Military Innovation on the Global Stage

One of the central elements in military affairs for millennia has been the game of “catch-up.” When the military of one empire or state develops a new technology or finds more effective ways of making battle, it might win a temporary advantage over potential enemies. But before long, those rivals will have adopted similar weapons and/or tactics and organization, and the advantage evaporates. These are military revolutions, such as Alexander the Great’s Macedonian infantry line with their heavy spears, or the Roman legionary box with its javelins and short swords, or more recently the adoption of the air-tank combination that saw German armies initially triumph in World War II.

Andrew Krepinevich, a former soldier, now an analyst of contemporary strategy, calls these military revolutions “disruptive military innovation.” They are disruptive because they challenge conventional military doctrine or render obsolete conventional weaponry, but they soon become the new norm as other military establishments hurry to imitate. German air-tank warfare is a good example. Initially successful in Poland, France, the Balkans, and the first stage of the invasion of the Soviet Union, by the end of the war the Allied powers had all adopted the same battlefield posture, but with massively more aircraft and tanks. It is this situation of disruption and imitation that exists in the 21st century, and it forms the core of this intelligent and perceptive elaboration of the current disruptive military innovation. 

Krepinevich divides his book in two. The first half deals with the past 30 years, when the disruptive innovation has been the “precision warfare revolution.” The second half explores four historical examples of innovation from the past century: the introduction of fast, heavily gunned battleships by the Royal Navy before World War I; the German use of air-tank battle; the U.S. Navy’s introduction of fleet carrier warfare in the Pacific against Japan; and, finally, the American shift that began after Vietnam away from mass bombing and boots on the ground to precision warfare based on what is now called the “reconnaissance-strike complex.” The historical examples take up a large part of the book because Krepinevich is keen to understand what it is that explains the onset and establishment of innovative warfare, in order to illustrate what should be done today.

It is Part I of the book that will attract the greater attention. The historical examples are explored effectively enough, and at length, but they are useful to only a limited degree when trying to understand what has driven and is driving the precision warfare revolution. For the general reader it is this initial narrative that matters, because the ongoing revolution poses a range of possible warfighting scenarios that have potentially disastrous consequences, even putting aside the use of nuclear weapons. The disruptive innovation began in the 1970s and 1980s with the electronic revolution that made possible the development of the electronic battlefield with accurate assessment of targets, precision-guided weaponry, and integrated communication and control. The first use occurred in the Gulf War of 1991, but Krepinevich points out that only 10 percent of the American missiles and bombs were precision guided in that campaign; by the 2003 Gulf War, the percentage had risen to 60 percent. Significantly, some 85 percent of the damage inflicted in 1991 came from precision weaponry. 

Since then, the pace of change has been exponential as the science has expanded. In the past 20 years, the shift to precision has been followed by the United States’s major international rivals, China and Russia. The possibility of cyberwarfare and warfare in space, neither possible 20 years ago on any scale, is transforming the nature of military competition. The United States has understandably been coy about its advanced package of weaponry and electronic hardware, and the way it might be used, but the Russians and Chinese have not. Krepinevich discusses the Chinese strategy documents that lay out plans for the “reconnaissance-strike” capability of the Chinese army, which depends entirely on catching up with what the United States pioneered in the 1990s. The Russians, too, have been quick to shift from an old-fashioned view of warfare—which failed in Afghanistan in the 1980s—to the new precision complex. The wide gap that existed between the United States and the others in the brief unipolar moment after the collapse of the Soviet Union has narrowed. As with earlier examples of disruptive innovation, China and Russia have caught up rapidly to avoid American global dominance.

Not only have they caught up, but Krepinevich paints a menacing picture of the new areas in which China in particular is experimenting, using artificial intelligence (AI), anti-satellite space war, hypersonic missiles, and cyberwar. Russia has already begun to use some of this package in the war in Ukraine. Krepinevich is not quite clear if these new applications are yet another military revolution or an extension of the existing one, but they represent a threat to the Western world if they are not matched or exceeded. China has conducted anti-satellite exercises in space for some years now, and destruction of the satellite communications that govern American military activity would at a stroke disable China’s main rival in the Western Pacific. Putin is on record for saying, according to Krepinevich, that the state that first adopts AI for military purposes “will rule the world.” This seems unlikely, but it signals that in this area Russia is striving to match or overtake the United States.

The problem is not simply that the precision warfare revolution is being adopted by states that can afford it (and most cannot) but also that the geopolitical configuration has shifted. From unipolar power in the 1990s, the United States now looks out at a multipolar world, with at least nine nuclear powers and multiple sources of crisis. Krepinevich is scathing about the current failure of the American military establishment to find an operational concept, or rather several concepts, to define likely conflicts and how to respond to them in anticipation. He points out that the focus on the war on terror and counterinsurgency, both conducted using modern materiel and reconnaissance, has made the United States less flexible in coping with much larger potential threats in East Asia or Europe. A multipolar, multi-crisis world is, of course, difficult to embrace in terms of contingency planning or operational thinking, exactly the problem facing the British and French in the 1930s. Their solution in the end was to define the greatest threat, Hitler’s Germany, and to fight that in the hope that a stable global order would result from victory. It eventually did, but not the order that Britain or France had in mind in 1939.

No major state wants to fight World War III. It is a zero-sum game, as it was during the Cold War. But Krepinevich argues that deterrence, which worked more or less successfully during the American-Soviet standoff, is now difficult to exploit when there are numerous states that need to be deterred. But there has to be some way to ensure that major war can be avoided. Nuclear weapons probably still play a deterrent role, though it is evident that states still imagine conducting non-nuclear war and need to be deterred from that. China’s strategic concept seems to include building such an impressive array of “reconnaissance-strike” capabilities in the Western Pacific that it is the United States, or Japan, that ought to be deterred. It may be that the military might of the United States, still the world’s biggest spender on the military, will be sufficient in the current competitive situation to deter some states, but the problem is always what happens when deterrence has no effect. In 1939, that was the point at which the British and French chose war when Hitler would not be deterred. In a reverse scenario, the Japanese were not deterred by American sanctions in 1941 but instead chose to confront that threat with military action. 

What clearly did not work was the ability of the United States to use its large lead in the precision warfare revolution to ensure that there would be no serious challenge to that position. The game of catch-up began almost simultaneously, and that lead, as far as it is possible to judge, is now slender at best. The temptation is to reach for the Power Transition Theory to show how the American hegemon will be overtaken by the Chinese challenger and war may result from the one trying to hold on to global power, the other trying to usurp it. This still seems an unlikely outcome. It is more likely that there will come a period of rough balance as the current military revolution plays out. It is hard to imagine what the next might look like. Militaries everywhere have pushed to the limits; every domain, as Krepinevich points out, is now a field for potential conflict—the ether, space, undersea. The next step might be to real science fiction, with robot armies and laser death rays, but whether even this would now be disruptive innovation is hard to judge.

Should all this produce collective anxiety about an unpredictable future with modern war always an option and current reliance on electronic communications appearing increasingly fragile? It is here that Krepinevich brings in the historical examples to show what happened in recent cases of disruptive innovation and to test the United States against the model. The history is, unsurprisingly, far from clear-cut. Britain’s introduction of the Dreadnought-class battleship during World War I reinforced the Royal Navy’s existing predominance, but the result was the indecisive battle at Jutland in 1916, which scarcely demonstrated the battleship’s predicted transformative role. The large battleship was doomed. The sinking of the Prince of Wales by Japanese aircraft in December 1941 symbolized its demise. The German development of air-armour battle in the 1930s derived from lessons in World War I that all combatants could have learned, but the German lead was very short term and soon imitated. The real revolution of guided weapons, rockets, and cruise missiles—all developed by the Germans during the war—did them no good. The American development of fleet-carrier battle imitated the Japanese, who had a carrier fleet at Midway, only to see it destroyed by dive bombers. And carriers in the end were only part of the story; the evolution of a sophisticated amphibious operational capability was arguably a major innovation, though it was used sparingly thereafter. It was also necessary to supply the new technology in large numbers to ensure success, rather than just innovate, as Jeffrey Ding has argued recently in his book “Technology and the Rise of Great Powers.” But what all these innovations needed for success above all, argues Krepinevich, were original thinkers and a clear operational concept, and it is those things he sees lacking in the current U.S. military establishment. 

The United States needs to define the principal challenges and assign priorities for dealing with them. This institutional context for ensuring military effectiveness chimes with the argument presented by Risa Brooks and Elizabeth Stanley in their 2007 book on “Creating Military Power.” Yet one of the things Krepinevich’s book does is to remind the reader just how immensely complicated it is to double-guess the intentions of others and to deal with a wide array of scientifically sophisticated capabilities to make sure the right ones are given preference. Planning warfighting has almost certainly never been more challenging. It is at this point useful to ask whether the capabilities Krepinevich describes are certain to work. One of the lessons from past innovation is the messy nature of battle once war has started. Nothing is certain, and not everything will perform as it should. A telling example is the current war Russia is waging against Ukraine. Despite all the drones (whose accuracy is in all too many cases wayward), hypersonic missiles, and state-of-the-art aviation that Russia has fielded, the war quickly became a slogging match using infantry, artillery, and tanks (which have continued to display their vulnerability). Images of Mariupol hardly illustrate precision warfare, except perhaps in the sense of the 1945 headquarters of Gen. Curtis LeMay, who described the destruction of Japanese cities as “precision incendiary bombing.” The Russian army has taken high field casualties but is in turn inflicting heavy casualties on the Ukrainian civilian population—more like World War II than disruptively innovative.

Israel’s war against Hamas and Hezbollah has followed a similar course. “Precise strikes” seems at best a euphemism when 44,000 people (currently) have been killed. Modern surveillance has helped track leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah, but the price has been massive civilian destruction. The inhabitants of the Gaza Strip would be hard put to see the difference between the “precision” warfare of the Israel Defense Forces and the carpet-bombing of World War II. There is no way of judging whether the precision-warfare profile of the Russian and Israeli armed forces works, but in neither case has it resulted in a quick result or as yet brought anything that could be described unequivocally as victory. Krepinevich emphasizes throughout the discussion of the current warfare revolution that speed and surprise are essential to potential success, but in neither of these examples of actual current warfare have these characteristics been demonstrated. If major war were to break out, there will be the unexpected, the incompetent, the technical failures, and the hurried planning that are common once actual combat is joined. Carl von Clausewitz’s “friction of war” is just as likely in the 21st century as it was in the 19th.

One question Krepinevich does not really pose is why the major states are so keen to continue to push forward the threshold of military capability, to remain one critical step or two ahead. Or why scientists and engineers can so easily be persuaded worldwide to help to push that threshold forward. It would make more sense to scale down the research and production, to find ways of collaborating instead of competing, to stop the clock. The issue is security. No state, even those that have no desire to make war, can afford to lag behind. For all the criticism leveled at “neo-realism,” the pursuit of military advantage and a state of continuous vigilance still characterizes the global order. Otherwise, a book like this would not be necessary. Krepinevich, rightly, has scant time for the idea that states today can rely on the rationality of the actors involved in making geopolitical and military decisions, and history is certainly on his side. This is not an optimistic outlook. For anyone who wants to know what we should feel pessimistic about, Krepinevich is a sure and scrupulous guide.