Despite their disagreements, proponents of deep engagement and offshore balancing share an optimistic but unrealistic assessment of U.S. military power. In particular, both sides in the debate over ...U.S. grand strategy underestimate the potential consequences of China's military modernization. China's antiaccess/area denial strategy and conventional precision-strike capabilities are already undermining the United States' ability to prevent local conflicts, protect longtime allies, and preserve freedom of the commons in East Asia. Whether the United States intends to uphold the status quo when threats emerge or adopt a wait-and-see approach to regional conflicts, it will need to adapt its military for power projection operations in much less permissive environments than it has become accustomed to during the unipolar era. These adaptations include developing air and undersea platforms that can survive inside denial zones, forward bases that are better able to withstand attacks, and satellite and cyberspace networks that are less vulnerable to disruption.
Objectives The aim of this study was to examine mortality and cancer incidence in a cohort of 28 300 military servicemen known, from personnel files, to have served in the Royal Norwegian Navy during ...1950–2004. Methods The cohort was followed from 1951–2007 for mortality and from 1953–2008 for cancer. Standardized mortality ratios (SMR) and incidence ratios (SIR) for cancer were calculated from national rates. Internal comparisons rate ratios (RR) were made using Poisson regression. Results Mortality for all Navy personnel was lower than expected for all causes combined (SMR 0.84) and for most disease groups and violent causes, but not for cancer mortality (SMR 1.02). Vessel crews had consistently higher SMR than land-based personnel, still with rates lower than — or close to — national ones. The relative risk between the two subgroups was in the same direction for mortality from alcohol abuse and non-malignant alcohol-related diseases (RR 1.56) and for the incidence of alcohol-related cancers (RR 1.58) and lung cancer (RR 1.65). An overall small excess in the incidence of all cancers combined for the entire cohort (SIR 1.06) was caused by prostate cancer, malignant melanoma, and non-melanoma skin cancer. An excess of bladder cancer was observed among submariners (SIR 1.53). Conclusion The low all-cause mortality was in line with a "healthy soldier effect". Navy personnel had a lower-than-expected mortality from accidents and suicide. Alcohol-related diseases were more frequent among vessel crews than among land-based personnel, but largely comparable to the rates among all Norwegian men.
This article investigates the internal governance institutions of violent criminal enterprise by examining the law, economics, and organization of pirates. To effectively organize their banditry, ...pirates required mechanisms to prevent internal predation, minimize crew conflict, and maximize piratical profit. Pirates devised two institutions for this purpose. First, I analyze the system of piratical checks and balances crews used to constrain captain predation. Second, I examine how pirates used democratic constitutions to minimize conflict and create piratical law and order. Pirate governance created sufficient order and cooperation to make pirates one of the most sophisticated and successful criminal organizations in history.
Movement is the enemy of camouflage: most attempts at concealment are disrupted by motion of the target. Faced with this problem, navies in both World Wars in the twentieth century painted their ...warships with high contrast geometric patterns: so-called "dazzle camouflage". Rather than attempting to hide individual units, it was claimed that this patterning would disrupt the perception of their range, heading, size, shape and speed, and hence reduce losses from, in particular, torpedo attacks by submarines. Similar arguments had been advanced earlier for biological camouflage. Whilst there are good reasons to believe that most of these perceptual distortions may have occurred, there is no evidence for the last claim: changing perceived speed. Here we show that dazzle patterns can distort speed perception, and that this effect is greatest at high speeds. The effect should obtain in predators launching ballistic attacks against rapidly moving prey, or modern, low-tech battlefields where handheld weapons are fired from short ranges against moving vehicles. In the latter case, we demonstrate that in a typical situation involving an RPG7 attack on a Land Rover the reduction in perceived speed is sufficient to make the grenade miss where it was aimed by about a metre, which could be the difference between survival or not for the occupants of the vehicle.
The stern rudder presents a formidable challenge to the power of the sea. Already extant by the twelfth century in the Frisian region, it has long been compared with the quarter rudder of antiquity. ...Past scholarly studies have focused almost entirely on the reasons for its creation, ignoring the complex evolution of this steering system. The disastrous consequences of the rudder's loss mid-voyage made its replacement necessary, although this was a last resort. Through a close analysis of the printed sources, the article considers the attempts of the English and French navies to incorporate emergency and spare devices on board. The present review reveals the importance of the stern rudder to seafarers and the means undertaken by these two naval forces in order to find substitutions in the event of damage to the initial rudder.
The paper presents an adaptive model that utilized the machine learning algorithms to predict the heart diseases. As heart disease is one of the leading causes of death and understanding its ...mechanism, effective prevention, diagnosis, and treatment is very crucial. With the help of data analytics, machine learning, artificial intelligence, it is possible to provide optimal solution to the heart diseases. But still getting optimal accuracy is a challenging issue. Identifying the data pattern, correlation and algorithms affects the accuracy very much. In this work, a stacking model has been proposed to find the best models out of it and validate the model for better prediction accuracy. The model is stacked with seven algorithms different machine learning algorithms such as Radom Forest, Naïve Bayes, Linear Regression, Decision Tree, Ad boost, K Nearest Neighbour, and Gradient Boosting. The experiment was carried out with a training and testing ration of 80:20 in ration. Evaluations are carried out in different measures such as Precision, Recall, F Score, and Accuracy to demonstrate the efficiency of the algorithms. Form the experimentation it is observed that the gradient boosting outperforms the other competitive approaches as this algorithm combines weak predictive models to form a stronger ensemble model that can make highly accurate predictions with an accuracy of 94.67 percentages.
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