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Thinking About Innovation
Naval War College Review, Spring, 2001 by Williamson Murray
Today, that understanding appears in danger of dissipating, notwithstanding the even more Clausewitzian statement issued by the Marines under General Charles C. Krulak. In 1992 the Army published a considerably watered-down version of FM 100-5, and its concurrent efforts to draft a post--Cold War view of the operational level of war floundered in the late 1990s. The 1998 revision of Air Force Manual 1-1 was extraordinarily weak, a jumble of assertions, pictures, and dogma--a manual more concerned with style than substance, a pale shadow of the far more substantive manual published in the early 1990s.
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In the larger sense, it is the cultures of the services that constitute the greatest cause for alarm. The American armed services remain alone among "First World" militaries in not making intellectual, along with operational and tactical, accomplishments prerequisites for senior command. [31] As one senior officer has suggested, American officers with substantial academic attainment have to prove that they are "muddy-boots" soldiers or "blue-water" seamen, etc., but the latter do not have to prove they have brains.
Part of the problem is that the service personnel systems are so constrained by laws drawn up in the late 1940s, as well as by more recent service practices and congressional mandates, that it is virtually impossible for young officers to find time and opportunity to attain the broad spectrum of historical knowledge, language training, and cultural awareness that the twenty-first century is going to demand. The officer corps of the U.S. armed services are therefore likely become ever more narrowly technological and less capable of adapting and innovating in the face of diverse threats and emerging challenges. [32] For successful innovation in the coming decades, as in the past, it will be the ability to conceptualize that matters.
(*.) The (state-sponsored) Stakhanovite labor movement in the Soviet Union in the 1930s was characterized by centralized organization and very large individual work assignments.
NOTES
(1.) This view of innovation contrasted sharply with that of two senior Army officers (who had been leaders in the renaissance of the late 1970s) who suggested in a conference at the Army War College in March 2000 that a crucial element in innovation was to form small, carefully picked groups to work on substantive doctrinal and conceptual issues.
(2.) For all the talk about how important transformation and innovation are to the future capabilities of the U.S. military, the chief intellectual positions in that process, those of the presidents and commandants of the war and staff colleges, seem often to be filled as afterthoughts--in the case of the National War College, on the basis of which service's turn it is, in the "joint world," to hold that three-star position
(3.) For a discussion of the role of technology in the processes of innovation and the creation of "revolutions in military affairs," see Barry Watts and Williamson Murray, "Military Innovation in Peacetime," in Military Innovation in the Interwar Period, ed. Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millett (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996).
