Innovative tech shifts don’t pay off – trade off with too much preexisting, battle-tested and proven infrastructure

Equating peacetime innovation with greater military effectiveness is puzzling, however, because scholars recognize that the two are not synonyms. Barry Posen categorizes military doctrine as either innovative or stagnant, but he recognizes that “neither … should be valued a priori.” He suggests that instead of stagnation, “stability might be a better choice of terms, as it is less loaded [italics in the original].”7 Historians Allan Millett and Williamson Murray caution that during peacetime innovation “wrong choices and irrelevant investments will occur and will be hard to correct.”8 Others warn that “it is entirely possible that a military innovation may make a military less effective,” and that “not all innovations should be welcomed.”9

Nonetheless, virtually all theories of military innovation are built and tested on cases of performance-enhancing innovations. Posen's influential study of the Battle of France and the Battle of Britain finds that it was the military services that innovated before the war that achieved political-military integration.10 In Winning the Next War, another agenda-setting work, Stephen Rosen ignores “innovations that were put into practice but were clearly mistaken” because “despite an extensive and intensive search,” he finds that mistakes made by the U.S. military “all appear to have been the result of failures to innovate, rather than inappropriate innovations.”11

When innovation improves performance, it is appropriate to merely explain its presence or absence, as existing theories aim to do. But this approach cannot fully explain whether, when, and how innovation affects military power. Moreover, equating innovation and effectiveness wrongly implies that resistance to innovation is always an undesirable military pathology. Military organizations are conservative for a reason: there are countless solutions to complex problems, but many of them could produce catastrophic results. Therefore, assuming improved performance strips the concept of innovation of its most interesting and dangerous attribute—it is a gamble that costly changes are worth making.

Military Innovation and Its Risks

I define military innovation in this article as the process of creating a new capability—a new institutionalized technique of organized violence intended to convert a service's resources into success in future missions.12 For instance, an air wing designed for strategic bombing will be organized, equipped, and trained to operate in a way that is distinct from close air support. Capabilities are embedded in the service's organization and equipment (i.e., force structure) and a relatively ordered and consistent way of using these components in combat (i.e., doctrine). Capabilities reflect the service's preferred methods of using military force in response to particular historical modes of warfare.

Following common practice, I limit the concept of military innovation's scope to major changes in peacetime at the service level. Most studies distinguish between peacetime innovation and wartime adaptation because their learning environments are different: performance feedback from combat is unavailable in the fog of peace.13 I also focus on “major” military innovations, which Michael Horowitz defines as “a major change in the conduct of warfare” that involves “shifts in the core competencies of military organizations, or shifts in the tasks that the average soldiers perform.”14 The unit of analysis is therefore an innovating service.

The ostensible purpose of innovation is to enhance military effectiveness. For the economist Joseph Schumpeter, innovation is a new production function that changes the rate of converting a fixed quantity of factors into products.15 In a similar fashion, military innovation tries to improve the efficiency of converting allocated resources—money and personnel—into mission success by creating a new capability. Ideally, armed forces field capabilities that maximize their chances of accomplishing assigned missions at a minimal cost in resources.

But innovation's promise of resource efficiency and mission effectiveness comes with risks. The first risk is that creating a new capability is a step into the unknown without the benefit of experience, hindsight, or relevant skills.16 The second risk relates to the destruction of old capabilities in the process of creating new ones, or what Schumpeter calls “creative destruction.”17 As military organizations innovate, they are “down-grading or abandoning older concepts of operation and possibly of a formerly dominant weapon.”18 In other words, “a military service destroys or thoroughly redirects an important part of itself.”19 When a traditional capability is destroyed, it may be recoverable, but creative destruction inevitably involves opportunity costs. Destroying traditional capabilities is risky because they often are battle-tested methods of generating military power. After all, effective organizations survive and succeed in part by maintaining their existing “infrastructure”—those unglamorous and old investments.20