Dangerous Changes
Dangerous Changes Kendrick Kuo
When Military Innovation Harms
Combat Effectiveness
Conventional wisdom
suggests that innovation consistently improves military power. Militaries that
oppose it invite defeat, but those that innovate secure victory. Innovation is
considered a sign of organizational health because the ever-changing character
of war constantly threatens to render existing capabilities obsolete. Conversely,
misfortune comes to those who allow the march of historical change to over-
take them. The notion that innovation and better military performance go
hand in hand is thus intuitive. It is also wrong.
In popular imagination, for example, the German blitzkrieg was a revolu-
tionary innovation in World War II that restored the possibility of decisive vic-
tory, which had eluded European armies since the Franco-Prussian War. What
is less known is that the British also innovated in armored warfare yet per-
formed poorly on the battleªeld. While the German Army mechanized its
combined-arms tactics developed at the end of World War I, the British de-
ployed armored brigades comprised almost entirely of tanks and expected
them to ªght with virtually no help from supporting arms.
What is puzzling about this example is not the presence or absence of
innovation—both armies innovated new forms of armored warfare—but in-
stead why some innovations enhance combat effectiveness while other innova-
tions do not. The idea that innovation is a gamble is not novel, but too often
analysts focus on only beneªcial changes. They overlook harmful innovation
in military organizations, implying that the gamble is always worth making.
This article seeks to restore the atmosphere of risk inherent to innovation and
explain why its perils deserve as much attention as its promises. To do so, I de-
Kendrick Kuo is Assistant Professor at the Strategic and Operational Research Department at the U.S.
Naval War College.
For their comments on various iterations of this project, the author thanks Stephen Biddle, Jasen
Castillo, Audrey Kurth Cronin, Fiona Cunningham, Alexander Downes, Martha Finnemore,
Benjamin Friedman, Andres Gannon, Eugene Gholz, Mariya Grinberg, Jason Lyall, Sara Plana,
John Schuessler, Caitlin Talmadge, Rachel Tecott, Sanne Verschuren, seminar participants at Amer-
ican University, the Catholic University of America, the U.S. Naval War College, the University of
Notre Dame, and Texas A&M University, and the anonymous reviewers. The ideas in this article
were ªrst presented in “Military Magic: The Promise and Peril of Military Innovation,” Ph.D. dis-
sertation, George Washington University, 2021. The views expressed here are those of the author
and do not necessarily represent those of the U.S. Department of Defense or its components.
International Security, Vol. 47, No. 2 (Fall 2022), pp. 48–87, https://doi.org/10.1162/isec_a_00446
No rights reserved. This work was authored as part of the Contributor’s ofªcial duties as an Employee of the
United States Government and is therefore a work of the United States Government. In accordance with
17 U.S.C. 105, no copyright protection is available for such works under U.S. Law..
48
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Dangerous Changes 49
velop a theoretical framework that relates patterns of peacetime innovation to
its impact on wartime effectiveness—the ability of a military service to accom-
plish its assigned missions at acceptable cost.1
My central claim is that innovation is more likely to weaken a service’s effec-
tiveness when growing security commitments outstrip shrinking resources.
This wide commitment-resource gap exerts pressures to innovate in ways that
cannibalize traditional capabilities before beliefs about the effectiveness of
new ones are justiªed. When wartime comes, not only has the service lost
proªciency in those older capabilities, but the new capability underdelivers,
thereby creating vulnerabilities for the enemy to exploit.
Studying harmful innovation is crucial for both scholarship and contempo-
rary policy challenges. Scholars study military innovation primarily because of
its promise to improve effectiveness. But whether peacetime innovation in-
creases military power is usually an assumed relationship rather than a stud-
ied one. There is a bias in case selection: scholars almost exclusively study
power-enhancing innovation and ask why it occurred. Explaining the adop-
tion of new ways of war, however, says little about whether the change is
beneªcial or harmful.
For defense policy, this article cautions against overly relying on military in-
novation to bridge wide commitment-resource gaps. The United States is in an
era of military modernization in which military and civilian leaders must
make important decisions about future platforms and systems that will shape
U.S. military power for a long time. At the same time, the armed services oper-
ate with relatively constrained resources compared with their expansive com-
mitments. The conºuence of these trends creates pressure to make big bets on
new capabilities and take risks in shedding traditional ones. My theory and
ªndings suggest, however, that it is precisely this type of environment that en-
courages miscalculation.
This article proceeds in eight sections. First, I review the existing literature
on military innovation, highlighting the curious absence of studies that sys-
tematically examine the downside risks of innovation. Next, I deªne military
innovation as used in this article. The third section proposes a theory of harm-
1. For a similar deªnition of military effectiveness, see Dan Reiter, “Confronting Trade-Offs in the
Pursuit of Military Effectiveness,” in Dan Reiter, ed., The Sword’s Other Edge: Trade-Offs in the Pur-
suit of Military Effectiveness (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), p. 4. I use “military ef-
fectiveness,” “combat effectiveness,” “wartime effectiveness,” “military power,” “combat power,”
and “military performance” as interchangeable terms. The terms “military service,” “armed ser-
vice,” and “service” are also used as synonyms.
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International Security 47:2 50
ful military innovation. In the fourth section, I introduce the puzzling case of
British armor innovation after World War I and the British Army’s subsequent
combat ineffectiveness, and I discuss the research design. Sections ªve and six
illustrate the theory, tracing British armor innovation in the interwar period
and performance in the Desert War during World War II. I then evaluate alter-
native explanations in section seven, before concluding with avenues for fu-
ture research and implications for scholarship and defense policy.
Innovation and the Promise of Military Power
In popular discourse, the word “innovation” connotes desirable progress.
The same is true in research on international relations and military innova-
tion. Theories of international relations assume that innovation enhances
a state’s power in the international system by changing the unit cost of
military power such that a given supply of resources is converted more efª-
ciently into wartime effectiveness. Robert Gilpin argues that military innova-
tion gives a “particular society a monopoly of superior armament or technique
and dramatically decreases the cost of extending the area of domination.”2
John Mearsheimer similarly observes that great powers “prize innovation”
because it offers “new ways to gain advantage over opponents.”3 Assuming
then that innovation bestows a competitive edge, “contending states imi-
tate the military innovations contrived by the country of greatest capability
and ingenuity.”4
Theories of military innovation reºect this optimistic view. In his inºuential
review of the literature, Adam Grissom identiªes a “tacit deªnition of military
innovation that is, approximately, ‘a change in operational praxis that pro-
duces a signiªcant increase in military effectiveness’ as measured by bat-
tleªeld results.” He ªnds that “only reforms that produce greater military
effectiveness are studied as innovations, and few would consider studying
counterproductive policies as innovations.”5 Some researchers have made
Grissom’s tacit deªnition a formal one, treating effectiveness as a deªning fea-
ture of military innovation.6
2. Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981),
p. 60.
3. John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), p. 166.
4. Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979), p. 127.
5. Adam Grissom, “The Future of Military Innovation Studies,” Journal of Strategic Studies, Vol. 29,
No. 5 (2006), p. 907, https://doi.org/10.1080/01402390600901067.
6. For example, see Nina Kollars, “Military Innovation’s Dialectic: Gun Trucks and Rapid Acquisi-
tion,” Security Studies, Vol. 23, No. 4 (2014), p. 790, https://doi.org/10.1080/09636412.2014.965000;
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Dangerous Changes 51
Equating peacetime innovation with greater military effectiveness is puz-
zling, however, because scholars recognize that the two are not synonyms.
Barry Posen categorizes military doctrine as either innovative or stagnant, but
he recognizes that “neither . . . should be valued a priori.” He suggests that in-
stead of stagnation, “stability might be a better choice of terms, as it is less
loaded [italics in the original].”7 Historians Allan Millett and Williamson
Murray caution that during peacetime innovation “wrong choices and irrele-
vant investments will occur and will be hard to correct.”8 Others warn that “it
is entirely possible that a military innovation may make a military less effec-
tive,” and that “not all innovations should be welcomed.”9
Nonetheless, virtually all theories of military innovation are built and tested
on cases of performance-enhancing innovations. Posen’s inºuential study of
the Battle of France and the Battle of Britain ªnds that it was the military ser-
vices that innovated before the war that achieved political-military integra-
tion.10 In Winning the Next War, another agenda-setting work, Stephen Rosen
ignores “innovations that were put into practice but were clearly mistaken”
because “despite an extensive and intensive search,” he ªnds that mistakes
made by the U.S. military “all appear to have been the result of failures to in-
novate, rather than inappropriate innovations.”11
When innovation improves performance, it is appropriate to merely explain
its presence or absence, as existing theories aim to do. But this approach can-
not fully explain whether, when, and how innovation affects military power.
Moreover, equating innovation and effectiveness wrongly implies that resis-
tance to innovation is always an undesirable military pathology. Military orga-
and Adam M. Jungdahl and Julia M. Macdonald, “Innovation Inhibitors in War: Overcoming Ob-
stacles in the Pursuit of Military Effectiveness,” Journal of Strategic Studies, Vol. 38, No. 4 (2015),
p. 469, https://doi.org/10.1080/01402390.2014.917628.
7. Barry R. Posen, The Sources of Military Doctrine: France, Britain, and Germany between the World
Wars (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984), p. 29.
8. Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millett, “Military Effectiveness Twenty Years Later,” in Allan
R. Millett and Williamson Murray, eds., Military Effectiveness, Vol. 2: The Interwar Period (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. xiii.
9. Theo Farrell, Sten Rynning, and Terry Terriff, Transforming Military Power since the Cold War:
Britain, France, and the United States, 1991–2012 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 8;
and Harvey M. Sapolsky, “On the Theory of Military Innovation,” Breakthroughs, Vol. 9, No. 1
(2000), p. 35. See also Harvey M. Sapolsky, Brendan Rittenhouse Green, and Benjamin H. Fried-
man, “The Missing Transformation,” in Harvey M. Sapolsky, Benjamin H. Friedman, and Brendan
Rittenhouse Green, eds., U.S. Military Innovation since the Cold War: Creation without Destruction
(New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 6.
10. Posen, The Sources of Military Doctrine, pp. 102–104.
11. Stephen Rosen, Winning the Next War: Innovation and the Modern Military (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press, 1991), p. 53. But see Andrew Bacevich, The Pentomic Era: The U.S. Army between
Korea and Vietnam (Washington, D.C.: National Defense University Press, 1986).
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International Security 47:2 52
nizations are conservative for a reason: there are countless solutions to
complex problems, but many of them could produce catastrophic results.
Therefore, assuming improved performance strips the concept of innovation of
its most interesting and dangerous attribute—it is a gamble that costly changes
are worth making.
Military Innovation and Its Risks
I deªne military innovation in this article as the process of creating a new
capability—a new institutionalized technique of organized violence intended
to convert a service’s resources into success in future missions.12 For instance,
an air wing designed for strategic bombing will be organized, equipped, and
trained to operate in a way that is distinct from close air support. Capabilities
are embedded in the service’s organization and equipment (i.e., force struc-
ture) and a relatively ordered and consistent way of using these components in
combat (i.e., doctrine). Capabilities reºect the service’s preferred methods of
using military force in response to particular historical modes of warfare.
Following common practice, I limit the concept of military innovation’s
scope to major changes in peacetime at the service level. Most studies distin-
guish between peacetime innovation and wartime adaptation because their
learning environments are different: performance feedback from combat is un-
available in the fog of peace.13 I also focus on “major” military innovations,
which Michael Horowitz deªnes as “a major change in the conduct of war-
fare” that involves “shifts in the core competencies of military organizations,
or shifts in the tasks that the average soldiers perform.”14 The unit of analysis
is therefore an innovating service.
The ostensible purpose of innovation is to enhance military effectiveness.
For the economist Joseph Schumpeter, innovation is a new production func-
tion that changes the rate of converting a ªxed quantity of factors into prod-
ucts.15 In a similar fashion, military innovation tries to improve the efªciency
12. For similar deªnitions, see Kimberly Marten Zisk, Engaging the Enemy: Organization Theory and
Soviet Military Innovation, 1955–1991 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 4; and
Michael C. Horowitz, The Diffusion of Military Power: Causes and Consequences of International Politics
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010), pp. 22–23.
13. For example, see Rosen, Winning the Next War, pp. 22–23.
14. Horowitz, The Diffusion of Military Power, pp. 22–23. See also Theo Farrell and Terry Terriff,
“The Sources of Military Change,” in Theo Farrell and Terry Terriff, eds., The Sources of Military
Change: Culture, Politics, Technology (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 2002), p. 5.
15. Joseph Schumpeter, Business Cycles: A Theoretical, Historical, and Statistical Analysis of the Capi-
talist Process (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1939), pp. 87–88.
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Dangerous Changes 53
of converting allocated resources—money and personnel—into mission suc-
cess by creating a new capability. Ideally, armed forces ªeld capabilities that
maximize their chances of accomplishing assigned missions at a minimal cost
in resources.
But innovation’s promise of resource efªciency and mission effectiveness
comes with risks. The ªrst risk is that creating a new capability is a step into
the unknown without the beneªt of experience, hindsight, or relevant skills.16
The second risk relates to the destruction of old capabilities in the process of
creating new ones, or what Schumpeter calls “creative destruction.”17 As mili-
tary organizations innovate, they are “down-grading or abandoning older con-
cepts of operation and possibly of a formerly dominant weapon.”18 In other
words, “a military service destroys or thoroughly redirects an important part
of itself.”19 When a traditional capability is destroyed, it may be recoverable,
but creative destruction inevitably involves opportunity costs. Destroying tra-
ditional capabilities is risky because they often are battle-tested methods of
generating military power. After all, effective organizations survive and suc-
ceed in part by maintaining their existing “infrastructure”—those unglamor-
ous and old investments.20
For innovation to improve military effectiveness, it must create more combat
power than it destroys. A military service ideally calibrates its balance of capa-
bilities such that a new capability’s marginal beneªt equals or exceeds the mar-
ginal cost of losing traditional ones. But the optimal balance between creation
and destruction is unknown. If the organization invests too heavily in the new
capability, the costs to long-established capabilities can weaken the service’s
overall combat performance. Destructive changes are not adequately compen-
sated by the creative developments allegedly taking their place. But if the or-
ganization invests too little, it forgoes potential gains in wartime effectiveness.
Innovation is therefore an exercise in risk management, a balancing act be-
tween the promises of a new capability and the perils of losing older ones.
16. Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper Perennial, 1942;
repr., 2008), p. 132; and James G. March, “Footnotes to Organizational Change,” Administrative Sci-
ence Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 4 (1981), p. 572, https://doi.org/10.2307/2392340.
17. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, p. 83.
18. Rosen, Winning the Next War, pp. 7–8.
19. Owen R. Cote Jr., “The Politics of Innovative Military Doctrine: The U.S. Navy and Fleet Ballis-
tic Missiles,” Ph.D. dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1996, p. 9.
20. Andrew L. Russell and Lee Vinsel, “After Innovation, Turn to Maintenance,” Technology and
Culture, Vol. 59, No. 1 (2018), p. 17, https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2018.0004.
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International Security 47:2 54
Figure 1. A Theory of Harmful Innovation
commitment-resource gap
(wicked mismatch)
desperation
flawed innovation
process
combat ineffectiveness
●
●
growing commitments
shrinking resources
●
●
●
bureaucratic crisis
professional crisis
temporal crisis
radical proposals
●
● wishful thinking
rushed process
●
●
●
●
new capability fails
old capabilities lost
reverse innovation
A Theory of Harmful Innovation
My central claim is that harmful innovation is more likely to occur when mili-
tary services, faced with growing security commitments that outstrip shrink-
ing resources, make desperate gambles on new capabilities to meet overly
ambitious goals while cannibalizing older capabilities. The military service
treats innovation as a silver bullet and endorses destroying traditional capabil-
ities before innovation advocates can justify their beliefs about the new one’s
effectiveness. The service later discovers that the new capability alone may not
accomplish assigned missions, that the enemy can exploit vulnerabilities pro-
duced by the loss of traditional capabilities, and that the service likely must re-
store traditional capabilities as a backstop to shore up its combat power.
Figure 1 summarizes the causal logic.
commitment-resource gaps and the “wicked mismatch”
Achieving an economically solvent alignment between commitments and re-
sources is a perennial concern of statecraft. The journalist Walter Lippmann
popularized the idea that “foreign policy consists in bringing into balance,
with a comfortable surplus of power in reserve, the nation’s commitments and
the nation’s power.”21 But when available means are insufªcient to achieve de-
sired political ends, there is overstretch or overcommitment. My theory em-
phasizes how the conºuence of expanding commitments and shrinking
resources—what I call a “wicked mismatch”—can shape innovation processes
in harmful ways. The term is drawn from “wicked problems,” of which a key
characteristic is that “proposed ‘solutions’ often turn out to be worse than
the symptoms.”22
Security commitments refer to the mission burdens assigned to a military
21. Walter Lippmann, U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic (Boston: Little, Brown, 1943), p. 9.
22. C. West Churchman, “Guest Editorial: Wicked Problems,” Management Science, Vol. 14, No. 4
(1967), p. B141, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2628678.
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Dangerous Changes 55
service. Some commitments are written down in treaties or domestic legisla-
tion, whereas others are declared in speeches announcing a vital interest or
policy doctrine.23 The service uses these commitments to set appropriate
benchmarks for the size, shape, and types of its forces, to which the state al-
locates money and personnel. These resources maintain or expand force
structures, training regimens, military bases, administration, and operations.
A military service also worries about whether it has enough personnel with
the requisite skill and training to accomplish assigned missions. The service in-
vests these resources into capabilities.24
A commitment-resource gap develops when a service’s mission burdens
grow, its allocation of money and personnel shrink, or both. Mission bur-
dens can grow in scope, intensity, or time. Mission scope widens when the
state acquires new territories and bases to defend, makes or expands security
guarantees to allies and partners, or adds entirely new tasks to a service’s mis-
sion set. The mission burden intensity deepens when a mission becomes more
difªcult to accomplish because of threats such as a competitor’s relative mili-
tary strength, changes in an adversary’s military strategy, or shifts in the tech-
nological landscape. Finally, a service’s mission set demands higher levels of
military readiness as war appears likelier and more imminent because of dip-
lomatic crises, militarized disputes, or alarming intelligence assessments.25
A gap can also open when the state reduces the service’s allocated money
or personnel. It might redirect money to other investments, social spending, or
private consumption through tax cuts. Or civilian leaders might manipulate
budget levels, provoking greater interservice competition over budget alloca-
tions.26 Innovation scholars have also highlighted historical episodes in which
civilian leaders shortened conscription time.27 Moreover, the quantity and
23. Harold Sprout and Margaret Sprout, “‘Retreat from World Power’: Processes and Conse-
quences of Readjustment,” World Politics, Vol. 15, No. 4 (1963), p. 658, https://doi.org/10.2307/
2009462.
24. There are other military-relevant resources not considered here. For example, see Klaus Knorr,
The Power of Nations: The Political Economy of International Relations (New York: Basic Books, 1975),
pp. 45–78.
25. Scholars recognize the role of mission burdens in the innovation process. For example, on
scope, see Rebecca D. Patterson, The Challenge of Nation-Building: Implementing Effective Innovation
in the U.S. Army from World War II to the Iraq War (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littleªeld, 2014),
p. 3. On intensity, see Rosen, Winning the Next War, p. 76; and Zisk, Engaging the Enemy, pp. 3–4.
On time, see Posen, The Sources of Military Doctrine, pp. 59, 74–75.
26. Cote, “The Politics of Innovative Military Doctrine,” pp. 339–342.
27. Elizabeth Kier, Imagining War: French and British Military Doctrine between the Wars (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 56–88.
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International Security 47:2 56
quality of personnel eligible for military service varies with a population’s age
distribution and the national system of military recruitment.28
If the state reduces resources or expands commitments, all else being equal,
it can weaken or exceed the service’s capabilities and, by implication, its
military effectiveness. One solution is retrenchment, which can take the form
of territorial withdrawal, diplomatic accommodation, appeasement, arms con-
trol, or increasing reliance on allies.29 Retrenchment, however, may weaken the
state’s security posture, embolden rivals, and afford domestic political oppo-
nents the opportunity to criticize incumbent leaders for reducing the credibil-
ity of the country’s commitments, betraying allies, or being soft toward a
security threat. Another remedy is a military buildup—allocating a larger por-
tion of national resources to the service.30 But constituents might prefer more
spending on butter and less on guns, or policymakers might believe that a mil-
itary buildup would destabilize the economy.
In contrast to these alternatives, innovation promises to restore the service’s
effectiveness by increasing efªciency without reducing commitments or ex-
panding resources.31 If political leaders reject both retrenchment and a military
buildup, the affected service has an incentive to innovate. Whether it does so is
outside the scope of this theory, but the size of a commitment-resource gap has
important implications for whether innovation, if it occurs, is likely to succeed.
I expect that harmful innovation is more likely in a wicked mismatch, when
a service’s commitments are increasing and its resources are decreasing. In a
wicked mismatch, a service’s traditional capabilities not only are threatened by
severe resource scarcity for the foreseeable future but also are rendered ineffec-
tive by the ambition of future missions. Expectations about the future are
bleak. The service is therefore, I argue, in a professional and bureaucratic cri-
sis. Ofªcers doubt the service can perform assigned missions successfully, fear
that the security of the state is at risk, and worry about the service’s status and
continuing relevance to national security. The service also wants to rectify this
situation because it is overstretching its operational capacity by offering a sem-
28. Klaus Knorr, War Potential of Nations (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1956),
pp. 167–169; and Eliot A. Cohen, Citizens and Soldiers: The Dilemmas of Military Service (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 117–151.
29. Paul K. MacDonald and Joseph M. Parent, “Graceful Decline? The Surprising Success of Great
Power Retrenchment,” International Security, Vol. 35, No. 4 (Spring 2011), pp. 19–21, https://
doi.org/10.1162/ISEC_a_00034.
30. Joseph M. Parent and Sebastian Rosato, “Balancing in Neorealism,” International Security,
Vol. 40, No. 2 (Fall 2015), pp. 61–64, https://doi.org/10.1162/ISEC_a_00216.
31. Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics, pp. 188–189.
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Dangerous Changes 57
blance of meeting commitments, and business as usual offers little prospect of
enhancing its political standing, contribution to national defense, and associ-
ated budget justiªcations.
Military innovation becomes a desperate, high-payoff, low-probability gam-
ble to resolve the wicked mismatch by placing large bets on a new capability
and cannibalizing traditional ones to do so. This strategy expands the range
of possible outcomes: the new capability may signiªcantly increase mission
effectiveness and resource efªciency, but the service could perform even
worse by neglecting traditional capabilities.32 Such innovative gambles are
surprising because the standard intuition in military innovation studies is that
bureaucratic organizations in general, and military hierarchies in particular,
are prone to stasis and resist dramatic changes that disrupt their standard op-
erating procedures.33 But a wicked mismatch generates pressures to adopt
risk-seeking preferences.34
Factors widely considered to be conducive to military innovation can, when
taken to extremes, cause harm. Innovation scholars argue that shrinking re-
sources or expanding commitments can align bureaucracy behind innovation,
but I propose that extremely wide commitment-resource gaps signiªcantly in-
crease the probability that innovation will be too radical and ultimately self-
defeating. Although similar behavior might result from either severe resource
scarcity or ambitious commitments, the gap’s size, not its drivers, ultimately
trigger harmful innovation. The size of a commitment-resource gap, however,
is in large part a matter of political and professional judgment and thus hard to
measure objectively.35 After all, armed services perennially complain about re-
source scarcity. A wicked mismatch therefore serves an analytical purpose be-
cause an extremely wide gap is especially obvious when resources shrink and
commitments grow at the same time.
32. The logic here is akin to “gambling for resurrection,” in which high-risk policies are adopted
in hopes of staving off an otherwise certain and undesirable outcome. See George W. Downs and
David M. Rocke, “Conºict, Agency, and Gambling for Resurrection: The Principal-Agent Problem
Goes to War,” American Journal of Political Science, Vol 38, No. 2 (1994), pp. 374–376, https://
doi.org/10.2307/2111408.
33. David Barno and Nora Bensahel, Adaptation under Fire: How Militaries Change in Wartime (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 10–17.
34. Pursuing high-risk innovation amid a wicked mismatch aligns with prospect theory: risk-
seeking is more common in the “domain of losses” as opposed to the “domain of gains.” The origi-
nating work is Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision
under Risk,” Econometrica, Vol. 47 (1979), pp. 263–291.
35. Richard K. Betts, Military Readiness: Concepts, Choices, and Consequences (Washington, D.C.:
Brookings Institution Press, 1995), pp. 87–143; and Michael E. O’Hanlon, The Science of War: Defense
Budgeting, Military Technology, Logistics, and Combat Outcomes (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 2009), pp. 31–43.
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International Security 47:2 58
ºawed innovation process
A wicked mismatch can produce ºaws in the innovation process, with three
particularly dangerous and potentially interrelated characteristics: radicalism,
wishful thinking, and rushed development.
First, a wicked mismatch can elicit radical proposals to substitute a new ca-
pability for traditional ones. In professional military organizations, ofªcers
regularly search for new solutions that could increase effectiveness and im-
prove efªciency.36 What makes these proposals different is their radicalism—
the degree of creative destruction—and their ready audience. The new
capability promises to do much more with much less if it heavily cannibalizes
traditional ones. Proponents of the new capability suggest that older capa-
bilities are obsolete and cannot meet future mission requirements, and they
further suggest that the military service should divest from old capabilities
and transfer resources to create new ones. Such proposals should fare poorly
in hierarchical and conservative military bureaucracies because of their organi-
zational predilection for current operating procedures, but the crisis produced
by a wicked mismatch opens an opportunity for radicalism to gain a wider au-
dience. For example, the U.S. Army in the 1950s—facing global commitments
in Europe and Asia amid shrinking personnel and money—adopted the pen-
tomic division proposal, specializing in strategic mobility and limited nuclear
warfare to the detriment of its conventional capabilities.37
A second ºaw in the innovation process is that a wicked mismatch incen-
tivizes wishful thinking that exaggerates the rewards of innovation and
downplays its risks. As the service experiments with the new capability, con-
cerns almost inevitably arise. Political constraints might preclude its future
use, the underlying technology might be premature, enemy countermea-
sures might negate its intended effects, or the loss of traditional capabilities
might signiªcantly weaken the service. But there is an organizational impera-
tive to justify the service’s continued relevance.38 The service may therefore
disregard plausible criticisms and ignore contemporary evidence that in-
novation’s promises may be oversold.39 Desperation motivates generous
interpretations of the limited data about the new capability based on deduc-
36. Benjamin Jensen, Forging the Sword: Doctrinal Change in the U.S. Army (Stanford, Calif.: Stan-
ford University Press, 2016), pp. 16–17.
37. Kendrick Kuo, “Military Magic: The Promise and Peril of Military Innovation,” Ph.D. disserta-
tion, George Washington University, 2021, pp. 525–565.
38. Philip Selznick, Leadership in Administration (New York: Harper and Row, 1957), pp. 65–89.
39. Anthony Downs calls this the “superman syndrome.” See Downs, Inside Bureaucracy (Boston:
Little, Brown, 1967), pp. 216–219.
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Dangerous Changes 59
tive logic that arrives at favorable conclusions, rather than prolonged empiri-
cal testing.
Wishful thinking can overemphasize the promises of innovation. For exam-
ple, in the late 1940s, the U.S. Air Force innovated an air-atomic blitz capability
in which an unescorted ºeet of intercontinental bombers could rapidly drop
most of if not the entire U.S. nuclear stockpile and destroy the Soviets’ capacity
and will to ªght. But the air force dismissed several plausible criticisms of the
new capability. First, it assumed that political and moral constraints would not
preclude nuclear use in the next war. Second, it overlooked shortcomings in
several key elements needed to ensure the success of the new capability: the
intelligence to identify, the bombing accuracy to destroy, and the ªghter es-
corts to reach critical targets deep within the Soviet Union. Consequently, the
air force disproportionately invested in Strategic Air Command and cannibal-
ized important capabilities in air superiority and close air support.40
Wishful thinking can also de-emphasize the perils of creative destruction.
The new capability will allegedly cover vulnerabilities opened by the loss of
traditional methods. Ofªcers may interpret experimental data using a one-
size-ªts-all approach to problem solving. For instance, if a capability allows
the army to win a major war, then it should also be effective at ªghting small
wars. Another example of wishful thinking occurred before World War II,
when it was thought that strategic bombers could operate effectively in inde-
pendent ºying formations without support from escort ªghters.
Third, desperation can accelerate and rush the innovation process, reducing
the quality of vetting. In standard accounts, a military innovation process un-
folds as a protracted, even decades-long struggle between innovators and con-
servatives. Naval aviators championing the aircraft carrier, for example,
criticized battleship admirals for wanting to preserve outmoded ways of
war. But predictions about future warfare are often wrong, and the mili-
tary’s enduring quest for short, decisive battles is arguably misguided.41
Conservatives—a better term is “maintainers”—can therefore serve as a
healthy check on magical thinking. Prolonged intellectual and bureaucratic
tugs-of-war serve a virtuous purpose because “debate and resistance are re-
quired to separate the truly good from the merely new among innovations.”42
In contrast to prolonged debate, acceleration increases the risk of imple-
40. Kuo, “Military Magic,” pp. 326–349.
41. Lawrence Freedman, The Future of War: A History (New York: PublicAffairs, 2019), pp. 264–287;
and Cathal J. Nolan, The Allure of Battle: A History of How Wars Have Been Won and Lost (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2017).
42. Sapolsky, Green, and Friedman, “The Missing Transformation,” p. 7.
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International Security 47:2 60
menting inferior procedures—what organization theorists call a “competency
trap.”43 This is particularly dangerous when undertaking major changes in the
highly complex and difªcult conduct of modern warfare. Radical change is not
inherently harmful, but it requires time and resources to properly assess and
manage its higher degree of risk. As military technology and operations be-
come more complex, organizations must grapple with “rogue outcomes” and
develop appropriate information practices.44 Similar friction emerges in orga-
nization and doctrine. The larger the magnitude of change, the greater the like-
lihood that complications and countervailing problems will arise, both of
which take time and careful consideration to address.
combat effectiveness
When conducted under the pressures of a wicked mismatch, an innovation
process animated by radicalism, wishful thinking, and rushed development is
more likely to undermine combat performance. Combat effectiveness is ulti-
mately about producing favorable outcomes, which vary among different mis-
sions.45 Effectiveness also involves achieving results at acceptable costs (i.e., in
terms of casualties and losses in matériel), as determined by the political stakes
and commanders’ intents. Therefore, innovation harms military performance
insofar as it prevents ªelded combat forces from achieving mission objectives,
or from doing so at acceptable levels of cost in lives and equipment.
The drivers of ineffectiveness are twofold: the intended effect is not
achieved, and unintended effects are harmful and consequential. First, combat
forces associated with the new capability ªnd that their force structure and
doctrine fail to deliver the promised decisive effects. This could be because the
underlying technology is premature or the enemy deploys predictable coun-
termeasures. The point is not the speciªc problems, but rather that the service
willfully ignores these well-anticipated concerns in their desperate search for a
silver bullet. Second, traditional capabilities atrophy, and the service cannot
rely on these either. The innovation process overlooks foreseeable vulnerabili-
ties that will emerge if the service does not maintain its traditional methods—
the very capabilities developed to prevent these weaknesses.
43. Barbara Levitt and James G. March, “Organizational Learning,” Annual Review of Sociology,
Vol. 14 (1988), pp. 322–323, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.so.14.080188.001535.
44. On rogue outcomes, see Chris C. Demchak, Military Organizations, Complex Machines (Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 15–27. See also Jon R. Lindsay, Information Technology and
Military Power (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2020), pp. 32–70.
45. Stephen Biddle, Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 2004), pp. 5–6.
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Dangerous Changes 61
A ªnal indicator of harmful innovation is that, over time, disappointing
combat results prompt the service to unlearn or abandon the new capability
and restore traditional ways of war. It attempts to reverse creative destruction.
Reverting to older methods reºects an effort to shore up combat power after
the promises of military innovation are unmet and its perils materialize.
This evaluative framework examines just one causal pathway between
military innovation and combat effectiveness. Innovation can also be self-
defeating because a service prepares for the wrong mission by misreading the
nature and context of the next conºict. Innovation can also diffuse across
the international system, giving imitators an unexpected competitive advan-
tage. Or cost overruns might dwarf the innovation’s promised efªciency
gains.46 These alternatives are all valid ways to assess an innovation’s impact
on performance, but I focus narrowly on intended effects and immediate unin-
tended consequences. In doing so, I sidestep the challenge of evaluating the
impact of extenuating circumstances and comparing near-term versus long-
term effects.
The Puzzle of British Performance in the Desert War, 1941–1942
I demonstrate the plausibility of the theory using a case study of British Army
innovation in armored warfare during the interwar period and its subsequent
performance in the Desert War. From February 1941 to July 1942, British and
Commonwealth forces suffered a string of defeats against the German Army
and its Italian allies in North Africa, but then notably improved their bat-
tleªeld performance and achieved three victories (two at El Alamein and one
at Alam el Halfa) in subsequent months. The theory suggests that the British
Army’s ineffectiveness and its subsequent improvement in combat occurred in
large part because of harmful innovation in peacetime and that innovation’s
reversal in wartime.
One of the most enduring images of World War II remains Germany’s rapid
victory in the Battle of France. According to standard treatments in political
science and strategic studies, the German Army was effective because it inno-
46. On these alternative pathways, see Murray and Millett, “Military Effectiveness Twenty Years
Later,” p. xiii; Emily O. Goldman and Richard B. Andres, “Systemic Effects of Military Innovation
and Diffusion,” Security Studies, Vol. 8, No. 4 (1999), pp. 102–122, https://doi.org/10.1080/09636
419908429387; Horowitz, The Diffusion of Military Power, pp. 42–51; and Lena Andrews and Julia
Macdonald, “Five Costs of Military Innovation,” War on the Rocks, February 18, 2016, https://
warontherocks.com/2016/02/ªve-costs-of-military-innovation/.
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International Security 47:2 62
vated blitzkrieg, whereas its British counterpart failed to innovate and thus
performed poorly.47 Both interpretations need correction. The word blitzkrieg
conjures the idea of fast tanks rolling up on the opponent with infantry follow-
ing behind conducting mop up operations. But the blitzkrieg is a misleading
myth that the Germans innovated a revolutionary fully mechanized approach
to mobile warfare.48 In reality, rather than being a drastic departure from the
past, German tactics and operations in World War II were an extension of
the inªltration tactics that it developed to restore mobile warfare on the
Western Front.49 German innovation in armored warfare involved mechaniz-
ing and motorizing combined-arms organization and doctrine and, as such, is
synonymous with modern concepts of maneuver warfare.50
The blitzkrieg myth complements another misleading narrative: that British
armor innovation failed because conservative army leaders suppressed a small
group of prophetic tank enthusiasts, which resulted in weak army perfor-
mance on the armor-dominated battleªelds of World War II. But in reality,
Britain’s interwar army favored reform and mechanization. Inspired by futur-
istic visions of mechanical warfare, the British Army relied too heavily on ar-
mor organized in tank-only brigades as the decisive arm on the battleªeld.51
47. Posen, The Sources of Military Doctrine, pp. 143–144, 156, 179–182, 205–208; and Kier, Imagining
War, pp. 120–121. For similar interpretations, see Williamson Murray, “Armored Warfare: The Brit-
ish, French, and German Experience,” in Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millett, eds., Military In-
novation in the Interwar Period (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 21–29; and John
Stone, “The British Army and the Tank,” in Farrell and Terriff, The Sources of Military Change,
pp. 193–194.
48. Karl-Heinz Frieser, The Blitzkrieg Legend: The 1940 Campaign in the West, trans. John T. Green-
wood (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2005).
49. Instead of being a “mechanized juggernaut,” the Wehrmacht was a semi-modern, semi-motor-
ized army that relied primarily on feet, horses, and railroads for movement. The critical difference
between 1917–1918 and 1940 was that the radio and the internal combustion engine accelerated
the tempo of combat operations for some assault divisions. Otherwise, the German Army applied
its traditional principles of operations. Richard L. DiNardo, Mechanized Juggernaut or Military
Anachronism? Horses and the German Army of World War II (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1991);
Frieser, The Blitzkrieg Legend, pp. 329–339; and Stephen Biddle, “The Past as Prologue: Assessing
Theories of Future Warfare,” Security Studies, Vol. 8, No. 1 (1998), pp. 44–49, https://doi.org/
10.1080/09636419808429365.
50. John J. Mearsheimer, Conventional Deterrence (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983),
pp. 35–52. According to one strategic interpretation of blitzkrieg, Germany planned a series of
rapid and decisive campaigns. But the German Army was arguably preparing for a prolonged to-
tal war like World War I. See Wilhelm Deist, “‘Blitzkrieg’ or Total War? War Preparations in Nazi
Germany,” in Roger Chickering and Stig Förster, eds., The Shadows of Total War: Europe, East Asia,
and the United States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 278, 282.
51. For revisionist accounts, see Robert H. Larson, The British Army and the Theory of Armored War-
fare, 1918–1940 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1984); Harold R. Winton, To Change an
Army: General Sir John Burnett-Stuart and British Armored Doctrine, 1927–1938 (Lawrence: University
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Dangerous Changes 63
Any praise of such a blitzkrieg and condemnation of British resistance to simi-
lar ideas must assume that this radical vision would work—but the Germans
never tried it and the British Army in many respects did.52
The case of British armor innovation and performance in the Desert War is a
well-suited illustration of the theory, for three reasons. First, it is a “hard case”
because the case outcome is surprising from the perspective of previously es-
tablished theory, yet it matches the expectations of a new argument.53 The nar-
rative of British ineffective conservatism and German effective radicalism is
attractive because it conforms to the dubious assumption that innovation con-
sistently improves military effectiveness. In contrast, my theory of harmful in-
novation counterintuitively expects British ineffectiveness to stem in part from
prewar innovation.
Correcting the understanding of the British armor case also sheds light on
German armored warfare—a critical case for military innovation studies. My
theory does not identify causal mechanisms for beneªcial innovation. That is,
the absence of a wicked mismatch does not guarantee beneªcial innovation
even if resources exceed commitments. But if a wicked mismatch imposes
harmful pressures on an innovation process, its absence removes certain con-
straints on that process.54 An important dimension of effective German inno-
vation in the interwar period was the army’s ambitious rearmament programs,
which reduced demands for radical innovation to bridge its commitment-
resource gap.55
Second, analyzing British battleªeld performance in the Desert War from
February 1941 to November 1942 offers some control over ªve other important
determinants of military effectiveness: balance of numerical strength, balance
of qualitative superiority, regime type, the adversary’s leadership and military
prowess, and prewar preparations.56 The ªrst three factors—all commonly
Press of Kansas, 1988); and J. P. Harris, Men, Ideas, and Tanks: British Military Thought and Armoured
Forces, 1903–1939 (New York: Manchester University Press, 1995).
52. Timothy Harrison Place, Military Training in the British Army, 1940–1944: From Dunkirk to
D-Day (London: Frank Cass, 2000), p. 96.
53. Aaron Rapport, “Hard Thinking about Hard and Easy Cases in Security Studies,” Security
Studies, Vol. 24, No. 3 (2015), pp. 454–456, https://doi.org/10.1080/09636412.2015.1070615.
54. On asymmetric causal mechanisms, see Gary Goertz, Multimethod Research, Causal Mechanisms,
and Case Studies: An Integrated Approach (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2017), pp. 70–
71, 98–100.
55. For example, see Geoffrey P. Megargee, “The German Army after the Great War: A Case Study
in Selective Self-Deception,” in Peter Dennis and Jeffrey Grey, eds., Victory or Defeat: Armies in the
Aftermath of Conºict (Canberra: Big Sky, 2010), pp. 105–108; and Deist, “‘Blitzkrieg’ or Total War?”
pp. 274–275.
56. The engagements before and after this timeframe offer more ambiguous and less useful evi-
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International Security 47:2 64
cited sources of effectiveness—suggest that British forces were the favored bel-
ligerent. At the outset of almost every battle, British forces had more infantry,
tanks, and artillery. British armaments in North Africa were also at least quali-
tatively equivalent to German tanks and artillery.57 To be sure, the Germans
had superior anti-tank guns, but the British did not use their superiority in
ªeld artillery to negate this advantage.58 Finally, some theories of military ef-
fectiveness argue that democratic regimes produce better armies because their
meritocratic systems promote higher-quality commanders and liberal values
cultivate tactical initiative.59 But Britain was the relatively democratic belliger-
ent, not Germany.
Analyzing British performance over time also helps put in perspective the
relative signiªcance of German leadership and general military prowess. Be-
cause Erwin Rommel was primarily in command for much of the period under
study, his celebrated leadership of Axis forces in North Africa cannot alone ex-
plain variation in British effectiveness. And even though German forces had
inherent advantages—a long legacy of combat effectiveness and ideologically
motivated cohesion—these too were relatively constant throughout the Desert
War, so again cannot by themselves explain variation in battleªeld results.60
The British Army also had more opportunity to prepare for the mission. Be-
fore the war, the British Army trained and prepared to ªght in the desert, and
by none other than Maj. Gen. Percy Hobart, the army’s leading armor innova-
tor at the time. In fact, desert warfare embodied everything that British armor
innovators dreamed of: a featureless landscape allowing ºuid offensives car-
ried out by fast tanks.61 In contrast, German armor organization and doctrine
dence for the purposes of examining the impact of British armor innovation on combat perfor-
mance. During Operation Compass (December 1940–February 1941), Britain’s small Western
Desert Force routed the large Italian Tenth Army in North Africa, but the British Seventh Armored
Division only took part in a few minor skirmishes, while low morale and inferior tanks could as
easily explain Italian defeat. The analysis does not extend beyond November 1942 because U.S.
forces began landing in North Africa on November 8, which introduces additional factors related
to coalition warfare that shaped British planning and performance.
57. On the numerical and qualitative balance between British and German matériel in North
Africa, see John Agar-Hamilton and Leonard C. F. Turner, Crisis in the Desert, May–July, 1942 (Cape
Town: Oxford University Press, 1952), pp. 10–13; and John Agar-Hamilton and Leonard C. F.
Turner, The Sidi Rezeg Battles, 1941 (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1957), pp. 36–50, 53–56.
58. Agar-Hamilton and Turner, Crisis in the Desert, p. 11; and Agar-Hamilton and Turner, The Sidi
Rezeg Battles, pp. 45–46.
59. Dan Reiter and Allan C. Stam, Democracies at War (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
2002).
60. On German force cohesion, see Jasen Castillo, Endurance and War: The National Sources of Mili-
tary Cohesion (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2014), pp. 44–93.
61. Percy Hobart to Director of Staff Duties, “A.F.V. Requirements in the Revised Field Force,” No-
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Dangerous Changes 65
were developed with the narrower topographies of Europe in mind.62 Bat-
tleªeld results are not mono-causal outcomes, but the case selection strategy
weakens confounding factors and increases the likelihood that peacetime in-
novation played a consequential role in army ineffectiveness.
Third, the case of British armor innovation is data-rich, making it suitable
for process tracing. I draw evidence from a variety of sources, including
ofªcial government documents, internal army memoranda, army publica-
tions, published memoirs, and ofªcial histories. I examine objective indicators
(i.e., foreign policy decisions, service budgets, and troop levels) and subjec-
tive perceptions (i.e., how service leaders describe strategic challenges) to
identify whether the interwar British Army operated under wicked mismatch
pressures. I also process trace the interwar debates among innovators and
maintainers, looking for “mechanistic evidence” of radicalism, wishful think-
ing, and a rushed process.63 I then analyze the wartime effectiveness of the
new capability, the loss of traditional ones, and the army’s attempts to improve
performance under ªre in the Desert War.
British Innovation in Armored Warfare, 1919–1939
The British Army’s size and expenditure experienced unrelenting downward
pressure for virtually the entire interwar period, despite a heavy mission bur-
den and growing international threats to its security commitments. To resolve
this wicked mismatch, the army innovated all-tank mobile assaults that alleg-
edly improved its effectiveness in assigned missions while also economizing
the army’s limited budget and personnel. The innovation process was charac-
terized by radicalism, wishful thinking, and rushed development, all of which
downplayed criticisms that contemporary tanks were mechanically unreliable
and that armored assaults were susceptible to anti-tank countermeasures if
they lacked the support traditionally provided by other arms.
commitment-resource gap: wicked mismatch
The British Army faced the challenge of bridging a wicked mismatch between
expanding commitments and shrinking resources—a gap that persisted for
vember 25, 1937, LH 15/11/7, Liddell Hart Center for Military Archives (LHCMA), London,
United Kingdom; Michael Carver, Tobruk (London: Pan, 1964), pp. 266–267.
62. Ronald Lewin, The Life and Death of the Afrika Korps (New York: Quadrangle, 1977), pp. 11–13.
63. On mechanistic evidence, see Derek Beach and Rasmus Brun Pedersen, Process-Tracing
Methods: Foundations and Guidelines (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019), pp. 165–172.
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International Security 47:2 66
most of the interwar period.64 The army had expansive imperial, domestic,
and continental obligations at this time.65 It had to police and defend an em-
pire at its territorial zenith, having grown from one-ªfth of the world’s land-
mass before World War I to one-quarter of the globe.66 At home, the army had
to contain an Irish insurgency movement and quell what were perceived to be
coordinated labor strikes that posed a political challenge to the government.67
Finally, the army had continuing obligations in Europe, most signiªcant of
which was upholding the Locarno Pact to guarantee the common borders
between Belgium, France, and Germany.
To meet these wide-ranging security commitments, the army had fewer sol-
diers and less money than before World War I. From a high of 3.8 million regu-
lars in 1918, army strength rapidly dropped to 217,477 by 1922 and remained
below 200,000 for most of the interwar period. In comparison, there were
247,250 army regulars in 1913.68 India and the Dominions—which signiªcantly
contributed to the war effort—were unwilling or unable to assist in imperial
emergencies. They took responsibility for local defense, but Britain was re-
sponsible for imperial defense as a whole.69
The army’s personnel shortage was exacerbated by budget levels being held
as low as possible for almost two decades. In August 1919, the cabinet decided
that the defense departments should base their budget requests on the as-
sumption that “the British Empire will not be engaged in any great war during
the next ten years, and no Expeditionary Force is required for this purpose.”70
Beginning in 1928, this Ten Year Rule was renewed daily. To produce surpluses
64. Brian Bond, British Military Policy between the Two World Wars (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980),
pp. 94–97; and John Ferris, “Treasury Control, the Ten Year Rule, and British Service Policies, 1919–
1924,” Historical Journal, Vol. 30, No. 4 (1987), pp. 874–875, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X
00022354.
65. Michael Howard, The Continental Commitment (London: Maurice Temple Smith, 1972; repr.,
1989), pp. 74–79.
66. Keith Jeffrey, “Sir Henry Wilson and the Defence of the British Empire, 1918–22,” Journal of Im-
perial and Commonwealth History, Vol. 5, No. 3 (1977), p. 271, https://doi.org/10.1080/03086537708
582487.
67. Jeffrey, “Sir Henry Wilson,” pp. 276–278.
68. Statistical Abstract for the United Kingdom, Cmd. 2207, 4489, 6232, ProQuest UK Parliamentary
Papers, https://parlipapers.proquest.com/parlipapers/search/basic/hcppbasicsearch, accessed
September 9, 2022.
69. Anthony Clayton, The British Empire as a Superpower, 1919–39 (Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 1986), pp. 5–9; Douglas E. Delaney, The Imperial Army Project: Britain and the Land Forces of the
Dominions and India, 1920–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 166–167, 170–180; and
George C. Peden, Arms, Economics, and British Strategy (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2007), pp. 148–150.
70. Quoted in Bond, British Military Policy, p. 24.
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Dangerous Changes 67
and pay off wartime debts, the treasury tried to cut spending to 1913–1914 de-
fense estimates, with the army consistently in the weakest position among
the armed services. From the 1922–1923 to the 1925–1926 defense estimates, al-
most all real cuts came from the army, whose net estimates fell by 25 percent.71
Even after the cabinet revoked the Ten Year Rule in 1932, army spending re-
mained low because the government allocated most rearmament resources
to the Royal Air Force and Royal Navy.72 Two interlocking beliefs guided
Britain’s reluctance to rearm and build a ªeld army. First, Britons would
“never again” ªght a drawn-out war in Europe because another war meant the
end of empire if not civilization.73 Second, rearmament would lead to an egali-
tarian socialist state, and ªnancial stability was, in addition to the land, naval,
and air arms, the fourth arm of defense.74
Each successive Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS) drew attention to
the wicked mismatch and pressed civilian leaders to either reduce the army’s
commitments or increase its resources. CIGS Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson
(1918–1922) wrote to the secretary of state for war: “I cannot too strongly press
on the Government the danger, the extreme danger, of His Majesty’s army be-
ing spread all over the world, strong nowhere, weak everywhere, and with no
reserve to save a dangerous situation or to avert coming danger.”75 Wilson’s
successor, Gen. Sir Rudolph Lambert (1922–1926), the Earl of Cavan, recorded
that “the whole of my four years as C.I.G.S. was a period of [army] retrench-
ment . . . a struggle for existence.”76 The next CIGS, Field Marshal Sir George
Milne (1926–1933), described how the army was operating at full capacity,
with fewer infantry battalions than before World War I, while trying to match
its Locarno obligations and respond to unrest in China, the swaraj movement
in India, policing Palestine and Iraq, and an anti-British Egypt.77 “The Army is
71. Ferris, “Treasury Control,” p. 880.
72. Howard, The Continental Commitment, p. 116; and George C. Peden, “The Burden of Imperial
Defence and the Continental Commitment Reconsidered,” Historical Journal, Vol. 27, No. 2 (1984),
pp. 410–415, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X00017854.
73. Howard, The Continental Commitment, pp. 74, 107.
74. Daniel Todman, Britain’s War, Vol. 1: Into Battle, 1937–1941 (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2016), pp. 69–82; Alan Allport, Britain at Bay: The Epic Story of the Second World War, 1938–
1941 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2020), pp. 44–47; and Peden, Arms, Economics, and British Strat-
egy, p. 132.
75. Henry Wilson to Secretary of State, June 9, 1920, WO 33/1004, British National Archives
(BNA), Kew, United Kingdom. See also General Staff, “Military Liabilities of the Empire,” July 27,
1920, CAB 4/7, BNA.
76. Quoted in Jeffrey, “Sir Henry Wilson,” p. 289.
77. George Milne to Laming Worthington-Evans, November 2, 1927, WO 32/2823, BNA.
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International Security 47:2 68
pared to the bone,” Milne warned, and “our army is so small that it is incapa-
ble of fulªlling our international obligations.”78
british innovation of armored maneuver
To resolve the wicked mismatch, the army found an innovative solution in a
new capability that I call “armored maneuver.” The idea was that a mobile
force, consisting almost entirely of tanks, could maneuver on the future bat-
tleªeld with impunity and land a decisive blow against the enemy’s rear areas.
This new capability allegedly solved the army’s wicked mismatch by improv-
ing combat effectiveness in great wars, small wars, and internal security, while
requiring fewer men and less money than the army’s existing force structure.
But experimentation with prototype forces yielded worrying results, and crit-
ics raised plausible concerns about enemy countermeasures and mechanical
unreliability. Nonetheless, the army remained wedded to a futuristic vision of
armored warfare.
radicalism. British armor innovators shared an overarching idea of ar-
mored warfare as mobile all-tank operations with little need for supporting
infantry and conventionally towed artillery.79 Maj. Gen. J. F. C. Fuller and
Capt. Basil Liddell Hart were the key spokespeople for armored maneuver,
though other ªgures in the Royal Tank Corps—namely, George Lindsay,
Charles Broad, and Percy Hobart—were the implementers. Together, they ar-
gued that tanks were the optimal combination of protection, mobility, and of-
fensive power.80 As such, armored maneuver promised to be a panacea for the
army’s wide-ranging security commitments and a substitute for the traditional
capabilities associated with the combined-arms offensives of the Western
Front. Armor radicalism demanded a high degree of creative destruction.
Armored maneuver allegedly increased the army’s effectiveness in all its as-
signed missions, whether it be great wars, small wars, or internal security.81 In
the next great war in Europe, armored maneuver would prevent another
bloody Western Front. Battles would begin with an armored clash for “tank su-
premacy” in which infantry, artillery, and horsed cavalry would play “the part
78. Quoted in N. H. Gibbs, Grand Strategy, Vol. 1: Rearmament Policy (London: Her Majesty’s Sta-
tionary Ofªce [HMSO], 1976), p. 64.
79. Winton, To Change an Army, pp. 17–23.
80. J. F. C. Fuller, “The Development of Sea Warfare on Land and Its Inºuence on Future Naval
Operations,” RUSI Journal, Vol. 65, No. 458 (1920), pp. 289–290, https://doi.org/10.1080/03071842
009421887.
81. J. F. C. Fuller, “Problems of Mechanical Warfare,” Army Quarterly, Vol. 3, No. 2 (1922), pp. 284–
301; and Percy Hobart to Director of Staff Duties, March 22, 1935, LH 15/11/2, LHCMA.
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Dangerous Changes 69
of interested spectators” and “do next to nothing.”82 Fast tanks would exploit
into the enemy’s rear and paralyze the enemy’s communication and command
centers, plunging the opposing army into psychological disarray. The tradi-
tional arms would come into play only after the battle had been decided: as ar-
mored forces moved forward “by a series of bounds,” the traditional arms
would occupy conquered territory and garrison “a chain of fortiªed depots”
established behind the advancing tank forces.83
In small wars, the main challenges were that military garrisons were usually
located far away from disturbances and rebels had growing access to small
arms. But tanks could allegedly travel far without relying on supply lines, do
so quickly across various terrains, and counter small arms ªre.84 Mechaniza-
tion functionally reduced the size of empire. Finally, for policing and internal
security, tanks dispensing nonlethal chemical gases offered a discriminating
and less escalatory way to disperse riots.85
Armored maneuver could allegedly do these things at cheaper cost than
the traditional capabilities developed in World War I. In the ªnal year on the
Western Front, the British Army was integrating infantry, artillery, and armor
capabilities, with the aid of aerial spotting and surprise, to penetrate German
defensive positions held in depth and to do so with acceptable losses.86 Heavy
counter-battery artillery ªre was followed by a tank-supported infantry ad-
vance under cover of a creeping artillery barrage that included both high-
explosive shells and smoke shells to suppress enemy resistance.87 This became
the standard way of war enshrined in British doctrine after 1919.88
In contrast, innovators touted armored maneuver as an efªcient substi-
tute for the difªcult and demanding tasks associated with implementing
82. Fuller, “Problems of Mechanical Warfare,” p. 287. See also J. F. C. Fuller, “Progress in the
Mechanicalisation of Modern Armies,” RUSI Journal, Vol. 70, No. 477 (1925), p. 79, https://
doi.org/10.1080/03071842509433766; and B. H. Liddell Hart, “Army Manæuvres, 1925,” RUSI
Journal, Vol. 70, No. 480 (1925), p. 653, https://doi.org/10.1080/03071842509426075.
83. B. H. Liddell Hart, “The Development of the ‘New Model’ Army: Suggestions on a Progres-
sive but Gradual Mechanicalisation,” Army Quarterly, Vol. 9, No. 1 (1924), p. 45.
84. Fuller, “The Development of Sea Warfare on Land,” pp. 283, 288; and Fuller, “Problems of
Mechanical Warfare,” pp. 292–294.
85. Fuller, “Problems of Mechanical Warfare,” pp. 295–296.
86. David French, Raising Churchill’s Army: The British Army and the War against Germany, 1919–
1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 17–19.
87. Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson, Command on the Western Front: The Military Career of Sir Henry
Rawlinson 1914–18 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 292–295, 311–315. This is not to overstate the uni-
formity of British tactics; see Aimée Fox, Learning to Fight: Military Innovation and Change in the Brit-
ish Army, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 51–77.
88. French, Raising Churchill’s Army, pp. 27–33.
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International Security 47:2 70
combined-arms principles.89 Fuller and Liddell Hart proposed a “new model
army” in which mechanical vehicles performed all primary land combat func-
tions. “The tank is likely to swallow the infantryman, the ªeld artilleryman,
the engineer and signaller,” Liddell Hart wrote, “while mechanical cavalry
will supersede the horseman.”90 Moreover, light tanks, fast cruiser tanks, and
heavy tanks could allegedly coordinate better than the current arrangement of
inter-arm cooperation.91 Conversely, hitching tanks to slower elements such as
infantry would be “tantamount to yoking a tractor to a draught-horse” and
having them “operate together under ªre” would be “equally absurd.”92
By reducing troop requirements and mechanizing the remainder, a remod-
eled army could “produce, within the limits of the money available, a military
organization of the highest efªciency and with powers of efªcient develop-
ment along the economic line.”93 With stagnant army budget estimates for the
foreseeable future, “new mechanised units” were touted “in place of, not in
addition to the old infantry and cavalry units,” or else there would be “no real
reduction of cost, nor modern efªciency.”94 Substitution was not only econom-
ical, it would improve the army’s combat power. In a great war, a new model
division had equivalent ªghting value to four or more current divisions and to
“almost any number of present-day divisions” if ªghting a small war.95
wishful thinking. The British Army experimented with armored maneu-
ver during two training seasons in 1927 and 1928, which featured the world’s
ªrst fully mechanized combat brigade—the Experimental Mechanized Force,
later renamed the Experimental Armored Force. These experiments should
have tempered excessive faith in the promises of armored maneuver, but they
did not.
First, the experimental force failed to achieve assigned mission objec-
tives despite being organized according to armored-maneuver principles.
Col. George Lindsay, inspector of the Royal Tank Corps, actively lobbied for
89. On these difªculties, see Paddy Grifªth, Battle Tactics of the Western Front: The British Army’s Art
of Attack, 1916–18 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 20–44; and Michael
Hunzeker, Dying to Learn: Wartime Lessons from the Western Front (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University
Press, 2021), pp. 47–55.
90. Liddell Hart, “The Development of the ‘New Model’ Army,” p. 44.
91. Ibid., pp. 45–46.
92. J. F. C. Fuller, Lectures on F.S.R. III (London: Sifton Praed, 1932), p. 12.
93. J. F. C. Fuller, “Gold Medal (Military) Prize Essay,” RUSI Journal, Vol. 65, No. 458 (1920), p. 255,
https://doi.org/10.1080/03071842009421885.
94. B. H. Liddell Hart to Lloyd George, “The Economic Efªciency of the Army,” April 18, 1929,
LH 11/1929/6, LHCMA.
95. Fuller, “Gold Medal (Military) Prize Essay,” p. 263.
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Dangerous Changes 71
armor-centric formations to economize personnel and money, as opposed to a
prototype all-arms mechanized division. CIGS Milne sided with Lindsay
(“Colonel Lindsay is on the right lines and we have now to decide how to
translate his ideas into action”) and offered command to Fuller (though he de-
clined).96 The 1927 and 1928 training seasons culminated in large exercises that
pitted the experimental force against a more traditional opponent. In 1927, op-
posed by an infantry division and a horsed cavalry brigade, the Experimental
Mechanized Force failed to take a high-ground location. In 1928, the same in-
fantry division, augmented by a tank company, an armored car company, a
cavalry regiment, and an artillery brigade, successfully stalemated a combined
force of the Second Cavalry Brigade and the Experimental Armored Force.
Second, given the tight resources, the mechanized formations lacked ade-
quate and appropriate equipment, which limited the reliability of experimen-
tal data. Milne recognized that the army wanted “to make certain experiments
and we have not had the money to do what we really intended.”97 The proto-
type units lacked suitable, reliable, and streamlined vehicles to conduct the de-
sired exercises, and they struggled to ªeld them in adequate numbers.98
Third,
the exercises were designed to highlight
the vulnerabilities of
armor. Maj. Gen. Sir John Burnett-Stuart served as the director of the maneu-
vers. He openly admitted that the armored force’s 1928 exercises were “delib-
erately planned to bring out its limitations rather than to make a display of
its powers.”99
Criticism of armored maneuver centered on enemy anti-tank countermea-
sures and unreliable tank mobility.100 Postexercise assessments repeatedly em-
phasized the need for greater supporting ªre in any tank attack on enemy
96. George Milne, “Comments on BM 796,” May 15, 1926, LH 15/12/4, LHCMA. On the debate
over force composition, see Harris, Men, Ideas, and Tanks, pp. 211–214. On Fuller’s refusal of com-
mand in the so-called Tidworth Affair, see J. P. Harris, “British Armour 1918–40: Doctrine and
Development,” in J. P. Harris and F. H. Toase, eds., Armoured Warfare (London: B.T. Batsford, 1990),
pp. 36–37.
97. Address by Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS) to Experimental Mechanized Force, Sep-
tember 1927, LH 11/1927/5–16, LHCMA.
98. J. P. Harris, “British Armour and Rearmament in the 1930s,” Journal of Strategic Studies, Vol. 11,
No. 2 (1988), p. 223, https://doi.org/10.1080/01402398808437339.
99. J. T. Burnett-Stuart, “Armoured Forces Training Report—1928,” Minute 1C, WO 32/2828,
BNA.
100. Both criticisms were publicized by the military writer Victor Germains. See Victor Germains,
The “Mechanization” of War (London: Sifton Praed, 1927); and Victor Germains, “‘Armoured War-
fare’: A Plea for Common Sense,” Army Quarterly, Vol. 16, No. 2 (1928), pp. 361–374. The Army
Quarterly dismissed his critiques as “theoretical rather than practical.” See “Editorial,” Army Quar-
terly, Vol. 16 (April 1928), pp. 178–179.
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International Security 47:2 72
defenses because armored maneuver was vulnerable to enemy anti-tank
weapons and artillery.101 Similarly, a general staff memorandum on army
training criticized the failure to secure proper ªre support to suppress enemy
anti-tank ªre before assaulting a position, violating the “correct principles” es-
tablished during World War I.102 It warned that mechanized forces must not be
allowed to “upset all our preconceived notions of war.”103 Tank mobility
was also a perennial issue. Burnett-Stuart cautioned that tanks could not tra-
verse all terrain and that their mobility was still in the developmental stage.104
The experimental force lost many of its medium tanks from breakdowns even
on short trips.105
These criticisms were highly plausible. In World War I, British tanks were in-
deed vulnerable to German countermeasures in the form of ªeld guns, anti-
tank riºes, armor-piercing machine gun ammunition, and mineªelds. In the
interwar period, British tanks could not survive a direct hit by the shell of even
a small-caliber, high-velocity gun (technology that was already available).106
Moreover, much like the tanks in World War I, interwar models had trouble
traversing difªcult terrain and often broke down.107 When the War Ofªce dis-
patched an armored “Mobile Force” to Egypt during the Abyssinian crisis, it
had the newest light tanks, yet struggled with so many broken tracks that
it was nicknamed the “Mobile Farce.”108
Instead of altering the radical trajectory of British armor innovation, how-
ever, the experiments somehow conªrmed the theory of armored maneuver.
Instead of conceding that traditional capabilities of infantry cooperation and
indirect artillery ªre support were necessary, armor innovators argued that
tank mobility sufªced as a form of protection. First, exercise umpires allegedly
overestimated the effectiveness of anti-tank weapons. The representative
white and green ºags used to fortify defenses in the exercises were “cheap to
provide and easy to wave” but “an effective weapon, complete with tractor
101. R. J. Collins, “Experimental Mechanized Force,” Journal of the Royal Artillery, Vol. 55 (1928),
p. 33.
102. Army Training Memorandum, “Collective Training Period,” 1927, LH 15/3/115, LHCMA.
103. Ibid.
104. Burnett-Stuart, “Armoured Forces Training Report—1928.”
105. David French, “The Mechanization of the British Cavalry between the World Wars,” War in
History, Vol. 10, No. 3 (2003), p. 306, https://doi.org/10.1191/0968344503wh279oa.
106. Shelford Bidwell and Dominick Graham, Fire-Power: British Army Weapons and Theories of War
1904–1945 (Boston: George Allen and Unwin, 1985), p. 179; and French, “The Mechanization of the
British Cavalry,” p. 307.
107. David J. Childs, A Peripheral Weapon? The Production and Employment of British Tanks in the First
World War (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1999), pp. 141–170.
108. French, “The Mechanization of the British Cavalry,” pp. 306–309.
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Dangerous Changes 73
and ammunition trailer” was “an expensive item,” such that no “infantry divi-
sion could be provided enough to form the immense circular screen that
would be necessary for its protection.”109
Second, European armies in the next great war would allegedly be smaller
than in the last one, and therefore would have exposed ºanks.110 Even if anti-
tank weapons were lethal, an armored force could use its incredible mobil-
ity to maneuver around obstructions, which in turn precluded the need for
infantry cooperation to establish bridgeheads and clear localities.111 A few
years later, when crystal sets (a rudimentary form of radio) made possible the
tactical control of a mobile force, Liddell Hart declared the dawn of new “anti-
anti-tank gun” tactics with which a “few scattered guns” could “easily be
overrun by a tank force in its onward surge.”112
Finally, critics simply needed greater faith in the principle that “he who ap-
plies a novel device by a novel method has oftenest attained revolutionary re-
sults in history.”113 Liddell Hart attributed the mechanized force’s defeat in the
1927 training season to the commander’s imprudent fear of enemy attack.
The problem was not the enemy, but that the mechanized force was too
concerned about security; its maneuvers were not bold enough.114 The 1928 ex-
ercises revealed nothing that reasoning—“the cheapest form of experiment”—
had not already made self-evident: “that the present composition of the force is
fundamentally unsuitable” and the “obvious truth that armoured and unar-
moured vehicles do not coalesce.”115 The solution, Liddell Hart reiterated, was
an all-tank force with streamlined vehicles.116 Whereas concerns about anti-
tank weapons and unreliable mobility arose from the army’s own practical
experiences in World War I, armored maneuver was based primarily on de-
ductive logic and theoretical leaps into an uncertain future.
109. B. H. Liddell Hart, “Contrasts of 1931: Mobility or Stagnation,” Army Quarterly, Vol. 23, No. 2
(1932), p. 248.
110. B. H. Liddell Hart, “Armoured Forces in 1928,” RUSI Journal, Vol. 73, No. 492 (1928), p. 725,
https://doi.org/10.1080/03071842809422496. The idea that future European armies would be rela-
tively small was a common assertion made by armor innovators. See Harris, “British Armour
1918–40,” p. 39; and Percy Hobart to George Lindsay, November 10, 1933, Liddell Hart 1/376/5,
LHCMA.
111. Liddell Hart, “Armoured Forces in 1928,” pp. 723, 727–728. But he was willing to consider a
company of “land-marines” for “stalking and silent penetration.”
112. Liddell Hart, “Contrasts of 1931,” p. 244.
113. Liddell Hart, “Armoured Forces in 1928,” p. 729.
114. B. H. Liddell Hart, The Tanks: The History of the Royal Tank Regiment, Vol. 1: 1914–1939 (New
York: Praeger, 1959), pp. 249–250, 253–254.
115. Liddell Hart, “Armoured Forces in 1928,” p. 722.
116. Ibid., p. 723.
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International Security 47:2 74
rushed development. Armor innovators quickly succeeded in entrenching
their mechanizing agenda. Top army ofªcers endorsed the ideas behind ar-
mored maneuver and empowered known armor radicals to design and train
mechanized formations. The historian David French observes that “by the end
of the 1920s the British had virtually abandoned the attempt to create perma-
nent, all-arms formations incorporating a balance of tanks, infantry, and sup-
porting arms.”117 Attempts to temper armor radicalism in the 1930s failed; and
armored maneuver principles guided how British armor organization
and doctrine developed in the lead-up to World War II.
In September 1927, Milne praised the Experimental Mechanized Force be-
cause he was “perfectly certain that we are working on absolutely the right
lines.” At the outbreak of war, a mobile force designed to operate across hun-
dreds of miles could deliver “a swinging blow to come around the ºank” and
“carry out big operations and big turning movements.” Normally, this force
would remain entirely armored because infantry became a liability in com-
bat.118 Milne later proposed to the Army Council a future armored brigade
with essentially the same blueprint as Liddell Hart’s all-tank force.119 He also
tasked Col. Charles Broad, a known supporter of armored maneuver, to
compile primers on armored warfare. These envisioned tank brigades achiev-
ing decisive victory with numerically inferior forces comprised of light tanks
for reconnaissance and medium tanks for striking, but they excluded other
arms.120 When Milne’s successor, Field Marshal Sir Archibald Montgomery-
Massingberd, permanently established the First Tank Brigade in 1933, it ad-
hered to an all-tank conception.121 The director of staff duties observed that it
could “safely be said that the general consensus of Army opinion was in agree-
ment,” that the armored brigade was a commander’s “most powerful offen-
sive agent.”122
The 1934 trials with the First Tank Brigade represented the last serious
117. French, Raising Churchill’s Army, p. 29.
118. Address by CIGS to Experimental Mechanized Force, September 1927. To avoid provocation,
the address was not publicly circulated.
119. George Milne to Laming Worthington-Evans, November 12, 1928, WO 32/2825, BNA.
120. These pamphlets were Mechanized and Armored Formations (1929) and an updated version,
Modern Formations (1931). The latter considered possible ªeld artillery support against prepared
enemy positions but assumed that these operations would be rare. See Harris, “British Armour
1918–40,” p. 39.
121. Ibid., pp. 40, 42; and Larson, The British Army, pp. 156, 163.
122. E. K. Squires, “Note on the Composition of the Mobile Division,” October 11, 1937, Min-
ute 4A, LH 15/11/7, LHCMA.
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Dangerous Changes 75
attempt to temper armor radicalism. Hobart, now inspector of the Royal Tank
Corps and commander of the First Tank Brigade, preferred an independent
tank brigade concept, in which tanks would carry out deep penetrations with
only the smallest attachments to avoid logistics problems and coordinating
different arms. But Lindsay pushed for a mobile division concept that incorpo-
rated the tank brigade into an all-arms mechanized division. The two agreed
to temporarily form a Mobile Force comprised of the First Tank Brigade,
Seventh Infantry Brigade, a mechanized ªeld artillery brigade, and other sup-
porting arms—an armored division in all but name.123 The Mobile Force was
defeated by the unmechanized First
Infantry Division, which prepared
signiªcant defensive arrangements and used motorized units to block the
Mobile Force’s retreat with mines and anti-tank guns. Again, a more tradi-
tional force defeated the more innovative one. The Royal Tank Corps blamed
the Mobile Force’s poor performance on Lindsay’s command, not on armored
maneuver, and, as a result, Hobart’s independent tank brigade concept
eclipsed Lindsay’s mobile division.124
Thereafter, the army designed its armored division for armored maneuver
carried out by their main striking element—all-tank armored brigades.125
Tanks and infantry would be organized separately, cooperating only in partic-
ular operations and only at the divisional level. As the armored division
evolved over the latter half of the 1930s, the already small representation of
supporting arms shrank over time. In the ªnal prewar model, the division con-
tained only one infantry battalion, whereas four battalions eventually became
standard in World War II.126 The Royal Tank Corps “dominated” the armored
division, “committed to a machine-age vision that tanks by themselves could
win battles.”127
123. George Lindsay to Percy Hobart, November 17, 1933, LH 15/12/8, LHCMA. The difference
between their concepts can easily be exaggerated. Both organizations lacked substantial organic
support from arms other than the Royal Tank Corps. See Winton, To Change an Army, p. 178.
124. Harris, Men, Ideas, and Tanks, pp. 250–252.
125. By the mid-1930s, the British Army adopted a distinction between “cruiser” and “infantry”
tanks. The armored division’s armored brigade centered on mobile cruiser tanks. Heavy infan-
try tanks were organized in “army tank battalions” attached to infantry divisions but did not rep-
resent combined-arms integration. Trained and operated by the Royal Tank Corps, army tank
battalions also tended to function independently against enemy armor as anti-tank weapons.
On cruiser versus infantry tanks, see Harris, “British Armour and Rearmament in the 1930s,”
pp. 221–228.
126. Richard M. Ogorkiewicz, Armoured Forces: A History of Armoured Forces and Their Vehicles
(New York: Arco, 1960), pp. 59–60, 73–74.
127. French, Raising Churchill’s Army, p. 42.
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International Security 47:2 76
Variation in British Army Effectiveness in the Desert War, 1941–1942
British armored maneuver and German combined-arms maneuver came
head-to-head in the Desert War. Three months after Italy invaded Egypt in
September 1940, Britain’s Western Desert Force launched Operation Compass,
a counterattack that resulted in a complete rout of the Italian Tenth Army as it
retreated westward toward Tripolitania. In February 1941, the Afrika Korps
under Lt. Gen. Erwin Rommel’s command arrived in North Africa to make
sure that Tripoli was not abandoned without a ªght. Over the next two years,
the Desert War unfolded across a 1,200-mile stretch of land between Tripoli
in the west and Alexandria in the east.
British military performance for the ªrst sixteen months was poor—the
army repeatedly failed to achieve mission objectives at acceptable costs—but
then noticeably improved at the First Battle of El Alamein, the Battle of Alam
el Halfa, and the Second Battle of El Alamein. My theory of harmful innova-
tion expects, and the evidence shows, that British armor innovation helped un-
dermine military effectiveness. When the principles of armored maneuver
held sway, British forces were ineffective, but as British commanders gradu-
ally unlearned armored maneuver and restored traditional capabilities—
speciªcally those associated with the infantry-artillery team developed on the
Western Front—performance improved.
british army ineffectiveness in the desert war, 1941–1942
From March 1941 to June 1942, British forces suffered a string of defeats as de-
picted in ªgure 2. Rommel’s ªrst offensive (March 28–May 30, 1941) reversed
Italian territorial losses from Operation Compass and pushed the British out
of Libya, except for the garrison at the port city of Tobruk. The British and
Commonwealth allies tried to relieve the siege of Tobruk three times.
Operation Brevity (May 15–16, 1941) and Operation Battleaxe (June 15–17,
1941) failed to reach Tobruk, and British armor suffered shocking losses.
On the third attempt, in Operation Crusader (November 18–December 30,
1941), the Western Desert Force had expanded into the Eighth Army and
ªnally relieved Tobruk with overwhelming matériel superiority. But again, the
British bore an unacceptable cost to its armored forces, while Rommel and his
staff were satisªed with their army performance.128 Shortly thereafter, Rommel
128. Martin Kitchen, Rommel’s Desert War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 177–179.
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Dangerous Changes 77
Figure 2. Major Operations of the Desert War, 1941–1942
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SOURCE: Map by Beehive Mapping, © Kendrick Kuo.
launched his second offensive and again chased British and Commonwealth
forces eastward across Libya. The offensive slowed just west of Tobruk,
around Gazala. During the subsequent Battle of Gazala (May 26–June 21,
1942), Rommel’s divisions again forced the Eighth Army into retreat, but this
time seized Tobruk and pushed onward into Egypt.
British Army ineffectiveness can be traced to the radicalism of its armor in-
novation: the new capability failed to deliver on its promises, but the army
could not rely on its traditional capabilities either. The central principle of ar-
mored maneuver was tank primacy—the mistaken idea that tanks would be
war-winning weapons if they were unencumbered by the complicated tasks of
cooperating with infantry and artillery. But British armored divisions conduct-
ing armored maneuver found that their tank numbers fell at an astonishing
rate for the very reasons raised by interwar critics. Tanks’ mechanical unreli-
ability was a persistent problem throughout the conºict, as it had been in the
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International Security 47:2 78
interwar period.129 The chief culprit, however, was the German use of anti-
tank guns—a plausible countermeasure that armor innovators downplayed by
appealing to tank mobility and surprise attacks.
British campaign plans expected tanks to search for and destroy German
panzer forces in decisive tank battles that would determine any land opera-
tion’s outcome.130 But German combined-arms maneuver eschewed tank-on-
tank engagements and instead emphasized anti-tank guns, as was done in
World War I. German tactics pushed anti-tank guns forward to prepare the
way for panzer regiments and to cover their ºanks in combat. Rommel drew
British armor onto anti-tank guns while reserving his own armor for maneu-
ver against more vulnerable targets such as supply columns, dismounted in-
fantry, or a formation’s headquarters.131
When confronted with these tactics, British armored divisions struggled to
overcome enemy defenses because they lacked traditional capabilities. Tradi-
tionally, infantry spotting and artillery ªre would be used to suppress enemy
defenses, but the armored division’s artillery and infantry components oper-
ated haphazardly and independently.132 The artillery lacked a standard tech-
nique to support fast tank forces, and mobile infantry battalions did not know
how to cooperate with tanks.133 For example, although the Eighth Army’s
order of battle showed a decisive ªeld artillery advantage in Operation
Crusader, panzer divisions typically enjoyed a local superiority in artillery
support against British armor attacks.134 After the Battle of Gazala, the chief of
staff of the Middle East Headquarters criticized the handling of British armor,
which “fought without its vital motor infantry component.”135 With little ªre
support from other arms, British tanks repeatedly charged German anti-tank
gun screens to their own demise. When the British tried to work around the
German ºank, they were lured onto German guns.136
129. Daniel Todman, Britain’s War, Vol. 2: A New World, 1942–1947 (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2020), pp. 262–263.
130. Agar-Hamilton and Turner, The Sidi Rezeg Battles, p. 35.
131. Barrie Pitt, The Crucible of War: Western Desert 1941 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1980), p. 302.
132. British weakness in combined-arms ªghting is widely recognized. For example, see William-
son Murray, “British Military Effectiveness in the Second World War,” in Allan R. Millett and Wil-
liamson Murray, eds., Military Effectiveness, Vol. 3: The Second World War (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2010), pp. 110–113. For an overview of various unorthodox organizations and
desert tactics, see Shelford Bidwell, Gunners at War (London: Arrow, 1972), pp. 170–184.
133. Bond, British Military Policy, p. 187.
134. Agar-Hamilton and Turner, The Sidi Rezeg Battles, p. 53.
135. Quoted in Niall Barr, Pendulum of War: The Three Battles of El Alamein (London: Pimplico,
2005), p. 57.
136. Agar-Hamilton and Turner, The Sidi Rezeg Battles, pp. 35, 47.
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Dangerous Changes 79
Commanders on both sides eventually recognized the causal relationship
between British armored maneuver, the loss of traditional capabilities, and
military ineffectiveness. From Rommel’s perspective, “the British armoured
divisions—in contrast to our own—were ‘pure in race,’ that is to say, they con-
sisted of armour throughout.”137 Similarly, Lt. Gen. Sir Henry Maitland
Wilson, who commanded the Western Desert Force, sought to “check a perni-
cious doctrine . . . that tank units were capable of winning an action without
the assistance of the other arms.”138 Gen. Sir Claude Auchinleck, commander
in chief in the Middle East and commander of the Eighth Army, bemoaned
“the idea that the Royal Armoured Corps was an army within an army” and
emphasized the need to “restore the proper balance of the three arms and so
secure their better co-operation on the battleªeld.”139
The root problem was innovative deviation from combined-arms organiza-
tion and tactics. According to one German staff ofªcer, the German panzer di-
vision was “a highly ºexible formation of all arms, which always relied on
artillery in attack or defense,” whereas the British forces “failed to make ade-
quate use of their powerful ªeld artillery, which should have been taught to
eliminate our anti-tank guns.”140 Maj. Gen. William Gott, commander of the
Seventh Armored Division, attributed German strength and British weakness
to the way that a German soldier “[in] every phase of battle . . . co-ordinates
the action of his anti-tank guns, Field Artillery and Infantry with his tanks.”141
And Maj. Gen. Sir Bernard Freyberg, commander of the New Zealand
Division, concluded that British failures through 1942 were not for want of a
good tank but for want of artillery support for British armor.142
The heavy reliance on armored maneuver also weakened the infantry divi-
sions’ effectiveness in defensive and offensive engagements. Since armor was
deemed the principal anti-tank weapon, infantry commanders expected and
demanded fast tanks to be stationed nearby to defend them against panzers.
This strategy warped campaign plans. For instance, in Operation Crusader, the
Eighth Army suboptimally dispersed its overwhelming number of tanks and
positioned them to guarantee protection to infantry divisions that refused to
137. Quoted in Agar-Hamilton and Turner, Crisis in the Desert, p. 13.
138. Henry Maitland Wilson, Eight Years Overseas, 1939–1947 (London: Hutchinson, 1950), p. 28.
139. Claude J. E. Auchinleck, “Operations in the Middle East from 1st November 1941 to 15th Au-
gust 1942,” London Gazette, January 15, 1948, p. 368.
140. Quoted in Correlli Barnett, The Desert Generals, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1982), p. 108.
141. Quoted in ibid., p. 109.
142. Agar-Hamilton and Turner, Crisis in the Desert, p. 11.
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International Security 47:2 80
move until the armored battle was underway.143 But later experience demon-
strated that an infantry division with adequate artillery could repel a panzer
attack and even inºict heavy damage.144
The British Army had also lost the traditional capabilities needed to attack a
position held in depth.145 Infantry mounted night attacks and successfully
seized their objectives by daybreak, but supporting arms got lost in the night,
were held up by enemy posts that the infantry had bypassed, or never de-
parted from the starting line. Shorn of supporting arms, entire infantry bri-
gades were destroyed by inevitable German counterattacks at dawn. Infantry
commanders expected too much from tanks, whereas tank commanders were
not trained to cooperate with infantry.146
improvement in british army effectiveness, 1942
After the Battle of Gazala, the Axis forces’ momentum weakened near a defen-
sive line prepared by the Eighth Army that ran south from El Alamein. It was
here that British forces began to show signs of improvement. From July 1942
to the end of the year, the Eighth Army mounted three successful opera-
tions, achieving mission objectives at acceptable cost. At the First Battle of
El Alamein (July 1–27, 1942), the Eighth Army successfully repelled Axis ad-
vances, though its counterattacks failed to make headway against enemy de-
fenses. Rommel again tried to break through British defenses in the Battle of
Alam el Halfa (August 30–September 5, 1942) but was similarly repulsed.
This time, instead of an immediate counterattack, British forces reorganized
and retrained for almost two months before initiating the Second Battle of
El Alamein (October 23–November 4, 1942), which was the British Army’s ªrst
truly effective offensive against German forces.
What were the British doing that they had not done before? The evidence
suggests that British military effectiveness improved as the army reversed in-
novation, unlearned armored maneuver, and restored traditional capabilities:
an infantry-artillery team supported by tank forces. British commanders ªrst
restored traditional capabilities on the defense. The Eighth Army learned to
coordinate and concentrate artillery ªre to peel apart the all-arms organization
143. Agar-Hamilton and Turner, The Sidi Rezeg Battles, pp. 61–70; and Barnett, The Desert Generals,
pp. 88–89.
144. Agar-Hamilton and Turner, The Sidi Rezeg Battles, pp. 65–66.
145. Barr, Pendulum of War, pp. 141–142.
146. I. S. O. Playfair, The Mediterranean and Middle East, Vol. 3: British Fortunes Reach Their Lowest
Ebb (London: HMSO, 1960), pp. 351–352; and Barr, Pendulum of War, pp. 122–139.
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Dangerous Changes 81
of attacking panzer divisions. Infantry learned to defend themselves as they
received more anti-tank weapons, and to act as forward infantry observers for
artillery ªre. And British armor learned to lure the enemy into combined-arms
ªre delivered by artillery, infantry, and tanks in hull-down position, as op-
posed to charging forward against attacking panzer formations.
At the First Battle of El Alamein, Rommel tried to outºank the Eighth
Army’s position and force it back to the Suez Canal. On the ªrst day, an infan-
try brigade, supported by nine heavy tanks and artillery, blunted the attack at
Deir el Shein. The next day, Rommel redirected his attack, but coordinated ar-
tillery ªre pinned down his forces. By the third day, attacking forces dug in
and transitioned to the defensive, and eventually withdrew. After a month’s
rest, at the Battle of Alam el Halfa, Rommel tried once more to swing south of
the British defensive line. British armor and anti-tank gunners hid in the folds
of Alam el Halfa ridge and ªred on the advancing panzers once they were
within 300 yards, followed by heavy concentrated ªre from over 100 ªeld
guns.147 After two days, Rommel was forced to withdraw.
During the two-month lull between Alam el Halfa and the Second Battle of
El Alamein,
the Eighth Army restored traditional offensive capabilities.
Lt. Gen. Bernard Montgomery was in command, having replaced Auchinleck
after the First Battle of El Alamein. He reorganized and retrained the infantry,
armor, and artillery to carry out coordinated set-piece battles that were ªt for
the Western Front.148 Each infantry division and its components underwent
full-scale rehearsals to form a bridgehead: the infantry assault, artillery sup-
port, mineªeld gapping, and cooperation with heavy infantry tanks and the
Royal Air Force. British armored divisions practiced coordinating tank, artil-
lery, and machine-gun ªre to ªght as a division rather than as independent ar-
mored brigades. Finally, the Eighth Army returned authority to divisional
artillery commanders, reintroduced counter-battery and creeping barrage
methods developed in World War I, and adapted a new standardized tech-
nique of defensive ªre against alternating impromptu targets.149
Unlike previous offensives, the Second Battle of El Alamein exhibited the
qualities that were a hallmark of British operations in World War I. It was a
147. Francis Tuker, Approach to Battle (London: Cassell, 1963), pp. 195, 199; and Barr, Pendulum of
War, p. 230.
148. French, Raising Churchill’s Army, p. 282. Maj. Gen. Sir Bernard Freyberg observed that the op-
erational plan for the Second Battle of El Alamein “approximates to the battles fought in 1918.”
Quoted in Barr, Pendulum of War, p. 261, see also pp. 409–410.
149. For details, see Barr, Pendulum of War, pp. 262–265, 289–293; Tuker, Approach to Battle, pp. 249–
250; and Bidwell, Gunners at War, pp. 189–190.
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International Security 47:2 82
rehearsed infantry-artillery assault, supported by heavy tanks, against ªxed
defenses and enemy garrisons, designed to destroy the enemy’s offensive
power through attrition. The battle opened with a counter-battery barrage that
destroyed up to half the enemy’s anti-tank guns, followed by creeping bar-
rages to suppress enemy ªre and guide the infantry forward. The infantry re-
turned to the “bite-and-hold” tactics that were common on the Western Front.
And through robust battle drills and proven consolidation techniques, the in-
fantry defended themselves against counterattacks even by enemy panzer di-
visions. After the Second Battle of El Alamein, a ºood of reports promoted a
return to the 1918 practice of coordinating massed ªres from ªeld artillery in
support of infantry advances.150
The Second Battle of El Alamein was Britain’s ªrst permanent land vic-
tory in World War II, and it was achieved at expected costs. Remarkably,
Montgomery predicted that the battle would last ten to twelve days and in-
structed medical services to prepare for 13,000 casualties. From opening salvo
to Rommel’s ofªcial retreat, the battle lasted twelve days and the Eighth Army
suffered 13,500 dead, wounded, or missing.151 Lingering vestiges of armored
maneuver continued to hamper the armored divisions’ performance, but by
restoring the traditional infantry-artillery team—reversing the radical innova-
tion of armored maneuver—the British Army improved its performance.152
In sum, wartime evidence reveals that innovation can have varying ef-
fects. German innovation in armored warfare improved effectiveness but
British innovation did not. Moreover, reversing innovation improved British
combat power.
Evaluating Alternative Explanations of Harmful Innovation
Research on military innovation has not systematically explained harmful in-
novation, but some existing intuitions about technology and culture could
plausibly privilege bad innovation trajectories and screen out better pathways.
First, a given technology’s characteristics could mislead innovation efforts
away from its optimal employment. Disruptive technology, for instance, can
improve performance in a dimension of combat that is undervalued by a
150. Mark Johnston and Peter Stanley, Alamein: The Australian Story (South Melbourne, Australia:
Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 204.
151. Barr, Pendulum of War, p. 404.
152. French, Raising Churchill’s Army, pp. 274–285; and Barr, Pendulum of War, pp. 409–410.
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Dangerous Changes 83
given service, which increases the likelihood that the service uses the technol-
ogy in suboptimal ways.153 But the German Army also innovated with tank
technology, did so differently, and to better effect. In fact, it was the British
Army that undertook more “disruptive” innovation, which is commonly as-
sumed to be a superior mode of competition, whereas the German Army in-
corporated tanks into its traditional operational concepts.
Second, organizational culture could either prevent innovation altogether or
channel innovation efforts in harmful directions. A service’s culture is a “set of
basic assumptions, values, norms, beliefs, and formal knowledge that shape
collective understandings,” which in turn deªnes “what is a problem and
what is possible.”154 British Army culture thus might have obstructed innova-
tion in armored warfare. Elizabeth Kier makes this case, for example, when she
argues that British Army culture valued drills and ceremonial duties beªtting
of a gentleman-ofªcer, rather than professional skills and technological exper-
tise.155 But the bulk of the ofªcer corps, including every CIGS, accepted mecha-
nization as the primary way that the army could win quickly while avoiding
casualties—internal disagreements centered on the pace of reform.156 Critics
also suggest that the cavalry’s regimental commitment to horses was a major
obstacle to mechanization efforts.157 But once the army decided to mechanize
the cavalry, most regimental ofªcers were “determined to make a success of it
as the only way of ensuring the future of their regiments.”158
Another approach to organizational culture argues that armed services tend
to develop new capabilities that align with preferred mission goals and meth-
ods, which can misalign with effectiveness.159 The British regimental system,
for instance, could have prevented inter-arm cooperation.160 But by the late
nineteenth century, the War Ofªce professionalized the regimental system and
broke down regimental parochialism through compulsory training, promotion
153. On disruptive technology in military innovation, see Gautam Mukunda, “We Cannot Go On:
Disruptive Innovation and the First World War Royal Navy,” Security Studies, Vol. 19, No. 1 (2010),
pp. 124–159, https://doi.org/10.1080/09636410903546731.
154. Kier, Imagining War, p. 28.
155. Ibid., pp. 120–137.
156. French, Raising Churchill’s Army, pp. 12–16, 35–36, 43; and Liddell Hart, “The Development of
the ‘New Model’ Army,” p. 37.
157. Murray, “Armored Warfare,” pp. 22–24; Liddell Hart, The Tanks, pp. 199–201; and Bidwell
and Graham, Fire-Power, pp. 190–191.
158. French, “The Mechanization of the British Cavalry,” p. 299.
159. Kier, Imagining War, p. 31.
160. Barnett, The Desert Generals, pp. 103–104; and Brian Bond and Williamson Murray, “The Brit-
ish Armed Forces, 1918–39,” in Millett and Murray, Military Effectiveness, Vol. 2, pp. 121–122.
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International Security 47:2 84
exams, and overseas duties.161 Or perhaps the army’s cultural identity, being
rooted in imperial garrisoning, could have prioritized frontier warfare, which
contradicted the skills needed for conventional warfare.162 But the general staff
stubbornly prepared for continental involvement; and the army resisted train-
ing speciªcally for small wars and preferred training for conventional military
operations.163 Disruptive technology and organizational culture are thus plau-
sible alternative explanations, but cannot in themselves account for the British
Army’s harmful innovation.
Conclusion
Military innovation is more dangerous than is generally acknowledged. Pre-
vailing wisdom suggests that innovation improves military power, and that
the more disruptive the change the more effective the resulting combat forces.
In contrast, this article has argued that under the stress of expanding commit-
ments and shrinking resources, an impacted military service is incentivized to
make desperate gambles on new and relatively untested capabilities, wish
away problems that may arise from cannibalizing traditional capabilities, and
rush the innovation process. When the resulting force structure and doctrine is
used in combat, however, the military service is likely to discover that it
has overspecialized in the new capability to its own detriment. To improve
performance, the service may try to downgrade the centrality of the new
capability and restore traditional capabilities that remain surprisingly relevant
and necessary.
Evidence from British armor innovation shows the plausibility of this argu-
ment. Facing a wicked mismatch between ambitious commitments that out-
stripped austere resources, the British Army developed armored maneuver
and siphoned resources away from traditional capabilities, placing a big bet on
a radical vision of future warfare while ignoring plausible vulnerabilities.
But in the Desert War, British armor radicalism did not deliver on its promises;
the enemy exploited vulnerabilities left open by the loss of traditional capabil-
161. David French, Military Identities: The Regimental System, the British Army, and the British People,
c. 1870–2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 153–160.
162. Bond, British Military Policy, pp. 124–125, 181, 188.
163. J. P. Harris, “The British General Staff and the Coming of War, 1933–39,” in David French and
Brian Holden Reid, eds., The British General Staff: Reform and Innovation, c. 1890–1939 (London:
Frank Cass, 2002), pp. 177–181; T. R. Moreman, “‘Small Wars’ and ‘Imperial Policing’: The British
Army and the Theory and Practice of Colonial Warfare in the British Empire, 1919–1939,” Journal of
Strategic Studies, Vol. 19, No. 4 (1996), pp. 125, 127, https://doi.org/10.1080/01402399608437654.
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Dangerous Changes 85
ities associated with the infantry and artillery arms, and commanders returned
to older methods of the infantry-artillery team as a backstop to shore up com-
bat power.
My theory of harmful innovation identiªes only one set of conditions that
generate adverse pressures to innovate in self-defeating ways. Innovation is
inherently complicated and laden with idiosyncratic processes that can vary
according to distinct environmental factors, across organizations, and given
the personal predilections of inºuential individuals. As such, for reasons other
than extreme commitment-resource gaps, military organizations pursuing in-
novation might be tempted to overhype new capabilities and underestimate
the impact of the loss in traditional ones. Nonetheless, the proposed theory
may offer generalizable explanations beyond the British armor case. For in-
stance, it may offer important insights into the U.S. Air Force’s innovation of
an air-atomic blitz capability in the late 1940s and the U.S. Army’s pentomic
division in the 1950s.
The theory has critical implications for the study and practice of military in-
novation. If innovation is not always beneªcial for combat performance, then
identifying the conditions under which innovation occurs is insufªcient. Cur-
rent theories cannot fully explain why the identiªed causes of innovation
should improve combat performance and how innovation relates to military
power. Therefore, military innovation research needs to refocus on the quality
of the innovation process.
For those concerned with the future character of war, the ªndings suggest
that innovation does not necessarily improve combat performance. A bias in
favor of military innovation may be helpful because of countervailing bureau-
cratic and cultural pressures against disruptive changes, but professional in-
stincts to preserve existing ways of war can also be prudent, especially if
warfare evolves toward essential continuity rather than discontinuous revolu-
tions.164 Making big bets on technologies such as unmanned systems comes
with signiªcant risks because the novel capabilities are unfamiliar and what is
lost in an innovation process can be as important as what is created—capital
substitution involves tradeoffs.165
Fervor for military innovation is especially high in the United States because
there is a particularly foreboding sense that the U.S. military is overstretched,
164. Biddle, “The Past as Prologue.”
165. Daniel R. Lake, The Pursuit of Technological Superiority and the Shrinking American Military
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), pp. 1–7, 17–62.
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International Security 47:2 86
and that its resources and commitments are misaligned. Ever since World
War II, the United States has accumulated expansive interests abroad, but it
has been reluctant to invest the necessary resources to sustain these commit-
ments.166 Today, while the United States remains concerned about Russia in
Europe and Iran in the Middle East, Chinese military modernization and for-
eign policy has eroded conªdence in the U.S. military’s ability to operate
effectively in the western Paciªc and credibly deter Chinese aggression. Mean-
while, resources are relatively stagnant as the rising cost of military equipment
exceeds inºation and growth in the defense budget.167
The shift to great power competition in U.S. foreign and military policy has
animated a range of promising and innovative proposals, but their perils
should be explicitly recognized. With China as the pacing threat, the United
States has incentive to reorganize its force structures, concentrate on weapon
technologies for high-end conventional warfare, and develop new operational
concepts to counter Chinese anti-access/area-denial military forces in the
Indo-Paciªc region.168 This is evidenced most starkly in the recent decision by
the U.S. Marine Corps to divest from all its tanks and cut back on aircraft and
cannon artillery to invest in new technologies and novel “littoral combat
regiments” designed to conduct expeditionary advanced base operations.169
The U.S. Army has also debated whether the infantry brigade combat
team, the building block of its operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, will become
obsolete in future multi-domain operations.170
Military innovation can be healthy insofar as it realigns military means with
political ends. But ensuring the proper balance and integration of new and tra-
ditional capabilities involves calibrating the appropriate level of radicalness in
an innovation process for an uncertain strategic landscape, which only be-
166. Colin Dueck, Reluctant Crusaders: Power, Culture, and Change in American Grand Strategy
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006), pp. 30–34.
167. John A. Alic, Trillions for Military Technology: How the Pentagon Innovates and Why It Costs So
Much (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 49–106.
168. Ronald O’Rourke, Renewed Great Power Competition: Implications for Defense—Issues for Con-
gress, CRS Report R43838 (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Research Service, 2022), pp. 13–22.
169. For a recent critique of the U.S. Marine Corps’s Force Design 2030, see Charles Krulak, Jack
Sheehan, and Anthony Zinni, “War Is a Dirty Business. Will the Marine Corps Be Ready for the
Next One?” Washington Post, April 22, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/
04/22/marines-restructuring-plan-scrutiny-generals/. For a defense, see Robert Work, “USMC
Force Design 2030: Threat or Opportunity?” 1945, May 15, 2022, https://www.19fortyªve.com/
2022/05/usmc-force-design-2030-threat-or-opportunity/.
170. Liam Collins and Harrison Morgan, “Affordable, Abundant, and Autonomous: The Fu-
ture of Ground Warfare,” War on the Rocks, April 21, 2020, https://warontherocks.com/2020/04/
affordable-abundant-and-autonomous-the-future-of-ground-warfare/.
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Dangerous Changes 87
comes more challenging as a commitment-resource gap widens and options
narrow. If mission burdens continue to grow, and the resourcing or efªciency
of the armed services declines, U.S. policymakers can expect increasingly radi-
cal proposals for innovation that promise dramatic returns in combat power.
But it is in this very context of a yawning commitment-resource gap that harm-
ful innovation is more likely to occur. In 1942, the strategist Bernard Brodie
warned that the United States was “under the sway of a dogma of innovation,
just as blind and as dangerous as that there is nothing essentially new in
war.”171 His warning remains relevant today.
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171. Bernard Brodie, A Layman’s Guide to Naval Strategy (New York: Oxford University Press,
1942), p. 177.