Innovation, Transformation, and War
Innovation, Transformation, and War

Author: James Russell

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2010-12-15

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 0804777489

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Within a year of President George W. Bush announcing the end of major combat operations in Iraq in May 2003, dozens of attacks by insurgents had claimed hundreds of civilian and military lives. Through 2004 and 2005, accounts from returning veterans presaged an unfolding strategic debacle—potentially made worse by U.S. tactics being focused on extending conventionally oriented military operations rather than on adapting to the insurgency. By 2007, however, a sea change had taken place, and some U.S. units were integrating counterinsurgency tactics and full-spectrum operations to great effect. In the main, the government and the media cited three factors for having turned the tide on the battlefield: the promulgation of a new joint counterinsurgency doctrine, the "surge" in troop numbers, and the appointment of General David Petraeus as senior military commander. James Russell, however, contends that local security had already improved greatly in Anbar and Ninewah between 2005 and 2007 thanks to the innovative actions of brigade and company commanders—evidenced most notably in the turning of tribal leaders against Al Qaeda. In Innovation, Transformation, and War, he goes behind the headlines to reveal—through extensive field research and face-to-face interviews with military and civilian personnel of all ranks—how a group of Army and Marine Corps units successfully innovated in an unprecedented way: from the bottom up as well as from the top down. In the process they transformed themselves from organizations structured and trained for conventional military operations into ones with a unique array of capabilities for a full spectrum of combat operations. As well as telling an inspiring story, this book will be an invaluable reference for anyone tasked with driving innovation in any kind of complex organization.

Buying Military Transformation
Buying Military Transformation

Author: Peter J. Dombrowski

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 023113570X

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In Buying Military Transformation, Peter Dombrowski and Eugene Gholz analyze the United States military's ongoing effort to capitalize on information technology. New ideas about military doctrine derived from comparisons to Internet Age business practices can be implemented only if the military buys technologically innovative weapons systems. Buying Military Transformation examines how political and military leaders work with the defense industry to develop the small ships, unmanned aerial vehicles, advanced communications equipment, and systems-of-systems integration that will enable the new military format. Dombrowski and Gholz's analysis integrates the political relationship between the defense industry and Congress, the bureaucratic relationship between the firms and the military services, and the technical capabilities of different types of businesses. Many government officials and analysts believe that only entrepreneurial start-up firms or leaders in commercial information technology markets can produce the new, network-oriented military equipment. But Dombrowski and Gholz find that the existing defense industry will be best able to lead military-technology development, even for equipment modeled on the civilian Internet. The U.S. government is already spending billions of dollars each year on its "military transformation" program-money that could be easily misdirected and wasted if policymakers spend it on the wrong projects or work with the wrong firms. In addition to this practical implication, Buying Military Transformation offers key lessons for the theory of "Revolutions in Military Affairs." A series of military analysts have argued that major social and economic changes, like the shift from the Agricultural Age to the Industrial Age, inherently force related changes in the military. Buying Military Transformation undermines this technologically determinist claim: commercial innovation does not directly determine military innovation; instead, political leadership and military organizations choose the trajectory of defense investment. Militaries should invest in new technology in response to strategic threats and military leaders' professional judgments about the equipment needed to improve military effectiveness. Commercial technological progress by itself does not generate an imperative for military transformation. Clear, cogent, and engaging, Buying Military Transformation is essential reading for journalists, legislators, policymakers, and scholars.

The Culture of Military Innovation
The Culture of Military Innovation

Author: Dmitry (Dima) Adamsky

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2010-01-27

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 0804773807

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This book studies the impact of cultural factors on the course of military innovations. One would expect that countries accustomed to similar technologies would undergo analogous changes in their perception of and approach to warfare. However, the intellectual history of the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) in Russia, the US, and Israel indicates the opposite. The US developed technology and weaponry for about a decade without reconceptualizing the existing paradigm about the nature of warfare. Soviet 'new theory of victory' represented a conceptualization which chronologically preceded technological procurement. Israel was the first to utilize the weaponry on the battlefield, but was the last to develop a conceptual framework that acknowledged its revolutionary implications. Utilizing primary sources that had previously been completely inaccessible, and borrowing methods of analysis from political science, history, anthropology, and cognitive psychology, this book suggests a cultural explanation for this puzzling transformation in warfare. The Culture of Military Innovation offers a systematic, thorough, and unique analytical approach that may well be applicable in other perplexing strategic situations. Though framed in the context of specific historical experience, the insights of this book reveal important implications related to conventional, subconventional, and nonconventional security issues. It is therefore an ideal reference work for practitioners, scholars, teachers, and students of security studies.

Contemporary Military Innovation
Contemporary Military Innovation

Author: Dima Adamsky

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 231

ISBN-13: 0415523362

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This book explores contemporary military innovation, with a particular focus on the balance between anticipation and adaption. The volume examines contemporary military thought and the doctrine that evolved around the thesis of a transformation in the character of war. Known as the Information-Technology Revolution in Military Affairs (IT-RMA), this innovation served as an intellectual foundation for the US defence transformation from the 1990s onwards. Since the mid-1990s, professional ideas generated within the American defence milieu have been further disseminated to military communities across the globe, with huge impact on the conduct of warfare. With chapters written by leading scholars in this field, this work sheds light on RMAs in general and the IT-RMA in the US, in particular. The authors analyse how military practice and doctrines were developed on the basis of the IT-RMA ideas, how they were disseminated, and the implications of them in several countries and conflicts around the world. This book will be of much interest to students of strategic studies, defence studies, war and technology, and security studies in general.

The Challenge of Nation-Building
The Challenge of Nation-Building

Author: Rebecca Patterson

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2014-09-17

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 1442236957

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In the last decades, the United States Army has often been involved in missions other than conventional warfare. These include low-intensity conflicts, counterinsurgency operations, and nation-building efforts. Although non-conventional warfare represents the majority of missions executed in the past sixty years, the Army still primarily plans, organizes, and trains to fight conventional ground wars. Consequently, in the last ten years, there has been considerable criticism regarding the military’s inability to accomplish tasks other than conventional war. Failed states and the threat they represent cannot be ignored or solved with conventional military might. In order to adapt to this new reality, the U.S. Army must innovate. This text examines the conditions that have allowed or prevented the U.S. Army to innovate for nation-building effectively. By doing so, it shows how military leadership and civil-military relations have changed. Nation-building refers to a type of military occupation where the goal is regime change or survival, a large number of ground troops are deployed, and both military and civilian personnel are used in the political administration of an occupied country, with the goals of establishing a productive economy and a stable government. Such tasks have always been a challenge for the U.S. military, which is not normally equipped or trained to undertake them. Using military effectiveness as the measurement of innovative success, the book analyzes several U.S. nation-building cases, including post World War II Germany, South Korea from 1945-1950, the Vietnam War, and Operation Iraqi Freedom. By doing so, it reveals the conditions that enabled military innovation in one unique case (Germany) while explaining what prevented it in the others. This variation of effectiveness leads to examine prevailing military innovation theories, threat-based accounts, quality of military organizations, and civil-military relations. This text comes at a critical time as the U.S. military faces dwindling resources and tough choices about its force structure and mission orientation. It will add to the growing debate about the role of civilians, military reformers, and institutional factors in military innovation and effectiveness.

Contractors and War
Contractors and War

Author: Christopher Kinsey

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2012-07-25

Total Pages: 397

ISBN-13: 0804782938

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The U.S. military is no longer based on a Cold War self-sufficient model. Today's armed forces are a third smaller than they were during the Cold War, and yet are expected to do as much if not more than they did during those years. As a result, a transformation is occurring in the way the U.S. government expects the military to conduct operations—with much of that transformation contingent on the use of contractors to deliver support to the armed forces during military campaigns and afterwards. Contractors and War explains the reasons behind this transformation and evaluates how the private sector will shape and be shaped by future operations. The authors are drawn from a range of policy, legislative, military, legal, and academic backgrounds. They lay out the philosophical arguments supporting the use of contractors in combat and stabilization operations and present a spectrum of arguments that support and criticize emergent private sector roles. The book provides fresh policy guidance to those who will research, direct, and carry out future deployments.

The Dawn of Innovation
The Dawn of Innovation

Author: Charles R. Morris

Publisher:

Published: 2012-10-23

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 1586488287

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From the bestselling author of The Trillion Dollar Meltdown and The Tycoons comes the fascinating, panoramic story of the rise of American industry between the War of 1812 and the Civil War

Transforming Military Power since the Cold War
Transforming Military Power since the Cold War

Author: Theo Farrell

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2013-10-17

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 1107471494

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This book provides an authoritative account of how the US, British, and French armies have transformed since the end of the Cold War. All three armies have sought to respond to changes in their strategic and socio-technological environments by developing more expeditionary capable and networked forces. Drawing on extensive archival research, hundreds of interviews, and unprecedented access to official documents, the authors examine both the process and the outcomes of army transformation, and ask how organizational interests, emerging ideas, and key entrepreneurial leaders interact in shaping the direction of military change. They also explore how programs of army transformation change over time, as new technologies moved from research to development, and as lessons from operations were absorbed. In framing these issues, they draw on military innovation scholarship and, in addressing them, produce findings with general relevance for the study of how militaries innovate.