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Military forces call for innovation more now than perhaps in previous generations due to the many overlapping efforts of disciplines studying how humans create, think, and reflect on how they engage with a complex reality. War has always been historically complex, and arguably chaotic in that organized violence remains the most volatile, dynamic, dangerous, and destructive context that humans place themselves into. Yet for most of human history, warfare has oriented around the regulation, standardization, uniformity, and predictive attempts of control, whether in strategic aims or tactical execution of organized violence. It is a controversial argument to state that contemporary warfare is well beyond the complexity of earlier terrestrial or otherwise socially or technologically limited conflict. Often, the reason we stipulate war today is consistent with earlier war periods is to reinforce our ontological position that war itself has an enduring, unchanging nature. The modern scientific ordering and natural laws become a paradigm shift that destroys earlier non-scientific natural orderings.[1]

However, today’s military forces and political leadership now have the context of violent conflict manifesting not just in the earlier terrestrial domains (with vastly sophisticated technological abilities and effects) but also into previously unreachable or unrealized domains of cyberspace and space. There is no such objective scale for complexity and conflict, as the subjectivity of human existence is far too difficult to associate universal metrics to such a thing. War today extends into a digital plane of human existence, where artificial intelligence and cyber existences form entirely new directions for organized violence to mutate. Our ability to change what we are as carbon-based life forms at a genetic level is an emerging capability no other species has experienced, nor has any species gained the ability to become multi-planetary. That war today offers far more nonlinear and emergent paths to unfold in a deeper interplay of terrestrial, non-terrestrial, physical, and abstract planes of human experience is a true statement that suggests complex warfare today should not be limited by historical definitions and beliefs. Potentially, a multi-paradigmatic war frame would examine beyond any natural ordering, to include the interplay of a range of incommensurate war paradigms that may be employed by a host of conflict stakeholders.

In roughly a century, humans unlocked how to reach the skies in powered flight, and then extended that reach to the stars, landing humans on the moon and flinging unmanned systems to beyond the edge of our solar system. Cyberspace is unique in that it must exist through a scaffolding that starts in the physical world where time and space are explicit and tangible, but the human experience of cyberspace extends our consciousnesses beyond the limits of our bodies and also the physical planes we exist within normally. There is no “space” in cyberspace, at least not in how humans previously conceptualize the geographical certainty of the time-space continuum that is the real world. Cyberspace if anything acts as an extension of the abstract plane of human conceptualization that previously could only function in our imaginations, where we might dream of fantastic, impossible things that break the laws of physics, or otherwise could never occur chemically, biologically, or in any possible material form. Cyberspace provides a new plane of human experience that exists atop the physical reality that humans themselves exist within but is distinct in that it extends into realms where humans intentionally can explore ideas and also conduct activities that are impossible in the real world, yet also produce direct effects that extend back into that same reality.

Innovation produced human achievements in unlocking the air domain, and later the space domain, followed quickly by the cyber domain as the technological advancements by a western, industrialized, scientific oriented society granted such new opportunities. These opportunities for the entire species included the extension of war into these new areas that previously were unreachable, unrealized, or otherwise impossible and irrelevant to military strategists and tactical practitioners. However, the western fixation on artificially separating theory and practice has also contributed to a discrepancy between innovation and adaptation, in that modern militaries tend to seek pragmatic, evolutionary, predictable change. This confusion over adaptation and innovation breeds a particular contempt in military theorists over how change ought to occur in war paradigms and military organizations, and also a scorn over how innovation requires fantastical, iterative patterns of ideation, experimentation, and increased risk so that as it is unfolding, innovators are improvising and reflecting without clear goals or rigid plans.

Starting with innovation and adaptation, the terms are not interchangeable despite this occurring frequently in military debate, doctrine, and practice. Adaptation is when the system is changed either by a competitor or systemically, such as if a lake experienced a landslide that introduced significant different chemical changes into the water. The ecosystem of that lake would then experience various species declining, and others improving, depending on how the changes in the water impacted the flora and fauna. Suppose one species of fish had a genetic latent ability to thrive in water that was more acidic, while a competitor did not. The change in the water would cause one species to flourish and the other perish, and the predatory species would need to adapt to the changes or also perish.

Adaptation is a reactive behavior when confronted with a systemic change that causes pain or damage. In the 1930s, the economic depression and drought drove farmers in the American and Canadian prairies to use inappropriate land for farming and also poor topsoil management. The natural and manmade causes combined and created a devastating effect of severe dust storms that cascaded in scope, destroying the ecology and agriculture. Settlers and farmers adapted to poor economic and weather conditions in their environment by increasing the deep plowing of farmland, displacing the natural deep-rooted prairie grasses that had retained soil and moisture during drought and high winds before human settlers arrived. In this example, the settlers experienced a change in their ecosystem and adapted poorly, by reinforcing behaviors that caused further acceleration of the very changes that were forcing them to adapt. Adaptation is reactionary, and poor adaptation carries the risk of further damage and destruction, particularly if adaptive behaviors or actions further remove the adaptor from competing in the new, changed system.

Innovation could be conceptualized as the logical paradox of adaptation in that innovative actions are implemented to create systemic change, whether wittingly or unwittingly. Unwitting innovation can be found in examples such as how several engineers from the industrial company 3M were asked to create an airplane “super glue”, and in experimentation stumbled upon the recipe for a somewhat sticky, perpetually adhesive glue that could be used to attach paper to objects in an enduring fashion.[2] The management for 3M told the engineers to stop wasting time with the failed glue, but several engineers continued to experiment on their own as they felt the glue somehow was useful in a yet-to-be-imagined way. This eventually led to the Post-it Note®, and forty years later more than 50 billion Post-it Notes® are produced each year.[3] The original glue formula was a failure in that it was not the airplane superglue original goal, and unwittingly the innovators knew they had an interesting glue, but they did not yet know what purpose it might serve. Spencer Silver, the scientist innovating with the glue, called it “the solution in search of a problem,”[4]and he would not realize what the problem was until Art Fry, another 3M scientist, realized the sticky glue on paper could serve as unmoving bookmarks in his church hymns during choir practice. The innovators went from unwitting to witting, and from the fantastic and unrealized (or unrecognized by top management wanting super glues) to an entirely new product that would unlock billions in new revenue.

Innovation begins not in the known, pragmatic, or the orthodox. Certainly, adaptation finds its primary breeding ground in such contexts where an organization (or organism) experiences surprise, confusion, and/or pain due to tomorrow not being as yesterday suggested. Innovative acts are cognitive leaps in conceptualizing in the fantastic so that opportunities are grasped in novel, perhaps previously unimagined or ignored ways. This is where the term ‘eureka moment’ occurs, and the innovator refines an ideation in a way that all others do not possess. Innovation changes the system, in that a successful act of innovation creates systemic transformation where those other competitors now must operate in the emergent system that the innovation ushered into reality.

Innovators cause systemic change, and those impacted by that change must adapt in a reactive, secondary, and often costly fashion. Unlike adaptation where the institution often understands and encourages the changes as they are implemented, innovation is conducted outside the mainstream, frequently in such a way that the institutional defenders resist innovation until such time as the innovation is over, and the system is clearly transforming so that ignoring the innovation will only cause further damage and disruption. There are myriad military examples of innovation, from the rise of air power, the development of the tank, the creation of the aircraft carrier, or the restoration of mounted animals for reconnaissance and special operations in Afghanistan after the 9–11 attacks. In most all of these, the institution resisted innovation quite fiercely.

Why do institutions fight innovation despite paradoxically proclaiming that innovation is a priority requirement? Much of this has to do with the modern war paradigm, and how militaries prioritize a pragmatic, incremental, stable process of assimilating new ideas only as long as they do not disrupt or challenge core beliefs and values. An example of this can be found in one of the selected essays in the National Defense University’s Toward a Theory of Spacepower 2011 publication. Sheldon and Gray posit, “A theory of spacepower must also guard against flights of fancy and overactive imaginations that make theory useless as a guide to practice…. Spacepower is not science fiction, and its intellectual guardians, the theorists… must take care to protect it from the ignorance of some and the worst excesses of others.”[5] The authors go on to argue that military strategy overall is: “nothing if not pragmatic” and that “strategic theory is a theory for action”,[6] citing earlier similar pragmatism from renowned strategist Bernard Brodie.[7] Essentially, we do not yet understand the space domain or how it may change war as we know it, but any innovative thinking needs to remain wedded to the realist frames currently endorsed by the military institution. This is when one puts the institutional cart ahead of the emerging, ill-defined space warfare horse.

[1] Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

[2] “History Timeline: Post-It(R) Notes,” corporate website, informational, 2023, https://www.post-it.com/3M/en_US/post-it/contact-us/about-us/.

[3] Nick Glass and Tim Hume, “The ‘Hallelujah Moment’ behind the Invention of the Post-It Note,” CNN, April 4, 2013, CNN Business edition, https://www.cnn.com/2013/04/04/tech/post-it-note-history/index.html.

[4] Andy Warner, “How a Solution Without a Problem Became the Post-It Note,” digital online technology blog, Wired Backchannel (blog), July 7, 2015, https://www.wired.com/2015/07/how-a-solution-without-a-problem-became-the-post-it-note/.

[5] John Sheldon and Colin Gray, “Theory Ascendant? Spacepower and the Challenge of Strategic Theory,” in Toward a Theory of Spacepower: Selected Essays (Washington, D.C.: National Defense University Press, 2011), 14–15.

[6] Sheldon and Gray, 15.

[7] Bernard Brodie, War and Politics (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1973), 452; Sheldon and Gray, “Theory Ascendant? Spacepower and the Challenge of Strategic Theory,” 15.