Disruptive innovations to help protect against future threats

Abstract

Innovation is back in vogue within the U.S. military. In the face of defense spending cuts and reductions in military manpower after prolonged campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. is turning once again to developing key technologies to offset its quantitative inferiority in conventional forces. The U.S. has pursued this offset strategy twice before—the first time was in the 1950s with nuclear deterrence countering the numerically superior armament and fighting forces of the Warsaw Pact, and the second time was in the 1970s with DARPA-led efforts to gain technological superiority from enhanced intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, precision-guided weapons, stealth technology, and space-based communications and navigation. The current Third Offset Strategy targets many promising innovations including robotics and autonomous systems, miniaturization, big data, and advanced manufacturing. The U.S. military has even created a number of new organizations such as the Army Cyber Institute to explore high-tech innovation and the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental to expedite the transfer of cuttingedge technology to warfighters. Nonetheless, some critics believe the U.S. military is such an unwieldy bureaucracy that it lacks the nimbleness to transform into a force that can win tomorrow’s wars—particularly in cyberspace. These critics also note that most of the innovation the U.S. currently seeks come from groundbreaking research—the type of innovation that is expensive to develop. This paper proposes that by adding disruptive innovations—the type of innovation that tends to be cheaper and less technologically complex—into its R&D portfolio mix, the U.S. military will not only strengthen its offset strategy, it will also better protect itself from future threats by reducing the likelihood of strategic surprise. In this paper, we review Christensen and Bower’s disruptive technologies framework, illuminate successful disruptive innovations in military history, and provide insights into how the U.S. can foster disruptive innovation.