MILITARY MAGIC:
MILITARY INNOVATION AND COMBAT EFFECTIVENESS IN MODERN WAR
BOOK PROJECT

Today, as the United States reorients to great power competition and modernizes its military, leaders must make important decisions about future platforms and systems that will shape U.S. military power for a long time to come. At the same time, the armed forces are still in an era of constrained resources. The confluence of these trends means that the United States will need to make big bets about the future character of war, but it cannot afford for these bets to be too wide of the mark. Unfortunately, my work finds that it is this very environment of rising defense requirements and tight resource constraints that can encourage risky, and ultimately harmful, military innovation.

I argue that self-defeating innovation is more likely to occur when a military service, faced with growing security commitments that outstrip shrinking resources, is incentivized to make desperate gambles on radically new capabilities to meet overly ambitious goals, all while cannibalizing its older capabilities. The service later discovers that the new capability alone cannot accomplish assigned missions, that the enemy can exploit vulnerabilities left opened by the loss of traditional capabilities, and that to restore military effectiveness, combat units must relearn older methods of warfare. Innovation therefore has a logic of creative destruction. It is a balancing act between creating new ways of war, on the one hand, and destroying traditional methods, on the other. When military services are overstretched, they can over-innovate in ways that are self-destructive.

Prevailing wisdom suggests that innovation consistently and dramatically enhances the effectiveness of a state’s armed forces and therefore redistributes power in the international system. I challenge this intuition. The research speaks to how policymakers can create an environment where military services innovate in healthy and productive ways. And finally, the case studies themselves should temper excessive faith in the promises of radical and rapid military innovation. Innovation is not inherently good and not all major military changes result in increased military power.