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The purpose of this paper is to review the 2009 AUVSI Conference and Show held in Washington, DC with emphasis on unmanned vehicles or service robots, their application on the ground, in the air, and in the water.

The paper is of in‐depth interviews with exhibitors of unmanned vehicles and the providers of the technologies which are fundamental to their design and deployment.

The unmanned robotic vehicle industry is largely driven by government requirements, both military and civilian. Unmanned service robots are also found in commercial applications such as pipeline surveillance, crop monitoring, and fish school location at sea.

Developers will be challenged to meet the need for improvements in speed, payload, sensor capabilities, autonomous operation, and command and control of fleets of unmanned vehicles.

The paper offers insights into trends and new products in the unmanned robotic vehicle industry.

US Navy warships are capital-intensive national defense assets that require periodic depot and intermediate level maintenance availabilities (periods). Oftentimes, ship maintenance is deferred or forgone altogether due to geopolitical strife or fiscal challenges. The impacts of missed maintenance are not only a burden on ships’ crews, but they also have a deleterious effect on current and future readiness. It is a difficult task to strike a balance between current and future readiness when insufficient resources are available to sustain a fleet of warships. This paper draws from multi-attribute utility theory (MAUT) to develop a ship maintenance decision-making model that considers attributes from the current and life cycle readiness cohorts. Using the current maintenance plans for two DDG 51-class ships entering availabilities in same fiscal year, this model determines which ship is more capable of absorbing a loss of maintenance and planned modernizations relative to the context of the decision environment. Five attributes are considered for the overall decision: mandatory maintenance, non-mandatory maintenance, mission impact from maintenance, mission impact from planned modernizations, and maintenance backlog. The model presented here is generalizable to a number of U.S. Navy ships and watercraft and can be used to inform decision-makers of the short- and long-term impacts of deferring critical maintenance.

A steering device for watercraft having a hull bottom with sides sloping inwardly and downwardly from the chine to the keel comprising a rudder forming in retracted position a portion of said bottom between said chine and keel adjacent one end thereof, means connecting the forward end of said rudder to said bottom for swinging movement about a hinge axis, said hinge axis sloping forwardly from said chine to said keel in a plane substantially parallel with the plane of said bottom, said rudder being swingablc outwardly and downwardly about said axis into an extended operative position wherein it lies substantially in a vertical plane whereby planing effects causing adverse pitching moments about the craft's centre of gravity are minimized, means for deflecting said rudderto produce a turning moment, and locking means for holding said rudder in closed position to complete the contour of said hull bottom.

The police response to the protests in Ferguson, Missouri refocused attention on law enforcement agencies’ participation in the military surplus equipment program, or 1,033 Program. Given the extensive media coverage, particularly regarding the acquisition of military vehicles and weapons, it is important to empirically investigate the 1,033 Program. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Survey data were collected from 1,205 law enforcement regarding 1,033 Program participation and the types of equipment acquired. This study also explores whether significant differences exist by region, agency type, and size.

The results demonstrated that while a majority of state and local law enforcement agencies participated in the 1,033 Program, a significant number of agencies did not. Acquisition of military surplus weapons, vehicles, and other types of equipment was not the norm. Significant differences were discerned for overall participation and equipment acquisition based on region, agency type, and size.

This study does not address other concerns such as how surplus military equipment is used or policies agencies may have to govern that use, which provide avenues for further research to discern best practices.

Law enforcement agencies do not appear to acquire military vehicles and weapons to the extent that has been dramatized by the media.

This study contributes empirical data to inform the discussion of law enforcement agencies’ acquisition of military surplus equipment in the USA.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of organizational culture as a company migrates through a four-stage model for designing a performance measurement system (PMS) focused on customer profitability.

This is a single-site phenomenological case study, at Growth Spurt Marine Accessories (Growth Spurt), a manufacturing organization headquartered in the USA. Data were collected over a two-year period through interviews with accounting staff, internal company documents and recording observational notes.

The paper identifies three major factors that prevented Growth Spurt from transitioning its customer profitability analysis (CPA) reporting package through Kaplan and Cooper’s four-stage model of PMS design: executives exerting their power and spending political capital to prevent implementation without providing rationale, executives believing that the allocation methods were too subjective and executives relying on their own intuition in analyzing customer profitability rather than relying on data. These factors suggest that organizational culture plays an important role in migrating a customer-focused profitability PMS through Kaplan and Cooper’s four-stage model of PMS system design.

The findings suggest that a PMS focused on customer profitability that does not advance beyond Stage II (financial reporting-driven) may still suit the needs of an organization. Additionally, managers should advocate for a multidisciplinary PMS design and implementation team to minimize potentially adverse effects of organizational culture.

This paper is unique because it applies Kaplan and Cooper’s four-stage model for PMS design to CPA and it uses a phenomenological case approach to explore impediments to a comprehensive CPA implementation.