Military Innovation and Military Culture

This article examines the significance of culture as a moderator of innovation, and criticizes monolithic accounts of military resistance to innovation. It then describes a dimension of military culture focused on the concept of the ideal combatant, and how that concept relates to innovation. Military culture can be improved by: (1) engineering the competitive context for innovation, and (2) creating career paths in which new kinds of personnel have a means of advancing, while preserving enduring organizational values. F modern militaries, innovation is not a scientific or technical problem; it is an organizational challenge. Some observers of innovation speak of “revolutionary” versus “evolutionary,” or “radical” versus “incremental” innovation.1 These approaches to innovation predict the success or failure of an organization’s adoption of something new based on how difficult the technology is to adopt. Such constructs are flawed, because they treat as an independent variable (the organization’s difficulty in adopting whatever it is that is new) the very thing we are trying to predict, the theoretical equivalent of a dog chasing its tail. Furthermore, the magnitude of a technological advance is not a good predictor of whether an organization will struggle with it. Militaries may succeed at rapidly adopting new platforms that involve major technological change, yet fail (or be unforgivably slow) to adopt innovations that are incremental improvements. Terms like “radical” and “revolutionary” have little use when applied to predicting the organizational response to an innovation. Bureaucracies thrive on consistent, standard approaches to resolving familiar problems. Militaries are bureaucracies that depend on standardization of tools, training, methods, and organization. Innovation subverts this standardization and consistency, first, in the exploration of a new approach (the introduction of variance into the system), and then (if the innovation is successful enough) in the eventual replacement of the existing approach throughout the organization. The generalization of an innovation requires organizational change, which in turn may require cultural change. “Culture” is a notoriously vague term, sometimes used as a catch-all to account for behavior in organizations that is 1 Williamson Murray, “Innovation: Past and Future,” in Military Innovation in the Interwar Period, ed. Williamson Murray and Allan Millett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 306310. Michael Tushman and Charles O’Reilly III, “The Ambidextrous Organization: Managing Evolutionary and Revolutionary Change,” in Managing Strategic Innovation and Change: A Collection of Readings, 2nd ed., Michael Tushman and Philip Anderson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 278-82. culture And the us Army Military Innovation and Military Culture