Military Capability During Peacetime Innovation

William Pollard once said, "Learning and innovation go hand in hand. The arrogance of success is to think that what you did yesterday will be sufficient tomorrow." Maybe the generals of World War 1 (WW1) should have been told this when they used cavalry when they were outdated and rifles and machine guns were the weapons of this war. They found this out the hard way which sparked the time of technological innovations and changes that was WW1. The three technological innovations I will write about are machine guns, planes and tanks.

During the 1950’s we see an economic boom in America. A large amount of this growth has to do with the money made by Corporations with Military Contracts making goods and supplies for the United States Military. With the Cold War beginning the push for new invention in aviation, rocket propulsion, energy, and even automobiles was at the forefront of national defense. Industrial giants like Boeing, General Dynamics, and Raytheon received 60% if their income from the Defense Department. Ten percent of the domestic (GDP) was from military spending. With fears of falling behind the Soviet Union, gaining any edge in innovation was important. The government even funneled millions of dollars into American Universities for scholarships and research

In a 2015 article, “Is U.S. military becoming outdated?” written by Stuart Bradin, Keenan Yoho, and Meaghan Keeler-Pettigrew, the authors argued that despite the U.S. military maintaining a position of global dominance “without peer” during conventional operations, it is not the ideal force against current and future threats. The authors claim that there are several negative factors arising due to the past sixteen years of war against several state and non-state elements, inferior cultural differences of government bureaucracy compared to commercial firms, and a misallocation of defense spending that leaves the US military waging war inefficiently while simultaneously losing technological dominance against current and future threats.

“Technology had to be invented or adopted” (Diamond). Indeed, technology was not risen from nothing. They were originally people’s impractical ideas. With efforts and attempts, they were achieved and became true. Technologies often made lives more convenient and efficient. Just as human evolved from hominid, technologies had also advanced throughout history. Although the advancement might not seem significant in terms of decades, it gradually improved daily life of Americans. Throughout the course of technological advancement, World War II was usually marked as the turning point of technological advancement. It was known for its strong influences on dramatic changes in technology. Although World War II caused enormous casualty, the weaponry advancement advanced technology that could also be used in everyday life and thereby improved post war society.

The foreign policy strengths for the privatized combat role includes policy flexibility, force agility, and reduced political barriers. Policy flexibility is defined as the variety of options available and the scope in which they can be applied. The resulting collection of choices which may be mapped and compared to other choices can be referred to as the option space. In the case of the military, some of the policy options available can include mission types and the variety of roles from non-combat to combat. Force agility is defined as an armed force’s scalability, physical mobility, and adaptability. Force agility is mostly understood as a tactical level capability but the potential to provide agile capabilities can

Military innovation can occur at any moment as history and more importantly the conflicts that shape them runs their course. One can pontificate that the most significant innovation from all states, but particularly the Germans during the interwar period. On the eleventh hour, of the eleventh day, of the eleventh month in 1918, states across the globe were celebrating the end of the war to end all wars. However, on the contrary, Germany was on the other end of the spectrum trying to comprehend what happened in the previous four years that led to their current situation. Although World War I ended up as a disaster for the Germans resulting in the Treaty of Versailles, Germany valued their lessons learned which highly influenced their interwar

Events that occur in a society have a significant influence on the trajectory of innovation. During the cold war, the United States was in a heated competition against the Soviet Union. On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik into orbit, which had a significant impact on the American government. Hours after the launch, congress got together and determined that it would be necessary to increase funding for satellites, missiles and other projects that could help surpass Soviet capabilities (Lambright, 50). The government’s direct intervention helped spark innovation, but their motivation was not just about helping foster creativity. Political interests often nurture innovation. Many of the projects funded may not have directly dealt with security concerns, but they allowed technologies to be developed and tested. One of Jasik’s patents was used by the military in aircraft navigation. Jasik filed many patents that were implemented by the government for the purpose of national defense. Jasik did not set out to develop military technology, but the events of the time led the government to pursue ways of incorporating ideas in order to combat Soviet innovations.

First of all, if adversaries can exploit rapid advances in commercial electronics to run circles around America’s multi-billion dollar arsenal, our slow-moving procurement process needs to be more open to civilian innovation. But new technology is not enough.

The war and care of the place of the country is the main duty of the every military. Therefore, the military must have a ready side and weapons. Must be learn and keep up the technology to strengthen insights into the application of technology in military missions. This will create an advantage in maintaining the national interest.

Although there are many flaws in the advancement of military technology, researchers aren’t going to stop developing it because “the pluses of technology are too great” (Barnes, 2011). That being said, because of all the upside to the advancement of military technology and regular technology in

Strength and security has adapted to the technological developments of the past century. In comparison to how we derived strength and security in the past, technology now heavily obscures what makes us feel safe. Companies, realizing this, have produced several advertisements that sell their product by making it appear as if it will increase our safety and security. An effective example of this is in Mophie’s 2015 Super-bowl commercial titled “All Powerless,” where the creative producers linked having a charged phone with the safety and security found in everyday natural laws. The advertisement utilizes sound, shot composition, lighting, and mise en scene in order to distill a sense of both wonderful and terror in the viewer, while at the end providing an antidote to the fear they have created. The antidote is, of course, Mophie’s product which allows cell phones to stayed charged for longer.

This process of developing tactics to most efficiently utilize a weapons system is not restricted to new weapons. Napoleons identification and development of light mobile cannon is a case in point. He determined a need, the technology was created and then Napoleon devised a new set of tactics, massed canon fire, with which to best exploit the characteristics of the new weapon. Once a new weapon is introduced and effective tactics are designed for its operational employment, there is an understandably urgent requirement for the opposing force to develop some form of defence against it. This is generally done in two ways. Firstly the opposing Army must adapt its tactics in order to minimize its vulnerability and secondly they must develop a countering technology that will neutralize the new threat.

Independent investors, designers, architects along with many autonomous organizations used to play an important role in developing skyscrapers, synthetic dyes, electricity and other household technologies in the earlier years, but the military set its stamp from the start of the industrial era (Misa, pg. 251). The technologies produced by the military such as computer chips, nuclear power, artificial intelligence, Internet, etc. gave the world a kick-start in the field of modern technology (Misa, pg. 251). The Apollo Missions between the years 1969 and 1972 were possible only due to the military derived rockets; even the space shuttles missions were successful due to the satellites positioned by the military (Misa, pg. 251). Highly advanced technological companies such as IBM, Boeing, Lockheed, MIT, Raytheon, etc. too were being funded by the military (Misa, pg. 251). This ongoing state of economic affair during the industrial era was termed as Pentagon capitalism by an industrial engineer named Seymour Melman (Misa, pg. 251). According to him, it was a really gloomy time because the capitalism went from being ‘profit maximizing’ to ‘contract maximizing’ (Misa, pg. 251). Furthermore the 20th century saw the universities as well as companies, government foundations and all military services knee deep into finding and funding new technologies (Misa, pg. 252). This was being done in the hope of

The United States, however, is less inclined to participate in international collaborations, and to date, only a small portion of the overall defence budget is allocated to cooperative projects. This is due to a number of factors. First and foremost, the U.S. has an established and robust military equipment manufacturing industry, that has the capability and capacity to meet the needs of domestic consumption without having to augment production with foreign assistance. Secondly, the enormous U.S. military budget means that the country is under less pressure than its European counterparts to find efficiencies in production. Another factor contributing to its isolation is concerns related to maintaining control and secrecy over military technological innovation. The U.S. understands that, despite its advantages, collaboration can result in a loss of control. Despite this, the U.S. does participate in some international collaboration. For example, the U.S. and Japan have continually collaborated on a number of projects over the past three decades, and they still have a number of co-production agreements in place today (Mehta, 2015).

The connection between military expenditure and economic growth has been analyzed from several perspectives, at the industrial, national and private-sector firm levels. Other issues have been researched, such as relationships between civilian and defence research and development and the potential for development of scientific and engineering