Nathan J. Carlson, Adam. D. Reiman, Robert E. Overstreet and Matthew A. Douglas
The United States Air Force often provides effective airlift for cargo distribution, but is at times inefficient. This paper aims to address the under-utilization of military…
Abstract
Purpose
The United States Air Force often provides effective airlift for cargo distribution, but is at times inefficient. This paper aims to address the under-utilization of military airlift cargo compartments that plagues the airlift system.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors examine seven techniques designed to increase cargo compartment utilization and increase airlift utilization rates. The techniques were applied through load planning software to 30 real-world movements consisting of 159 sorties. They then ran each post-technique movement through a modeled flight environment to obtain cycle movement data. The metrics gained from both the load planning software and the modeled environment were regressed to provide statistical understanding regarding how well each technique influenced cost savings.
Findings
The results showed a 24 per cent elimination of aircraft required and a savings of $14.5m. Extrapolation of the authors’ findings to four years of airlift mission data revealed an estimated annual savings of $1.6bn.
Originality/value
This research effort provides multiple options to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of military airlift.
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Vincent McLean and Adam D. Reiman
Aircraft fail to meet mission capable rate goals due to a lack of supply of aircraft parts in inventory where the aircraft breaks. This triggers an order at the repair location…
Abstract
Purpose
Aircraft fail to meet mission capable rate goals due to a lack of supply of aircraft parts in inventory where the aircraft breaks. This triggers an order at the repair location. To maximize mission capable rate, the time from order to delivery needs to be minimized. The purpose of this research is to examine the case of three airfields for the order to delivery time of mission critical aircraft parts for a specific aircraft type.
Design/methodology/approach
This research captured data from three information systems to assess the order fulfillment process. The data were analyzed to determine the performance in fiscal year 2020. Using the model of that performance, the cost of reducing transportation times using publicly available commercial cost estimates was assessed against the impact on aircraft availability.
Findings
The results indicate that paying the costs for expedited shipping would have increased aircraft availability by 1.09 times the average annual aircraft flying hours for the three cases. The cost for the equivalent of an additional aircraft for the year was a third of the annual straight-line depreciation for that aircraft type.
Research limitations/implications
This research assumed that the transportation time service levels publicly posted could be achieved. The weight of each mission critical part was not available, so the weight was selected from a probability distribution of mission critical part weights that was retrieved from prior research. This research provides options to enhance aircraft availability and identifies the associated costs.
Practical implications
Adjusting the contract with transportation providers to reduce the transportation times of mission critical parts could have a large impact on aircraft availability at relatively little cost.
Social implications
This research could enhance aircraft readiness in service of the common defense.
Originality/value
This research provides an effective methodology for enhancing military readiness through contract adjustments with commercial partners. The value of this research is that it will serve to adjust the value proposition of mission critical parts inside the United States Transportation Command’s Next Generation Delivery Service contract.
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Jonathan Slottje, Jason Anderson, John M. Dickens and Adam D. Reiman
Pilot upgrade training is critical to aircraft and passenger safety. This study aims to identify variances in the US Air Force C-130J pilot upgrade training based on geographic…
Abstract
Purpose
Pilot upgrade training is critical to aircraft and passenger safety. This study aims to identify variances in the US Air Force C-130J pilot upgrade training based on geographic location and provide a model to enhance policy that will impact future pilot training efforts that lower cost and increase operator quality and proficiency.
Design/methodology/approach
This research employed a mixed-method approach. First, the authors collected data and analyzed 90 C-130J pilots' aviation records and then contextualized this analysis with interviews of experts. Finally, the authors present a modified version of Six Sigma's define–measure–analyze–improve–control (DMAIC) that identifies and reduces the variances in C-130J pilot training, translating into higher quality outcomes.
Findings
The results indicate significant statistical variances across geographically separated C-130J pilot training organizations. This leads some organizations to have higher proficiency levels in specific tasks and others with comparative deficiencies. Additionally, the data analysis in this study enabled a recommended number of flight hours in several distinct categories that should be obtained before upgrading a pilot to aircraft commander to enhance standards.
Research limitations/implications
This research was limited to C-130J pilot upgrades, but these results can be implemented within any field that utilizes hours as a measure of experience. Implications from this research can be employed to scope policy that will influence pilot training requirements across all airframes in civilian and military aviation.
Originality/value
This research proposes a process improvement methodology that could be immediately implemented within the C-130J community and, more importantly, in any upgrade training where humans advance into higher echelons of a profession.
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The purpose of this paper is to provide a survey piece on the concept of privacy and the justification of privacy rights.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to provide a survey piece on the concept of privacy and the justification of privacy rights.
Design/methodology/approach
This article reviews each of the following areas: a brief history of privacy; philosophical definitions of privacy along with specific critiques; legal conceptions of privacy, including the history of privacy protections granted in constitutional and tort law; and general critiques of privacy protections both moral and legal.
Findings
A primary goal of this article has been to provide an overview of the most important philosophical and legal issues related to privacy. While privacy is difficult to define and has been challenged on legal and moral grounds, it is a cultural universal and has played an important role in the formation of Western liberal democracies.
Originality/value
The paper provides a general overview of the issues and debates that frame this lively area of scholarly inquiry. By facilitating a wider engagement and input from numerous communities and disciplines, it is the authors' hope to advance scholarly debate in this important area.
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It was typical in nineteenth century economic thought to view thetensions between the interests of capital and labour as critical toindustrial society. Yet later economic thought…
Abstract
It was typical in nineteenth century economic thought to view the tensions between the interests of capital and labour as critical to industrial society. Yet later economic thought has generally reduced these tensions to those captured in contract theory. Explores how this narrowing of focus has cast an important source of contemporary social dynamics into the shadows. A broad survey is made of the various ways in which capital‐labour tensions are manifested in today′s advanced industrial economies, with special attention given to the case of the USA. Concludes with a discussion of how intensified international competitiveness, combined with our increasing distance from the threat of material privation, may force societies to restructure their economies so as to eliminate the source of capital‐labour tensions. The task facing liberal economic thought is to expand its scope to better provide guidance for meeting this challenge.
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Stories govern the criminal justice system and consequently the millions of individuals under its control. In the US the harms experienced by those individuals, their families and…
Abstract
Stories govern the criminal justice system and consequently the millions of individuals under its control. In the US the harms experienced by those individuals, their families and their communities are massive. A prominent system-sustaining story is that antisocial persons, who are essentially different from the rest of us, get that way through negligent parenting. The story's moral oppositions rest on textual absences concerning crime, work, care, humanity and the mind of the scholar. In this chapter, first, I discern what goes unsaid via close analysis of the story of antisociality constructed by Gottfredson and Hirschi in their 1990 book A General Theory of Crime. Second, I offer a method for cataloguing what goes unsaid in stories that effect control, by (1) evaluating figurative language and other means of ambiguation; (2) assessing patterns of elaboration and explanation and (3) asking what and whose knowledge is missing. Rigorously deployed with a reflexive stance on one's position as to what should be said, the method can help uncover subtext, understatement and silencing.
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The purpose of this paper is to incorporate historical theories of political economy as means better to clarify and classify contemporary state police and private policing…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to incorporate historical theories of political economy as means better to clarify and classify contemporary state police and private policing practices.
Design/methodology/approach
A diverse historical investigation of largely, non‐traditional public police history was conducted by utilizing a selective variety of social, political, and economic sources.
Findings
The paper finds that several theoretical features of eighteenth and nineteenth century Marxian, classical, and neoclassical political economy have contributed in defining the origins of contemporary American public police and private policing practices. Born from these perspectives, public goods theories frameworks, in conjunction with Wilson's police officer job function typologies in Varieties of Police Behavior, more clearly illustrate the current political and economically defined state supported police relative to private market arrangements.
Research limitations/implications
This research describes the positioning of this mixed economy in theoretical fashion, but does not provide contemporary private sector market growths or publicly supplied police trends that are a suitable next step for further research.
Practical implications
The public “monopoly” of state supported police is largely rejected. More interdisciplinary research approaches should be pursued in the twenty‐first century that better reflect the American political and economic realities of public and private forms of policing.
Originality/value
This paper is highly original when considering the paucity of theory utilized in describing simultaneous state and private policing scenarios.
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The aim of this study is to offer valuable insights to businesses and facilitate better understanding on transformer-based models (TBMs), which are among the widely employed…
Abstract
Purpose
The aim of this study is to offer valuable insights to businesses and facilitate better understanding on transformer-based models (TBMs), which are among the widely employed generative artificial intelligence (GAI) models, garnering substantial attention due to their ability to process and generate complex data.
Design/methodology/approach
Existing studies on TBMs tend to be limited in scope, either focusing on specific fields or being highly technical. To bridge this gap, this study conducts robust bibliometric analysis to explore the trends across journals, authors, affiliations, countries and research trajectories using science mapping techniques – co-citation, co-words and strategic diagram analysis.
Findings
Identified research gaps encompass the evolution of new closed and open-source TBMs; limited exploration across industries like education and disciplines like marketing; a lack of in-depth exploration on TBMs' adoption in the health sector; scarcity of research on TBMs' ethical considerations and potential TBMs' performance research in diverse applications, like image processing.
Originality/value
The study offers an updated TBMs landscape and proposes a theoretical framework for TBMs' adoption in organizations. Implications for managers and researchers along with suggested research questions to guide future investigations are provided.