perturbations is applied to the determination of the optimal range-fuel-time trajectory for an air-breathing missile. This method is shown to lead to the reduced-order "cruise-dash" model, and this model is used in the optimization study. Earlier work in this area is extended by the inclusion of two not heretofore considered limits on the dynamical system. The results of the earlier work are shown to hold throughout much of the velocity regime in which the missile operates, but operation in the very high and very low velocity ranges is shown to be sharply curtailed, with the optimal operating points being changed drastically in some cases. Also, the effect of the non-zero minimum admissible throttle setting and the resultant throttle-chattering on the solution of the control problem is examined in some detail. / M.S.

The engagement between an antiship missile and a ship’s defense system is investigated. The missile is equipped with proportional navigation guidance for homing in on its ship target. The ship’s defense system consists of a radar, an estimation system (the extended Kalman filter and the “jump filter” are used), and a gun system. The performance index is defined as the estimated number of hits (EHITS) of projectiles on the missile. The main objective of this dissertation is to determine maneuvering periods for the missile which minimize the EHITS to evade the ship’s gunfire under different engagement conditions. The maneuvering periods are design parameters in the missile’s controls of both the vertical and the horizontal planes. The engagement conditions are the follows: the maximum amplitude of the maneuvering functions, the homing in position of the missile on the ship, the measurement noise condition of the ship’s radar, and the missile’s model assumed in the ship’s filters. The missile’s control functions considered are periodic and of specific types (sinusoidal, square and sawtooth waveforms); therefore, the periods which minimize the EHITS in this study are suboptimal for the general engagement problem. Two methods are used to obtain the suboptimal periods: one is the ”brute force" method of computing the EHITS for certain equally spaced periods, the other uses an optimization software to search for the minimum point. The results show that the curve of EHITS vs. period is monotonically decreasing until it reaches a minimum point. The optimal period increases with an increase in measurement noise. Among the three waveforms used, the square wave gives the smallest optimal period and the sawtooth wave gives the largest one. The sinusoidal waveform with the period of 1.9 seconds is recommended. We consider the missile's performance against a perfect radar, a modern radar, and an earlier model radar. The optimum EHITS resulting from the optimal periods are between two and three EHITS for all three radars considered. / Ph. D.

This thesis analyzes Libya's historic 2003 decision to abandon its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs. In the 2 years following the decision, several theories have emerged to explain why the Libyan regime renounced these dangerous weapons. The author uses current literature and relevant sources to analyze the three most probable external causal factors: sanctions and diplomacy, intelligence, and coercive diplomacy. He finds that sanctions, diplomacy, and intelligence were significant in altering the Libyan cost-benefit analysis in favor of the West. These findings have political and theoretical implications. Lessons learned from the Libyan case will not be effective against Iran and North Korea due to differences between these countries' proliferation motivation levels and the Libyan case. However, the influence strategies that were effective against Libya are likely to be applicable in other situations. The author finds that more research is still needed to identify the conditions when different strategies are most likely to be effective.

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