Human innovation key to deterring China

Today’s strategic environment features rapid technological change coupled with the increasing accessibility of cutting-edge technologies to more and more actors. These changes, and the threats they pose to U.S. national security, span presidential administrations and cross party lines. The 2018 National Defense Strategy, for example, notes that maintaining U.S. technological advantage requires significant changes across the “National Security Innovation Base” and calls on the Department of Defense (DoD) to “organize for innovation” and “out-innovate revisionist powers.”1 In his Interim National Security Guidance, President Joe Biden pledges to “sustain America’s innovation edge” and encourages “the culture of innovation required to address today’s complex challenges.”2 Over the past several years, DoD has attempted to adapt to this dynamic technological landscape by establishing organizations and concepts such as the Defense Innovation Unit, the Chief Digital and AI Office, Joint All-Domain Command and Control, Project Convergence, Project Overmatch, the Rapid Defense Experimentation Reserve fund, and a network of “tech bridges” focused on leveraging artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other advancements to develop sensor networks and shorten kill chains.3

The 2018 National Defense Strategy specifically mentions China’s military modernization, which has been so massive in scale and rapid in speed, that it threatens the U.S. military’s technological edge. Innovation, therefore, is a must. Since before the Spanish-American War, innovation has been a key “way” of U.S. military strategy. Out-innovating our adversaries has been a hallmark of the U.S. military—think stealth, high-bandwidth communications, space-based intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, and precision-guided munitions. But just as sea power was taken for granted after the end of the Cold War, the Pentagon’s ability to innovate faster than its adversaries became a given—one that is no longer. Witness China’s antiship ballistic missiles, hypersonic weapons program, informationized warfare, and military space capabilities. The imperative to innovate is back.

Integrating new technologies into U.S.warfighting capabilities is vital to national security. However, in today’s security discourse, innovation is often conflated with new technology and disruptive change, which leads to misunderstanding and misconceptions regarding innovation and a certain degree of “technologitis,” or overreliance on technology. In addition, there is an inclination to view new or big ideas as innovative by their very nature, although innovations often evolve from the accumulation of little ideas and combinations that are tested and refined over time.4 The iPhone, for example, was not a big new thing but rather a recombinant innovation. This tendency also overlooks the importance of people and the organizations in which they operate. Steve Jobs reminds us, “Technology is nothing. What’s important is that you have a faith in people, that they’re basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they’ll do wonderful things with them. It’s not the tools that you have faith in—tools are just tools.”5