Misled innovation and mistaken trade-offs tank hegemony

For those concerned with the future character of war, the findings suggest that innovation does not necessarily improve combat performance. A bias in favor of military innovation may be helpful because of countervailing bureaucratic and cultural pressures against disruptive changes, but professional instincts to preserve existing ways of war can also be prudent, especially if warfare evolves toward essential continuity rather than discontinuous revolutions.164 Making big bets on technologies such as unmanned systems comes with significant risks because the novel capabilities are unfamiliar and what is lost in an innovation process can be as important as what is created—capital substitution involves tradeoffs.165

Fervor for military innovation is especially high in the United States because there is a particularly foreboding sense that the U.S. military is overstretched, and that its resources and commitments are misaligned. Ever since World War II, the United States has accumulated expansive interests abroad, but it has been reluctant to invest the necessary resources to sustain these commitments.166 Today, while the United States remains concerned about Russia in Europe and Iran in the Middle East, Chinese military modernization and foreign policy has eroded confidence in the U.S. military's ability to operate effectively in the western Pacific and credibly deter Chinese aggression. Meanwhile, resources are relatively stagnant as the rising cost of military equipment exceeds inflation and growth in the defense budget.167

The shift to great power competition in U.S. foreign and military policy has animated a range of promising and innovative proposals, but their perils should be explicitly recognized. With China as the pacing threat, the United States has incentive to reorganize its force structures, concentrate on weapon technologies for high-end conventional warfare, and develop new operational concepts to counter Chinese anti-access/area-denial military forces in the Indo-Pacific region.168 This is evidenced most starkly in the recent decision by the U.S. Marine Corps to divest from all its tanks and cut back on aircraft and cannon artillery to invest in new technologies and novel “littoral combat regiments” designed to conduct expeditionary advanced base operations.169 The U.S. Army has also debated whether the infantry brigade combat team, the building block of its operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, will become obsolete in future multi-domain operations.170