Introduction

In 2023, XVIII Airborne Corps hosted an iteration of Dragon’s Lair, replicating the television show Shark Tank. In the end, the winning innovation was not a weapon to help the Army prevail in battle, but a sensor to increase lethality against mold in the barracks.^[1]

This invention highlights that defining a clear problem is essential to innovation. The Soldiers had a specific enemy, in a particular situation, that they could repeatedly test their device against. These are the elements necessary for innovation. You cannot just implore people to innovate. You must provide them with a problem to solve. Then, you have to grant them time to iteratively solve that problem.

During times of war, problems are apparent, which yields a fast pace of innovation. War provides a specific enemy, employing particular formations, in a unique context. During the Russo-Ukrainian War, the Ukrainian Defense Forces have been incredibly entrepreneurial because they have clear problems to solve. Ukrainian brigades are connected to start-ups to share challenges and produce solutions.^[2] They have proven that necessity is the mother of invention.

When at war, the U.S. Army has generally been adept at innovating new technologies, organizations and techniques.^[3] But in peacetime, it has been less effective.^[4] Consequently, the Army has often lost the first battle of its wars. Now, we are at peace. So how can we improve how we innovate to ensure the Army wins the first battle of its next war?

Often, commentators make empty recommendations on how to improve innovation. They discuss building cultures of creativity or adaptive mindsets. Considering our Soldiers come from a society that leads developed economies in productivity growth and creative destruction,^[5] the Army should have Soldiers with the necessary entrepreneurial spirits. Providing them with Post-its and bean bag chairs for ideation sessions is not going to magically manifest innovation.

Instead, we should learn from 250 years of Army innovation, which succeeds when the Army: (1) develops a clear concept for how it will fight; (2) establishes a bureaucratic structure that ensures that concept is tied to war plans, doctrinal and equipment development; (3) maintains a personnel system that provides Soldiers with time to develop techniques to solve a problem; (4) conducts realistic, large-scale exercises to test and iterate innovation; and (5) avoids pursuing “offset” technologies and instead prioritizes feasible solutions to employ in the context of near-term strategic problems.

As the Army celebrates its 250th birthday, we have a duty to learn from those who preceded us.

The Army’s Foundations

Between the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, the Army innovated little. Due to the American public’s belief in the effectiveness of a volunteer militia, the Regular Army was a small, neglected organization. It had few professionally trained officers from the nascent United States Military Academy. It relied on translated tactical manuals for its doctrine, and it did not have a strategic concept.^[6] After the fiasco of the attempted invasion of Canada in 1812, reformers sought to establish the Army on a firmer foundation.

In 1817, John C. Calhoun became Secretary of War and attempted to address the maladministration of the War of 1812. He rationalized the War Department by creating a system of bureaus directly responsible to the secretary. Divided by function, the bureaus operated as virtually autonomous entities throughout the 1800s. Their chiefs wielded considerable influence with Congress and enjoyed independent budgets.^[7] While Calhoun could corral them, few of his successors achieved the same.

Calhoun also established the post of commanding general of the army, which sounded imposing, but it did not come with corresponding authority. The commanding general did not command. He was an adviser to the secretary of war. Commanding generals’ attempts to assert power over the bureaus were invariably frustrated.^[8]

Adding to this decentralized structure, after British raids exposed U.S. coastal vulnerabilities, President James Monroe created the Fortification Board. Its 1821 and 1826 reports became the United States’ only coherent defense plan until the Civil War.^[9] It was succeeded by the Harbor Defense Board in 1866 and the Endicott Board in 1886. The existence of these bodies meant that defense planning and a large portion of engineer and artillery personnel and equipment development occurred outside the War Department.

Throughout the 19th century, these divided bureaus and boards prevented the Army from establishing a unifying concept of how it would fight. The Army lacked an organization equivalent to Prussia’s general staff, which could define the primary problems to solve and organize its innovation efforts.

Scott’s Long Tenure

While the Army did not have the institutional structure to develop a coherent concept for how it would fight, General Winfield Scott shaped the pre–Civil War Army during his decades as commanding general. He sought to create a small, well-drilled Army of regulars to fight limited wars as in 18th-century Europe.

In 1815, to address the deficiencies of the War of 1812, Scott served as president of the board that developed the Rules and Regulations for the Field Exercise and Maneuvers of Infantry. He copied heavily from the 1791 French regulations.^[10] Scott traveled to Europe and brought back a large library of texts, and he distilled them into the United States’ first General Regulations, which dictated procedures for every routine task. He revised his work periodically to ensure the Army could act with predictability and precision.

With a similar pursuit, Dennis Hart Mahan, the long-serving tactics instructor at West Point, argued that military science revealed principles that applied equally to ancient Greece and to contemporary America. His textbook became the primary manual for a generation of officers and focused on practical, small-unit tactics.^[11] In addition to Mahan’s work, Henry W. Halleck’s Elements of Military Arts and Science served as a key text for officers. Employing Henri Jomini’s writings, Halleck focused on timeless principles and the “old and true system” of military operations based on “strategic points and lines.”^[12]

With this proscribed thinking, Scott secured his vision for the Army. Soldiers of the line, scattered in small outposts, spent peacetime rehearsing intricate, small-unit drills. This Army proved ideally suited for the Mexican-American War. During the campaign from Veracruz to Mexico City, Scott adroitly maneuvered his well-drilled regiment and seized the Mexican capital with tactical finesse.^[13]

Although he had optimized the Army to prevail in a limited, expeditionary war, he did not provide a concept for how it would fight frontier wars even though these missions would occupy most of the Army throughout the 1800s. During his own foray into such wars, he proved inept. As commander during the Seminole War, he tried to bring his elusive opponents to set-piece battles; the Seminoles easily slipped through his cordons.^[14]

Without the commanding general, or any theorists like Mahan or Halleck, providing a concept on how to fight frontier wars, innovation occurred independently within regiments. Soldiers spent their careers within the same unit, which allowed them to test and share techniques for frontier warfare. However, since no organization codified these techniques, they were not communicated to other units or adapted to new contexts. This system of informal knowledge allowed Soldiers to eventually succeed in each unique frontier conflict, but it often came at a cost. As one officer wrote, “The beginning of almost every Indian war has been marked by some disaster, due chiefly to ignorance of the country.” To prevent such disasters, the Army needed to pass on the knowledge of the “customs, signs, moral and intellectual traits, methods of chase, and warfare of each tribe.”^[15]

As frontier wars often started with a disaster, so would the Civil War. Such a large-scale war had not been envisioned by Scott, Mahan or Halleck. If instead of relying on such individuals, the Army had established a general staff that had deeply studied the changing character of war, it might have had a concept to deal with the scale and technologies of the Civil War.

Some leaders sensed that steamships, railroads, the telegraph and rifles would change war, but they were unsure how. A commission studied the new technologies on display in the Crimea War, most notably the Minié ball, but its officers did not attempt to deduce broad lessons on reforming how the Army fights.^[16] The Army had developed a rifle musket, the 1855 Springfield, to employ the Minié ball and had translated the French Army’s manual on rifle tactics but it had not developed practices to train or employ the new technology to its full potential.^[17]

The Civil War

The Army suffered a series of humiliations at the outset of the Civil War. Rarely drilling above the company level, its officers did not understand how to lead divisions and corps. Many officers still believed in the close order drill of Scott’s and Mahan’s texts, but mass attacks against dug-in defenders armed with rifles were suicidal, bloodily illustrated by the 7,000 casualties in 30 minutes at Cold Harbor. Often driven by bottom-up innovation and self-preservation, Soldiers learned to disperse, take cover, maneuver and fire as individuals.

In the latter periods of the war, President Abraham Lincoln entrusted General Ulysses S. Grant with broad authority to ensure a unified approach, which allowed him to reign in the autonomous bureaus. This pattern would repeat during the United States’ major wars. Divided bureaucracies inhibited innovation during peacetime, but during wartime, centralized leadership would be empowered to drive change. Grant attempted to pass his authority over the bureaus to his successor, General William Tecumseh Sherman, but Secretary of War John A. Rawlins protested this concentration of power.^[18]

Little Guidance from Post-Civil War Commanding Generals

From 1869 to 1903, the Army had just four commanding generals: Sherman, Philip H. Sheridan, John M. Schofield and Nelson A. Miles. Although they observed the changes in military thought and technology during the Industrial Age, they did not provide a coherent concept for modern warfare to guide innovation.^[19]

In his memoirs, Sherman highlighted the technological changes of the telegraph, railroad, rifle and field entrenchments, but he did not provide a vision of their impact.^[20] In 1881, Sherman established the Infantry and Cavalry School of Application at Fort Leavenworth, which would eventually become the Command and General Staff College. He also created the School of Instruction for Cavalry and Light Artillery at Fort Riley, Kansas. He hoped consolidating light artillery in one location would allow them to better understand how to use steel, breechloading artillery. Without an organization dedicated to the development of tactics, branch schools led innovations.^[21]

Sherman’s successor, Sheridan, foresaw a total war involving entire societies. He anticipated that war would become a long struggle of attrition, in which economic and political strength would be as important as military strength.^[22] But, he did not provide a concept of how the Army should fight a total war.

After Sheridan, Schofield attempted an analysis of modern warfare. Desiring to avoid the mistakes and the extremes of the Civil War, he wanted officers to study the science of war to identify principles to integrate new technology while limiting the escalation of violence.^[23]

Schofield viewed military science as governed by immutable laws. He believed that officers acting as amateur researchers could identify these principles. He promoted the Military Service Institution, which published and awarded prizes for articles on contemporary war. He required each installation to conduct “officers’ lyceums,” which did not have formal curricula but which required junior officers to write annual essays.^[24] Schofield’s decentralized method stood in contrast to the coordinated approach of a general staff system. Without a clear vision to organize innovation and drive detailed thinking on war plans, mobilization schedules and rail logistics, Schofield’s innovation schemes produced scant practical results.

After Schofield, Miles, a more traditionally minded officer, reversed his predecessor’s innovation drive. In place of Schofield’s experimentation, Miles argued “drill, discipline, and instruction are but the preparatory for the perfection and efficiency of the army.”^[25]

Throughout the post–Civil War era, Army senior leaders provided little definitive guidance on modern warfare. Without a general staff to fill the void, the various bureaus and branches fought for their own parochial interests, and the result was an era of paralysis.

The Army’s Independent Thinkers

While senior leaders provided few concepts, a series of thinkers in Army schools attempted to improve Army doctrine. In the mid-1800s, while teaching at West Point and then the Artillery School, Emory Upton sought to develop a tactical system to avoid the slaughter of the Civil War. Sherman empowered Upton to create new regulations for the Army. In 1867, he published A New System of Infantry Tactics, which became the Army’s official infantry drill regulations.

Upton desired to prepare the Army for large-scale combat and to teach officers how to serve on higher-level staffs. To do so, Sherman sent him on a world tour. Upton was impressed with the German model.

However, when he wrote his findings, isolated at the artillery school in Fort Monroe and far from the requirements of the field, he produced texts that were not aligned with the needs of small units spread across the frontier conducting constabulary duties. Those Soldiers continued as they had before the Civil War. They developed effective techniques over years of service with their regiments.

Upton’s successor was Arthur L. Wagner, who, while teaching at Leavenworth, wrote additional manuals that served as doctrine. He built on Upton’s work and sought ways to compensate for the “murderous fire” of repeating rifles.

While the work of officers like Upton and Wagner was laudable, they were isolated efforts. As one West Point professor wrote on the lack of artillery standards, “We have instead a hydra-headed organization, as diverse in its aim, as it is scattered in extent.”^[26] Between arms, there was no combined-arms doctrine. The bureaus continued to act independently without a vision to drive change. Obsolete weapons like the Springfield rifle or muzzle-loaded artillery remained in service long after European armies had modernized.

The Spanish-American War

In 1896, Wagner transferred to the War Department and realized its lack of readiness to plan for a major war. He was one of just three officers to plan a mobilization.^[27] He had studied the Prussian General Staff and knew that it had spent decades calculating rail capacity to precisely mobilize armies in accordance with war plans. The United States lacked such detailed planning when it went to war with Spain in 1898.

The war began in chaos. The initial corps for the invasion of Cuba was sent to Tampa, which did not have the port and rail capacity to support it.^[28] The War Department’s bureaucratic dysfunction led to a host of difficulties. The ordnance department could not procure sufficient modern weapons for the troops.^[29]

At the start of the Battle of San Juan, General William Shafter repeated the amateurism of the early Civil War generals by failing to conduct a thorough reconnaissance or issue a written order. He attacked with a hazy scheme based on only a vague notion of the terrain and enemy dispositions.^[30] He outnumbered Spanish artillery 12 to two, but the Spanish two were modern, smokeless powder weapons. The U.S. artillery fired from exposed positions, while the concealed Spanish responded with such accuracy that it forced the American artillery to retire and leave the infantry to fend for themselves. U.S. artillery tactics had changed little over the century even though Prussia had demonstrated the power of concentrating modern artillery in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War.^[31]

Fortunately for the underperforming Army, the Navy defeated the Spanish fleet. The Spanish garrison in Cuba surrendered soon afterward. General James H. Wilson critiqued the Army’s unpreparedness for the war: “A great nation can win even with inferior tools or by the use of inferior men, through the agency of main strength and awkwardness, or the weight of superior battalions, or the wealth of a greater treasury, but one likes to see it win by the use of brains and character where it is possible.”^[32]

Adding a Central Brain to the Army

Secretary of War Elihu Root would add the missing central brain to the Army. Appointed in 1899 to address the deficiencies of the Spanish-American War, he responded by establishing a chief of staff, a general staff, a command and staff school and the Army War College. With a general staff, he sought to reign in the autonomous bureaus and the ability to establish “intelligent planning for possible future military operations and effective executive control over current ones.”^[33]

However, Root met resistance from the bureaus and Congress. In 1903, the legislation that created the general staff did not imbue it with powers to analyze, plan, and conduct wars. It had little authority and was seen as an advisory body to the secretary of war.

In addition to the general staff, Root employed Wagner to create training exercises that replicated the scale of modern war. Wagner saw them as an opportunity to address the deficiencies he witnessed in Cuba.^[34] The exercises he developed tested units in iterations of modern tactics and ended with a “big tent” discussion to learn from the exercise. In 1904, the maneuvers involved 26,000 participants. It was the first time the Army trained at such a scale.

However, as with the general staff, the potential of the exercises was curtailed. Root’s successor, William H. Taft, was unwilling to defend the cost of the exercises, and so the Army returned to only training small units. Taft further restricted the purview of the general staff and allowed bureau chiefs to bypass it.^[35] The general staff section responsible for creating war plans was exiled three miles away from the War Department.^[36]

Root’s reforms had attempted to establish an institutional apparatus for the Army to examine and adapt to modern conditions, but those institutions were quickly weakened. Without them, the Army did not develop a clear concept of how to employ the rapidly changing technologies of the early 20th century, such as magazine-fed rifles, machine guns and rapid-fire artillery.

The Russo-Japanese War provided an opportunity to study these new weapons. The Army’s observers believed that Japan’s campaign in Manchuria made America’s in Cuba look amateurish. However, observers wrote conflicting lessons from the war, particularly regarding the value of infantry, machine guns and artillery. The weak general staff did not resolve these debates.^[37]

Instead, doctrine continued to be outsourced to schools and individual writers. At Leavenworth, Captain Joseph T. Dickman led the writing of the 1905 Field Service Regulations (FSR), which attempted to bind the drill regulations of the various branches together into a holistic set of principles for combined arms. As an attempt to cross bureaucratic divides rather than produce a novel concept for war, the manual was so uncontroversial that most of the Army’s general officers ignored Dickman’s request for comments. Updated in 1910, the new edition of the FSR also presented no coherent vision of warfare; it reflected the tactical confusion of the Army.^[38]

Meanwhile, Lieutenant Colonel John F. Morrison authored the 1911 Infantry Drill Regulation. He believed that determined infantry could consistently overcome machine guns and artillery. He provided detailed spacing for Soldiers similar to the compact formations of the Civil War.^[39] Without large-scale exercises, the Army could not test such potentially costly ideas. And, lacking a general staff to drive concept development, the Army could not ensure doctrinal writings like Dickman’s or Morrison’s were appropriate to train and employ a massive Army of volunteers for a large-scale war.

The Army also lacked the equipment for a modern conflict. The bureaus controlled military research and development, and their results were disappointing. By 1917, the Army did not possess a standard machine gun or a rapid-firing artillery piece equivalent to the French 75, which had been introduced in 1897.

As World War I approached, the Army continued to suffer the same barriers to innovation. It lacked a clear vision of modern war, and its bureaucracy impeded coordination. In 1912, Brigadier General Clarence R. Edwards complained that “each arm or department of our service has been left to develop itself separately and to struggle, not for the whole, but for itself alone.”^[40] After the war, General George C. Marshall disparaged the “old men” who prevented the general staff from having the “power and duty . . . to indoctrinate the army” through maneuvers, Army schools and doctrine.^[41]

World War I War Department Dysfunction

In 1917, the United States entered World War I, and the Army’s bureaus quickly proved that they were incapable of meeting the demands of mobilization. The bureaus maintained nine independent systems for estimating requirements. One critic said, “The supply situation was as nearly a perfect mess as can be imagined. It seemed a hopeless tangle.”^[42]

The Army particularly struggled with fielding new technology. When it finally went into combat, it would rely on France and Britain to provide much of the heavy artillery, most of the aircraft and all of the tanks for the American Expeditionary Force (AEF).

Although the war had been raging for three years, the American general staff had not produced a comprehensive study of it to inform a concept of how the Army would fight in the trenches of the Western Front. It did not attempt to analyze the Somme or Verdun to revise its doctrine manual. An update to the 1911 Infantry Drill Regulation would not come out until May 1918. To control their forces, many officers resorted to straight line, “normal attacks,” which the war’s participants had long-learned resulted in bloodbaths.^[43]

In February 1918, to address the Army’s deficiencies and meet the demands of modern war, Secretary of War Newton D. Baker appointed a new Chief of Staff, General Peyton C. March, and empowered him to supervise “the several corps, bureaus and all other agencies of the Military Establishment.”[44] He also expanded and empowered the general staff; it grew to 1,072 officers by the end of the war.[45] For the remaining six months of World War I, the general staff was able to cut through the log jam of traditional procedures and rationalize the mobilization for war around the rationalist principles of centralized control and decentralized operations.

Meanwhile, in France, the president and secretary of war delegated broad authority to General John J. Pershing over the planning, operations, personnel, organization and doctrine of the AEF. Pershing achieved a unity of effort to rapidly adapt the hastily mobilized and largest Army the United States had ever fielded. With complete control over the assignment of officers in France, he ensured his views were rapidly disseminated. Having witnessed the Japanese general staff function in Manchuria, he sought to emulate it. He trusted his staff officers to act independently and alter plans in his absence. He sent liaison officers to every division to ensure doctrinal coherence and feedback.^[46]

While the War Department dithered in bureaucratic chaos, the AEF rapidly innovated new techniques due to its clear mission and unity of effort. Its streamlined organization allowed it to quickly improve techniques based on learning from its allies and battlefield feedback. The artillery abandoned its prewar doctrine, adopted French doctrine to concentrate artillery and then, as the battlefield became more fluid after 1918’s Spring Offensive, created its own doctrine of accompanying guns to allow infantry units to maintain momentum in an attack.^[47] Similarly, the AEF learned from British and French tank experiences to organize a tank corps and established its doctrine in a few months.^[48] In Cuba, the Army had struggled to coordinate three divisions and a handful of guns. In France, during the Meuse-Argonne campaign, the Army effectively employed 600,000 troops with thousands of artillery pieces and hundreds of planes.

As the war ended, Pershing established a series of boards from his staff to study the lessons of the war. They concluded, “No greater lesson can be drawn from the World War than that Unity of Command is absolutely vital to the success of military operations. All the activities of a separate military organization, large or small, must be controlled by the mind of the command.”^[49]

Interwar Innovation Inhibition

Unfortunately, just as after the Civil War, the Army would return to its disaggregated system, which prevented the establishment of a unifying concept during the interwar years. In that period, schisms in strategy, technology and the nature of war inhibited innovation efforts.^[50]

While a robust general staff could have established a unified vision of war, as the German general staff would during the same period under General Hans von Seeckt, Congress deconstructed the strong general staff that emerged during the war, cutting it from more than 1,000 officers to just 88.^[51] Congress returned power to the bureaus and established new branch chiefs of infantry, cavalry and artillery. Acting independently of the general staff, the branch chiefs autonomously developed technology, doctrine and organizations.^[52]

One officer described the inefficiency of this system: “Our Army is lacking a suitable agency for general research, experimentation, and development. We have branch boards . . . But these minor agencies are severely limited in what they can do . . . And, most important of all, they are isolated from one another . . . Criticism that attributes our slow progress to ultra-conservatism is unjust. The fault lies not there but in the lack of a suitable agency.”^[53]

As an example of this problem, the chief of infantry controlled tank doctrine but not tank design and production, which fell to the chief of ordnance. While the chief of infantry established expectations for tanks, the ordnance bureau would make independent development decisions and only bring the infantry into the process when it delivered a pilot tank. Throughout the 1920s, infantry and ordinance debated designs, so much so that by 1930 only a dozen tanks were built, none of which met the infantry’s specifications. An impasse occurred over the weight of the tanks. The ordinance department sought to keep tanks under 15 tons to meet the weight limits of the engineers’ pontoons. In doing so, the tanks lacked the capabilities that the infantry required.^[54] Without a general staff to make priorities based on a clear concept of war, no one had the authority to solve this deadlock.

After 1931, the chief of cavalry added another competitor to the arena of tank development. While the infantry largely viewed tanks as heavy equipment to support infantry against entrenched enemies, the cavalry saw tanks as light vehicles that would conduct traditional cavalry tasks and exploit breakthroughs. However, due to parochial interests, the cavalry only dabbled in mechanization. While Major General Herr served as chief from 1938 to 1942, the cavalry feared that by replacing horses, the Army would destroy the spirit of the cavalry. As the War Department pushed for more experiments in mechanization in response to Germany, Herr countered, “Any attempt to encroach on my horse cavalry will meet with bitter opposition.”^[55]

As U.S. involvement in World War II seemed inevitable, the new chief of staff, Marshall, sought to eliminate the bureaucratic inefficiencies that had paralyzed the interwar Army. In 1940, he appointed Major General Adna Chaffee Jr. as the commander of a new armored force and of I Armored Corps. Marshall gave him complete control over the development of armor doctrine, organization and equipment. In just one year, Chaffee had established a doctrine and organization for the armored force that would remain largely unchanged through World War II. By early 1943, the Army had activated 16 armored divisions and 63 separate tank battalions.^[56]

Echoing March’s reforms during World War I, Marshall reestablished the general staff’s ability to provide strategic direction to the War Department. Marshall stated that in the two decades since the general staff was neutered, the War Department had “lost track of its purpose of existence . . . [and] had become a huge, bureaucratic, red-tape-ridden operating agency.”^[57] In March 1942, he eliminated the branch chiefs and created the Army Ground Forces, which integrated all arms into a unified structure and had broad authority to develop doctrine and organizations.^[58] He also created the Army Service Forces and Army Air Forces. While delegating authority to these three commands, he concentrated the Army general staff in the War Plans Division to focus on providing strategic direction to the Army. In creating a general staff that could develop a unified concept of how to fight a world war, Marshall eliminated the strategic dithering and bureaucratic inertia of the interwar years.

Much like Root, Marshall put an emphasis on large-scale exercises to innovate the techniques appropriate for a modern war. In a series of exercises in Tennessee, Louisiana, the Carolinas, and California that involved hundreds of thousands of Soldiers, he ensured units received the repetitions of maneuvering at corps level that was essential for modern combat. These exercises fed doctrine and equipment development. For example, at the Desert Training Center in California, during two years of exercises designed to prepare units to fight in the extremes of North Africa, the Desert Warfare Board developed 150 projects that ranged from ammunition and tank improvements to desert warfare boots, dust respirators, navigational aids and high-speed road pioneering.^[59]

When the Army entered the war, it suffered an initial setback at Kasserine Pass, but it quickly learned from early mistakes and achieved the strategic direction set by Marshall. However, air-ground integration was a persistent deficiency. Throughout the interwar years, the air service had grown in independence and dedicated itself to a theory of strategic air bombing to validate its independence. After Marshall created the Army Air Forces, they became largely autonomous from the needs of the ground forces. Without a unifying concept of air-ground integration, minimal effort was put into innovating techniques to ensure reinforcing effects by the ground and air forces. While some officers at the front, like Lieutenant General Elwood Quesada, tried to develop techniques to effectively integrate air and ground operations, they lacked a shared vision from the general staff to drive doctrine and equipment innovation.^[60]

Post-World War II Reorganization

Ideally, in 1947, the establishment of the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) and the joint staff could have created an organization to provide a unified vision of fighting and drive doctrinal and equipment innovation. Instead, the joint staff was limited to a hundred officers and given authority to coordinate rather than command the services.^[61] The joint staff became an additional layer of bureaucracy, while the Army, Air Force and Navy—to win budget battles—created competing concepts for how to prepare for a future war.

The reform complicated Army innovation. Its initiatives had to adhere to policies established by OSD while sharing proprietorship over many technologies with other services. Technological turf battles were constant over atomic, missiles, aviation, electronics and computers. Dwight Eisenhower would regret that “In the battle over reorganization in 1947 the lessons of World War II were lost. Tradition won. The resulting National Military Establishment was little more than a weak confederacy of sovereign military units, a loose aggregation that was unmanageable.”^[62]

After World War II, the Truman and Eisenhower administrations sought to balance the budget. Eisenhower believed that the Cold War would be won by the strength of America’s economy and culture. Both administrations focused their strategy on the prospect of a total, nuclear war to deter the Soviet Union. The Air Force’s strategic bomber contingent would be the primary weapon in such a war, and the Army would be the billpayer.

The Army dramatically downsized while conducting constabulary and occupation duties in Europe and Asia. In the years immediately following World War II, Eisenhower commented that the general staff immersed themselves in managerial issues and were removed from developing a coherent concept of how to fight in the emerging Cold War.^[63]

The Equipment Board was established to predict the future needs of the Army. It prioritized simplicity to develop a stockpile of weapons for a future draftee Army, but it faced opposition from influential communities. Field artillery officers demanded atomic cannons and missiles. Coastal artillery officers wanted atomic anti-aircraft missiles to defend the nation against Soviet bombers. Armor officers complained Soviet tanks outclassed theirs. Airborne officers saw the future of war in fleets of jets deploying thousands of troops across the globe.^[64]

The Army did not provide a concept to give direction to these competing groups. Its staff also failed to anticipate that the next war would be a limited but brutal conflict on the Korean Peninsula. On the eve of the Korean War, scattered across the globe in undermanned and poorly equipped units, the U.S. Army was not ready to fight.

The Atomic Battlefield

The Korean War revealed that even in the Atomic Age, limited war could still occur. To fight such a limited war that might involve the use of tactical but not strategic nuclear weapons, General James M. Gavin developed a concept. He viewed nuclear weapons as preventing the massing of formations and logistics. He sought to conduct operations with “scores, perhaps hundreds, of widely separated battle groups, relatively small in size but possessed of great mobility and tremendous firepower from conventional as well as atomic weapons.” He predicted groundbreaking technologies would enable his concept. Although many of the technologies that Gavin envisioned never materialized, his vision of future combat operations was soon widely accepted.^[65]

In 1954, the War College’s Project Binnacle built on Gavin’s concepts. It anticipated that while nuclear weapons would be plentiful, the threat of mutual annihilation would restrict future conflicts to “limited objective wars.” This assumption, that wars could be limited to tactical but not strategic nuclear weapons use, would provide essential support to the Army’s concepts in the 1950s. Project Binnacle recommended reforming divisions into Atomic Army Battle Groups of 12,000 men split into 1,000-man self-constrained combat teams that were air-transportable, equipped with cross-country vehicles and armed with atomic weapons.^[66]

In 1955, General Maxwell Taylor became chief of staff and fully invested in the ideas of Project Binnacle. He immediately began restructuring divisions into “Pentomic” formations. Combing “five” and “atomic,” it was a catchy name to market the Army’s transformation for the Atomic Age to society and for budget battles. It eliminated the traditional regimental structure and divided divisions into five self-contained battle groups. It reduced division manning by a quarter, while tripling its assigned frontage and doubling its assigned depth.^[67]

While inspired by the War College’s study, Taylor undertook his decision to implement the Pentomic divisions without a rigorous analysis by the Army staff of how the units would fit into a larger strategy or sustain themselves. Taylor even contradicted himself on their utility. He doubted that even tactical atomic weapons would be authorized to defend Western Europe, given that by the late 1950s, the number of such weapons fielded by both sides would turn the very countries that the United States was trying to defend into wastelands. Instead, Taylor expected “to see the Communists continue to push in the soft spots about the world, using subversion, coup d’état, political infiltration, and actions short of general war.”^[68] His push for Pentomic divisions did little to develop organizations or techniques to address that threat.

In July 1956, Taylor appointed Major General Lionel C. McGarr as the commandant of the Command and General Staff College (CGSC) and made him responsible for developing both the Pentomic divisions and a new doctrine of atomic warfare. Displaying how a concept can drive thinking, between 1955 and 1959, Military Review published 139 articles on atomic war.^[69] However, McGarr eventually recognized that any atomic weapon usage would open the door to uncontrolled escalation. Instead, he argued that “unconventional warfare doctrine and its instruction will be aggressively, imaginatively and soundly developed as a matter of urgency.”^[70]

While CGSC came to understand the limitations of the concept, a series of large-scale exercises also highlighted its deficiencies. From 1952 to 1956, in exercises Longhorn, Flashburn, Follow Me and Sagebrush, the Army attempted to replicate tens of thousands of Soldiers on an atomic battlefield, revealing the unsoundness of many of its underlying concepts. Deep airborne landings were easily targeted by enemy atomic or overrun by armor.^[71] One division commander reported that the new organizations were no better at atomic warfare, but were worse at dealing with aircraft, guerrillas and armor. The dispersed units were a logistic mess, and their thin perimeters were easily breached by enemy armor.^[72]

Even with these shortcomings, Taylor did little to address Pentomic’s problems. He did not even revise the Army’s operational doctrine. One author wrote that Taylor “created units more Potemkin than Pentomic.”^[73] These shortfalls may not have mattered to Taylor, since Pentomic was probably more useful for marketing that the Army was transforming for the Atomic Age. As Secretary of the Army William M. Brucker stated, “The Pentomic Army necessarily draws much of its power from new weapons. Indeed it is the weapons themselves which, in some instances, have prescribed the design of pentomic units.”^[74]

Pentomic was a means for the Army to pursue offset technologies to provide a decisive edge on the battlefield and to secure budgets. However, many of these technologies never advanced beyond the developmental stages. For example, the M-60 tank was initially envisioned as “an atomic firing, atomic propelled tank that was protected against radiation.”

The designs that were fielded suffered significant drawbacks. The 280mm M-65 cannon could fire 20 kiloton atomic shells. A cornerstone of the atomic fight, it could not operate on the envisioned mobile and dispersed battlefield. It took hours to emplace for a fire mission, could not fit under European bridges and was restricted to operating on major roads. Its size made it easy to target.^[75] Other seemingly breakthrough weapons such as Davy Crocket atomic bazookas or Nike nuclear air-defense missiles had limited utility.^[75]

The Army’s focus on high-profile weapons came at the expense of supporting technologies like radios and target acquisition equipment, which made it impossible to control the dispersed Pentomic divisions. Additionally, the Army was slow to improve its conventional weapons, such as rifles, tanks, infantry fighting vehicles and artillery. While the Army pursued super weapons, by 1961, three-fifths of its equipment predated the Korean War. With flawed concepts and a misguided focus on offset technologies, the Army’s innovation efforts in the 1950s yielded few results.

Vietnam and the End of the Atomic Battlefield

When John F. Kennedy took office in 1961, he ditched Eisenhower’s reliance on massive retaliation and sought to develop the capabilities for a flexible response to a spectrum of conflicts. The Army welcomed this change and shifted away from atomic warfare. It dissolved the pentomic divisions and created the more traditional Reorganization Objectives Army Divisions (ROAD), which could be tailored to specific missions for flexible response.^[77]

Kennedy’s secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, pursued a reorganization of the DoD along modern management practices. The Army established the Continental Army Command with authority over all training, the Army Materiel Command to oversee logistics and the Combat Developments Command to lead doctrine and equipment development.

With a more coherent organizational structure and a focus on more immediate requirements, the Army developed replacements for much of its conventional equipment. By 1962, the Army had a new rifle, machine gun, tank and artillery piece. It also led the development of new helicopters and doctrine for airmobile operations.

These technologies would provide a tactical edge during the Vietnam War, but unfortunately, General William Westmoreland, the commander during the height of the war, had the wrong concept for the conflict. He focused on destroying enemy forces and seeking large battles with search-and-destroy operations.^[78]

How Personnel Policy Blocked Innovation

In its past counterinsurgency campaigns, the Army could succeed without an effective doctrine, because its regimental system had enabled bottom-up learning. In counterinsurgency, developing local understanding and an administration apparatus is paramount, but that takes time.[79] Previously, Soldiers had such time. They spent their entire career in the same regiment. But after the Army implemented an individual replacement system during World War II, Soldiers no longer had this luxury.^[80]

The 1947 Officer Personnel Act established a predictable but rigid timeline for officers’ careers. The proscribed career paths prevented the sort of unique experiences that gave rise to innovative thinkers like Upton and Wagner. Officers also could not spend years learning culture and languages to fight a counterinsurgency as Pershing did in the Philippines.

The transition to a high turnover personnel system impacted innovation in terms of talent retention as well. In the 1950s, General John Dahlquist concluded that the Army’s “increasing inability to attract and hold high caliber personnel for longer periods of active service” stemmed from “the instability of assignments and too frequent overseas tours.”^[81] In 1957, the Army reported that, while it needed 33 percent of electronic technicians to reenlist, only 13 percent did, and while it needed 28 percent of combat arms leaders to reenlist, only 18 percent did.^[82] With a constant churn of personnel, the Army could not effectively develop personnel to operate or maintain the equipment envisioned for the modern battlefield.

Active Defense to AirLand Battle

As the Army emerged from Vietnam, it established Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) to create a doctrine to reorient the Army toward defeating Soviet forces in Europe. TRADOC’s first commander, General William E. DePuy, believed that doctrine could drive an Army reformation. He focused doctrinal development on a specific problem: how to prevail in the first battle against the Warsaw Pact in Central Europe. In 1976’s Field Manual (FM) 100-5 Operations, DePuy explained, “Battle in Central Europe against forces of the Warsaw Pact is the most demanding mission the US Army could be assigned . . . this manual is designed mainly to deal with the realities of such operations.”^[83] He based the doctrine around a study led by Major General Donn Starry on 1973’s Yom Kippur War, which detailed the lethality of the new Soviet weapon systems employed by Egypt and Syria.^[84]

The resulting doctrine was called Active Defense. It provided a coherent and detailed concept of how the Army should fight, including weapon employment considerations and “target servicing” goals for how many enemies a battalion or even a single tank should destroy. Its focus on qualitatively superior mechanized forces resulted in the procurement of the Abrams, Bradley and Apache. DePuy also drove a training revolution by establishing detailed assessment criteria to evaluate units’ training performance and ensure their readiness to obtain the kill ratios called for in Active Defense.

Active Defense’s coherent vision enabled innovation, and it also drove constructive criticism that resulted in a more effective doctrine. Officers noted that the weapon effectiveness in the Sinai Desert, where the Yom Kippur study focused, was different from in the hills and forests of Central Europe.^[85] Others recognized that the Soviets had changed their doctrine from what was assumed in active defense. Instead of committing initially to a main effort, they would conduct dispersed attacks with second echelon forces exploiting success.^[86] These were but some of the criticisms. Between 1977 and 1981, Military Review published 80 articles criticizing the doctrine.^[87]

One of the strongest critics was Starry, even though he had led the study of the Yom Kippur War. Starry had assumed command of V Corps in Central Europe and tested the concepts of Active Defense. He found it insufficient to deal with Soviet echelon forces and recognized that it did not provide a method for offensive action to threaten the Soviets with the liberation of Warsaw Pact countries.^[88] With his staff, he developed an alternative approach called Central Battle. After he took command of TRADOC, he leveraged the diverse critiques of Active Defense to improve Central Battle and published the AirLand Battle doctrine in 1982.

The doctrine provided a central premise that “AirLand Battle will be dominated by the force that retains the initiative and, with deep attack and decisive maneuver, destroys its opponent’s abilities to fight and to organize in depth.”^[89] AirLand Battle had a clear theory of victory that drove how units would fight and train. It presented a battlefield geometry based on a close analysis of how Soviet echelons would mobilize and how fast they would act.

Units understood they had to innovate techniques to meet the requirements of AirLand Battle, and they could conduct large-scale testing during annual Reforger Exercises in Germany or brigade-level exercises at the new National Training Center. The advantages that the Army obtained from this period were revealed during the Persian Gulf War. Whereas previously, the Army’s poor peacetime innovation had meant initial battlefield defeat followed by effective, wartime innovation, this time, the Army dominated its first battle.

While it seemed to revitalize doctrine, TRADOC continued a tradition of doctrinal development being detached from strategic planning because of the lack of a robust general staff. By bringing Starry to TRADOC, who as V Corps Commander had already thought deeply about how to fight the Soviets in Central Europe, the Army bridged this gap. But that was a personality and not an institutional solution. As the Cold War ended, the Army’s doctrines would become increasingly vague and unmoored from strategic context. By lacking a clear vision of war, the Army inhibited innovation.

Post-Cold War

After the Cold War, Army chiefs of staff continuously committed to reform or “Army transformation,” but innovation stalled without a clear concept to drive change. General Carl E. Vuono, the Chief of Staff as the Cold War came to an end, initiated the trend by focusing the Army on “imperatives”: doctrine, force structure, training, modernization, leadership and force quality.^[90] While it was hard to argue with such imperatives, they did not provide a clear problem to which the Army could mobilize to innovate solutions.

Successive chiefs of staff would continue to promote transformation, without providing a problem to innovate against. From 1991 to 1995, General Gordon R. Sullivan initiated the Modern Louisiana Maneuvers. He sought a new force structure that was “more modular, more lethal, more easily deployed.” The result was Force XXI. Sullivan wanted to “break the mold” and “get away from business as usual.”[91]

However, the Modern Louisiana Maneuvers bore little resemblance to their namesake, the large-scale exercises to prepare the Army to fight in Europe in 1941. The new ones used simulations instead of large-scale force-on-force exercises and did not define a specific strategic context that they were meant to solve. Such an over-reliance on simulations impedes effective innovation. Since simulations require assumptions about capability performance, they risk just validating those assumptions with a facade of pseudoscience. Most notably, the Army’s history of the Modern Louisiana Maneuvers never mentions what strategic problem they were meant to address. It was a backward form of innovation that tried to transform the Army without a problem for that transformation to solve.

Sullivan’s successor, General Dennis Reimer, produced Vision 2010 in 1996 to “channel the vitality and innovation.” However, the vision was so broad—it called for “the ability to conduct prompt and sustained operations on land throughout the entire spectrum of crisis”—that it is unclear exactly what problem Soldiers were supposed to be channeling their vitality and innovation against.^[92]

Throughout the 1990s, leaders attempted to drive innovation with buzzwords such as mass effects, dominant maneuver, precision engagement, shaping the battlespace, full dimensional protection, asymmetric leverage and full spectrum dominance. Buzzwords do not provide a problem to solve. They instead slow innovation by focusing debates on the meaning of the words themselves, and eventually, buzzword innovation replaces material changes.

From all of its investment in the discourse of transformation after the Cold War, the Army had poor returns. Between 1995 and 2010, it canceled 22 major weapon programs that cost $32 billion. These included the Future Combat System family of vehicles, the Comanche helicopter and the Crusader self-propelled howitzer.^[93]

While the Army focused on transforming for an ill-defined, hypothetical conflict, it put minimal institutional emphasis on innovating for the stability missions of the 1990s or the counterinsurgency campaigns of the 2000s. Thus, the Army was not prepared for the counterinsurgency campaigns of Afghanistan and Iraq.

With the continued bureaucratic separation of capability and doctrine development from operational requirements, the Army was slow to adapt to counterinsurgency and innovate against its threats. For the first time, the Army struggled to innovate in wartime like it previously had in peacetime. For example, by the end of 2003, improvised explosive devices (IEDs) had become the leading cause of U.S. fatalities. The Army could have procured mine-resistant ambush-protected (MRAP) vehicles to protect its Soldiers against IEDs. Instead, it blocked their procurement, because they did not meet the vision of transformation. It took until 2007 and the personal intervention of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to force the Army to procure more of these lifesaving vehicles.^[94] As one analyst noted, “The commanders were at war, but the acquisition programs were not.”^[95]

It was not just equipment innovation that was siloed from the wars. The Army also took until 2006 to write a new counterinsurgency doctrine, FM 3-24 Counterinsurgency, released three years into the war in Iraq and five years into the war in Afghanistan. To achieve this breathtakingly slow pace, General David Petraeus had to bypass the normal doctrinal process.^[96] The lack of effective doctrine was particularly impactful; just like in the Vietnam War, the Army continued to force personnel to move every couple of years, which prevented long-term technique development. Units rotated into the wars for yearlong or shorter deployments, which meant Soldiers were unable to develop the expertise of the local population and appropriate stabilization techniques that their forebearers who served decades in the same regiment could.^[97]

In 2018, the Army established Army Futures Command (AFC) to lead its technological modernization. AFC added another bureaucratic divide between Army equipment and doctrinal innovation and operational requirements. Basing its equipment investments on distant concepts for the future of war, Army innovation became further detached from specific strategic problems.^[98] With few returns from this additional bureaucratic division, the Army is now recombining AFC with TRADOC.

Lessons from 250 Years of Innovation

We can learn from the Army’s 250 years of innovation, both its successes and struggles, to ensure that the Army takes the right direction in innovating equipment, doctrine and organizations before the next war. Too often, due to poor peacetime preparation, the Army has lost the first battles of its wars only to innovate in wartime at the cost of our Soldiers’ lives. We cannot assume we will have that luxury in the future; we have never fought a nuclear-armed adversary who could threaten nuclear escalation after achieving an initial victory to solidify a fait accompli.

From long-tenured Scott to short-lived AFC, five primary lessons on how to prepare for the next war emerge: establish a specific problem to solve, flatten the bureaucracy, give Soldiers time to innovate, train in the context the Army will fight, and avoid the temptation to pursue “offset” technologies.

Lesson 1: Establish a Specific Problem to Solve

In peacetime, the primary impediment to innovation has been the lack of a clear vision of how to win a future war. A century ago, the Soviet theorist Alexandr Svechin wrote on the importance of developing a concept to drive Army innovation: “Indicating a proper goal will lead to a feverish stream of ideas and will.”^[99] Admittedly, isolated from major threats, the United States has often lacked a primary enemy to focus a concept against. However, the Army needs to forecast which threat it can least afford to lose the first battle of its next war against. It can then optimize innovation against that threat.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Army tended toward vague and overly broad doctrines that have taken refuge in buzzwords rather than detailing how to defeat a specific enemy. Active Defense and AirLand Battle forecasted detailed times and distances for a fight against the Soviet Union based on its probable mobilization rates and tactics. Multi-Domain Operations offers an example of a battlefield framework but does not state whether the times and distances described are based on how Russia, China or any particular enemy will fight.^[100]

To drive innovation, the Army needs to develop a concept of how to win the first battle against Russia in the Baltic or China in Taiwan. It needs Soldiers to figure out how they will rapidly reinforce the Baltic Defense Line or how they will defend beaches in Taiwan. Maybe we should be developing artillery-delivered sea mines and innovating techniques for cannon artillery to sink landing ships. Alternatively, the Army might conclude that it is not postured to come to our allies’ aid in sufficient time to fight on the initial day of an invasion, and instead develop a concept focused on winning the likely prolonged urban defenses of either Tallinn, Riga or Taipei. Since Soldiers only have a vague understanding of how they fit into a fight against Russia or China, they cannot put their minds toward innovations to support either potential concept.

Lesson 2: Flatten the Bureaucracy

Developing a clear concept of how we fight needs to be tied to war planning. Except during World War I and World War II, the Army has lacked a robust general staff to integrate plans with doctrine, equipment development and training. Instead, the Army, as well as the DoD, has created a bureaucratic structure that divides these functions, promotes parochialism and impedes innovation.

In 1940, during the darkest days of World War II, Prime Minister Winston Churchill appointed Lord Beaverbrook to lead the Ministry of Aircraft Production. He created a ministry with minimal hierarchy and bureaucracy, posting two notices that read, “Committees take the punch out of war” and “Organization is the enemy of improvisation.” By creating an agile organization that did not have layers of bureaucracy between requirements and outputs, he drastically improved fighter production and innovation to win the Battle of Britain.^[101]

By having a strong general staff that integrates war planning with doctrine and equipment development, armies flatten their hierarchy and enable innovation. The German general staff conducted a holistic study of World War I and created a concept to rapidly prevail against Poland and France. With its centralized authority, it ensured that doctrine, training and equipment research and procurement aligned with this doctrine.^[102]

While restructuring TRADOC and AFC is a positive step toward flattening the Army’s bureaucracy, the resulting organization will still be detached from war planning. The Army should centralize concept development in a more robust Army staff to ensure it aligns with national strategy. The downstream doctrine should have annexes authored by the U.S. Army Pacific and U.S. Army Europe-Africa Commands that provide specifics of how the Army will prevail against China in Taiwan and Russia in the Baltic.

The Army will still have to align with joint doctrine. Ideally, concepts and strategy would emanate from a robust joint staff to ensure alignment across services. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) employ such a staff. When the IDF was established in 1948, Israel created a simple military structure with a single service, a single commander and a single general staff. Its general staff combined strategic planning, wartime operations, doctrinal development and training in one organization, providing a unity of military thought and preparations. Within this simplified organizational structure, Israel achieved impressive innovation that allowed it to dominate its opponents in just six days in 1967.^[103]

Finally, OSD could alleviate the interservice concept competition and budget brawling by reforming the planning, programming, budgeting and execution (PPBE) process. It was developed in 1961 to ensure a centralized means for the DoD to align budget with strategy. In the 1970s, it decentralized management of the services. If OSD returned to controlling PPBE, DoD could ensure a joint concept that meets our strategic requirements and drives budget decisions in place of service-on-service knife fights.^[104]

Lesson 3: Give Soldiers Time to Innovate

By establishing a clear concept for how the Army would fight a future war, Soldiers will have a problem to solve using bottom-up innovation. But innovation takes time. Soldiers need time to develop, test and iterate equipment adaptations or new standard operating procedures. Unfortunately, since the 1940s, Soldiers have not had the requisite time to innovate.^[105]

Before the 1940s, Soldiers spent years in the same unit, allowing them to become experts in their position and to develop techniques for how the unit would fight. Now, they do not have that luxury. Soldiers change positions and units every year or two. They become focused on just training the “fundamentals” to ensure readiness metrics are met. Like the Greek myth of Sisyphus, they spend countless hours pushing a readiness boulder up a hill, only for it to roll back down during transition season. Brigades invest millions of dollars attending a Combat Training Center, where they capture improvements at after-action reviews, only to immediately lobotomize those lessons as the leadership scatters to new jobs.

This transitory existence impedes bottom-up innovation. Compare France and Germany’s personnel policies leading into World War II. France focused on efficiently placing individuals against unit manning requirements. It put little emphasis on maintaining unit cohesion. This system prevented units from developing a shared understanding of how they would fight. France relied on authoritative doctrine to make its Soldiers interchangeable instead of promoting individual initiative. Meanwhile, Germany put a premium on unit cohesion. Soldiers trained with the same unit for years, attending repeated large-scale exercises that allowed them to establish and test techniques and operate with shared understanding and initiative. Germany proved the value of their personnel system by soundly defeating France in 1940.^[106] Like the French system, the U.S. personnel system may be bureaucratically efficient, but it has proven to undermine cohesion, fighting capabilities and innovation since the Korean War.

Lesson 4: Train in the Context We Will Fight

Throughout much of its history, the Army has not trained at the scale and in the context it would fight. Root’s attempts at large-scale exercises quickly met resistance. Marshall recognized that the lack of large-scale exercises before World War I had made the Army unprepared for that war. The series of maneuvers he conducted before World War II allowed the Army to test its equipment and doctrine at scale and in the contexts it would have to fight.

Today, the Army relies on Warfighter exercises—simulations—to train its divisions and corps. These exercises minimize friction and allow units to fight in ways that they could not in the real world. The Soldiers in the simulations do not tire, subordinate units react without conducting planning or rehearsals, sustainment is seamless, communications rarely go down and high-altitude unmanned aerial systems facilitate targeting even though non-state actors like the Houthis can now shoot down such systems. These simulations may allow us to defeat China and Russia in a computer game, but they do not present realistic problems for our divisions and corps to innovate against.

The Army needs to train at scale, and it needs to train in the appropriate context. Units attending Combat Training Centers must train in a context that replicates our first battle against Russia or China. The scenario needs to occur in terrain replicating the Baltic or Taiwan, and the enemy needs to be organized and to fight like Russian or Chinese formations so that our units are innovating in peacetime against the problems they will face in war.^[107]

Lesson 5: Offset Technologies are a Costly Mirage

Finally, the Army should avoid the temptation to pursue offset technologies. In the 1950s and since the 1990s, the Army became enamored with offset technologies. They are a tempting mirage. But in seeking a decisive edge over opponents, the Army lost the path of innovation. Dreams of offsets resulted in developmental nightmares.

Offset technologies that provide an enduring, decisive advantage are unlikely in the modern, globalized age. Investments in research and development (R&D) have diminishing returns. When advances do occur, they defuse rapidly. While it took the Soviet Union four years to break America’s monopoly on the atomic bomb, today, China, with far less investment, replicated our most advanced large language model in a few months and at much less cost.

Furthermore, DoD is unlikely to drive breakthroughs since the private sector’s investments in R&D have outstripped the government. In the 1950s and 1960s, the U.S. government controlled 70 percent of global R&D spending. In 2023, the government only accounted for about a quarter of national R&D spending.^[108] For Ukraine, the essential technological innovations were developed in the civilian sector: StarLink and mass-produced drones.

Instead of pursuing offsets, the Army will find more success in focusing its resources on leveraging civilian technologies and iteratively improving its capabilities to address immediate strategic problems.

Conclusion

When given a clear problem, today’s Soldiers can be incredible innovators. For example, look at the command post decoys created by the 101st Airborne Division. Command posts produce electromagnetic emissions that have proven easy to detect and target on the battlefield in Ukraine. The opposing forces (OPFOR) at the Combat Training Center have been replicating some of the capabilities to detect and target command posts. Given this problem, soon after the Russo-Ukrainian War started in 2022, 2nd Brigade, 101st Airborne Division began working with EagleWerx, the division’s innovation lab, to develop a device to replicate the emissions of battalion command posts. While Soldiers changed out, the civilians assigned to EagleWerx continued to work on a solution using a cheap, off-the-shelf device called a Raspberry Pi.

Eventually, they produced prototypes to test at the Joint Readiness Training Center. Understanding the specific tools and techniques that the OPFOR used to detect command posts, the brigade scattered the decoy devices in areas where they would likely establish command posts. The OPFOR targeted the decoys, revealing their artillery for counterfire, while the actual command posts remained concealed. This unit alleviated the problem of command post survivability, but it required a detailed understanding of the problem and time to innovate.

★  ★  ★  ★

Author Biography

Major Robert G. Rose, USA, is a LTG (Ret) James M. Dubik Writing Fellow. He commands Alpine Troop, 3rd Squadron, 4th Security Forces Assistance Brigade. He holds an undergraduate degree from the United States Military Academy and graduate degrees from Harvard University and, as a Gates Scholar, from Cambridge University.

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