Bring Back Disruptive Thinkers and Radical Ideas

For almost two decades leading up to World War II, a group of Army Air Corps mavericks known as the Bomber Mafia challenged the long-held belief that the sole purpose of Army aircraft was to support the infantry. Their concept—daylight, high-altitude, precision bombing—led to the eventual development of advanced systems such as the B-29 Superfortress equipped with the Norden bombsight and gave the Allies a strategic advantage. While the newsreels flashed images of those shining examples of U.S. industrial might, the key to the Bomber Mafia’s success was a radical idea.

The Navy’s original grassroots innovation efforts focused heavily on radical ideas and finding talent able to think in an agile, innovative way. Disruptive Thinkers, founded in 2011 by a SEAL and an F-18 pilot, later became the Chief of Naval Operations’ Rapid Innovation Cell, which in turn became DIUx. While material solutions emerged from Disruptive Thinkers, its focus was always on learning and ideas.

Navy-wide forums such as Disruptive Thinkers foster “double loop learning”—not simply making small adjustments but questioning overall policies and strategy.³ Former Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Mike Gilday described this type of behavior in an address at the 2022 Surface Navy Association Symposium:

History shows the navy which adapts, learns, and improves the fastest gains an enduring warfighting advantage. The essential element is fostering an ecosystem—a culture—that assesses, corrects, and innovates better than the opposition.

Adapting, learning, and improving are behaviors that come from ideas. In some cases, ideas turn into requirements, which turn into new capabilities, but, in every instance, the provenance of the warfighting advantage is a radical idea. 

The Navy’s innovation units have lost sight of the power of ideas and should bring back a Navy-wide forum such as Disruptive Thinkers. A first step might be to encourage TEDx-like events within each warfare community (at the appropriate classification levels). Sticky ideas could make their way to a larger forum hosted annually by the Naval Postgraduate School, home of the Naval Innovation Center, or NavalX. Like the Disruptive Thinkers events, these forums would be open to civilians in industry and academia. With the right structure, these discussions might help inform the Navy’s resourcing decisions or lead to the development of Small Business Innovation Research programs or Cooperative Research and Development Agreements.

An Atlantic Council report notes that “the United States does not have an innovation problem, but rather an innovation adoption problem” (emphasis in the original).⁴ However, venture capitalists have long had a name for this phenomenon: SISP—solutions in search of a problem. Developing an innovative technology does not necessarily mean it will solve a specific problem for a specific customer.⁵ Innovation units typically have plenty of “whats” but not enough “whys.” These units, with a few exceptions, mostly have produced only marginal, peripheral gains because of a focus on new technology without a clear vision guided by a radical idea. Innovation units seem to be tuned to produce “unresourced” gadgets that rarely transition into real warfighting capabilities.

Today’s naval innovation units could provide greater value to the Navy by cultivating an ecosystem that encourages the discussion of radical ideas, not just ways to shortcut the defense acquisition process to develop and procure new technology. In future conflicts, sailors and Marines no doubt will rapidly develop innovative workarounds to technological gaps. Right now, however, the Navy needs ideas to maintain its war-fighting advantage and should reenergize a forum such as Disruptive Thinkers to continue adapting, learning, and improving.