Dangerous changes: when military innovation harms combat effectiveness/ Kendrick Kuo

Prevailing wisdom suggests that innovation dramatically enhances the effectiveness of a state's armed forces. But self-defeating innovation is more likely to occur when a military service's growing security commitments outstrip shrinking resources. This wide commitment-resource gap pressures the service to make desperate gambles on new capabilities to meet overly ambitious goals while cannibalizing traditional capabilities before beliefs about the effectiveness of new ones are justified. Doing so increases the chances that when wartime comes, the service will discover that the new capability cannot alone accomplish assigned missions, and that neglecting traditional capabilities produces vulnerabilities that the enemy can exploit.

MILITARY