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War is a social activity involving Wicked problems in a VUCA world (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity). A mastery of the humanities and comfort with insoluble ambiguity are necessary and essential for strategic and military innovation.
Our Motto:
SAPERE AUDE
Latin for "Dare to know"
The Military Innovation Lab is designed to start a conversation about creativity within a strictly bounded world. Note the tension in the premise! Innovation in the strategic world is much more complex to achieve than in the commercial sector.
In the commercial world, innovation is most often a very narrow single channel exercise. The vast majority of businesses focus on one or two core activities. Like making a car for example. A strong business will seek constant improvement. Their creatives will design a new solution, test it and market it. The reward is simple and measurable - profit.
The US military is the most complex system of systems on the planet. Any effort to be creative spans multiple domains, spectrums, and conflicting powerful interests, across commercial, bureaucratic and political power bases, domestically and internationally.
Innovation in this context is complex, faces many enemies and obstacles (within friendly circles, long before an enemy gets a vote), and is often hard if not impossible to measure. Its greatest test is war and even then, so many other factors are involved they may mask the contribution of any one particular innovation.
Most people associate innovation with advances in technology. This may be true in car manufacturing, but it is of limited impact in changing the way of war. War has vastly more variables than the advent of a new technology.1
Air power is a classic case in point. It was resisted by all but its most passionate advocates for decades until it proved itself in war. Not just once, but multiple times. The technology of aircraft did not deliver airpower. First, its purpose and method had to be agreed upon. Even these basic ideas were disputed for years. Eventually resulting in fighters then bombers. Aircraft by themselves were useless. They had to be modified for purpose and other technologies incorporated, like radio and radar. As these matured, many other roles were added to airpower as new tech came along (eg. ISR).
Entirely new organizations had to be created to exploit the potential of the emerging military capability. The first aircraft left the earth in 1903. The USAF was not created until 1947. The idea of joint forces was yet another ideational development designed to enhance the utility of airpower. It was not formalized until 1986 under Goldwater-Nichols. The US space force was not created until 2019, 77 years after the first V2 left the ground.
The story of airpower demonstrates the subordinate role of new technology to the importance of new ideas for using military power in the service of a political objective.
Accordingly, MIL’s primary focus is on innovation in strategic thought. Here is a first cut at a definition:
Military Innovation comes from new ideas, requiring new methodologies, using new organizations that adopt or use technologies in new ways to achieve political outcomes when the use of force is required to coerce another party to behave in ways acceptable to us in the international system.2
In future posts we will be discussing the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of military innovation. We will explore case studies, including the most public attempt at military innovation currently in progress - the US Marine Corps Force Design 2030 program. You could not ask for a more perfect example of the passions that can get stirred up by new ideas. Everyone agrees the USMC must adapt to new ways of warfare in part because of the unique setting of the Indopacific and lessons from the war in Ukraine. HQMC has not been shy in transparently presenting and testing alternative ideas. The best part of the debate is the use of hard evidence and spirited debate to test proposed concepts and their criticisms. This enables ideas to be refined. The debate goes off the rails when it takes on a culture war cast, where officers plaintively ask “what are you doing to my Corps” and whine substancelessly against change they dont like but cant articulate reasons for that dislike.
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Thanks
Adam
War and warfare and not the same thing. War is a political activity to use force or the threat of force to coerce another party in the international system to do one’s bidding. Warfare are the ways and means used to achieve this political objective. This vitally important distinction will be a common refrain on MIL because failure to understand this axiom of strategy causes all sorts of problems.
MIL working definition.
