The purpose of this paper is to provide a systematic and detailed analysis of the key components that characterise the military operational environments and that should be considered to improve the ...effectiveness of the operations process. Also, it focuses on understanding how these salient characteristics might influence capabilities and tactics with particular emphasis on the adaptability of military forces in the face of rapid and unforeseen changes in the operational environment. The research objectives include identifying and assessing the impact of operational environment’s factors, and analysing how military forces adapt to these conditions to maximise their effectiveness. The results highlight the need for continuous adaptability and flexibility of the military forces to respond performantly to the ever-changing operational requirements. Furthermore, the paper demonstrates that military operational effectiveness is closely connected to the ability to anticipate, understand and integrate new technologies, as well as to adjust continuously designated strategies and tactics in the face of the challenges specific to the operational environment.
Managing financial resources efficiently is a requirement for all levels of government. However, measuring the performance of governments or other public authorities is usually highly complex. The ...results of this type of assessment are likely to be biased or perverse. This study attempts to identify non-discretionary or exogenous variables that are associated with better/worse economic performance of local governments (the determinants of efficiency). Based on past research, the paper starts by providing a classification for the different types of determinants of local government performance. Afterwards, using data from all Portuguese municipalities, the relationship between a large number of factors and the efficiency scores is assessed. To accomplish this, several Tobit, OLS and double-bootstrap models were implemented. The efficiency scores are computed through non-parametric frontier methodologies. The results indicate that analysts must be prudent while interpreting the economic results achieved by each municipality. To be impartial and robust any performance evaluation model should (at least) consider the effects of the determinants of cost efficiency identified in this paper.
•This paper measures the efficiency of Portuguese local governments using non-parametric methods.•A taxonomy for the operational environment of a generic DMU is suggested.•The determinants of local government performance are analyzed.•Several Tobit, OLS and double-bootstrap models were implemented.•To be robust, performance evaluation models must take into account several exogenous variables.
The current operational environment is characterized by a high degree of complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity. Military leaders must be able to adapt to these ongoing challenges in order to succeed ...in their missions and achieve their objectives. One of the key challenges facing military leaders in the current operational environment is the rapidly changing nature of the threats they face. These threats can come from a wide range of sources, including state and non-state actors, terrorist organizations, and cyber attacks. Additionally, the proliferation of advanced technologies has created new vulnerabilities that military leaders must be able to address. Another challenge facing military leaders is the need to operate in a highly networked and interconnected environment. This requires a deep understanding of the complex systems that underpin modern warfare, as well as the ability to coordinate and collaborate with a wide range of stakeholders across multiple domains. Overall, the complexity of the current operational environment requires military leaders to be highly skilled, adaptable, and flexible. By developing these skills and leveraging new technologies and approaches, they can successfully navigate the challenges they face and achieve their objectives.
The military environment, by its very nature, is recognized as a source of occupational stress. The military’s approach to measuring stressors, analyzing and comparing them with the capacity to cope, ...gives rise to both distress and eustress. Challenges arise when the effects of stress surpass an individual’s ability to adapt, hindering their response to new demands. Military organizations highly value resilience as the key to effectiveness and success. In the military context, resilience can be viewed as a process, skill, or outcome, wherein military leaders exhibit the ability to confront fear, navigate outside their comfort zone, and overcome challenging moments in pursuit of a greater purpose
Municipal solid waste collection is a public service with impact on the environment, public health, and the appearance of a municipal area. The standard of efficiency achieved in providing this ...service has a direct impact on household expenditure, since the costs of collection are recovered through citizens’ taxes. The failure to consider relevant performance drivers recently led some Italian waste utilities into bankruptcy and financial collapse. Following prior research to identify the environmental and operational variables affecting the efficiency and quality of waste collection services, this study applies a more suitable and robust non-parametric method based on conditional order-m efficiency to identify the performance drivers of the waste collection services in 40 municipalities in Verona province, Italy. The exogenous variables studied could be clustered as 1) customer features (size of population served, population density, tourist flows, and percentage of non-residential customers; 2) household features, measured by number of inhabitants per house; and 3) operational features, represented by tons of waste collected for each load, method adopted (curbside or street bin), and maturity achieved with a given method. The study demonstrates that all variables affect the cost efficiency of waste collection with different intensity and direction.
•Integrating collection services of small municipalities does not improve the efficiency.•Best practices should be adopted to collect waste of non-residential customers.•Less famous resorts of the province should improve their collection activities.•The curbside method should be implemented in all municipalities.•Collection processes have to be innovated in highly populated areas.
This field study (a) assessed sleep quality of sailors on the U.S. Navy (USN) ships while underway, (b) investigated whether the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI) scores were affected by ...occupational factors and sleep attributes, and (c) assessed whether the PSQI could predict impaired psychomotor vigilance performance.
Longitudinal field assessment of fit-for-duty USN sailors performing their underway duties (N = 944, 79.0% males, median age 26 years). Participants completed questionnaires, wore actigraphs, completed logs, and performed the wrist-worn 3-min Psychomotor Vigilance Task (PVT).
Sailors slept on average 6.60 ± 1.01 h/day with 86.9% splitting their sleep into more than one episode/day. The median PSQI Global score was 8 (interquartile range IQR = 5); 80.4% of the population were classified as "poor sleepers" with PSQI scores >5. PSQI scores were affected by sailor occupational group, rank, daily sleep duration, and number of sleep episodes/day. Sleep quality showed a U-shape association with daily sleep duration due to the confounding effect of split sleep. Sailors with PSQI scores >9 had 21.1% slower reaction times (p < 0.001) and 32.8%-61.5% more lapses combined with false starts (all p < 0.001) than sailors with PSQI scores ≤9. Compared to males and officers, females and enlisted personnel had 86% and 23% higher risk, respectively, of having PSQI scores >9. Sailors in the PSQI > 9 group had more pronounced split sleep.
Working on Navy ships is associated with elevated PSQI scores, a high incidence of poor sleep, and degraded psychomotor vigilance performance. The widely used PSQI score>5 criterion should be further validated in active-duty service member populations.
This paper examines the intention to use autonomous vehicles (AVs) in Bangkok, Thailand. The level of readiness for AVs in terms of infrastructure, technology, and regulation in our study area may ...represent those in other developing countries where individual preferences and operational environment are generally different from more developed countries. We analyzed survey data of 797 respondents in the Bangkok Metropolitan Region, using a modified Technology Acceptance Model. The model incorporated additional factors, including trust, perceived risk, and operational environment of AVs, as well as how they could affect the intention to use AVs. We found that all latent constructs, i.e., perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, trust, and perceived risk, were significantly associated with the intention to use. Trust was found to be the most powerful factor; it directly increased intention to use the vehicles, and indirectly increased intention to use through improvement of perceived ease of use and reduction in perceived risk. These findings imply that familiarizing the general public with AV-related technologies might help to improve trust and promote AVs adoption. The results also suggested that to promote the use of AVs in developing countries with irregular traffic patterns and mixed road usage, the operating environments in areas where AVs are allowed should be well designed and regulated to ensure confidence of the public.
Decision makers must keep in mind that water services have an invaluable 'price' for the public budget and society's welfare. However, due to the specific features of the service, water utilities are ...prone to inefficiency. Thus, performance evaluation becomes indispensable to face this constraint. Besides the application of the traditional technique of Data Envelopment Analysis to evaluate the performance of Portuguese water utilities, this study also implements the robust technique of order-m to assess the influence of operational environment on water utilities' performance. In spite of several reforms, the Portuguese water sector still reveals significant levels of inefficiency, partially caused by an inappropriate operating scale. Concerning the operational environment, it was possible to observe a positive influence of private sector participation, economies of scope, and groundwater sources on efficiency. The influence of the 'quality of service provided' was also studied in this performance analysis.
Using the lessons learned from recent military operations such as Operation Inherent Resolve (OIR) from Syria and Iraq, we proposed to investigate the need for tactical military units to adapt ...operationally to grapple with the most common requirements specific to current operational environments, but also for those that can be foreseen in the future. In this regard, by identifying the best practices in the field that can be met at the level of some important armies, such as USA and UK, we will try to determine a common denominator of most important principles whose application may facilitate both operational and organizational adaptation necessary for tactical military units to perform missions and tasks in the most unknown future operational environments.
Despite more than 40 years of counterdrug interdiction efforts in the Western Hemisphere, cocaine trafficking, or ''narco-trafficking'', networks continue to evolve and increase their global reach. ...Counterdrug interdiction continues to fall short of performance targets, due to the adaptability of narco-trafficking networks and spatially complex constraints on interdiction operations (e.g., resources, jurisdictional). Due to these dynamics, current modeling approaches offer limited strategic insights into time-varying, spatially optimal allocation of counterdrug interdiction assets. This study presents coupled agent-based and spatial optimization models to investigate the co-evolution of counterdrug interdiction deployment and narco-trafficking networks' adaptive responses. Increased spatially optimized interdiction assets were found to increase seizure volumes. However, the value per seized shipment concurrently decreased and the number of active nodes increased or was unchanged. Narco-trafficking networks adaptively responded to increased interdiction pressure by spatially diversifying routes and dispersing shipment volumes. Thus, increased interdiction pressure had the unintended effect of expanding the spatial footprint of narco-trafficking networks. This coupled modeling approach enabled the study of narco-trafficking network evolution while being subjected to varying interdiction pressure as a spatially complex adaptive system. Capturing such co-evolution dynamics is essential for simulating traffickers' realistic adaptive responses to a wide range of interdiction scenarios.
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