Military Innovation in Small States

Creating a Reverse Asymmetry

Michael Raska

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317661290
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

This book provides a comprehensive assessment of the global diffusion of the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) and its impact on military innovation trajectories in small states.

Although the 'Revolution in Military Affairs' (RMA) concept has enjoyed significant academic attention, the varying paths and patterns of military innovation in divergent strategic settings have been overlooked. This book seeks to rectify this gap by addressing the broad puzzle of how the global diffusion of RMA-oriented military innovation – the process of international transmission, communication, and interaction of RMA-related military concepts, organizations, and technologies - has shaped the paths, patterns, and scope of military innovation of selected small states. In a reverse mode, how have selected small states influenced the conceptualization and transmission of the RMA theory, processes, and debate? Using Israel, Singapore and South Korea as case studies, this book argues that RMA-oriented military innovation paths in small states indicate predominantly evolutionary trajectory, albeit with a varying patterns resulting from the confluence of three sets of variables: (1) the level of strategic, organizational, and operational adaptability in responding to shifts in the geostrategic and regional security environment; (2) the ability to identify, anticipate, exploit, and sustain niche military innovation – select conceptual, organizational, and technological innovation intended to enhance the military's ability to prepare for, fight, and win wars, and (3) strategic culture. While the book represents relevant empirical cases for testing the validity of the RMA diffusion hypotheses, from a policy-oriented perspective, this book argues that these case studies offer lessons learned in coping with the security and defence management challenges posed by military innovation in general.

This book will be of much interest for students of military innovation, strategic studies, defence studies, Asian politics, Middle Eastern politics and security studies in general.

1 Introduction

Debating military innovation and small states

One of the quintessential threads in strategic studies has centered on the debate on the sources, paths, and patterns of military change, learning, and innovation. In particular, why and how militaries change, when, how, and why do militaries succeed or fail in adopting and adapting to new ways of war? In 1984, Barry Posen examined why and how military organizations innovate in a comparative study of interwar military doctrines of Great Britain, France, and Germany (Posen 1984). Posen’s work triggered new debates in strategic studies, focusing on the causes, catalysts, conditions, and trajectories of military innovation. In particular, when, how, and why do military organizations innovate? What are the key variables, internal or external, that determine the paths and patterns of military innovation? Why do select military organizations succeed or fail in pursuing military innovation, under what conditions? How do major military innovations (MMIs) emerge, diffuse, and shape or change the international security environment relative to evolutionary, sustaining innovations? The nearly three-decade-long debate generated a number of theories with varying explanations of key drivers, patterns, processes, and outcomes of military innovation. Nearly all, however, start from the basic assumption that propensity of change in military organizations – institutionalizing new approaches to warfare – is neither probable nor simple.

Indeed, military innovation studies often point toward three types of barriers to innovation: organizational rigidity, bureaucratic politics, and organizational culture (Davidson 2011, 11). According to organizational theory, for example, military organizations function as large, complex, and functionally specialized bureaucracies, placing a premium on predictability, stability, and certainty (Posen 1984, 46). Coupled with institutionalized standard operating procedures, core missions, goals, strategies, and structural norms, these factors reinforce military stagnation. Similarly, bureaucratic politics theory blames uniformed leaders, seeking to promote the importance of their organizations, maximize resource allocation, and preserve their distinct organizational roles, missions, and capabilities (Halperin 1974). In other words, military organizations tend to protect their self-interests in an environment of scarce resources, which strengthens their risk aversion and resistance to change (Isaacson, Layne, and Arquilla 1999). Therefore, innovations that pose no threat to the organization’s mission, resources, autonomy, or essence are readily adopted, while those innovations perceived as a major threat may be strongly resisted (Goldman and Mahnken 2004).

In contrast, culturalist theorists view barriers to innovation embedded in particular strategic as well as organizational cultures. Williamson Murray defines strategic culture as “ethos and professional attributes, both in terms of experience and intellectual study, which contribute to a common core understanding of the nature of war within military organizations” (1999, 27). While strategic culture shapes ideas about the use of force within a state through their historical experiences and lessons learned, organizational culture comprises of identities, norms, and values that have been internalized by military organizations in their regulations, training, routines, and practice. Strategic culture thus conditions the preconceived notions on the character and conduct of warfare and serves both as an enabler or constraint in the effectiveness of organizational learning, adaptation, and innovation (Eisenstadt and Pollack 2001). Ultimately, pursuing and managing military innovation does not arise in a vacuum – the range of cultural, bureaucratic, and organizational barriers to military innovation are amplified by diverse contextual variables that include intrinsic geostrategic, political, economic, and operational variables shaping a state’s ability to generate military power (Isaacson, Layne, and Arquilla 1999, 9).

Throughout history, military innovation has thus reflected a seemingly perennial paradox (Farrell and Terriff 2002): on one hand, military organizations have been traditionally resistant to change, preserving tried-and-tested strategies and structures to foster continuity amid the prevailing process of institutionalization and the fact that the cost of error in the face of ubiquitous strategic uncertainty may be exceedingly high (Alberts 1996). On the other hand, militaries have recognized that failure to achieve advances in the ways and means of war may result in defeat and thus are motivated to seek developments that could revolutionize military operations (Pierce 2004). During the era of Napoleonic warfare, Carl von Clausewitz envisioned military innovation as a linear process of emulation and adaptation of effective practices on the battlefield: “If, in warfare, a certain means turns out to be highly effective, it will be used again; it will be copied by others and become fashionable, and so, backed by experience, it passes into general use and is included in the theory” (1984, 171). While Clausewitz did not explain how military learning may transcend from the battlefield into organizational practices, or why select armies learn while others do not, he noted that armies have at least three pathways to learn – historical examples (of self and others), personal battlefield experience, and the experience of other armies (Davidson 2011, 9).

Since then, historical and empirical evidence has shown a much broader variation in the sources, paths, and patterns of military innovation (Goldman and Eliason 2003): from development of new or different instruments (technology), practices (doctrines and operational concepts), to formation of new organizational force structures (Cheung, Mahnken, and Ross 2011, 77–80). Projecting the barriers to military innovation through different theoretical lenses yields different arguments on the appropriate mechanisms to overcome them. The ongoing debate can be structured into four major contending schools of thought: (1) civil–military conflict, (2) intraservice conflict, (3) interservice conflict, and (4) organizational culture (Grissom 2006, 907). The first three frameworks view MMI or disruptive innovation as a result of conflicts in decisive relationships – between civilian and military leaders, within services, or between services, while incremental innovation results from suppressing such conflicts. Barry Posen’s civil–military competition framework, integrates seemingly contrasting propositions of structural realist theory (balance of power) and organizational theory, arguing that external threats and civilian intervention are primary determinants of military innovation (Posen 1984). Posen views military organizations resisting change by design – as rational, functional, specialized bureaucracies, militaries have institutionalized vested interests to preserve their autonomy, size, and wealth while reducing operational uncertainties. As a result, military innovation can proceed through a direct combat experience with a new technology, major failure on the battlefield, and, most importantly, external civilian intervention forcing change in the military decision-making processes. In this context, civilian intervention is conditioned by the perennial insecurity and threat perceptions shaped by the anarchic structure of the international system. Civilian leaders interpret continuity and change in the security environment and react by modifying internal organizational, bureaucratic, and military commitments. When threat perceptions are low, civilian intervention and military innovation are incremental; when security threats are high, civilian leaders have a greater incentive to intervene and essentially impose major changes on the military. According to Posen (1984), the pathways for such intervention can be either direct or indirect, channeled through a link between civilian leaders and select “maverick” officers, who provide the civilian leadership with necessary military expertise and stimulate innovation within military organizations.

In contrast, proponents of intra-service competition model, such as Stephen Peter Rosen, argue that military innovation can be facilitated internally – between branches of the same service, without external civilian interference that often fails (Rosen 1991). According to Rosen, peacetime military innovation emanates from an ideological struggle for power between established and reform-oriented branches within a single service over competing visions of future warfare. Innovation diffuses through internal structural changes, which are gradual and evolutionary, altering the distribution of organizational power among competing organizational factions or subgroups and their preferences. Rosen argues that when intraservice competition between branches is high, innovation accelerates as a result of each branch trying to dominate the other. The essential mechanism for innovative military change is the determination and success of visionary senior officers or “product champions” advocating a new vision of future warfare and searching for allies and resources in reform-minded junior officers tasked to develop and experiment with innovative operational concepts, tactics, and techniques. In order to spearhead innovation, the senior officer “mavericks” open “promotional pathways” such as the establishment of new arms or branches of service for select junior officers, protecting them from political threats and internal struggles within the service, gradually enabling them to foster innovation, and ultimately empowering them to dominate the service. The process may take up to a decade, depending on the rate of junior officers’ promotions (Rosen 1991).

The third school of thought centers on inter-service competition, which has evolved from studies by Vincent Davis, Bradd Hayes, Owen Cote, and others (Davis 1967; Hayes and Smith 1994; Cote 1996). Its proponents acknowledge that if civilian intervention or intraservice competition may selectively accelerate military innovation by offering solutions for particular strategic or operational problems, so can interservice relations also moderate innovative effects through competitive and cooperative patterns. However, the dynamics of interservice conflict – between the military services within a state for new roles, missions, and resources – has a greater effect on innovation and can act alone and independently even in the presence of strong civilian and intraservice opposition (Cote 1996, 13–86). This is because military organizations are driven by professional ethos to provide security for the state under conditions of great uncertainty, which stimulates debate and amplifies both competition and cooperation between the services for scarce defense resources. Such interservice conflicts – that is, over the development of a new doctrine for the use or integration of a new technology, will be more intense and openly politicized than intraservice conflicts, resulting in greater spill-over effects into political decision-making arenas (Cote 1996, 91–94).

The fourth school of thought rejects military innovation as a result of conflicting relationships; it explains sources of military innovation through differences in strategic and organizational cultures – that is, distinctive, consistent, and persistent views on how states and their military organizations think about warfare. According to Dima Adamsky, “different cultures think differently about military innovation and produce various types of doctrinal outcomes from the same technological discontinuity” (2010, 1). In this view, military innovation is conditioned by different national “cognitive styles” – that is, strategic preferences, perceptions, ideas and knowledge, techniques and professional attributes and patterns of habitual behavior acquired over time within members of national strategic community. Theo Farrell defines military culture as “comprising those identities, norms and values that have been internalized by a military organization and frame the way the organization views the world, and its role and functions in it” (2008, 783). In other words, both cultural norms and professional traditions set the context for military innovation, fundamentally shaping organizational choices, preferences, and reactions to technological and strategic opportunities (Farrell 1998). Three select mechanisms may define this process: (1) senior leaders may plan and direct military organizations toward innovation through changes in strategic thought; (2) external shocks can trigger a process of cultural change; and (3) cross-national cultural norms can shape the paths and patterns of military emulation. Similarly, Elizabeth Kier (1997) argues that organizational culture shapes the direction and character of strategic thought of military leaders and, in doing so, state’s choices in military doctrine and innovation. At the same time, organizational culture can “play a critical role in determining how effectively organizations can learn from their own experiences” (Nagl 2002, 11). In short, strategic and organizational cultures can serve as both enabler and constraint of military innovation.

In this debate, however, the literature on military innovation has portrayed innovation largely through the argument of major military change by great powers in relation to existing ways of war. Stephen Peter Rosen, for example, conceptualized military innovation in the context of major “change that forces one of the primary combat arms of a service to change its concepts of operation and its relation to other combat arms, and to abandon or downgrade traditional missions. Such innovations involve a new way of war, with new ideas of how the components of the organization relate to each other and to the enemy, and new operational procedures conforming to those ideas” (1988, 134). Rosen (1991) differentiated between MMIs and technological innovations, with MMIs further subdivided into peacetime and wartime processes. Theo Farrell and Terry Terriff also distinguished MMIs, or “change in the [organizational] goals, actual strategies, and/or structure of a military organization,” and minor military innovations, or “changes in operational means and methods (technologies and tactics) that have no implications for organizational strategy or structure” (2002, 5). More recently, Michael Horowitz equated MMIs as “major changes in the conduct of warfare, relevant to leading military organizations, designed to increase the efficiency with which capabilities are converted to power” (2010, 22). Dima Adamsky too focused on disruptive military innovations through the lens of military-technical revolutions (MTRs) or revolutions in military affairs (RMAs), when “new organizational structures together with novel force deployment methods, usually but not always driven by new technologies, change the conduct of warfare” (2010, 1). Inherent in the above definitions has been a process of radical/disruptive change, a large-scale, RMA-oriented innovation defined by the synergy of technological change, military systems development, operational innovation, and organizational innovation (Krepinevich 1994, 30–43).

The debate on what constitutes military revolutions (MRs), RMAs, and MTRs in the broader context of military innovations has carved a significant path in strategic studies over the past two decades. Notwithstanding the often differing definitions and schools of thought that have evolved about each conceptual term, all have in essence reflected a “high strategic concept” synonymous with a “discontinuous” or “disruptive” military innovation in the character and conduct of warfare (Gray 2002, 1–27). Since its early inceptions as a MTR theory by Soviet strategic thinkers in the early 1980s to the broader contours of the U.S. Defense Transformation in the early 2000s, the underlying visions of future warfare have been anchored in an ongoing paradigm shift from the “industrial-age” toward twenty-first-century “information-age warfare” (Toffler and Toffler 1993, 27–64). In particular, three main arguments have defined the RMA drive: (1) the application of new information technologies into a significant number of military systems coupled with innovative operational concepts and organizational adaptation will fundamentally alter the character and conduct of warfare by producing a dramatic increase in the combat potential and overall military effectiveness (Krepinevich 1994, 30–43). (2) Attaining qualitatively new levels of military effectiveness that transcends marginal improvements will essentially mitigate the widening spectrum of security challenges of the twenty-first century, stipulated by the convergence of conventional, low-intensity, asymmetrical, and non-linear types of conflict (Cohen 1996; Mazarr 1994; Hundley 1999; Murray and Knox 2001). (3) States and military organizations adopting RMA-oriented concepts, advanced defense technologies, and relevant force structures will possess a considerable strategic advantage over those that do not (Mahnken and FitzSimonds 2003; Bitzinger 2008; Loo 2009).

At the forefront of the RMA-oriented conceptual, technological, and organizational military innovations over the past two decades has been the United States, with the world’s most sophisticated defense industrial base (DIB), resources, organizational and technological capacity to implement and actively exploit new technologies and concepts as new ways of war. The United States has taken the lead in conceptualizing visions of future wars while developing the next generation of precision-guided munitions (PGMs), intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) platforms, command, control, communications, computers, and information (C4I) systems, space-based intelligence assets, cyber capabilities, and integrating them with innovative “network-centric” operational concepts. The integration of “sensor to shooter” systems as “force multipliers,” including wide area of electronic sensors for long-range, all-weather target detection and acquisition, has been projected to enable near real-time situational awareness of the battlefield and, in doing so, mitigate the adverse effects traditionally synonymous with the fog of war – or the pervasive nature of uncertainty, ambiguity, fear, and friction of battle (Alberts, Garstka, and Stein 2000). The U.S. military would be then able to conduct rapid, stand-off, and precision strikes beyond the reach of enemy’s defenses. In theory, this would significantly mitigate the scope and magnitude of collateral damage, shorten the duration of conflicts, and also minimize combat casualty rates traditionally associated with high-intensity conventional wars. In doing so, U.S. forces would yield a decisive military advantage relative to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• About the author
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: debating military innovation and small states
• 2 The “six waves” of RMA theory, process, and debate
• 3 Creating a reverse asymmetry: military innovation concepts, issues, and debates in the IDF
• 4 Searching for security, autonomy, and independence: the challenge of military innovation in the ROK armed forces
• 5 A structured-phased evolution: the 3G+ force transformation of the SAF
• 6 Military innovation paths and patterns of small states: comparative assessments
• 7 Conclusion: theoretical and policy implications
• Index