Thinking About Innovation

Naval War College Review,  Spring, 2001  by Williamson Murray

• E-mail
• Print
• Link

The problem that the U.S. services confront today is that they cannot assess when, where, or against whom a future war might occur, or even how long it might last. [9] There is simply no discernible threat, even on the distant horizon, against which the United States can now measure its forces or its capabilities. The implications are profound, because they make real innovation especially difficult. In the interwar period, those military organizations, like the Royal Air Force and the U.S. Army Air Corps, that developed "generic" capabilities--that is, not focused upon specific projected missions--created doctrinal and operational concepts that were fundamentally flawed. The evidence suggests that ambiguity resulted in dangerous assumptions--for example, about the ability of strategic bomber formations to defend themselves.

But it is not only the uncertainties of the future strategic environment that raise problems for the American military. One of the major advantages that the services enjoyed in the 1920s and 1930s was the fact that that period of peace lasted no longer. Thus, the senior leaders who went to war in 1939 were all experienced combat officers who had studied definable tactical, and in some cases operational, problems on the basis of real-world combat experience. Today's American military confronts a peace that could last well into the century. The last significant war that the U.S. military fought was the Vietnam conflict; already, few even in the flag and general-officer ranks served in that traumatic war. [10] A long peace, one that lasts forty or fifty years, could well create military cultures that no longer understand the fundamental nature of war, in which planners assume that there will be little friction or that opponents will be unable to interfere with the conduct of operations. [11]

Certainly, the Royal Navy's history in the period from 1815 through 1914 suggests some of the professional pitfalls of a prolonged period of peace. [12] That military organization, primed by the decades of naval war against the fleets of the French revolutionaries and Napoleon, had come to rely on the willingness and ability of subordinate commanders--exemplified by Admiral Horatio Nelson's "band of brothers"--to discern and respond independently to the dictates of a situation. But in the decades after 1815 the Royal Navy, facing few demands more pressing than polishing brass and making a good impression, gradually changed into a service whose senior officers at Jutland refused to fire on German ships at virtually point-blank range because they had received no orders from their superiors--and neglected to inform those superiors that they had the enemy in sight.

The basic problem is that military organizations can rarely replicate in times of peace the actual conditions of war. It becomes increasingly easy, as the complexities, ambiguities, and frictions of combat recede into the past, for militaries to develop concepts, doctrines, and practices that meet the standards of peacetime efficiency rather than those of wartime effectiveness. There is no other profession in the world whose peacetime efforts represent only a pale shadow of the harsh realities in which its men and women must carry out their true functions--not least that their opponents are trying to kill them. That is why the profession of arms is the most demanding calling not only physically but intellectually. It is also why professional military education has been so profoundly important to armed services in preparing for and waging war. Here lies perhaps the greatest weakness in the current culture of the American military.