Military Magic: The Promise and Peril of Military Innovation
Open AccessPrevailing wisdom suggests that innovation dramatically enhances the effectiveness of a state’s armed forces. But innovation is a balancing act between creating new ways of using organized violence to accomplish a given mission, on the one hand, and destroying traditional ways of war, on the other. As such, there is always a risk that innovation destroys more than it creates. This dissertation examines the conditions under which peacetime innovation in the military can improve or harm its performance.My central claim is that self-defeating innovation occurs when a state’s growing security commitments outstrip shrinking military resources. In this environment, senior service officers are incentivized to gamble on a radically new capability to meet overly ambitious commitments, while also cannibalizing traditional capabilities to do so because of tight resource constraints. The service discovers, however, that the resulting force structure and doctrine have hyper-specialized in a new capability that cannot alone accomplish assigned missions, that the loss of traditional capabilities leaves the service vulnerable, and that combat units must recover older methods of war.The theory is tested using three historical case comparisons: (1) German and British innovations in armored warfare (1919–39) and the effectiveness of their respective armies in the Desert War (1940–42); (2) U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force innovations in strategic air warfare (1945–50) and each service’s subsequent performance in the Korean War (1950–53); and (3) U.S. Army innovation of the pentomic and ROAD divisions (1952–65).The findings challenge the assumption that innovation consistently improves combat performance, which in turn has important implications for scholarship and defense policy. Theories of military innovation treat the presence or absence of innovation as the key puzzle to be solved because its presence is expected to have positive effects. If this expectation is wrong, then variation within the innovation process itself deserves greater attention. For defense policy, this dissertation suggests that innovation is not a trustworthy measure of military power, that capabilities lost in an innovation process may be as important as what is gained, and that civilian and military leaders both have important roles to play in shaping major military innovations.
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