<p>In 1994, extremist Hutu rebels crossed into the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (Congo), then named Zaire, after committing genocide in their native Rwanda. Their violent presence destabilized the region and led to two wars in the Congo between 1996 to 2003 and continued violence that still plagues parts of the east, while instability remains widespread. For more than a decade, the conflict has seen civilians trapped in the middle and specifically, women and girls have found themselves under brutal attack as fighting factions employ sexual violence as a weapon in their battles. </p> <p>The widespread, systematic and vicious sexual violence against women and girls in the Congo is being perpetrated to serve a political purpose beyond individual objectives. Sexual violence has become an effective weapon used by the fighting forces as they compete for economic and political power through the control over land, resources, and the people that occupy the territory they seek. All women find themselves under attack, especially in the conflict-ridden east. All groups, including rebel forces and state agents such as the military and police, utilize sexual violence as a tool of destruction and terror against both the females they attack and the communities ripped apart by the stigma that accompanies the womens rapes. </p> <p>An examination of the specific reasons the groups commit strategic and systematic sexual assaults against women and girls, and of the contributing political and societal factors that create a climate where the abuse can occur without recourse, help to provide an understanding as to why sexual violence is being used as a political tool in the Congo. In addition, the ongoing political struggles, especially surrounding control over land, are rooted in a century of shifting political policies by divisive, oppressive and kleptocratic leadership that worked for themselves and left little for the population. It is this history that has led to an almost inevitable conflict that sees the destruction of women and girls through rape and other violent assaults on their being.</p>

The purpose of this research is to analyze the People’s Republic of China’s foreign policy towards the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. In order to analyze the People’s Republic of China’s foreign policy towards the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the author will take advantage of the constructivist approach and from that view the author will give the three specific issue areas to look at the People’s Republic of China’s foreign policy towards the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the nuclear weapon program, the possible reunification of two Koreas, the changed leadership in North Korea, respectively. Through these three specific issue areas, we can go tohave a general understanding about what is the People’s Republic of China’s governments’foreign policy towards the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.  The conclusion will be made on the basis of the three specific events and through that we can realize and conclude the standpoints of the People’s Republic of China’s foreign policy on the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

<p>In his Dispatches, Michael Herr quotes the gonzo photojournalist Tim Page: "Take the glamour out of war! I mean, how the bloody hell can you do that?[...] Ohhhh, war is good for you, you can't take the glamour out of that. It's like trying to take the glamour out of sex, trying to take the glamour out of the Rolling Stones." This dissertation is in essence an exploration of Page's question, examining how popular media during the American conflict in Indochina first removed and then restored the glamour of war. For most of its history, the United States has been defined by a certain level of militarism, a glamorizing of the process of regeneration through violence reflected in this quotation, but the late 1960s and early 1970s saw a challenging of this warrior ethos; this challenge was reversed by the 1980s, when American militarism was taken to a new, paramilitary, level. In this project, I propose that this oscillation in the association of masculinity and violence was directly linked to popular media's depiction of the Vietnam war and of the soldiers who fought it. American society is haunted by Vietnam, not just because it was the first war the US lost (as the cliché would have it), but because of the ways in which popular culture presented the war to Americans: in particular, because of the ways the American public received this war through the emerging technologies of their television screens. The rapid response of television news to the conflict created an image of mundane warfare not through any intention on the part of broadcasters but because of the nature of the medium itself; over the next twenty years this image was both mystified and moderated by the more delayed media of film and literature and eventually molded into the now-familiar Vietvet killing machine.</p><p>In five chapters, I chronicle the evolution of the iconic Vietvet through the twenty years following the war. Following the methods of Raymond Williams and the Birmingham School, I trace the history and development of images from Vietnam as well as the interaction of those images with popular narratives of war, violence, masculinity and heroism in America. I start with Susan Jeffords' work in The Remasculization of America, taking her emphasis on the cultural narratives that fostered the restoration of patriarchal ideologies; I then move through Marita Sturken's discussion of the creation of cultural memory from historical artifacts in Tangled Memories. To these foundational texts, I bring an emphasis on form and technology to shift the focus from the narratives to the mechanisms of transmission themselves. In my first chapter, I show how the relatively new medium of television, and the depiction on the nightly news of Vietnam as both mundane and corrupt, called into question the image of the heroic soldier, finally replacing that image with the demon of the uncontrollable violent vet, driven insane by an unjust war. My next two chapters look at how this image was rehabilitated through its recharacterization in the less immediate channels of novels and film, a recharacterization driven by national debates over the diagnosis of PTSD and the design of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. And in my final two chapters, I show how the image of the overly-muscled Supervet killing machine from pulps and blockbusters replaced the broken, victimized effigy.</p><p>I focus on the evolving history of veterans of the Vietnam War in particular because the strong interdependence of the history of that war and popular culture functions as a spotlight on the nature of the relation between media, history and cultural memory. Television coverage of the Vietnam War to a large extent worked not only to expose the inherent immorality of that particular conflict, but also of war more generally and of the image of the soldier hero. But in the two decades between the end of the Vietnam War and the first Gulf War, the standard history of the war had resolidified into one glorifying combat and violence. By looking at this changing social understanding of Vietnam, I hope to reveal the greater mechanisms by which the newly emerging media technologies of the 1960s through the 1980s drastically changed the nature of representation of warfare, violence, and masculinity: first routinizing, then rejecting, and finally enthroning the image of the explosively violent soldier yoked to the state.</p> / Dissertation

Systems engineering introduces the notion of top-down design, which involves viewing an entire system comprised of its components as a whole functioning unit. This requires an understanding of how those components efficiently interact, with optimization of the process emphasized rather than solely focusing on micro-level system components. The traditional approach to the systems engineering process involves requirements decomposition and flow down across a hierarchy of decision making levels, in which needs and requirements at one level are transformed into a set of system product and process descriptions for the next lower level. This top-down requirements flow approach therefore requires an iterative process between adjacent levels to verify that the design solution satisfies the requirements, with no direct flow between nonadjacent hierarchy levels. This thesis introduces a methodology that enables decision makers anywhere across a system-of-systems hierarchy to rapidly and simultaneously manipulate the design space, however complex. A hierarchical decision making process will be developed in which a system-of-systems, or multiple operationally and managerially independent systems, interact to affect a series of top level metrics. This takes the notion of top-down requirements flow one step further to allow for simultaneous bottom-up and top-down design, enabled by the use of neural network surrogate models to represent the complex design space. Using a proof-of-concept case study of employing a guided projectile for mortar interception, this process will show how the iterative steps that are usually required when dealing with flowing requirements from one level to the next lower in the systems engineering process are eliminated, allowing for direct manipulation across nonadjacent levels in the hierarchy. For this system-of-systems environment comprised of a Monte Carlo based design space exploration employing rapid neural network surrogate models, both bottom-up and top-down design analysis may be executed simultaneously. This process enables any response to be treated as an independent variable, meaning that information can flow in either direction within the hierarchy.

I Ching, a Chinese classic which contains more than three thousand years' history, is the most valuable Chinese cultural treasure. I Ching includes not only philosophical ideas, but military thoughts as well. Studying such military philosophy in I Ching can effectively prevent the war from happening.

The Weapon-Target Assignment (WTA) problem is a fundamental problem arising in defense-related applications of operations research. Optimizing the WTA is about the selection of the most appropriate weapon for each target in the problem. Basically the aim is to have the maximum effect on targets. Different algorithms / branch and bound (B&amp / B), genetic algorithm (GA), variable neighborhood search (VNS), are used to solve this problem. In this thesis, a more complex version of this problem is defined and adapted to fire support automation (Command Control Communication Computer Intelligence, C4I) systems. For each target, a weapon with appropriate ammunition, fuel, timing, status, risk is moved to an appropriate ammunitions, economy of fuel, risk analysis and time scheduling are all integrated into the solution. B&amp / B, GA and VNS are used to solve static and dynamic WTA problem. Simulations have shown that GA and VNS are the best suited methods to solve the WTA problem.

In this thesis, we defined a new assignment problem and named it as the artillery target assignment problem(ATAP). The artillery target assignment problem is about assigning artillery weapons to targets at different time instances while optimizing some objectives. Since decisions at a time instance may affect decisions at other time instances, solving this assignment problem is harder than the classical assignment problem. For constructing a solution approach, we defined a base case and some variations of the problem which reflects subproblems of the main problem. These sub-problems are investigated for possible solutions. For two of these sub-problems, genetic algorithm solutions with customized representations and genetic operators are developed. Experiments of these solutions and related results are presented in this thesis.

Cruise missile mission planning is a key activity of cruise missile operations. Ground planning activities aim at low observable missions that have high probability of success. These activities include end game planning, route planning and launch planning. While end game planning tries to optimize end game parameters for maximum effectiveness, route planning tries to maximize survivability and enable navigational supports by determining the waypoints to from launch zone to target through a defended area. And lastly, planner tries to find the appropriate launch parameters that will prohibit platform to contact enemy agents. Mission rehearsal is the execution of the planned mission in a virtual environment that will be constructed with the data that drives the planning process. Mission rehearsal will support planners by providing possible results of the planned mission. Stochastic processes of the execution of the planned mission will be incorporated in the simulation of the combat. Along with platform, cruise missile and target, other players like SAM Sites or Search Radars (Early Warning Radars) will be incorporated in the rehearsal process.

Within the air defense domain, the Weapon-Target Allocation problem is a fundamental problem. This problem deals with the allocation of a set ofiring units or weapons to a set of hostile targets so that the total expected effect on targets is maximized. The Weapon-Target Allocation problem has been proven to be NP-Complete by Lloyd and Witsenhausen [14]. In this thesis, the use of various algorithms including search algorithms, maximum marginal return algorithms, evolutionary algorithms and bipartite graph matching algorithms are demonstrated to solve the problem. Algorithms from the literature are adjusted to the problem and implemented. In addition, existing algorithms are improved by taking care of the maximum allowed time criterion. A testbed is developed to be able to compare the algorithms. The developed testbed allows users to implement new algorithms and compare the algorithms that are selected by the users easily. Using the testbed, implemented algorithms are compared based on optimality and performance criteria. The results are examined and by combining the algorithms that give better results, a new algorithm is proposed to solve the problem more effciently. The proposed algorithm is also compared to the other algorithms and computational results of the algorithms are presented.

<p>The problem area of the study concerns the current debate and claim that much of the Swedish weapon export contradicts the Human Rights criterion and condition for non-armed conflicts set down by the Swedish regulatory framework governing weapon exports. Since these factors are crucial aspects pertaining to recipient countries in granting of ex-ports, this Bachelor Thesis investigate the context and facts relating to the two cases of munitions export to the Islamic Republic of Pakistan and the Russian Federation in 2006. With the primary purpose of investigating if these cases pertain to the regulatory frame-work governing Swedish weapon exports, the study has been based on a deductive method of logical reasoning deriving 4 hypotheses from the regulatory framework. Over all, after testing the hypotheses, the findings show that the decisions are in clear conflict with the Human Rights criterion of the Swedish regulatory framework, but not in conflict with the framework as a whole. Thereby, the study concludes that the decisions to grant export ac-cord the regulatory framework.</p> / <p>Uppsatsens problemområde behandlar den nuvarande debatten och påståendena om hur svensk vapenexport står i strid med kriterierna för mänskliga rättigheter och icke beväpna-de konflikter, vilka är fastställda i riktlinjerna för export. Eftersom dessa är faktorer av av-sevärd vikt gällande mottagarländerna vid beslutsfattandet av export, så har denna uppsats syftat till att undersöka situationerna och empiri i förhållande till de två fallen av vapenex-port till Pakistan och Ryssland under 2006. Det primära syftet har således varit att under-söka om dessa fall är i samspel med svenskt regelverk för vapenexport. Undersökningen bygger på en deduktiv metod av logiskt resonemang som har etablerat 4 hypoteser, vilka är deducerade från svenskt regelverk. Allt som allt, efter att ha testat hypoteserna, så påvisar resultatet av studien att besluten för export står i klar strid med kriterierna för mänskliga rättigheter och icke beväpnade konflikter. Detta förklaras emellertid av andra punkter i re-gelverket, vilket ger slutsatsen att besluten är i linje med svenskt regelverk.</p>