The purpose of this thesis is to explore the nature of military behaviour during the High Middle Ages, in what is normally called the Age of Chivalry. I am not entirely comfortable with this appellation, which is why I have chosen to discuss the ethos and practice of warfare. My focus is essentially on the societies of north-western Europe which displayed certain characteristics in warfare, which they exported into the Mediterranean region and further east. It is somewhat of a simplification to describe this military culture as that of 'knight and castle'; but it is a convenient starting point. In what follows I have drawn together fourteen of my published articles over the period 1982-2005, in order to present my interpretation of the main strands that can be identified in warfare between 1050 and 1250. Although I continue to be research active and have published, or I am still in the process of publishing, half-a-dozen articles over the last five years, I felt that I could best present a coherent thesis from the pieces which I have selected.

Numerous studies, books, and articles have been written on Britains retreat from its former empire in the 1960s. Journalists wrote about it at the time, many people who were involved wrote about it in the immediate years that followed, and historians have tried to put it all together. The issues of foreign policy at the strategic level and the military operations that took place in this period have been especially well covered. However, the question of military strategic alternatives in this important era of British foreign policy has been less studied. This dissertation discusses such high-profile projects as the TSR.2 and F.111, prospective VTOL aircraft and not least the CVA-01 fleet carrier, but most of all it focuses on the issue of military strategy. The rivalry between the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force was largely about the questions of carrier aviation versus land-based air power – and which strategic option would best answer the British need to maintain influence as the garrisons were being scaled down. The Royal Navy argued for replacement fleet carriers for their mobile seaborne strategy, while the Royal Air Force argued that land-based air power would be as effective and far less costly. By using this underlying strategic debate as the framework for understanding more specific debates on aircraft, ships and weapon systems, this dissertation aims to bring new light to our understanding of the dramatic restructuring and altered priorities these two military services saw during the 1960s. The story may be divided into three broad periods: From 1960 until mid 1963, it was a conceptual debate on ‘Carrier Task Forces’ and a concrete alternative ‘Island Strategy’. This ended in July 1963 with a Cabinet decision in favour of new fleet carriers. However, the Royal Air Force and the Treasury kept fighting this decision. Their continued resistance, together with the new Labour Government with Denis Healey as Secretary of State for Defence, changed the decision of 1963. The highpoint of the debate on carrier aviation and land-based air power came during 1965-66, ending with the decision of February 1966 to cancel the CVA-01 and gradually phase out the existing carrier fleet. Denis Healey then used the arguments for land-based air power as a rationale for the decision. The dissertation rounds off with a discussion of the planned phase-out of the existing carrier fleet. However, the story saw a different end than planned, as new strategic challenges in home waters came about and the evolving VTOL Harrier aircraft and the ‘through-deck cruisers’ gave new possibilities. This is a historical study of the British debate about maritime air power and strategic alternatives in the 1960s. However, the detailed story and arguments used for and against both alternatives should clearly have relevance to any conceptual debates on carrier and land-based air power.

In light of an ever growing gap between Israel’s religious and secular communities, it is perhaps inevitable that the phenomenon would come to capture the interest of Israel-oriented scholars. Yet efforts to address the extent to which religion affects the nature and operations of the Israeli army and the degree to which that influence is advantageous – or perhaps detrimental – have been far from comprehensive. A manifestation of the religious-secular conflict, the religious-military cleavage within Israeli society has long been at the heart of Israel-focused research. Scholars have remained intrigued by the conflicts that arise when a soldier’s religious background is at odds with the inflexibility of army life. Many researchers have sought to measure the degree to which religion affects army cohesion and success in war, and determine whether or not religious influence on the State’s force is largely harmless or a looming threat. While scholars of both camps have posited credible theories crafted out of sound analyses, a review of selected scholarship on the subject suggests that the influence of religion on the Israeli military is benign. Opponents of religious influence on the military have failed to appreciate the benefits of integrating devout troops into the force and the successes of mediating mechanisms that have become instrumental to the IDF. Such mediators may have been implemented in an effort to accommodate religious soldiers, but the entire force has stood to benefit. / text

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Battlefield sites are some of the most iconic locations in any nation’s store of heritage attractions and continue to capture the imagination of visitors. They have strong historic, cultural, nationalistic and moral resonances and speak to people on a national as well as a local scale. They have the power to provoke contention but at the same time foster understanding and respect through the consideration of deep moral questions. Battlefields are suffused with powerful stories of courage, sacrifice, betrayal and even cowardice. They have a strong sense of place and can provoke a range of cognitive and emotional reactions. But as sites they are inherently unremarkable and rely on the incarnative powers of interpretation to inform and enliven otherwise empty landscapes. This thesis is a wide ranging analysis of what battlefields mean to tourists and the effect interpretation has on battlefield sites. In order to further understand these aspects the development of the sites is also investigated including the historical and cultural forces which have been at play in creating such ‘attractions’. This makes use of the semiotic interpretation of tourist sites and the ‘site sacralisation’ model of Dean MacCannell in addressing the important question of what factors are present in the creation of an attraction. The study uses the four main ‘managed’ battlefield sites in the UK – Hastings (1066), Bannockburn (1314) , Bosworth (1485) and Culloden (1746) – to illustrate these objectives and comparisons are also made with a more recent conflict, that of the First World War (1914-18) at the Western Front in France and Belgium. Using an array of qualitative and quantitative methods the study addresses a hitherto relatively understudied area of tourism in exploring the meanings attached to the more historic sites and how they compare and contrast with visitor experiences at sites of more modern conflict. Interviews with experts/stakeholders involved with battlefield sites as well as both visitors at conventional times and at a re-enactment event were made and a large corpus of material was gathered from which conclusions were drawn. Although not statistically generalisable because of methodological constraints the results from the study add an important dimension to our understanding of battlefield tourism and what conflict sites mean to people. The study demonstrates how there is a very dynamic relationship between site and visitor and this is manifested in deep and wide ranging discourses which are reflected by the visitor comments. This is complemented by the views of experts/stakeholders. The study addresses some of the salient points surrounding the nature of visitor experience using the theory of the tourist ‘gaze’ propounded by John Urry. It asserts that a broader appreciation of the visitor interaction needs to be adopted utilizing a multi-sensory approach and not restricted to the dominance of the visual in interpreting the battlefield site. Interpretation is seen as critical in endowing relatively unremarkable sites with meaning and the existing approaches taken by the agencies managing the case study sites are found to be particularly effective in educational terms. The study examined the deeper meanings thought to be attached to places of suffering and death (the numen) but found a very weak response suggesting that the commercialisation of such sites results in a diminution of any visceral type of experience. For the Western Front the deeper meanings were eclipsed by grief and the study thus concluded that the numen can be subsumed into more complex reactions to places of death and suffering. With regard to the development of the historical sites the study challenges the stages of sacralisation in that more contemporary forces involved in attraction creation are neglected. A further commercialisation stage is added to update the model. Battlefield sites have much to inform us about how heritage is received and understood by the public. This is even more instructive in the case of a conflict site where the nature of the attraction might sit uncomfortably with public perception. This study aims to shed light on the meanings of such ‘dark’ sites within society and in doing so can in turn provide vivid reflections on our own culture milieu.

The main objective of this thesis is to present a new image processing technique to improve the detectability of buried objects such as landmines using Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR). The main challenge of GPR based landmine detection is to have an accurate image analysis method that is capable of reducing false alarms. However an accurate image relies on having sufficient spatial resolution in the received signal. An Antipersonnel mine (APM) can have a diameter as little as 2cm, whereas many soils have very high attenuation at frequencies above 450 MHz. In order to solve the detection problem, a system level analysis of the issues involved with the recognition of landmines using image reconstruction is required. The thesis illustrates the development of a novel technique called the SIMCA (“SIMulated Correlation Algorithm”) based on area or volume correlation between the trace that would be returned by an ideal point reflector in the soil conditions at the site (obtained using the realistic simulation of Maxwell’s equations) and the actual trace. During an initialization phase, SIMCA carries out radar simulation using the system parameters of the radar and the soil properties. Then SIMCA takes the raw data as the radar is scanned over the ground and uses a clutter removal technique to remove various unwanted signals of clutter such as cross talk, initial ground reflection and antenna ringing. The trace which would be returned by a target under these conditions is then used to form a correlation kernel using a GPR simulator. The 2D GPR scan (B scan), formed by abutting successive time-amplitude plots taken from different spatial positions as column vectors,is then correlated with the kernel using the Pearson correlation coefficient resulting in a correlated image which is brightest at points most similar to the canonical target. This image is then raised to an odd power >2 to enhance the target/background separation. The first part of the thesis presents a 2-dimensional technique using the B scans which have been produced as a result of correlating the clutter removed radargram (’B scan’) with the kernel produced from the simulation. In order to validate the SIMCA 2D algorithm, qualitative evidence was used where comparison was made between the B scans produced by the SIMCA algorithm with B scans from some other techniques which are the best alternative systems reported in the open literature. It was found from this that the SIMCA algorithm clearly produces clearer B scans in comparison to the other techniques. Next quantitative evidence was used to validate the SIMCA algorithm and demonstrate that it produced clear images. Two methods are used to obtain this quantitative evidence. In the first method an expert GPR user and 4 other general users are used to predict the location of landmines from the correlated B scans and validate the SIMCA 2D algorithm. Here human users are asked to indicate the location of targets from a printed sheet of paper which shows the correlated B scans produced by the SIMCA algorithm after some training, bearing in mind that it is a blind test. For the second quantitative evidence method, the AMIRA software is used to obtain values of the burial depth and position of the target in the x direction and hence validate the SIMCA 2D algorithm. Then the absolute error values for the burial depth along with the absolute error values for the position in the x direction obtained from the SIMCA algorithm and the Scheers et al’s algorithm when compared to the corresponding ground truth values were calculated. Two-dimensional techniques that use B scans do not give accurate information on the shape and dimensions of the buried target, in comparison to 3D techniques that use 3D data (’C scans’). As a result the next part of the thesis presents a 3-dimensional technique. The equivalent 3D kernel is formed by rotating the 2D kernel produced by the simulation along the polar co-ordinates, whilst the 3D data is the clutter removed C scan. Then volume correlation is performed between the intersecting parts of the kernel and the data. This data is used to create iso-surfaces of the slices raised to an odd power > 2. To validate the algorithm an objective validation process which compares the actual target volume to that produced by the re-construction process is used. The SIMCA 3D technique and the Scheers et al’s (the best alternative system reported in the open literature) technique are used to image a variety of landmines using GPR scans. The types of mines included plastic, wooden and glass ones. In all cases clear images were obtained with SIMCA. In contrast Scheers’ algorithm, the present state-of-the-art, failed to provide clear images of non metallic landmines. For this thesis, the above algorithms have been tested for landmine data and for locating foundations in demolished buildings and to validate and demonstrate that the SIMCA algorithms are better than existing technologies such as the Scheers et al’s method and the REFLEXW commercial software.

The Cuban Crisis of October 22-28, 1962, pitted against each other the two world giants who have weapons that can destroy each other and at the same time all of human society. The suspenseful events of that week brought the world to the brink of World War III. As the crisis receded upon agreement of the Soviet Union to remove the offensive missiles from Cuba and by the States to refrain, under certain conditions, from invading Cuba, so did the memory of that week. [...]

Due to the complexities of modern military operations and the technologies employed on today's military systems, acquisition costs and development times are becoming increasingly large. Meanwhile, the transformation of the global security environment is driving the U.S. military's own transformation. In order to meet the required capabilities of the next generation without buying prohibitively costly new systems, it is necessary for the military to evolve across the spectrum of doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership and education, personnel, and facilities (DOTMLPF). However, the methods for analyzing DOTMLPF approaches within the early acquisition phase of a capability-based assessment (CBA) are not as well established as the traditional technology design techniques. This makes it difficult for decision makers to decide if investments should be made in materiel or non-materiel solutions. This research develops an agent-based constructive simulation to quantitatively assess doctrine alongside materiel approaches. Additionally, life-cycle cost techniques are provided to enable a cost-effectiveness trade. These techniques are wrapped together in a decision-making environment that brings crucial information forward so informed and appropriate acquisition choices can be made. The methodology is tested on a future unmanned aerial vehicle design problem. Through the implementation of this quantitative methodology on the proof-of-concept study, it is shown that doctrinal changes including fleet composition, asset allocation, and patrol pattern were capable of dramatic improvements in system effectiveness at a much lower cost than the incorporation of candidate technologies. Additionally, this methodology was able to quantify the precise nature of strong doctrine-doctrine and doctrine-technology interactions which have been observed only qualitatively throughout military history. This dissertation outlines the methodology and demonstrates how potential approaches to capability-gaps can be identified with respect to effectiveness, cost, and time. When implemented, this methodology offers the opportunity to achieve system capabilities in a new way, improve the design of acquisition programs, and field the right combination of ways and means to address future challenges to national security.

Thesis (M.S. in Joint Campaign Planning and Strategy)--Joint Forces Staff College, Joint Advanced Warfighting School, 2006. / Vita. "14 April, 2006." "National Defense Univ Norfolk VA"--DTIC cover. Includes bibliographical references (p. 87-90). Also available via the Internet.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Duquesne University, 2007. / Title from document title page. Abstract included in electronic submission form. Includes bibliographical references (p. 287-293).