Over the past year, the U.S. Department of Defense has engaged in an effort to reinvigorate the aging and exhausted U.S. military by reassessing and reforming its strategic and tactical priorities. These reforms are far-reaching in nature, ranging from the strategic pivot to Asia, to personnel reforms aimed at creating a more adaptive “force of the future,” to investments in new, high-tech war-fighting platforms. A key piece in this suite of changes, and the most significant from an operational standpoint, is DoD’s “third offset strategy” — an initiative aimed in part at countering new anti-access area-denial (A2AD) capabilities with a range of new technologies. And as the recent FY2017 budget rollout has illustrated, this reform effort is starting to take shape.
The announcement of the third offset strategy has attracted much attention from within the defense policy community, and has been heralded by many as necessary for the United States to maintain its technological edge. And these efforts will no doubt result in significant benefits for the U.S. military. But this emphasis on innovation is not without its risks, many of which might be overlooked, underestimated, or even ignored in the excitement of a new defense initiative. Indeed, the tendency to equate technological innovation with positive change — perhaps the result of publicized successes in the private sector — often misses the myriad costs and challenges that accompany major overhauls of the kind announced by DoD.
A number of recent articles in WOTR’s Beyond Offset series have turned to U.S. history to highlight some of the costs that accompanied previous offset strategies, and the challenges that might flow from today’s efforts. In addition to revisiting these specific experiences, it may also be beneficial to take a step back to map the landscape more broadly. This article aims to infuse the conversation about military innovation with a realistic sense of the potential pitfalls to this endeavor, so these challenges can be better understood, anticipated, and corrected as the United States develops its future force. Here we identify five major costs to innovation that are important to acknowledge:
1. Effectiveness
Too often overlooked in conversations about innovation, both in the military and elsewhere, is the natural, predictable, and sometimes crippling tradeoff between innovation and effectiveness. In the business literature on innovation, this is often referred to as the explore-exploit dilemma. Put simply, organizations which are good at “exploring” (i.e. innovating), tend to make significant sacrifices in “exploitation” (i.e. everyday production and efficiency). In other words, the very things that make an organization good at innovating — nonhierarchical structures, hands-off management techniques, nontraditional professional development and rewards, etc. — can be liabilities when it comes to consistent execution. The holy grail is thus to balance exploration and exploitation, a feat which only a handful of businesses can claim to have achieved.
In the military, this challenge is doubly problematic. First, in a world of constrained resources, innovation and change in one area can often undermine the military’s ability to deliver on other mission sets. It should therefore come as little surprise that investments in the third offset may weaken our ability to successfully carry out other missions, and this trade-off should explicitly be part of the discussion. For example, after a decade of investing in counterinsurgency and unconventional warfare capabilities, the third offset may very well mean that these new skills are left to atrophy as resources move elsewhere.
Second, the explore-exploit tradeoff has costs that are far more consequential in the military than in the private sector. For the private sector, the success and failure of innovation is measured in dollars. For the military, success and failure is measured in battlefield effectiveness and, sometimes, lives. Thus, while investing in new technologies may leave Google or Amazon strapped for cash, the costs of shifting investment priorities in the defense community are on a different scale entirely. We therefore need to acknowledge and understand where innovation will make us stronger and where it will make us weaker, so we can avoid sending our troops into situations where they are ill-equipped for the task at hand.