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In this article, I examine the meaning of the use of force for military professionals by analyzing the US Navy’s Crossing the Line ceremony. Ambiguity surrounds the initiation ritual for crossing the equator onboard naval warships, especially as it comes to its form prior to the late 1990s. All the while, the US Navy has maintained that the ceremony is part of a long tradition for teaching the values of honor, commitment and courage. Inspired by Max van Manen’s approach to phenomenological writing ([1984]. “Practicing Phenomenological Writing.” Phenomenology + Pedagogy 2 (1): 36–69; [2016]. Writing in the Dark: Phenomenological Studies in Interpretive Inquiry. London: Routledge), I explicate the idea that the ceremony, in its former form, did indeed teach the value of honor, but through inversion, acting out the worst possible behavior imaginable for military professionals in the form of a black mass, while the ceremony in its current form teaches the value of individual dignity as a professional obligation. The inquiry concludes with a reflective stance of honor and dignity as moral principles for enabling and constraining the use of force. Derived from the experience of a particular military practice, the stance also has general significance, helping navigate the line between thoughtlessness and thoughtful actions within a social framework, not unlike the just war tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the Great War, Imam Yahya, the spiritual and temporal ruler of Yemen, established control over the Yemeni highlands and fought wars against his rivals to extend his power. Jacopo Gasparini, the governor of Italy's Eritrean colony, increased Italian trade with Yemen, primarily by shipping arms to Imam Yahya. Italian influence in the Arabian peninsula worried British officials. Britain's primary goal was to protect its imperial road through the Suez Canal and the Red Sea by ensuring that no European Power established itself on the eastern shore or on strategic islands of the Red Sea. In 1927, Italy and Britain signed the Rome Understanding, agreeing to limit their imperial competition in the peninsula. Both parties maintained the Rome Understanding and its successor agreement in the 1938 Easter Accords until the outbreak of the Second World War, although both violated its spirit and letter when convenient. In the latter half of the 1930s, Imam Yahya wanted to acquire naval cannon to defend Sheīkh Saīd, a promontory that overlooked the strategically important Bab al-Mandeb Strait. Both Italian and British officials resisted providing them, as both feared that the other could seize Sheīkh Saīd and use these cannon to bar the southern exit of the Red Sea. After lengthy negotiations, the Italians eventually relented and shipped four naval cannon to Imam Yahya to try to earn his favour before the outbreak of Anglo-Italian conflict in World War Two. The episode of arming Sheīkh Saīd shows the nature of conflict and cooperation in Anglo-Italian relations in the Arabian Peninsula and the ultimate failure to reconcile their imperial interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Maritime transport is crucial for global trade, as over 80% of goods are transported by sea. Recent conflicts have exposed the vulnerability of shipping routes to disruptions. Therefore, devising an optimal plan for naval escort operations is critical to ensure that ships are safely escorted. This study addresses the naval escort operation problem by constructing a mixed-integer programming model that integrates escort scheduling of the warship with the speed optimization of liner ships, aiming to minimize overall cargo delay and fuel consumption costs while ensuring the protection of all ships. The results indicate that as the number of container ships increases, ships wait longer before departure with the warship, leading to a higher average delay cost per ship. For instances with a single ship type, ships have similar sailing speeds on different legs. The proposed model balances cargo delivery timeliness with carbon emission reduction, enhancing economic viability and environmental sustainability in crisis-prone maritime scenarios. Future research should explore real-time data integration and adaptive strategies to improve naval escort operations' robustness and responsiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights Continuously long carbon nanotube yarns (CNTYs) were integrated into glass fiber weave/vinyl ester composites to act as electrical sensing elements to self‐monitoring damage. A grid comprising one longitudinal and three transverse CNTYs, running through the 125 mm long flexural specimen, was integrated into the top and bottom layers of glass fiber weaves to allow monitoring of the electrical resistance and locate damage. Four‐point bending specimens were tested under cyclic flexural loading, alternating with low‐velocity impacts to monitor damage initiation and progression. The electrical response of the CNTY grid is able to pinpoint the region where damage initiates, accumulates, and propagates under cycling loading, triggered or not by impact. The damage location identified by the electrical response of CNTYs is supported by in situ in‐plane and through‐thickness strain fields measured by digital image correlation (DIC). The correlation between the electrical technique and the DIC‐measured strain fields indicate that the majority of damage occurs through interlaminar stresses at or near the supports and/or loading introduction elements of the flexural test rig. Integrating CNTYs into structural composites enables online damage monitoring, leading to intelligent condition‐based maintenance for naval ships, aircrafts, and other structures, ultimately extending service life and reducing costs. CNTYs were integrated into composites for damage self‐sensing. Electrical response of CNTYs pinpoints the region of damage. Damage caused by cyclic bending and low velocity impacts were identified. Electrically identified damage is supported by DIC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The number and coverage of weather observations over the oceans were considerably reduced during World War II (WW2) due to disruptions to normal trade routes. The observations that do exist for this period are often unavailable to science as they are still only available as paper records or scanned images. We have rescued the detailed hourly weather observations contained in more than 28,000 logbook images of the US Navy Pacific Fleet stationed at Hawai'i during 1941–1945 to produce a dataset of more than 630,000 records. Each record contains the date and time, positional information and several meteorological measurements, totalling more than 3 million individual observations. The data rescue process consisted of a citizen science project asking volunteers to transcribe the observations from the available images, followed by additional quality control processes. This dataset not only contains hourly weather observations of air temperature, sea surface temperature, atmospheric pressure, wind speed and wind direction, mainly in the Pacific Ocean but also includes some observations from the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. The new observations are found to be of good quality by inter‐comparing independent measurements taken on ships travelling in convoy and by comparing with the 20th‐Century Reanalysis. This dataset provides invaluable instrumental weather observations at times and places during WW2, which fill gaps in existing reconstructions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars often assert that one of Alexander's military innovations was to place siege towers (πύργοι) on board his warships at Tyre. In this note I argue that there is no literary evidence that this occurred. I also argue that unless the towers were higher than Tyre's walls, there would be no military advantage to doing so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thales is a worldwide leader in innovative radar and mission solution systems used by naval ships. As the demand for personalized products increased through time, Thales shifted from a project‐oriented to a product‐oriented approach. This shift aims to capitalize on variants, minimize customization, and streamline operations. In this context, Thales established a mission solution configuration process (SCP) to facilitate the selection of product variants to compose a system during the bidding phase. However, the current SCP has limitations, constraining exploration and integration with engineering processes and system data. Consequently, the proposed systems sometimes fall short of the most optimal solution the client could get. Therefore, the objective of this work is to develop and validate an improved mission solution configuration process to streamline the creation and selection of product variants at Thales, particularly during the bidding phase, to better meet client needs and operational requirements. This method integrates Model‐Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) and Tradespace Exploration (TSE), utilizing ARCADIA as the methodology and Capella as the tool. A descriptive model is generated for analytical purposes within TSE, employing Multi‐Attribute‐Utility‐Theory (MAUT) and Pareto‐Optimization for evaluating and selecting optimal mission solution variants. Validation was conducted through a Coast Guard mission case study involving 125 solution variants, revealing Pareto‐optimal solutions balancing performance and cost. This method enhances the current configuration process by aligning client and operational needs with Thales's sales and product teams, ensuring accurate interpretation of requirements and minimizing information inconsistencies. The case study results identify technological gaps in variant designs, guiding research and development efforts towards subsystems or components with significant impact on system performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In 1742, HMS Tyger, a 95-year-old, 50-gun ship-of-the-line, was the first of three British men-of-war to sink in the Florida Keys during the War of Jenkin's Ear. Lost while menacing Spanish shipping transiting the Straits of Florida, Tyger and its 300 crew ran aground and were marooned for 66 days in what is now Dry Tortugas National Park in the United States. One site identified and partially documented by members of the U.S. National Park Services Submerged Cultural Resource Unit (NPS SCRU) in the mid-1990s was only tentatively identified as Tyger based on preliminary evidence. This paper presents new findings based on recent historical and archaeological research to prove that a foreign warship perished within what would become one of the most isolated National Parks in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In shallow water off the coast of West Sussex in England lies the wreck of a French built, English warship, lost in 1706. The remains represent a hybrid of French construction and armament with English organisation and adaption. This paper brings the site's investigations up to date, discussing new records relating to the structure and internal layout of the main site, as well as the discovery of several new areas, rich in guns and other artefacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the response characteristics of a warship's double-layer plates under a secondary near-field explosion after the ship's outer plate has been perforated by shaped metal jets. First, the effectiveness of the Coupled Eulerian–Lagrangian (CEL) method was validated, showing numerical simulations to be well aligned with experimental results. Subsequently, the damage inflicted on the outer plate by metal jets was simplified to a prefabricated orifice, further studying the explosive impact response of double-layer plates under different inter-compartmental water levels and charge distances. Our findings indicated the following: (1) shockwave and bubble pulsation loads are the main causes of deformation in the outer plate; (2) the driving of the outer plate and the flooding water between compartments are the main causes of deformation in the inner plate; and (3) deformation in the outer plate will decrease as the water level in the compartment increases, while deformation in the inner plate will increase with the increasing water level. Consequently, under certain specific damage, the ingress of water into a compartment effectively enhances the explosion resistance of the double-layer plates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Pacific theater of World War II represents a turning point in the history of navigation: whether a ship’s commander should entrust the safety of his vessel to his own judgment based on years of practical experience at sea or rely instead on radio broadcasts, the beginnings of “big data,” and the output of detection systems, including radar. U.S. naval campaigns in the Northwest Pacific during World War II, when some of the largest armadas of naval vessels ever assembled were continuously at sea in a relatively restricted maritime area for months at a time, provide notable occasions when the old and the new knowledge were tested under extreme weather conditions and the exigencies of wartime operations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Image detection deep learning models are being used in various fields such as autonomous vehicles, medical, and agriculture. In the defense field, various efforts are being made to apply deep learning models to surveillance systems. Since the defense field deals with important issues such as combat, the reliability of the model is important. Therefore, this study intends to propose a new "strong supervised learning method" to ensure explainability of the defense image classification model. The proposed method is using the knowledge of military experts and the HITL (Human In The Loop) method in which humans and AI interact. This is the learning that provides the data of important parts of objects in addition to the general supervised learning which provides input data and labeling data. The learning process for the additionally provided data is carried out through a loss function of SSIM (Structural Similarity Index Map), which measures the similarity between data of important parts and a feature map of a convolutional neural network. In order to evaluate the proposed methodology, the model learned by general supervised learning and the model learned by the proposed method were compared. The comparison criteria were as follows: first, evaluation of similarity between the results of Grad CAM, a Visual Explain method, along with the data the important parts designated by experts; and second, the classification accuracy of objects. As a result of the experiment using the VGG16, ResNet50, InceptionV3, and Xception models, the similarity between the data of the Grad CAM and the region of interest was improved by an average of 15.52% based on the entire image area. In addition, the classification accuracy showed an average improvement of 4.72% based on Test Set. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the advances in additive manufacturing, there is the idea of using 3D printers to produce spare parts in isolated systems such as ships, oceangoing vessels, warships, spacecraft, isolated stations, and so on. However, it raises the question of the reliability of such spare parts. One area that has not been explored much is the aging of electrical and dielectric properties, which could reveal weaknesses of 3D‐printed spare parts for use in electrical and automation systems. Therefore, the paper aims to investigate the change in resistance and dielectric constant. The results show that these changes could increase the probability of discharge and have serious consequences for electrical and automation systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Technological innovation for re-identifying maritime vessels plays a crucial role in both smart shipping technologies and the pictorial observation tasks necessary for marine recon- naissance. Vessels are vulnerable to varying gradations of engaging in the marine environment, which is complicated and dynamic compared to the conditions on land. Fewer picture samples along with considerable similarity are characteristics of warships as a class of ship, making it more challenging to recover the identities of warships at sea. Consequently, a convolutional dynamic alignment network (CoDA-Net) re-identification framework is proposed in this research. To help the network understand the warships within the desired domain and increase its ability to identify warships, a variety of ships are employed as origin information. Simulating and testing the winning of war vessels at sea helps to increase the network's ability to recognize complexity so that users can better handle the effects of challenging maritime environments. The impact of various types of ships as transfer items is also highlighted. The research results demonstrate that the enhanced algorithm increases the overall first hit rate (Rank1) by approximately 5.9%; it also increases the mean average accuracy (mAP) by approximately 10.7% and the correlation coefficient by 0.997%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]