We can’t lose uniqueness for the turn – if they win that the military is down bad now, it proves innovative tech decreases military readiness because this is a “wicked mismatch” between an ailing military and an overpowering capability

I expect that harmful innovation is more likely in a wicked mismatch, when a service's commitments are increasing and its resources are decreasing. In a wicked mismatch, a service's traditional capabilities not only are threatened by severe resource scarcity for the foreseeable future but also are rendered ineffective by the ambition of future missions. Expectations about the future are bleak. The service is therefore, I argue, in a professional and bureaucratic crisis. Officers doubt the service can perform assigned missions successfully, fear that the security of the state is at risk, and worry about the service's status and continuing relevance to national security. The service also wants to rectify this situation because it is overstretching its operational capacity by offering a semblance of meeting commitments, and business as usual offers little prospect of enhancing its political standing, contribution to national defense, and associated budget justifications.

Military innovation becomes a desperate, high-payoff, low-probability gamble to resolve the wicked mismatch by placing large bets on a new capability and cannibalizing traditional ones to do so. This strategy expands the range of possible outcomes: the new capability may significantly increase mission effectiveness and resource efficiency, but the service could perform even worse by neglecting traditional capabilities.32 Such innovative gambles are surprising because the standard intuition in military innovation studies is that bureaucratic organizations in general, and military hierarchies in particular, are prone to stasis and resist dramatic changes that disrupt their standard operating procedures.33 But a wicked mismatch generates pressures to adopt risk-seeking preferences.34