The Innovation Gamble: Organizational Process and Peacetime Military Innovation 28 views

Why do some peacetime military innovations endure while organizations later reject others after implementing them? Military organizations often invest enormous resources in major changes to how they fight, only to conclude soon after that the change did not solve the problem it was meant to address. They then have to spend more resources to undo the innovation and adjust their approach to fighting. Scholars have explained much about why militaries face pressure to change in the first place, but most accounts stop at the point where the organization adopts the change. They say less about what happens next. I argue that the way military organizations manage the innovation process directly affects whether an innovation endures or is rejected. Two organizational capacities shape the outcome. Integrative capacity is the degree to which a military organization controls the parts of itself that have to change together — how the force fights, what equipment it uses, and how it is organized. Concept validation is the process by which the organization rigorously tests a proposed innovation before rolling it out across the force. Together, these capacities address the two recurring problems peacetime innovation must solve: uncertainty about whether the change will work and the need to coordinate across the parts of the organization that must change in concert. Organizations that test concepts before committing and coordinate change across the force are more likely to produce innovations that endure. Organizations that skip testing, divide authority, or do both are more likely to implement innovations they later reject. I evaluate this argument through eight historical cases that span different countries, services, and types of innovation: German and British armored warfare between the world wars; the U.S. Army’s Pentomic reorganization, the Marine Corps’ vertical envelopment concept, the Navy’s Polaris program, and the Air Force’s Atlas program in the 1950s; and the U.S. Army’s Active Defense and AirLand Battle doctrines after Vietnam. Across all eight, the presence or absence of these two capacities consistently corresponded with whether the organization sustained or rejected the innovation. This dissertation contributes to the study of military innovation by shifting attention from whether organizations innovate to whether they sustain their innovations, and by showing how the innovation process shapes that outcome.

PHD (Doctor of Philosophy)

military innovation; organizational learning; military doctrine; defense transformation

English

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2026-06-24