The naval services continue to struggle with transformation because there is a lack of healthy interservice competition and because too many innovators are lost to the unified commands and the Joint Staff.
While most innovations fail, organizations that do not innovate die. Because of the trust that citizens place in it, failure is not an option for the military. Yet the manner in which senior naval leaders are managing innovation today will not lead to a major warfighting innovation.
This does not mean that our senior military leaders are failing to invest aggressively in new technologies. Nor does it imply that senior naval leaders lack the tools necessary to achieve innovation. In fact, the current managing approach may yield important incremental (even radical) technical innovations, some of which could have enormous impact on naval warfare. These radical technical innovations, however, will be sustaining in nature: they will improve the performance of established warfighting methods along an established trajectory that the services currently value.
For the U.S. military to undergo a real revolution in military affairs, it must change how innovation is managed—particularly disruptive architectural innovation. Architectural innovations change the way components are linked while leaving core design concepts (and the knowledge underlying them) untouched. A disruptive innovation results in a change in how a primary combat arm fights or in the creation of a new combat arm. For a disruptive innovation to occur, senior leaders must manage change in such a way that it forces the services to follow new trajectories of war fighting.
How do senior naval leaders manage disruptive innovations when they are engaged heavily around the world with traditional challenges and have to fight for budgets that support sustaining innovations? First, follow the operational model used successfully by past naval leaders to manage disruptive innovations. Second, understand the negative impact that jointness can have on the traditional naval innovation model. Jointness is here to stay, but its effects can be mitigated. Finally, move forward with actions suggested by the latest innovation theories to make the traditional naval innovation model viable in the era of jointness.
U.S. naval leaders manage technological advances in a manner reminiscent of senior French military leaders during the interwar period. The French prepared for war by building a technological wonder known as the Maginot Line. It involved an exponential improvement in sustaining technologies for various components of their established warfighting scheme, and it worked as designed. Its lethal turrets derailed all German advances in the fighting of May and June 1940. The French painfully learned, however, that applying new technologies in old ways seldom results in decisive (or desired) outcomes. By contrast, existing technologies, employed in new ways, can prove much more effective. This truism the Germans taught the French using the tactics of the Blitzkrieg. Employing the same kinds of equipment and technology available to the French, the German Army simply went around the Maginot Line in a maneuver not imagined by French military leaders.
The technologies pursued by today's naval leaders are similarly sustaining in nature. This results as much from the current budgeting system as from a lack of imagination. To get funded, new technologies must demonstrate how they support "Joint Vision 2010" and "Joint Vision 2020," documents that promote the U.S. version of the French methodical battle. Any foe stupid enough to take on the United States head-on will find its military as formidable as the Maginot Line. If, however, U.S. foes confront it with disruptive innovations (i.e., a new way of fighting using existing technologies), the U.S. military (including naval forces) will court the same kind of disaster that met the French when they encountered the Blitzkrieg.
Senior naval leaders need to recognize that their approach for managing innovations must concentrate as much on disruptive change as it does on sustaining change. They can foster disruptive innovation by adopting a three-part strategy:
- Establish and manage a nonpermanent organizational structure—a disruptive-innovation team—that serves as an incubator to help redefine the way the organization will perform its warfighting tasks. A disruptive-innovation team is a mechanism by which senior officers can translate new visions of warfare into doctrine and critical military tasks. As an illustration, Marine Corps Commandant General Ben Fuller established in 1933 a disruptive-innovation group comprised of four Marine majors and Navy Lieutenant Walter Ansel to develop the doctrine for amphibious warfare.
- Manage the political struggle that leads to the creation of new, stable career paths for younger officers who are committed to the new way of war and who will have the opportunity to advance to positions of senior command.
- Formulate and implement a successful strategy for gaining political control over the naval services. Senior naval officers should use their political power to ensure officers favoring the new way of war succeed them.
Fostering Disruptive Innovation
Studies support the notion that disruptive innovations result when senior leaders create, protect, and manage autonomous groups established for just such a purpose. Perhaps the best example was the original Strategic Studies Group established in 1981 by Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Thomas Hayward. The Strategic Studies Group contributed to the conceptual underpinnings for the emerging "Maritime Strategy." Recent examples include the ". . . From the Sea" disruptive-innovation group headed by Rear Admiral Ted Baker7 and the "Forward... From the Sea" group headed by then-Captain Joseph Sestak and Colonel James Laswell and managed by Vice Admiral Philip Quast (later by Rear Admiral Philip Dur) and General Anthony Zinni (later by Major General Thomas Wilkerson).
After establishing a disruptive-innovation group, senior naval leaders should be prepared to manage the results. Innovations are complex and their value and application are uncertain. They almost always result in outcomes that cannot be predicted fully in advance, making them vulnerable to opponents who support the current way of fighting. Consequently, leaders must manage the results differently from how they would a sustaining innovation. Disruptive innovations must be nurtured and protected from those who deem them a threat.
A disruptive innovation can sneak into an established market because industry leaders fail to recognize the threat until it is too late, whereupon it begins outperforming the established method. A disruptive military innovation is an architectural change whose utility is frequently controversial and in doubt until the moment it is proved in battle. Initially, senior military leaders reject a disruptive innovation because they cannot envision how the change will be used. Eventually, however, an opponent who employs a disruptive innovation defeats the military that rejected it.
Rather than the Maginot Line being a notorious metaphor for bungling, it should be understood as a sustaining innovation of ingenious engineering and technological accomplishment. It performed magnificently the mission it was given. Unfortunately, the mission was wrong. As Williamson Murray notes, the Allies facing the Germans in May 1940 possessed more tanks—almost 1.3 to 1—and many of the Allied tanks possessed superior protection and armament. While French engineers were able to push the limits of component technology, reliance on old doctrine (e.g., the role of the tank is to support the infantry) blinded them to the disruptive aspects of maneuver warfare. Consequently, they underestimated maneuver warfare's potential and failed to see how new interactions in component development could give them a decisive advantage. This failure of vision was one of the factors that permitted the Germans to exploit armored warfare. Militaries do not succumb to disruptive innovations because of a lack of foresight, but a lack of insight. They underestimate the role new disruptive innovations may play in future conflicts and choose to focus on developing the sustaining technologies.
Senior leaders who successfully have managed disruptive innovations found ways to blend them into traditional doctrine to ensure their innovations survived. Admiral William Moffett, for example, initially described the role of aircraft carriers as extended "eyes" for battleships. Reconnaissance was not the prize on which he fixed his gaze. Almost all product champions disguised their nascent disruptive innovations as sustaining until the innovations had matured.
Dealing with Jointness
Since the passage of the Goldwater-Nichols Defense Reorganization Act of 1986, jointness has pushed greater unification rather than seamless integration. While unification emphasizes a centralized staff that orchestrates a minuet of conformity favoring one or more dominant capabilities (currently, long-range precision strikes) achieved at the expense of service uniqueness, integration emphasizes the concept of improved procedures for combining the unique capabilities of the different services. Joint unification efforts have had two major negative effects on naval innovation: a decrease in competition and an increase in the number of bright officers serving out of the Navy and on the Joint Staff.
Jointness that fosters unification kills interservice competition. Several innovation scholars argue that interservice competition is the engine that drives disruptive innovation. A lack of service competition stimulates sustaining innovation but discourages disruptive innovation. Owen Cote conducted an extensive study of the effect of jointness on disruptive naval innovation. He demonstrated a strong causal link between innovation and intense interservice competition, arguing that the unification effects of jointness have dampened drastically major naval innovation efforts.
To illustrate Dr. Cote's point, one needs only to examine the failure of naval doctrine organizations to foster disruptive innovation. Admittedly, these organizations are based on good designs for fostering sustaining innovations. Since 1986 the naval services have emulated the joint approach and opted for greater centralization and bureaucratization of innovation, which has resulted in a substantial degree of institutional rigidity and no major military innovations. The most glaring failure was the Naval Doctrine Command, established in 1993 as a derivative of ". . . From the Sea," which never achieved any disruptive innovations. Its replacement, the Navy Warfare Development Command, is modeled on the Marine Corps Combat Development Command. Although both incorporate excellent organizational designs for sustaining innovations, they are incapable of producing a disruptive innovation. When Marine Commandant General Alfred Gray developed his maneuver warfare tenets into doctrine, he ignored the institutional rigidity of the service's doctrine department and set up a disruptive-innovation group that included Colonel Paul Van Riper and Lieutenant John Schmidt.
Stephen Rosen has posited, and a recent Rand Corporation study has confirmed, that naval innovation depends on senior officers to champion innovations and open friendly career paths for their adherents. The problem is that the officers the naval services traditionally have relied on to achieve disruptive innovations are now spending several years on the Joint Staff. While these officers are helping to articulate and defend the principles of sea power in the joint arena, they are having little to no impact on naval innovation. Take, for example, the careers of four naval reformers—Generals Anthony Zinni and Charles Wilhelm, Admiral William Owens, and Vice Admiral Arthur Cebrowski. The Marine Corps' two greatest proponents of maneuver warfare doctrine were Generals Zinni and Wilhelm. Unfortunately for the Marine Corps, both were promoted to unified command positions, where their influence on Marine Corps maneuver warfare effectively ended.
The same thing happened to the Navy. Admiral Owens spent his most productive senior years as Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, where his innovative concepts fell on deaf ears. Vice Admiral Cebrowski, the Navy's champion of network-centric warfare, spent several years on the Joint Staff as Director, N6 (staff officer for communications); although he recently completed his final active-duty tour as president of the Naval War College and commander of the Navy Warfare Development Command, the nascent disruptive innovations he championed there, such as Streetfighter, likely were not mature enough upon his retirement to be continued.
Creating and Managing Innovation
With the innovation engine sputtering (because of lack of interservice competition) and the innovation throttle stuck in idle (because potential reformers are serving on the Joint Staff), senior naval leaders continue to struggle with transformation. Still, they can prime the innovation engine by implementing several actions that could lead to disruptive innovation. First, they must establish and support an innovation team that is separate from the normal bureaucratic chain of command. The CNO's existing Strategic Studies Group could be the answer. Unfortunately, recent CNOs seem to have dismissed, ignored, or embargoed the Strategic Studies Group's ideas.
Senior naval leaders must free the funds for prototypes, demonstrators, and experiments that support transformation concepts. One way is to use a venture capital incubator model. Venture capital incubators in the business world are small, separate organizations established by parent organizations to nurture and grow start-ups. They are designed to generate an innovative spirit where experimentation and failure are expected, not penalized. Venture capital incubators would increase intraservice competition and could sow the seeds of disruptive innovation. Management of the incubators should be decentralized.
Conclusion
The problem of achieving disruptive innovation has nothing to do with naval leaders being overworked or lacking the desire to innovate. They are doing a good job of investing in technologies that support sustaining innovations. Jointness, however, with its rigid mandates and methodical warfighting doctrine, prevents them from using all available tools to achieve disruptive innovations. Recognizing the importance of establishing small innovation groups, senior leaders should consider alternatives such as establishing venture capital incubators to reestablish the innovation engine and serve as a throttle for achieving disruptive innovations.
Senior naval leaders can succeed in developing disruptive innovations. To do so, they must manage the naval services to meet the needs of jointness by supporting sustaining innovation, while simultaneously managing disruptive innovation for the naval services. If they cannot, or will not, critics will continue to blame them for not having the desire to change. It is not the desire to innovate that is lacking; it is the process.
Captain Pierce is Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations and Plans, Amphibious Forces, 7th Fleet, Okinawa, Japan. He holds doctorate and master’s degrees from the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. His doctoral thesis covered Navy and Marine Corps disruptive innovations from 1899 to 1999. He commanded the USS Whidbey Island (LSD-41) and was the speechwriter for Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Jeremy M. Boorda. The author wishes to thank Bradd Hayes for his thoughtful comments and assistance in adapting the Henderson and Clark model for naval innovation.