Innovation in War
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| MQ-9 Reaper via Wikimedia Commons |
Because we live in the age of Apple and Google, we don’t immediately associate war with innovation. Yet the primeval urge to conquer and survive has always been a propulsive force for human invention. This close relationship holds not only for spears and crossbows and canon, but also for the jet engine, space flight, the internet, and the modern nation-state. Even “don’t be evil” Silicon Valley was built around defense enterprises funded by the Pentagon. Still, the relatively urbane combat of firms can also help to explain innovation in the world of war.
Why firms? We like to think of solitary inventors toiling away, Edison-like, in their garages, to design the perfect light bulb or the optimal search engine. Innovators have clever ideas and the will and vision to survive adversity. But they need teams of engineers, scientists, workers, and managers to hone an idea into a tool to change the world.
Edison, who wrote, “I tested no fewer than 6,000 vegetable growths, and ransacked the world for the most suitable filament material," was actually heading the world’s first multipurpose R&D lab, leading a staff of 40 scientists and technicians. In much the same way, Steve Jobs gets too much credit for Apple’s pearlescent little devices. Innovation is a cooperative endeavor. And firms are crucial for reducing the transaction costs of collaborating to create a product.
Some firms are more innovative than others. Smaller, more inventive firms often weaken and dismantle flat-footed market behemoths. Clayton Christensen, a professor of business at Harvard, has done a great deal of thinking about how and why this happens, and he has reached a deeply counterintuitive conclusion.
The technologies that dethrone seemingly invincible market leaders are often inferior. But stripped of the frills and high margins of existing products, they are cheaper and easier to use. Small pockets of customers buy these low-quality products. The new technologies improve over time, and the greedy new pretenders move steadily up the value chain, seizing an ever larger share of the market in the process. Christensen’s cases indicate that the incumbent is usually unable to overcome organizational inertia. Before he is ever really able to change course and vanquish his now full-grown challengers, the king is dead. Long live the new king.
Christensen’s book, “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” has many examples illustrating this phenomenon. One of them is from the Hard Disk Drive industry. The established firms always led in adopting sustaining innovations (new materials in disks and heads for example) that improved measurable elements of performance like capacity and speed. Many of these technologies were “risky, complex, and expensive.” The incumbents were not toppled because “they became passive, arrogant, or risk-averse or because they couldn't keep up with the stunning rate of technological change.”
They failed because they couldn’t anticipate disruptive innovations. These simple reconfigurations of existing technologies allowed hard disks to shrink. The diameter of drives went from 14 inches to 8, 5.25, and 3.5-inches, and later from 2.5 to 1.8 inches. The smaller disks were worse in terms of capacity, cost per megabyte, and access time. But they were smaller. And cheaper. And in the early 1980s, the doomed monarchs didn’t know that this is what would count in the still dim and unseen future of a computer on every desktop.
Christensen doesn’t discuss this example in his book (which was first published in 1997), but a similar process is at work in the more savage business of war. Every few days now, a missile streaks from an unmanned aerial vehicle and destroys a target chosen by the CIA. Each blast signals a new era of war-fighting.
The US’s covert drone program took its current form under President Bush, and has been vastly accelerated by President Obama, who has ordered close to three hundred strikes, mostly in the borderlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan, but also in Yemen, Somalia and Iraq. No one knows how many people have been killed, but estimates put the number at well over 2,000.
The ethical questions surrounding drone strikes are profound. People are being executed without trial by a killing machine piloted by someone thousands of miles away. Yet, perversely, the horrific cost borne by civilian victims of drone strikes may be a preferable alternative to the carpet bombing campaigns carried out by the US in places like Cambodia, Vietnam, and Serbia. There are no easy answers.
At the end of May, 2012, the US had lost 4,409 troops in Iraq and nearly 2,000 in Afghanistan. Its casualties numbered close to 60,000 in Vietnam and 40,000 in the Korean War. These numbers reflect the conventional superiority of the US, and the smaller footprint with which it has fought its recent wars. They also bespeak the US’s great aversion to risking the lives of its ground troops, airmen, and sailors today.
Even as it has grown less tolerant of casualties, the US has sought to pursue insurgents opposed to its interests in unfriendly territory across the world. Drones have flown into this breach. Their pilots drive to facilities in the US itself, complete missions, and return home to their wives and children.
Unburdened by the physiological constraints facing human pilots, drones can fly for hours and days, quietly watching the ground through high resolution cameras. At first, they were mostly used as surveillance aircraft. The US was haunted by wily, determined opponents in Iraq and Afghanistan. The drones were relatively cheap, easy to use, and minimized physical contact between US troops and their hidden adversaries. But like the smaller size drives that shook the hard disk industry, the unmanned aircraft have become ever more capable.
“Predator” drones are now armed with supersonic Hellfire missiles, transforming them into quiet, stealthy agents of sudden death. Loitering over their targets for hours, they can gather information and confirm their kills. The avionics, speed, endurance, and agility of drones have steadily advanced. The “Reaper,” with a sixty-six foot wingspan, can fly three times faster, nine times further, and carry fifteen times more ordinance than its predecessor. The autonomy of unmanned aircraft can only rise in the future, shrinking the role of distant human pilots.
Major components of the US’s military arsenal that are optimized for human operators will soon be obsolete. Each of the US’s fifth generation F-22 fighters cost $150 million. They are said to be the most capable tactical fighter jets to have ever been built. But they cannot do the unique type of mission currently performed by drones that cost a few million dollars.
The New York Air National Guard 174th Fighter Wing is the first fighter squadron to become an all-unmanned combat air vehicle (UCAV) attack squadron. It replaced its F-16 fighters with Reapers. By March 2011, the US Air Force was training more pilots for unmanned aircraft than for any other single weapons system.
The great wave of automation that has washed over every corner of the world economy is now breaking over the battlefield. Like planes, ships and tanks will also be piloted remotely and then grow ever more autonomous. Faced with the breathtaking pace of innovation, the powerful incumbents in the business of war will need to adapt rapidly. This is true not only for Lockheed Martin and BAE Systems, but also for the United States, Europe, China, and Russia.