“Soft” factors like history and culture give the US distinct advantages in military tech- not falling behind

Department of Political Science, University of Notre Dame; Department of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; The defense innovation machine: Why the U.S. will remain on the cutting edge; ND International Security Center; https://ndisc.nd.edu/news-media/news/the-defense-innovation-machine-why-the-u-s-will-remain-on-the-cutting-edge/

More important, we believe that the American defense technology system is pushed toward innovation by specific contextual factors, the ‘soft’ categories of attributes and capabilities, that cannot readily transfer to likely rivals.Footnote4 First, the political culture of the United States values technology strongly: technology is assumed to be the solution to most problems, including military ones. American culture also has a strong casualty aversion driven by an economy traditionally burdened by labor scarcity and by responsive political institutions that encourage the substitution of capital for labor to keep its own people out of harm’s way.Footnote5 The All-Volunteer Force reflects this by making military service voluntary and thus making military service expensive for government and service personnel lives ever-more-valuable and in need of husbanding. Second, competition is deeply engrained in defense, as it is in most of American society, stimulating new ideas and providing a diversity of approaches to any problem, in case one technology trajectory does not work out as hoped. Competition extends among the various military services and agencies, which each seek to propose solutions to the nation’s strategic problems, and among firms with different design-team philosophies. Third, the United States also welcomes foreign ideas much more readily than other countries, given U.S. openness to immigration, especially among the highly skilled and technically expert. Finally, a Cold-War organizational innovation in the United States created special public-private hybrid organizations, Federally-Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs) that offer unbiased technical advice and a mechanism for the accumulation of knowledge – a unique social, relational system for institutional memory and systems integration capability that generally works very well. Other nations, with different divisions between the public and the private and dramatically different governance institutions, cannot easily copy these capabilities. These soft innovation factors particularly emphasize American advantages in the functional category of institutional factors – norms of seeing technology as a solution, trying hard to minimise casualties, using innovation as a means of competition among organizations, and welcoming foreign ideas. The institutional factors draw from the particular American mix of organizations, notably independent military services with strong identities, competitive firms in the defense industry that readily form networks or teams of suppliers even as each maintains its own core competencies and technical habits, and FFRDCs that help keep systems integration efforts honest and less parochial and that help preserve knowledge of false-start technology trajectories and craft skills that enable high-tech systems to function well.Footnote6 Because of the robustness of America’s input factors and the difficulty of copying its unique institutional factors, we conclude that the American defense innovation system will remain at the cutting edge and will not be surpassed by a potential international rival. In the final section, we explain why American leaders are so nervous anyway.