Digital Commons Network^™

Human Security And Military Preparedness, Linda A. Malone

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Rise Of The New Apostolic Reformation And Its Implication For Adventist Eschatology, Trevor O'Reggio

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Constitution Of Cádiz In Florida, M C. Mirow

Faculty Publications

The article explores the vibrant constitutional community that existed in St. Augustine and the province of East Florida in the final decade of Spanish control of the area. Based on relatively unexplored primary sources, it reveals a great deal of unknown information about the importance of the Constitution in Florida immediately before the territory was transferred to the United States. The article provides full description of the Constitution's promulgation in 1812 and a second promulgation of the Constitution in 1820 (something unknown in the general literature). It also addresses the construction of the St. Augustine monument to the Constitution erected …

Rescuing The Dignitary Torts From The Constitution, Cristina Carmody Tilley

Faculty Publications

The rights of individuals to recover for dignitary torts has been withering for the past forty years, since the Supreme Court constitutionalized the state common law tort of defamation in New York Times v. Sullivan in 1964. The Court announced in that case that the First Amendment required it to impose high standards for individual defamation claims in order to protect robust speech. As that principle has taken hold, it has in effect squeezed the rights of individuals to recover for invasion of privacy and intentional infliction of emotional distress as well as defamation. Just last Term, the Court held …

"Delivered By The Power Of God": Nephi's Vision Of America's Birth, Kenneth L. Alford Ph.D.

Faculty Publications

Chapter 14 of the 2011 BYU Sperry Symposium volume, "'Delivered by the Power of God:' Nephi's Vision of America's Birth" by Dr. Kenneth L. Alford discusses evidence of God's hand andintervention in the American Revolutionary War. This essay specifically looks at 1 Nephi 13, Washington and the founding fathers, wartime weather, and the West Point chain.

Targeted Enrichment Of Ancient Pathogens Yielding The Ppcp1 Plasmid Of Yersinia Pestis From Victims Of The Black Death, Verena J. Schuenemann, Kristen Bos, Sharon Dewitte, Hendrik N. Poinar, Sarah Schmedes, Joslyn Jamieson, Alissa Mittnik, Stephen Forrest, Brian K. Coombes, James W. Wood, David J.D. Earn, William White, Johannes Krause, Hendrik N. Poinar

Faculty Publications

Although investigations of medieval plague victims have identified Yersinia pestis as the putative etiologic agent of the pandemic, methodological limitations have prevented large-scale genomic investigations to evaluate changes in the pathogen's virulence over time. We screened over 100 skeletal remains from Black Death victims of the East Smithfield mass burial site (1348–1350, London, England). Recent methods of DNA enrichment coupled with high-throughput DNA sequencing subsequently permitted reconstruction of ten full human mitochondrial genomes (16 kb each) and the full pPCP1 (9.6 kb) virulence-associated plasmid at high coverage. Comparisons of molecular damage profiles between endogenous human and Y. pestis DNA confirmed …

Taking International Law At Its Word And Its Spirit: Re-Envisioning Responsibility To Protect As A Binding Principle Of International Law, Tessa R. Davis

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

A Taskable Space Vehicle: Realizing Cost Savings By Combining Orbital And Suborbital Flight, Thomas Co, Jonathan T. Black

Faculty Publications

The use of space gives the United States distinct advantages in any battlefield environment, but the high cost of space operations increasingly jeopardizes those advantages. Although the United States pioneered much of the current space technology, declining budgets for space research, development, and operations leave our legacy systems vulnerable to adversaries around the world. Other nations formerly incapable of space exploitation are quickly learning to counter US space technologies at surprisingly low costs. In order to reduce the expense of deploying and maintaining a robust space capability, the Department of Defense (DOD) must change the status quo in space operations …

X-Hale: Designing The Atmospheric Surveillance Platforms Of The Future, Christopher M. Shearer

Faculty Publications

Imagine the benefits that battlefield commanders or intelligence analysts could derive from an airborne surveillance platform that would carry a 500-pound payload, operate above the range of small arms fire, remain on station for weeks or even years, cost much less than a satellite, and relocate around the globe to a new region of interest within a couple of weeks. Realizing this concept, known as a high-altitude, long-endurance HALE aircraft, is a 10-to-15-year goal of researchers at the Air Force Institute of Technology AFIT. In order to reach this goal, those researchers are following a developmental path similar to the …

Precision Position, Navigation, And Timing Without The Global Positioning System, Kenneth A. Fisher, John F. Raquet

Faculty Publications

The NAVSTAR Global Positioning System GPS has revolutionized modern warfare. Since 2005 almost all US precision-guided munitions have used GPS targeting data. Consequently, weapons delivery systems are able to strike enemy targets with precision, often resulting in little or no collateral damage. Furthermore, nearly all military assets, including aircraft, tanks, ships, missiles, mortar rounds, cargo boxes, and dismounted Soldiers rely on the accurate position determination that GPS provides. For military users of this system, two main limitations emerge. First, the system relies on line of sight that is, the satellites must be in view of the receiver s antenna so …

The Criticality Of Defense-Focused Technical Education, Walter D. Givhan, Eric D. Trias, William H. Allen

Faculty Publications

The United States Air Force is a service born of technology, and throughout its history, technology has remained central to its identity and power. From the start, visionary leaders realized the importance of technologically focused education to advancing airpower. Consequently, through the years, institutions of higher learning such as the Air Force Institute of Technology AFIT, as well as the civilian institution program it administers, have continued the meaningful work of developing the technology and organic human capital to sustain the Air Forces edge as a fighting force. As advances in technology have led the Air Force into the new …

Using Nanotechnology To Detect Nerve Agents, Mark N. Goltz, Dong-Shik Kim, Leeann Racz

Faculty Publications

Nanotechnology has opened a wide range of opportunities having potential impacts in areas as diverse as medicine and consumer products. In collaboration with researchers at the University of Toledo UT, Air Force Institute of Technology AFIT scientists are exploring the possibility of using a nanoscale organic matrix to detect organophosphate OP nerve agents. Current techniques for detecting OP compounds are expensive and time consuming. Developing a nanoscale organic matrix sensor would allow for direct, real-time sensing under field conditions. This article describes the science behind such a sensor and its possible applications. High-performance sensors are needed to protect Soldiers and …

For Their Own Good: Moral Slavery 101--The Aristotelian Cantus Firmus, Gary M. Simpson

Faculty Publications

“Moral slavery” will sound curiously—even immorally—oxymoronic to most of us, and a “course” in Aristotle’s views on “moral slavery” will seem quaintly archaic or irrelevantly “academic.” We will be surprised to learn how much these ideas have influenced our culture and continue to influence our lives and politics.

America's Turning Point, Jeffrey Rogers Hummel

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Lost In Doctrine: Particular Social Group, Child Soldiers And The Failure Of U.S. Asylum Law To Protect Exploited Children, Tessa R. Davis

Faculty Publications

Exploited and persecuted, child soldiers live lives dominated by violence, fear, and death. Very few will find security within their own nations or abroad. Subjected to exclusionary bars or rigid interpretations of the particular social group ground for asylum, U.S. asylum law frequently functions to exclude those lucky few children who are able to escape their persecutors. Scholars writing on child soldiers and asylum law focus, almost exclusively, on the exclusionary bars and question of whether children are persecutors or victims of atrocities. These concerns are critical because how courts view child soldiers determines whether they will grant or deny …

Change Comes With Time: Substantive Interpretation Of Non-Proportional Hazards In Event History Analysis, Amanda A. Licht

Faculty Publications

While methodologists have provided us ample notice of both the problem of non-proportional hazards and the means of correcting them, less attention has been paid to the post-estimation interpretation. The suggested inclusion of time interactions in our models is more than a statistical fix: these corrections alter the substantive meaning and interpretation of results. Framing the issue as a specific case of multiplicative-interaction modeling, I provide detailed discussion of the problem of non-proportional hazards and present several appropriate means of interpreting both the substantive impact and the significance of variables whose effects may change over time.

War Fighting In Cyberspace: Evolving Force Presentation And Command And Control, M. Bodine Birdwell, Robert F. Mills

Faculty Publications

The Department of Defense (DOD) is endeavoring to define war fighting in the global cyberspace domain. Creation of US Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM), a subunified functional combatant command (FCC) under US Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM), is a huge step in integrating and coordinating the defense, protection, and operation of DOD networks; however, this step does not mean that USCYBERCOM will perform or manage all cyberspace functions. In fact the vast majority of cyberspace functions conducted by the services and combatant commands (COCOM), although vital for maintaining access to the domain in support of their operations, are not of an active war-fighting nature. …

Determining Solution Space Characteristics For Real-Time Strategy Games And Characterizing Winning Strategies, Gary B. Lamont, Kurt Weissgerber, Brett J. Borghetti, Gilbert L. Peterson

Faculty Publications

The underlying goal of a competing agent in a discrete real-time strategy (RTS) game is to defeat an adversary. Strategic agents or participants must define an a priori plan to maneuver their resources in order to destroy the adversary and the adversary's resources as well as secure physical regions of the environment. This a priori plan can be generated by leveraging collected historical knowledge about the environment. This knowledge is then employed in the generation of a classification model for real-time decision-making in the RTS domain. The best way to generate a classification model for a complex problem domain depends …

How We Think: Thinking Critically And Creatively And How Military Professionals Can Do It Better, Richard Mcconnell, Leonard Lira, Ken Long, Mark Gerges, Bill Mccollum

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Impact Of Third-Party Financing On Transnational Litigation, Cassandra Burke Robertson

Faculty Publications

Third-party litigation finance is a growing industry. The practice, also termed “litigation lending,” allows funders with no other connection to the lawsuit to invest in a plaintiff’s claim in exchange for a share of the ultimate recovery. Most funding agreements have focused on domestic litigation in Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. However, the industry is poised for growth worldwide, and the recent environmental lawsuit brought by Ecuadorian plaintiffs against Chevron demonstrates that litigation funding is also beginning to play a role in transnational litigation.

This article, prepared for a symposium on “International Law in Crisis,” speculates about …

Reconciling The Controversy Of Animal Cruelty And The Shoah: A Look At Primo Levi's Compassionate Writings, Ilona Klein

Faculty Publications

Is it ethically admissible to compare the suffering of Jews during World War II to the general suffering of animals in the Western world? Who considers this parallel to be morally obscene, and who supports the comparison? Based on the historical evidence of Nazis insulting Jews with animal verbiage and herding them into the gas chambers of concentration camps, this study looks at a few textual examples by the Italian Jewish author Primo Levi, finding a conciliatory position in his poetry and prose.

Consumer Casualties, Amy J. Schmitz

Faculty Publications

On July 21, President Obama signed into law the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (Dodd-Frank),' which among other things calls for creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to serve as a centralized agency charged with protecting consumers from lending abuses and improper practices. The question is when and whether this agency will come to fruition-or suffer as a casualty of political warfare.

The Rights And Liberties Of The Palau Constitution, Kevin Bennardo

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Subject To Surveillance: Genocide Law As Epistemology Of The Object, Tawia Baidoe Ansah

Faculty Publications

This article analyzes the discourse on genocide from two angles: the legal genesis of the term in the 1940s and subsequent legal "capture" of the concept of genocide, and a recent socio-political critique of the legal meaning of genocide. The article suggests that a cross-disciplinary critique of genocidal violence not only describes the event and the victim, but also produces knowledge of them as discursive "objects." The key issue is the "surveillance" role of the outside observer, also produced as such in discursive relation to the object. At stake in this view of genocide law as epistemology is the capacity …

Consent To Retaliation: A Civil Recourse Theory Of Contractual Liability, Nathan B. Oman

Faculty Publications

In the ancient Near East, contracts were often solemnized by hacking up a goat. The ritual was an enacted penalty clause: “If I breach this contract, let it be done to me as we are doing to the goat.” This Article argues that we are not so far removed from our goat-hacking forbearers. Legal scholars have argued that contractual liability is best explained by the morality of promise making, or by the need to create optimal incentives in contractual performance. In contrast, this Article argues for the simpler, rawer claim that contractual liability consists of consent to retaliation in the …

Karen Azoulay: Carnation Thunder, Liz Linden

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Partisan And His Doppelganger: The Case Of Primo Levi, Ilona Klein

Faculty Publications

Published in 1982, Se non ora, quando? (If Not Now, When?) is Primo Levi's first novel proper. Perhaps Primo Levi is regretted not fully living life as an Italian Jewish partisan that he re-created his lost dream through its pages, and had his partisan brigade not been captured, perhaps Levi's underground fighting might have continued until the end of the war. If Not Now, When? thus might reflect Levi's need to explore that sought-after life as a partisan, which he had been denied after only three months of activity. Did Live write If Not Now, When? as a …

The Gospel According To God’S Judgment: Judgment As Salvation, Jiri Moskala

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

What Every Christian Should Know About Paul's Letters, Matthew L. Skinner

Faculty Publications

Paul was first and foremost a pastor, addressing particular issues facing people in churches he loved and tended. To read his letters properly is to understand Paul in the context of that world and of his Jewish faith—a faith not replaced but transformed by his experience of Jesus Christ.

‘The Grass That Gets Trampled When Elephants Fight’: Will The Codification Of The Crime Of Aggression Protect Women?, Beth Van Schaack

Faculty Publications

This article analyzes the outcome of the Kampala process with an eye toward the rarely-considered gender aspects of the crime of aggression, whether or not the provisions adopted represent an advancement for women, and how aspects of feminist theory might interpret the new regime. The Article concludes that any impact of the provisions will inevitably be limited by gaps and ambiguities in the definition of the crime and the jurisdictional regime, which is premised on state consent and exempts non-states parties altogether. At the same time, the insertion of the crime of aggression in the Rome Statute enables the prosecution …