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Fig 1
Figure 1 from this series, introduced in Part 3
26 April 2023

Conclusions on Modern Military Failures in Innovation (Part 5 of 5)

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Original post can be found here: https://benzweibelson.medium.com/conclusions-on-modern-military-failures-in-innovati-part-5-of-5-cc96a53158c3

If you missed out on the earlier sections of this series, this last one might not make much sense. Check out Part 1 here: https://benzweibelson.medium.com/an-inquiry-into-why-militaries-are-terrible-at-innovation-part-1-of-5-c6f04b35fce8

Part 2 is located here: https://benzweibelson.medium.com/an-inquiry-into-why-militaries-are-terrible-at-innovation-innovation-begins-not-in-the-pragmatic-96df4eb21395

Figure 2 of 3 in this series, explained in Parts 3 and 4

Part 3 is located here: https://benzweibelson.medium.com/an-inquiry-into-why-militaries-are-terrible-at-innovation-beating-a-dead-horse-how-institutions-227dbbbd698c

And Part 4 here: https://benzweibelson.medium.com/converging-and-diverging-iteratively-an-inquiry-into-why-militaries-are-terrible-at-innovation-3ba975f1b897

If you have caught up and read all the other sections, here is the conclusion for this series:

Graphic #3 in this series

Conclusions:

Innovation is risky, messy, and rarely unfolds in some orderly or logical flow of activities and events. Humans are further challenged by how we experience reality in a linear progression of time and space, where complexity and emergence seem almost obvious in hindsight, but impossible to anticipate with any accuracy on the horizon. Our expectations of the future are typically conceptualized in an ends-ways-means, reverse-engineered arrangement of ancient Greek and Roman logic. This western mindset permeates our interpretation of reality and demonstrates a perpetual military tension between what is science in war and that which can only be associated with creative artistry.

Today’s military forces continue to frustrate themselves by approaching complex security contexts equipped with Newtonian, oversimplified, and inappropriately reductionist methods, theories, models and terminology. While terms and phrases are found in mainstream defense doctrine and policy, they often are divorced from complexity science and assimilated into the orderly, stable, and reverse-engineered war paradigm popularized over the last few centuries [1]. This creates confusion, misinterpretation, and a high chance of failure in future conflicts if adversaries and future contexts do not unfold and behave in regulated, uniform, and compliant ways that this legacy military framework requires. It also largely hamstrings any attempts at innovation, in that such activities immediately violate the mechanistic, linear, systematic processes established not for divergent thinking, but entirely convergent activities. This is grounded in military methods and doctrine, articulated in engineering language and natural science inspiration. F.C. Fuller (British General Officer from WW1 writing extensively in the Interwar Period) was one of the pioneering military architects of this contemporary ‘science of war’ system, yet he too was frustrated with the military of the early twentieth century that also continued to wage war using insufficient cognitive tools. For him, the Interwar Period was the critical moment to educate what he felt was a pre-scientific, perhaps even an anti-intellectual military profession so that it might break from institutional rituals and tradition:

[In the Great War] the higher command of all armies never grasped their scientific limitations, and for the following reasons: because they had been brought up in 1[:] a school of war the doctrines and methods of which bore little resemblance with reality; because seniority carried with it a fictitious omniscience; and because totally ignorant men would again and again wave aside, with a gesture of pitiful sorrow, the opinions of the highest experts [2].

History may provide important lessons for how institutions (particularly military ones) fail to let go of outdated concepts, or otherwise fear new ones in an irrational, seemingly ritualistic sort of manner [3]. This can only be ushered in through innovative thinking, experimentation with divergent (not convergent) ideas and activities, and with the appreciation that progress occurs through failure, not success of legacy practice. Again, this violates the institutional values and essence of modern military belief systems that center around uniformity, reliability, repetition, risk reduction, convergence, analytical rationalism, and reductionism via engineering and natural science inspiration (the Newtonian Stylization of Modern Warfare).

Humanity is rapidly unlocking entirely novel developments in technology that may bring about game-changing transformation, which unavoidably impacts security affairs and defense matters. These pending manifestations of strong emergence are not isolated to some new super weapon or advanced tactic for a new battlefield, but developments that may reconfigure so much of the current world that it may not be recognizable to future generations. Artificial intelligence may be as revolutionary as Gutenberg’s moveable printing press was for fifteenth century Europe, or possibly as profound a development as the rise of culture or organic life itself. Such emergence would start with human designers, and by design those humans would introduce the seemingly unavoidable pattern of assimilating new technology with war. For more on AI, see: https://benzweibelson.medium.com/on-chatbots-machine-learning-the-future-of-war-and-dogs-versus-ants-f4d871dbff8d

War represents the most violent, chaotic, and destructive of any human behaviors capable of this species, and all human existence features a dizzying array of war activities that appear enduring and potentially part of the human condition. Innovation represents a foundational aspect of why our species differs from all other known life. We can not only imagine the real, but we can fantasize about entirely unreal and never-before-considered combinations of novel things and concepts. Some can only exist in the artificial fantasy of our minds, while others can be teased out into reality so that our invention generates systemic transformation. Innovation above all else is the defining characteristic of why humans cannot ever be limited by natural laws or social rules. Prior to 1903, it was impossible to fly in a controlled-power flight that was heavier than air. Prior to 1969, no human had set foot upon another celestial body. Prior to 1997, humans were bounded by biological rules so that reproduction or duplication of one animal could not be artificially cloned. Before 2003 and the mapping of the human genome, the foundational bits that make our species what it is was unavailable to us. Innovation smashes barriers and opens entirely new doors for humans to walk through. This of course exists in war, and the deterrence of such organized violence.

Modern military organizations are comfortable with military science in that a technological rationalism consumes how we process reality and attempt to institute order into a chaotic world. In many regards, modern societies demonstrate mastery of military domains such as air, land, and sea. We have invented an entirely new digital domain called cyberspace within which people can exist and also wage war in an entirely artificial plane of existence. Humans are the first species to leave this planet, and now are expanding across space as a new domain to exist in. Throughout our existence and within every armed conflict, innovation is a powerful and defining thread for which progress occurs and meaning is generated so that all social paradigms can somehow make sense of our complex reality.

Modern militaries are paradoxically able to channel innovation in certain aspects of complex warfare quite comfortably, such as in technological or local/immediate (tactical) applications. Yet we struggle with anything beyond these narrow areas of warfare, particularly with systemic appreciation of broader strategy and complex emergence of unanticipated consequences in war. We seek to standardize everything in war into some orderly or seemingly stable framework, including innovation. We even attempt in our doctrine and managerial methods for decision-making position military artistry in physical, mathematical, or engineering formulations. This illuminates what is often an institutionalized resistance to change, disruption, uncertainty, and the destruction of cherished or ritualized beliefs and behaviors. Innovation is not developed or capitalized in this pragmatic, artificially sterilized mode of human thought and action. Instead, it occurs in the fantastic, often manifesting in profoundly unusual or counterintuitive ways. The more disruptive an innovative concept is, the higher likelihood the institution will resist it greatly and potentially be blinded in even recognizing it. We fail to appreciate emergence in complex systems, mostly because our military paradigm is established not on complexity science fundamentals, but Newtonian ideals… we lack the cognitive tools, models, theories, and terminology to shift our decision-making methodologies away from one mode of warfare to this emerging one. For a deep dive into what this means and how emergence occurs in war, see: https://benzweibelson.medium.com/emegence-complexity-science-applied-to-warfare-recommended-innovation-articles-and-commentary-99e3d342c21b

This series addressed these tensions and presented a different way that modern militaries might conceptualize how innovation unfolds, and how the organization might transform its culture, belief systems, mental models, and decision-making methodologies to incorporate theories on innovation that do not exist in the dominant war paradigm employed across the enterprise. Such change would require a generational rather than immediate gaze so that the entire institution might reconfigure in an enduring and powerful shift. This transformation would make military artistry not remain some abstract association with magical “genius” and random realization, nor would it ever transition into an orderly recipe or formula the military might imprint upon all future operators. Instead, militaries must consider how military artistry be enhanced so that innovation oozes not through the seams of an institutional strait jacket but flows openly and in parallel with the well-developed scientific mastery of how modern defense organizations prepare and execute dangerous security activities.

Ready for another wild series where we explore replacing the Newtonian styled, simplistic geometric constructs (triangles, cubes, lines, ends-ways-means, linear causal) and simplified formalizations with mind-bending concepts like a Möbius strip or a Klein bottle to stimulate entirely different strategic thinking? Check out Part 1 of this series here: https://benzweibelson.medium.com/reconceptualizing-military-campaign-design-and-strategy-with-complexity-theory-systemic-design-and-878135aa993a


[1] Christopher Paparone, “Critical Military Epistemology: Designing Reflexivity into Military Curricula,” Journal of Military and Strategic Studies 17, no. 4 (2017): 125–28.

[2] Fuller J.F.C., The Foundations of the Science of War, 2012 reprinting by Books Express Publishing (London: Hutchinson & Company, LTD, 1925), 278.

[3] Russell Ackoff, “On the Use of Models in Corporate Planning,” Strategic Management Journal 2, no. 4 (December 1981): 359.

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