That new course on military innovation at Stanford: awesome, but one issue.

I confess that I am rather taken with the new course on military innovation at Stanford University. Joe Felter (a retired US Army officer and former deputy assistant secretary of defense) and Steven Blank (a serial entrepreneur) are offering a course on Technology, Innovation and Modern War: Keeping America’s Edge in an Era of Great Power Competition (Management Science & Engineering 296, cross-listed as International Policy 340). When I last taught Business Strategy in Government Contracting at George Mason University, I loved my guest speakers. These guys got Ash Carter, Max Boot, and Jim Mattis. So I'm at least a bit impressed.

 

I did teach a mini-course on military innovation once at the National Defense University. Actually, I designed that course. My dissertation was partly in the field, so I declare myself qualified. Steve Blank himself even provided some helpful insights for the course, over coffee one morning at the Pentagon City Ritz Carlton, to my college commandant, my dean, and myself. But I would still take their course, as it looks like great stuff.

 

However, I do have two quibbles. It's a minor grievance that I find shopworn their reliance on the "2+3" trope. That's the notion in declared policy that the US faces threats from not just China and Russia, but Iran, North Korea, and a wide range of insolent guerrillas. Really, anything but China is a lesser problem by far. But more importantly, I note how Blank & Felter write that

 

The course offers students the insight that for hundreds of years, innovation in military systems has followed a repeatable pattern: technology innovation → new weapons → experimentation with new weapons/operational concepts → pushback from incumbents → first use of new operational concepts.

 

That's a pretty good model for describing innovation in military systems, if systems means technological systems. Not all military innovation, however, starts with new technology. Consider that between 1690 and 1830, warfare worldwide experienced almost no technological change. Between the ring bayonet and the railroad, pretty much the same weapons ruled, on land and at sea: mostly smoothbore black-powder bronze guns, well-trained horses, sail-powered wooden ships, and legendarily iron men.

 

But consider also that the Nine Years War (1688–1697), or what we call King William's War in the United States, looked nothing like the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815), or what we experienced as the War of 1812 in North America. The difference wasn't technological; it was economic, organizational, and social. What Frederick the Great and Buonaparte achieved on the battlefield were not the product of technological advances, but  administrative acumen. It's thus worth asking what organizational reforms, quite apart from changes in technology, could achieve better military performance for the United States and its allies. Is the formation of the US Space Force one of those? What should we make of Ash Carter's remarkable observation that our rank structure is "an artifact of [those] Napoleonic Wars"? If our human resources policy really is stuck in the industrial age, how can we do better? If you expect "pushback from incumbents" after technological change, note that this is what leads to the really serious fights.

 

Perhaps that's why the course is listed in management and policy. I favor that. After all, that's where I did my graduate work, and where I teach today!

 

James Hasik is a senior fellow in the Center for Government Contracting at George Mason University, and a senior fellow in the Scowcroft Center on Strategy and Security at the Atlantic Council.

Comments

[Thaddeus Jankowski]

The late Dr. Rias van Wyk, my professor and friend, would have another take. He suggests there actually exists an emerging academic discipline of Technology capital T. Consider we have the field of chemistry with a fundamental framework the periodic table. Freshmen in college take Macro Economics also with fundamental frameworks of thought around which that academic discipline is organized. Yet noone take "Macro Technology" courses in college because Technology is not viewed as an academic field of study. Technologies always come to us as "tree", never as "forest".

He provided formal definitions that may more comprehensively account for what you describe. Technology is defined as "Created competence as seen in device, process and acquired human skill." This is more akin to the "software" definition of macro economics, not the "hardware" framework of chemistry. Corollary: a technological entity must have Device, process and acquired human skill. Finally his "periodic table" equivalent would categorize every technological entity by function in a nine cell grid of Matter, Energy, information on one axis, and Processing, Storing, Transporting on the other axis.

With a fundamental framework for all technology wisdom materializes where insight was previously lacking, just as a high school student can apprehend difficult ideas in chemistry because of God's elegant framework in nature. Without a fundamental framework only brilliant people can innovate and discover. With a framework insight is more available.