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China and the Soviet Union have disputed portions of their common border for centuries, sometimes violently. Some analysts base this dispute on competing territorial ambitions and deep‐seated cultural antipathy. The perspective elaborated here, using an historical‐structural rather than quantitative approach, is that modern China uses the border dispute as a convenient means of communicating with the Soviet Union when a particularly forceful, dramatic, or public forum is needed to accomplish Chinese objectives. Support for this hypothesis, derived from an analysis of China's relations with other neighbors, is also discussed.

The U.S. military is designed to take on a similarly constructed foreign military located across some line of demarcation. The goal of such conventional warfare is to incapacitate or annihilate the enemy military, whereupon victory is achieved – a task for which the U.S. military has no peer on the current world scene or the foreseeable future. However, the U.S.'s adversaries since the end of the Cold War have not been conventional forces, as evidenced most recently in Iraq and Afghanistan. Consequently, the U.S. Army and Marine Corps recently have become volcanoes of change in order to adapt their operational styles to this reality. In the past, departures from the conventional mode in similar circumstances have been temporary. Currently, there is considerable discussion in the U.S. defense establishment about how persistent these types of nonconventional threats are likely to be in the future and whether it is necessary to change the configuration of the U.S. military accordingly. A centerpiece of this discussion is a new Counterinsurgency (COIN) Field Manual 3-24 addressing issues related to the postures the military and support establishments may take. This paper discusses some events prior to the writing of the new COIN Manual, comments on issues raised by the Manual and its doctrine, and offers some social science implications for thinking about and implementing the doctrine.

Baron et al. briefly summarized the history of human performance modeling¹ (HPM) in their 1990 review. The application of control theory to aircraft simulations and the development of task network models stimulated the development of methods to represent the human contribution to system dynamics. These groundbreaking efforts first identified the manifold difficulties associated with the simulation of human performance in military settings, and many of these difficulties remain matters of contemporary concern. The technical challenges associated with the representation of human performance have endured, and military applications continue to be a major driver of interest in HBR. The expense and various difficulties associated with laboratory research, field studies, and operational tests have pushed modeling and simulation to center stage as an affordable alternative to empirical studies. Simulation is now an essential component of military force development, operational planning, engineering development and acquisition, and training.

I first met Charles C. Moskos back in 1983, at the first international conference in which I had the fortune to participate, and, since my history of relations with him parallels those of many colleagues and friends who study the military and who, like me, remember him, it seems worthwhile to introduce these studies in his honour with a personal recollection.

I first met Charles C. Moskos back in 1983, at the first international conference in which I had the fortune to participate, and, since my history of relations with him parallels those of many colleagues and friends who study the military and who, like me, remember him, it seems worthwhile to introduce these studies in his honour with a personal recollection.