This analysis does not seek to prove that any specific organization is superior to the other, rather it provides an initial framework to begin organizing the myriad of technological organizations that support the United States Government. Without specific technology case studies, a determination cannot be made whether any individual factor or category determines the success of the organization. However, this framework provides an initial understanding of these factors to help a potential customer leverage these organizations for rapid development and implementation of new technologies.
Technology Innovation Is Great, But Strategy Is Better
What’s missing is a strategy that accounts for latent and emerging technology-enabled threats and matches them with prioritized military requirements. Such a strategy would include an optimized mix of new and old technologies designed to exploit adversary vulnerabilities and minimize American weaknesses. There is reason for optimism in America’s potential to leverage technology for its own security as long as leaders make the hard choices around national priorities that will allow planners and strategists to engage technology with focus and purpose.
Introducing #TechnologyInnovation: A Strategy Bridge Series
The U.S. military has enjoyed a comfortable lead in the race for new battlefield technology since the end of World War II. In recent years, however, the rate of technology change has challenged the U.S. military’s ability to remain strategically superior to near peers while providing the warfighter with nimble and fiscally sustainable technology.
Chinese and Russian Defense Innovation, with American Characteristics? Military Innovation, Commercial Technologies, and Great Power Competition
While Russia and China are known for their lumbering civilian and military bureaucracies, both nations are nonetheless demonstrating that they can be nimble enough to accelerate certain technological developments, along with testing and evaluation. So far, both competitors have proven that they can take specific American elements and apply them to their own unique ecosystems. Nonetheless, using American-style institutional and procedural concepts is still a novel idea for the top-heavy ministries tasked with such breakthrough technological developments in both countries.
The Dawn of Anti-Personnel Directed-Energy Weapons
Directed-energy weapons could take armed aircraft to a new frontier in the capabilities they provide the joint force. Anti-personnel aerial lasers, specifically, have advantages making them superior to other accurate weapons because of their speed, greater accuracy, and maneuverability. If integrated into close air support and interdiction missions, directed-energy weapons would greatly enhance the operational effectiveness in each.
Innovation Determinants of the World’s First Integrated Air Defense System
Despite having the strongest air force in the world at the conclusion of the First World War, Britain faced a prominent strategic threat posed by a sizable French bomber force and the creation of the Luftwaffe, the German Air Force. To counter the threat, the British created the world’s first integrated air defense system—a synchronized nexus comprised of radar to detect enemy aircraft, a command and control network to relay warnings, and fighter aircraft to challenge threats.
Innovation and the Challenger Mentality
Interwar Airpower, Grand Strategy, and Military Innovation: Germany vs. Great Britain
Analyzing the development of the German and British air forces between the world wars reveals the importance of crafting strategy, identifying associated requirements, and marshaling the required resources to turn requirements into capabilities. Factors beyond the state’s control often drive technological requirements. Structural factors demanding innovative responses include the technological progress of potential enemies and of civil society, as well as shifts in the state’s own geopolitical circumstances. Yet the task of responding to these structural factors—of translating the state’s desired security ends into military technological means—requires an intentional, collaborative, human effort. The development of specific airpower capabilities in Germany and Britain during the interwar years illustrates the role of strategic innovators as “system builders” and doctrine entrepreneurs who brave the gauntlets of government bureaucracy, industry, and academia to turn theory into capabilities.
Strategic Innovation and Great Power Competition
The future of U.S. military competitiveness will depend upon the ability to remain a leader in innovation in these critical technologies through a national surge in science, while also building upon perhaps more enduring advantages in talent and training to advance innovation in concepts of operations.
The New Testament of Strategic Innovation: Three Paths to the Promised Land
Technology and military organizations exist in a paradoxical relationship. The relentless march of science creates pressure on strategists and their organizations to adopt novel technology and adapt their doctrine. This pressure can derive from technological innovation by one’s own scientists as well as the fear of what a potential enemy is developing on its side. Yet, as political scientist Stephen Rosen points out, organizations, and especially military organizations, have difficulty changing because “they are designed not to change.” A bureaucracy is organized to perform established tasks with uniformity and regularity. This inherent attribute presents the strategic innovator with a dilemma; a military organization must innovate to survive, but it resists innovation by its very nature. This problem is exacerbated by the reality that the direction and timing of optimal innovation is often ambiguous in the moment and only clear in hindsight.
Aligning Risk Tolerance to Meet the Demands of Complex Strategic Problems
Leaders in the national security community must remedy the incapacitating risk aversion which has permeated both the civilian and military ranks of the defense establishment if they are to successfully respond to the inherent uncertainty of future conflicts. Risk aversion stifles creativity, cedes the initiative to our adversaries, and presents a real, significant, and imminent threat to American national security. However, with the proper application of existing tools and an appropriate organizational comfort with uncertainty, strategic leaders can overcome the challenges posed by an increasingly complex world.
#Reviewing The Rise of the Machines
Right away The Rise of the Machines must be declared a fantastic work, conveying an accessible history of a distant in time (yet still strikingly present) and technical scientific story. To succeed in making wave after wave of scientific innovations not only understandable, but to also place them in their intellectual, cultural, political, and strategic contexts in such a compelling manner is testament to why Rid’s book must hold high position in any technologically-focused reading list.
Idealogues: An Innovative Approach to Growing Small Unit Creativity
Innovation is a powerful term in today’s defense lexicon. We desire a flexible and adaptable service member, enhanced and intuitive technology, and creative and niche-capable organizations. To make this happen, many military leaders have railed against the status quo with respect to problem-solving approaches and bureaucracy. The purpose of this article is to describe what an innovative change can look like in the form of junior leader engagement, introducing our concept of the idealogue.
The Military Mind in the Age of Innovation
A liberal education is only one aid to making the military more adaptable for the innovation age. Many other implements will be possible, as long as they fit the general criterion of building common ground between military and innovative minds. A liberal education is a fundamental solution, though, in that it can endure this generation of technological change and the many others that will follow.
The Timelessness of Leadership and Innovation
Innovation and leadership converge on this point: crafting environments and cultures in which the desire to improve outweighs the desire to stick with old habits. Because innovation and leadership have this in common, leaders shouldn’t think of innovation as something they do in addition to their real jobs. Innovation is leadership.
Institutional #Learning: A Diagnosis of Australian Army Education, Training, and Doctrine
The Australian Army needs a more agile system that is able to anticipate change and continuously adapt to the new generation of soldiers in its ranks, developments in the strategic environment, and new methods of learning that leverage technology. The possession of such an evolved system will better ensure that the soldiers and officers of the Army remain prepared for future operational challenges.
The Molotov Cocktail as Battlefield Innovation
The Molotov cocktail is one of the most visible icons of civil resistance in the modern age. Whether it is on the streets of Kyiv, Athens, or the latest site of any G20 meeting, the Molotov cocktail is one of the variables modern media will seize on to determine whether a mass demonstration is a protest or a riot. The image of fires burning and bottles being hurled through the air are eye-catching because they are asymmetric, providing average civilians with potent lethality to challenge even the most heavily-armed riot police.
Innovation & the Army Vision: Responding to the Soufflé Conundrum
In the course of thirteen pages, the Army lays out how the world’s most powerful land force must look one decade from now. This already difficult task is complicated by the fact that those ambitious (or crazy) enough to take on a document of this scope find themselves in an international environment where threats span the gamut of non-state actors to world superpowers, with a healthy dose of the latest Department of Defense buzzword, “hybrid,” thrown into the mix. To respond to these oftentimes still nebulous threats, the Army advocates for eight characteristics of a force for the future.Innovation is the most alluring of these characteristics to policymakers and the public alike. However, it could also prove to be the vision’s undoing should the conditions on the ground change.
Peacetime Restrains Strategy: R.B. Haldane and the Shortfalls of His Army Reforms
As the United States begins to formulate a new strategy for a post-Afghanistan era it should look back to this century-old calamity for perspicacity, not for similitude. British pre-war army reforms, implemented by Richard Burdon Haldane — Secretary of State for War (1905-1912) — and subsequently named after him, present another lesson from which strategists could analyze a familiar conundrum. Strategy is as vital in peace as it is in war, but peacetime restrains it. History provides invaluable insights into untangling this contradiction at a time of budgetary and political uncertainty.
Bridging Divides: Thoughts on a Startup Conference
A good sign of a successful gathering is not only the interaction that takes place at the event itself, but more importantly the conversation that occurs following. In this respect the Defense Entrepreneurs Forum has been blessed; one of the reasons I’ve been remiss in reporting out on the event is the rapidity and thoroughness that some of the participants have written on salient points from the weekend.