Dreams of victory: how military organizations select innovations based on warfighting culture & civilian strategic interest

Why do military organizations adopt some innovations and reject others? How do they balance their preferences against the strategic interests of their civilian leaders? Military organizations need to respond to changing strategic circumstances and new civilian demands, but they cherish warfighting practices consistent with their combat histories, doctrines, and values. This dissertation explores how these opposite pressures influence military receptiveness to new technologies and ideas. It develops and tests a model that explains military responses to innovations by combining research insights from organizational culture, bureaucratic politics, civil-military relations, and strategic theory. Two factors matter most: whether the innovation is congruent with a service’s dominant warfighting culture, and whether civilians take a keen interest. The model generates four potential outcomes based on the combination of these factors. They will accept, promote, reject or marginalize a new idea based on the balance of their cultural preferences with the level of civilian strategic interest. I test the model by process-tracing four historical case studies from the United States: the Army’s adoption of the 1st Cavalry Division (airmobile) (1953-1965), the Air Force’s promotion of the B-70 Valkyrie strategic bomber (1957-1964), the Navy’s rejection of Mobile Riverine Forces (1966-69), and the Marine Corps’ marginalization of Female Engagement Teams (2009-12).