The next war is an innovation war
What the Strategic Defence Review needs to understand about technological change
“The story of who innovates and why is critical to understanding patterns of warfare and transitions of power in the international system.”
Horowitz and Pindyck, 2022
With the UK's Strategic Defence Review under way, who guides military innovation, to what ends and at what pace, should be a live issue for policymakers. Because the answers are not obvious.
The Ministry of Defence has an alphabet soup of institutions - DE&S, DSTL and DASA - that are supposed direct technological innovation to military ends, through their relationships with prime defence corporations and startups.
But both academic research and evidence from Ukraine suggest that the real drivers of innovation are the grassroots practitioners, and that the pace of technological change is diverging from the pace of organisational response.
In this edition of Conflict & Democracy I will suggest how the SDR - once it looks beyond capability gaps and procurement catastrophes - should approach the question: how do we win the innovation war?
As with all my contributions to the SDR, there are three premises:
The UK will be involved in a peer-vs-peer conflict before 2030, and needs to deter aggression on this timescale;
It needs to spend a lot more on Defence now, but in a different way and on different stuff;
It needs to revolutionise everything in the pre-conflict phase, in order to revolutionise it all over again during the conflict itself, as the condition for victory.
What is military innovation?
Military innovation is a widely studied academic field with competing definitions, which has generally focused on big, strategic changes - where new technologies and new doctrines combine together to significantly alter the practice of warfare.
Some scholars stress changes driven at the level of tactics and organisation (e.g. Blitzkrieg); others stress change driven by technology (e.g. the German 88mm flak gun and its use as an anti-tank weapon). Those who focus on organisation (eg Grissom 2006) suggest four potential drivers of innovation:
Civilian leadership ("we need an atomic bomb"),
Inter-service rivalry ("the army needs to regain control from the navy over what gets targeted")
Intra-service problem solving ("the infantry needs need a vehicle that can attack trenches")
Service culture ("we need to justify our existence by doing something new")
Most analysts assume that, once a military innovation is successful, it will be "diffused" - not just throughout the friendly force, but will be copied by the adversary at lower cost, enabling its geopolitical catch-up.
If the change is big enough, it gets labelled as a full-scale "revolution in military affairs" (RMA) - as, for example, with the USA's adoption of the AirLand Battle concept of manoeuvre warfare in the 1980s, or the Dutch-Swedish tactical reforms of the 17th century.
However, what the SDR needs to think about is not "how did innovation happen in the past", but how it should happen for the rest of the decade, and why it's not happening to plan right now.
To help shape that discussion I want to propose four hypotheses:
We do not know, and will not know for a while, the true shape of the RMA that has been triggered by autonomy and artificial intelligence. What we do know is that the next war will be an "innovation war": the winner will be the side that innovates fastest under the pressure of conflict.
Even if the top-down model of military innovation was valid for the analogue past, all anecdotal evidence about the digital present suggests that innovation will be driven from the bottom up.
Information technology creates a fissure between the pace of technological innovation and the pace of organisational, tactical and doctrinal innovation: the side manages this best is likely to win.
All stakeholders in the military innovation process - politicians, corporations, commanders and combatants - need to focus on systems, not specific platforms or effects, as the primary object of analysis.
GCAP as a case study
To explore these assumptions, let's take the case of Global Air Combat Programme, which has suddenly hit the news because it's getting briefed against by people who say the project is too expensive, or has the wrong kind of airframe, or is the wrong solution because it's crewed etc.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Conflict & Democracy to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.