What the "Military Innovation Lab" (MIL) is All About
#1 - Getting You to Try on a Pair of Hot Pink Shorts for America!
Washington DC 22 Feb 2023
OVERVIEW
We choose to study military innovation not because it is easy, but because it is hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win. To paraphrase JFK.
The Military Innovation Lab was established to tackle the hard problems!
Innovation in the strategic world is not like any other human endeavor. Its incredible complex, has its own rules and demands a special methodology.
Military Innovation ≠ New Tech
Military Innovation = Possibilism + Adhocracy + Methodology
If we knew for a fact that wearing hot pink shorts would guarantee a victory in a future war with China, would we be able to convince the operators of SEAL Team VI, III MEF, the 7th Fleet, the 25th Inf Div, and US Air Forces Pacific to go pink for victory?
Not a chance.
Changing all uniforms to hot pink shorts would be like executing a bald eagle on live tv in front of an audience of inflamed Iranian clerics jumping up and down slapping their chests chanting “death to America”.
This ludicrous example is used to make the point that creating a creativity culture in the most structured system on earth is a big ask. Cultural adaptation is the hardest part of innovation, but alone it is insufficient.
This is part #1 of a 3 part introduction to the unique challenges go military innovation. Click here for Part 2 and Part 3. Or alternatively view the entire presentation in one file at the Overview.
Beware of simple solutions
Hierarchy, authority, structure, doctrine, repetition, uniformity, tradition, are hallmarks of military culture. They are essential to minimizing friction in an ever expanding system with millions of people, places, things, dollars, data and ideas to manage and coordinate across time and space - from the seabed to the galaxies. Yet the very things that are essential to control the most complex system of systems on earth, are the very things that inhibit creativity. This is by design. Lives, national prestige, and vast sums of tax payers money can be destroyed in an instant even by the most well-meaning, inadvertent, unwitting error.
Innovation is the fault line between control and creativity. In any bureaucratic system, the preponderance of effort, ideas and resources are applied to control. Bureaucracy seeks standardization through rule setting. Innovation seeks the best solution regardless of constraints. Balancing this tension - keeping the world’s largest bureaucracy rolling along and doing things completely differently is next to impossible. This challenge is multiplied when considering the military is deeply embedded in a political-industrial complex that has ridged ends-ways-means, laws, regulations, rules, and norms.
Complexity makes genuine innovation extremely difficult. Aligning all the stars from thought bubble to a new way to prevail in conflict consumes huge quantities of finite time, energy, and resources (human and otherwise), and is far more likely to fail than succeed. The Military Innovation Lab (MIL) is dedicated to explaining what innovation takes in the military context and how it can be done.
In the next article we will explain why confusing new technology with innovation is a common mistake and in the article after that we will outline a grand strategy for military innovation.
If you prefer the description, purpose and philosophy of MIL and its approach all in one article, jump to the All in One Overview.