Innovation backfires, overshoots and undermines military capability and risks miscalculation

Prevailing wisdom suggests that innovation dramatically enhances the effectiveness of a state's armed forces. But self-defeating innovation is more likely to occur when a military service's growing security commitments outstrip shrinking resources. This wide commitment-resource gap pressures the service to make desperate gambles on new capabilities to meet overly ambitious goals while cannibalizing traditional capabilities before beliefs about the effectiveness of new ones are justified. Doing so increases the chances that when wartime comes, the service will discover that the new capability cannot alone accomplish assigned missions, and that neglecting traditional capabilities produces vulnerabilities that the enemy can exploit. To probe this argument's causal logic, a case study examines British armor innovation in the interwar period and its impact on the British Army's poor performance in the North African campaign during World War II. The findings suggest that placing big bets on new capabilities comes with significant risks because what is lost in an innovation process may be as important as what is created. The perils of innovation deserve attention, not just its promises.

Conventional wisdom suggests that innovation consistently improves military power. Militaries that oppose it invite defeat, but those that innovate secure victory. Innovation is considered a sign of organizational health because the ever-changing character of war constantly threatens to render existing capabilities obsolete. Conversely, misfortune comes to those who allow the march of historical change to overtake them. The notion that innovation and better military performance go hand in hand is thus intuitive. It is also wrong.

In popular imagination, for example, the German blitzkrieg was a revolutionary innovation in World War II that restored the possibility of decisive victory, which had eluded European armies since the Franco-Prussian War. What is less known is that the British also innovated in armored warfare yet performed poorly on the battlefield. While the German Army mechanized its combined-arms tactics developed at the end of World War I, the British deployed armored brigades comprised almost entirely of tanks and expected them to fight with virtually no help from supporting arms.

What is puzzling about this example is not the presence or absence of innovation—both armies innovated new forms of armored warfare—but instead why some innovations enhance combat effectiveness while other innovations do not. The idea that innovation is a gamble is not novel, but too often analysts focus on only beneficial changes. They overlook harmful innovation in military organizations, implying that the gamble is always worth making. This article seeks to restore the atmosphere of risk inherent to innovation and explain why its perils deserve as much attention as its promises. To do so, I develop a theoretical framework that relates patterns of peacetime innovation to its impact on wartime effectiveness—the ability of a military service to accomplish its assigned missions at acceptable cost.1

My central claim is that innovation is more likely to weaken a service's effectiveness when growing security commitments outstrip shrinking resources. This wide commitment-resource gap exerts pressures to innovate in ways that cannibalize traditional capabilities before beliefs about the effectiveness of new ones are justified. When wartime comes, not only has the service lost proficiency in those older capabilities, but the new capability underdelivers, thereby creating vulnerabilities for the enemy to exploit.

Studying harmful innovation is crucial for both scholarship and contemporary policy challenges. Scholars study military innovation primarily because of its promise to improve effectiveness. But whether peacetime innovation increases military power is usually an assumed relationship rather than a studied one. There is a bias in case selection: scholars almost exclusively study power-enhancing innovation and ask why it occurred. Explaining the adoption of new ways of war, however, says little about whether the change is beneficial or harmful.

For defense policy, this article cautions against overly relying on military innovation to bridge wide commitment-resource gaps. The United States is in an era of military modernization in which military and civilian leaders must make important decisions about future platforms and systems that will shape U.S. military power for a long time. At the same time, the armed services operate with relatively constrained resources compared with their expansive commitments. The confluence of these trends creates pressure to make big bets on new capabilities and take risks in shedding traditional ones. My theory and findings suggest, however, that it is precisely this type of environment that encourages miscalculation.