The defense innovation machine: Why the U.S. will remain on the cutting edge

ABSTRACT

American security policy discussions commonly warn that the United States is falling behind technologically, especially vis-à-vis China. However, the U.S. military remains at the cutting edge because of its well-developed defense innovation system. No nation (or combination) comes close to U.S. investment in defense R&D. Unmatched political concerns about avoiding casualties, inherent rivalry among participants in the U.S. defense innovation system, and traditional American openness to immigration and new ideas drive the investment. The overly alarmist warnings come from a thriving threat assessment system that continually searches for potential military dangers and technological challenges. The warnings feed the defense innovation system.

KEYWORDS:

• Defense innovation
• United States
• military
• China
• R&D

The United States is the most powerful nation in the world.¹ It has the most powerful military, the biggest economy, and the most dominating culture. It is the world’s leader in science, engineering, and medicine. Its universities are the most admired. Its corporations are the richest and most successful. People eat Big Macs, drink Coca Cola, fly on Boeings, use their iPhones, and watch Hollywood movies around the globe. Everyone knows the name of the American president, what the CIA does, and who you should call if there is trouble on your border.

The United States is also a very secure country. It is surrounded by two big oceans and two unthreatening neighbors. Its surveillance systems scour the globe looking for dangers. It has nuclear weapons, a Navy and Coast Guard on constant patrol, an Air Force on high alert and with a global reach, and an Army and Marine Corps second to none in capability and recent combat experience.

But many Americans believe that this is all slipping away, that America is becoming vulnerable and losing its power and dominance. They cite internal and external sources of the vulnerability. American power, they claim, is being frittered away by a dysfunctional Congress, an incompetent president, and a bloated, slow moving, gold-plating acquisition bureaucracy that cannot keep up. Indecision and gridlock have seemingly become the American Way of government. Meanwhile, some fear that agile rival nations, specifically including China, can tap fast moving commercial technology to build modern weapons that will defeat the United States.²

Here we examine these concerns that the American military advantage in the Post-Cold War era has dissipated in large part because the Defense Department lags behind in developing advanced technologies. Our judgment is that the American defense research and development system, as honed during the Cold War and expanded since, is fully capable of handling any military challenge. It is a gigantic technology-generating, innovation-producing, war-fighting machine. U.S. ‘hard’ innovation capabilities – ‘input and infrastructure factors’ like R&D facilities, human capital, access to foreign technology, and availability of funding – far outstrip those of its potential rivals, even though those factors are the ones often thought of as easier for catch-up countries to obtain.³ Despite warnings that the United States no longer spends enough on R&D and that Chinese R&D spending is surging, the reality is that the United States dramatically leads in military innovation investment. In functional terms, the United States dominates all other countries, including China, in ‘input factors,’ starting with resource allocations to defense research and development.

More important, we believe that the American defense technology system is pushed toward innovation by specific contextual factors, the ‘soft’ categories of attributes and capabilities, that cannot readily transfer to likely rivals.⁴ First, the political culture of the United States values technology strongly: technology is assumed to be the solution to most problems, including military ones. American culture also has a strong casualty aversion driven by an economy traditionally burdened by labor scarcity and by responsive political institutions that encourage the substitution of capital for labor to keep its own people out of harm’s way.⁵ The All-Volunteer Force reflects this by making military service voluntary and thus making military service expensive for government and service personnel lives ever-more-valuable and in need of husbanding.

Second, competition is deeply engrained in defense, as it is in most of American society, stimulating new ideas and providing a diversity of approaches to any problem, in case one technology trajectory does not work out as hoped. Competition extends among the various military services and agencies, which each seek to propose solutions to the nation’s strategic problems, and among firms with different design-team philosophies.

Third, the United States also welcomes foreign ideas much more readily than other countries, given U.S. openness to immigration, especially among the highly skilled and technically expert. Finally, a Cold-War organizational innovation in the United States created special public-private hybrid organizations, Federally-Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs) that offer unbiased technical advice and a mechanism for the accumulation of knowledge – a unique social, relational system for institutional memory and systems integration capability that generally works very well. Other nations, with different divisions between the public and the private and dramatically different governance institutions, cannot easily copy these capabilities.

These soft innovation factors particularly emphasize American advantages in the functional category of institutional factors – norms of seeing technology as a solution, trying hard to minimise casualties, using innovation as a means of competition among organizations, and welcoming foreign ideas. The institutional factors draw from the particular American mix of organizations, notably independent military services with strong identities, competitive firms in the defense industry that readily form networks or teams of suppliers even as each maintains its own core competencies and technical habits, and FFRDCs that help keep systems integration efforts honest and less parochial and that help preserve knowledge of false-start technology trajectories and craft skills that enable high-tech systems to function well.⁶

Because of the robustness of America’s input factors and the difficulty of copying its unique institutional factors, we conclude that the American defense innovation system will remain at the cutting edge and will not be surpassed by a potential international rival. In the final section, we explain why American leaders are so nervous anyway.

Is the United States losing its military overmatch?

In the early 1990s, with the disintegration of the Soviet Union that marked the end of the Cold War and the rapid defeat of Iraq in the Gulf War, the United States had a dominating military edge against all comers in terms of the capabilities of both its nuclear and conventional forces. Many trace this edge to the so-called Reagan Build-up, which actually began in the last two years of the Carter Administration and then expanded under President Reagan. The buildup involved investments of hundreds of billions of dollars to modernize nearly all parts of the American military. The modernization of nuclear forces, for example, included the acquisition of Ohio-class ballistic missile submarines, the highly accurate Trident D-5 and MX Peacekeeper missiles, the B-1B and B-2 bombers, and the acceleration of work on strategic command-and-control, anti-submarine warfare, and anti-ballistic missile systems. Conventional forces improvements included fielding the Abrams tank, Bradley infantry fighting vehicle, Apache attack helicopter, and the Patriot missile system, constructing a nearly 600-ship Navy, and deploying the A-10, F-15, F-16, F/A-18, and JSTARS aircraft, along with important technical improvements in realistic training and investments in troop quality.

The Soviets were especially challenged by the conventional warfare improvements: the battlefield integration of sensors, communication systems, and precision weapons, which they labeled as a ‘Military-Technical Revolution’ or, in later American terms, a ‘Revolution in Military Affairs’ (RMA). The combination of new technologies seemingly rendered useless their ability to mass armored forces in a potential drive westward. As the Gulf War demonstrated to the entire world, numerical advantage in heavy metal on the battlefield had been transformed from the source of military power into an easily reduced target set for American forces.

Among the consequences of the Soviet Union’s collapse were a one-third reduction in the size of the United States’ standing forces and an increased use of the remaining forces in interventions across the globe. Freed from a possible clash with its nuclear-armed rival, the United States could involve itself in various civil wars and, after the 9/11 attacks on the United States homeland, interventions to counter terrorist groups and regimes that might support them. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq produced persistent insurgencies, where the RMA systems had little relevance and thus no major success.

But it is not the limitations of precision weapons but rather their diffusion that worries many. Both Russia and China, through clever tactics and the fielding of accurate offensive and defensive systems, seem to be on the verge of being able to blunt the global reach of American power.⁷ Add in their acquisition of space and cyber weapons, and America’s once unquestioned military edge appears in jeopardy. These threats to the previously established American technological advantages seem to require a new round of American innovation.

Strong input factors: Defense R&D spending and the FFRDCs

It is not that the United States cannot lag behind in some fields of militarily relevant technology or be surprised on the battlefield. Technology advances on many fronts and is pioneered in many places. Technological investment by potential adversaries surely can raise the costs to the United States of blithely sticking to operational concepts that previously promised great effectiveness at low cost.⁸ However, the United States has been mobilized on such scale, for so long, with a special emphasis on applying its vast science and engineering resources to its defense, that it will not readily fall behind in weapons technology or quality.

The United States invests heavily in defense-related research and development (R&D) activities. Figure 1 shows the past 40 years of history of U.S. inputs to defense research and development. Currently the United States invests more than 75 billion USD each year in defense R&D plus billions more in Department of Energy R&D investment for nuclear weapons. That is about two-thirds of what all other countries in the world, American friend or foe, spend on defense R&D.⁹ China is the only great power that spends more on its entire defense effort than the United States spends on just defense R&D. Seventy-five billion dollars is more than Russia, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, or Japan spends on defense.¹⁰

Figure 1. U.S. defense R&D budget authority, 1976–2016 (constant dollars)

Source: AAAS Reports and agency budget data.¹²

Moreover, the United States has invested at very high levels for more than 70 years. The United States substantially ramped up its defense R&D investment in the 1950s to levels comparable to today’s spending. While it is true that in inflation-adjusted terms, defense R&D totals in the 1950s were lower than today’s, that is mainly because of the lower complexity of that era’s technological frontier, not because of some subsequent policy shift to greater emphasis on defense R&D investment.¹¹ The continuing drive to push the military-technological frontier has kept R&D spending high all along, and the overall spending trend has increased in parallel with the increasing complexity rather than lagging behind. While R&D budget increases have not been constant, their cycle (including as shown in Figure 1) has ¹²crested and troughed at very high levels. Annual spending has not dropped below 55 billion USD (in 2018 dollars) since 1983, and in several years, it has been very close to 100 billion USD. That high level of spending, year-in and year-out, has a cumulative effect, because it builds a foundation of tacit knowledge, experience in integrating complex systems, and human capital that understands the specialized parameters of military systems, which often differ from those of even high-end civilian systems. For comparison, the much-hyped Chinese defense budget (not the Chinese defense R&D budget) did not exceed the level of U.S. defense R&D spending until the late-2000s. Cumulative Chinese defense R&D investment is surely quite modest in comparison to cumulative U.S. defense R&D investment.¹²¹³

The intensity of U.S. interest in defense research began at the start of the Second World War, with scientists rather than the military. American scientists had been frustrated by the failure of the military to use them effectively in the First World War, when they were confined to military laboratories and subject to military discipline. Led by Vannevar Bush of MIT, they approached President Roosevelt and gained their own organization to manage wartime research, what was eventually called the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD). That organization, not the military, directed the effort to develop the atomic bomb, radar, and many of the other significant technical advances of the war.¹⁴

In the postwar years scientists remained active in bomb research, though with less independence, in the newly created Atomic Energy Commission (later absorbed in the Department of Energy) and in the expansion of R&D efforts in the newly established Department of Defense (DOD), which sought in particular to exploit the advances in missile, jet propulsion, and submarine technologies of the war, including those made by the Germans. Although OSRD itself was disbanded, at least parts of its work continued in various university- and contractor-managed organizations and laboratories, the Federally Funded Research and Development Centers and University Affiliated Research Centers. Those organizations play a vital role in creating ‘soft’ innovation capabilities in the United States – preserving the institutional memory about past R&D efforts, cultivating multiple design-team philosophies that enable diverse approaches to technological challenges, and using their independence to prevent the capture of the U.S. R&D effort by rent-seeking activities of government customers and private-sector suppliers.¹⁵

For example, the Radiation Laboratory at MIT, which worked on radar in the Second World War, was renamed Lincoln Laboratory and continued under MIT management as an FFRDC doing classified work for the Air Force. The University of California manages the nuclear bomb-design laboratories, Los Alamos and Livermore, designated national laboratories for the Atomic Energy Commission. The Navy has its own set of university-managed laboratories, often called Applied Physics Laboratories, at Johns Hopkins University, the University of Hawaii, Pennsylvania State University, the University of Texas, and the University of Washington. The armed services also set up several policy-focused FFRDCs, the best known of which is the RAND Corporation. As new issues came up over the decades, new organizations were created such as the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University and the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies at MIT.

FFRDCs and related organizations do more than provide the American military with cutting edge research on important technical and policy problems. As non-profits dedicated only to serve government agencies, they are a source of valued, unbiased technical advice.¹⁶ In fact, some FFRDCs, specifically MITRE and the Aerospace Corporation but others as well, specialize in advancing systems design and integration skills to help the American military build its biggest systems.¹⁷

Until the Second World War, contractors hired to produce America’s weapons during wars returned to their commercial business at each war’s end, as military needs soon faded. But the end of the Second World War was quickly followed by the Cold War and the continuing demand for weapons. Many firms stayed in the weapons business, some focusing exclusively on defense while others formed specialized divisions to serve the military. This was especially true in the aviation industry, where firms like Lockheed, Northrop, Grumman, McDonnell, Douglas, and Boeing grew large developing and building the aircraft and missiles that were central to the Cold War arms competition.

The peak technologies in the arms race changed over time, but the U.S. organizations and level of investment maintained the U.S. lead. The 1950s added space: the shock of the launch of the Sputnik satellite spurred dramatic increases in American R&D investments and the commitment to reach the moon before the Soviet Union. The lead the United States already had in ballistic missiles became obvious in the 1960s, as it met milestone after milestone in the quest to deploy strategic nuclear forces and build satellites to support them, all the while fighting a war in Vietnam and reaching the moon. As the Soviet Union sought to catch up, the United States began the investment in sensors and precision weapons that eventually undermined Soviet power and self-confidence. The American emphasis on strategic defenses, sometimes more potential than real, nevertheless threatened to cancel the advantages the Soviets had worked hard to achieve in nuclear missile numbers and warhead size.¹⁸ The conventional warfare revolution took away the Red Army menace that had kept half of Europe in its grip and the other half in its fear for decades.¹⁹ The Soviets lost hope of winning battles that were never fought.

Little of this R&D structure went away at the end of the Cold War. The increase in defense R&D spending that marked the Reagan Build-up was a ratchet. Today, the United States spends more on defense research, in real terms, than it did at the height of the Cold War. Defense industry mergers and base closures reshuffled ownership of some military research facilities but did not shrink many of them. DOD employs nearly 100,000 people in 63 research laboratories and centers.²⁰ The FFRDCs and similar organizations continued their work supporting the military. The end of the Cold War was a dip, not a cliff.

Soft institutional factors: Incentives for innovation

What also didn’t go away with the end of the Cold War were the incentives that drive American military innovation – the institutional factors or ‘shared prescriptions guiding conduct [of] participants within the system’ that drive the American defense innovation system.²¹ There are at least three. One is a concern for avoiding casualties. A second is the rivalry that exists among the various components of the American defense establishment. And the third is the openness of American society to immigrants and their ideas.

The concern for avoiding casualties runs deep in American military operations and stems from both a persistent national labor shortage and the democratic nature of the American polity.²² There were never enough people to build the country, thus the constant importation of labor, free or not, to tend the fields or run the factories. The earliest defense forces were militias made up of all local men, but it was difficult to assemble significant troops for expeditions or to keep them deployed for long because of the need for their labor back home. Mobilization for wars relied heavily on state forces, which varied in quality and commitment. Later resort to conscription was contentious and often produced evasion and rioting. The United States resisted the maintenance of a large, professional military until the 1950s.²³

Even when the United States succumbed because of the Cold War, it sought to limit the military’s growth through the intense application of technology. The World Wars drew the United States into the age of total war with huge armies, but the combat experience made the United States fully aware of the human costs inherent in modern industrialized warfare. The Army Air Corps became the champion of strategic bombing doctrine that called for fleets of bombers bypassing the carnage of the battlefield to destroy industries that were thought to be central to an opponent’s power. Bombers themselves proved vulnerable in World War II, and when they failed to achieve the intended strategic effects, air power advocates repeatedly promised that with just a little more technological progress they would achieve the precision and invulnerability needed to make the operational concept work.²⁴ The accuracy problem persisted through the Vietnam conflict, where the destruction of specific targets, usually bridges, often required risking the lives or capture of hundreds of pilots in multiple missions involving dozens upon dozens of aircraft each.²⁵ Given the limited goals at stake in such conflicts, individual losses mattered much politically. Thus, the great and successful effort to improve the accuracy of conventional weapons and the speed and stealth of the platforms that carry them to the point where if a target can be identified and located, it can be destroyed with little or no risk to American personnel.²⁶ The means depend upon the circumstance, often weather- or platform-determined, and include laser- and GPS-guided weapons. Now drones often take the place of manned aircraft.

The race to develop new weapons and doctrine is spurred on in the American system by inter-service competition.²⁷ The United States military, unlike those of nearly all big nations, is not dominated by one armed service, the Royal Navy in the United Kingdom or the Red Army in the Soviet Union. The United States does not fear invasions across its borders by foreign armies, nor does it need a navy to link it to distant colonies. Instead, each of its armed services seeks special prominence among the others as being the answer to emerging dangers or the foreign policy desires of the president. There is overlap and duplication in their efforts – and the incentive to innovate.

It was this competition that gave the United States the lead in the race to develop ballistic missiles and satellites of all types.²⁸ Civilian agencies, particularly the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, sometimes join in. The United States has several intelligence agencies, four air forces, three armies, and a navy or two, and each favors certain technologies and sees a particular threat best. They are rivals for attention, resources, and public acclaim.

The Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986 and the intelligence reforms that followed the 9/11 terror attacks were intended to foster more cooperation and more central direction among the services and agencies. Certainly, the conflicts among the services are less visible, as all hail (in public) the virtues of Jointness. But it is a soft Jointness, more logrolling than subordination to a common doctrine or an agreed-upon set of priorities. The services still compete for attention and promote their vision of the threat that endangers the nation: witness the reactions of the Army and Marine Corps to the Navy- and Air Force-conceived AirSea Battle doctrine.

The resistance to centralization is protected first and foremost by the military services’ strong cultures, with their proud traditions and their situations as ‘total organizations’ that control their members’ entire lives. Even the civilians who work for the services tend to have a relatively strong sense of their organization’s mission, compared to other government workers, because of the services’ relatively clear definitions of their critical tasks, although the services are also notably complex organizations, and in other circumstances such complexity tends to dilute organizational identity. But in addition to the organizations’ natural drive to nurture and protect their professional jurisdiction, Congress, which has often pushed for centralization and planning, also protects inter-service competition by separating out favored causes. At the same time that it passed Goldwater-Nichols, which emphasizes Jointness, Congress created the Special Operations Command, essentially a new service with its own global jurisdiction and budgetary independence. More recently, Congress has elevated cyberwarfare to a separate warfare command and laid the groundwork for the creation of a separate Marine Corps-like Space Corps from within the Air Force.²⁹ One hand praises centralization and planning while the other advocates decentralization and competition, the stimulants of innovation.

The military power of the United States also benefits from immigration, which is a continuing source of new ideas and great energy. John Ericsson, the much-admired 19^th Century American naval engineer who promoted steam propulsion and ironclads, was born in Sweden. John Holland, the pioneer of the modern submarine, was born in Ireland. Igor Sikorsky, the developer of the helicopter, was born in Russia, as was Alexander P. de Seversky, the great promoter of air power. America got to the atomic bomb first, thanks to Albert Einstein and other Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. In aviation William Boeing was of German origin, the Lockheed brothers were of Scottish descent, and John Knudsen Northrop’s family was from Yorkshire. And Abraham Karem, the designer of the Predator drone, immigrated to the United States from Israel.³⁰

Immigration may be under scrutiny in the United States these days, but illegal immigration is much more contentious than immigration itself. The United States still admits a million new permanent residents and naturalizes another three quarters of million people each year.³¹ Immigrants are part of every aspect of American life, but most particularly science and engineering and every field of technology development that is relevant for defense – computer science, aeronautical engineering, nanotechnology, robotics. Just look at American universities or a list of Silicon Valley technology startups.³² America’s main military rivals have no immigrants or asylum seekers. None except desperate North Koreans fleeing an even-more-oppressive regime.

The irrelevance of reform

But doesn’t the importance of private organizations (private firms and FFRDCs) for the development of military technology mean that the Department of Defense needs to take special care to connect to the most innovative parts of the United States like Silicon Valley, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and other centers of high technology? Relative labor scarcity and inter-service competition can help the military come up with ideas and wish lists for technology, but if the military intends to tap the technologies of the future, someone else is going to have to actually design and build the systems. Former Defense Secretary Ashton Carter set up initiatives like the DIUx (Defense Innovation Unit – experimental, now no longer experimental and known simply as DIU) during the Obama administration to make these connections, fueled by a concern that the military organizations’ style is a poor fit for the modern American culture of innovation.³³ Will a new generation of research scientists relate well to defense’s mission of breaking things and accommodate at all to its requirement to apply reams of acquisition rules to its contracts and to take months for reviews in order to make any decisions? Can the private-sector world of stock options and public offerings be a part of the public world of government shutdowns, salary freezes, and debt-ceiling crises?³⁴

Because the Defense Department relies heavily upon prime contractors such as Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman to design and build its most advanced weapon systems, the technology question really is: can the existing prime contractors effectively use advances in technology to build the best weapon systems? There is no indication that they cannot. With these primes, the United States still builds the best weapon systems. The primes already are the integrators of technologies produced by others, including the commercially oriented firms that DIU and the other new agencies are meant to reach.³⁵ The primes’ job is to bring together a network of subcontractors with the appropriate technology and skills and manage them to an exacting schedule and within certain budget limits to build systems that can survive and dominate in the harshest environment of them all, a battlefield, usually after traversing another difficult environment like space or the ocean to get to the fight. The technologies are important, but it is weaponizing them by creating complex systems that can work when stressed that counts the most, and that is what Lockheed, Northrop, and the other primes do for the American military.

The Department of Defense taps into advanced technology by funding some basic research and lots of applied science and engineering at universities through its own research support agencies and its set of service-specific laboratories.³⁶ For riskier efforts usually involving major prototyping or technology demonstrations, the military uses the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).³⁷ The FFRDCs, national laboratories, and dozens of defense-supported specialized institutes are linked in with all of this and have their own ties to academic research. It is this system that gave the United States the lead position in computers, created the internet, pioneered work in oceanography and ocean engineering, and pushed capabilities in remote sensing and satellite imaging.

The Defense Innovation Unit initiative may help a little. So, too, may the Defense Department’s Strategic Capabilities Office, the Defense Innovation Board, and the CIA’s experimental venture capital unit In-Q-Tel.³⁸ These initiatives reinforce and complement what defense agencies in the United States have been doing for decades. More important, creating these agencies is also politically smart, as it shows defense agencies dealing directly with what the American public perceives to be the very cutting edge of technology and innovation. Likely unnecessary, but no harm done.

No harm unless the Department of Defense gets so caught up in pursuing the new organizations that it somehow forgets that what it really buys is the expertise in designing and building complex systems specifically for military roles. Systems integration works in any field because the integrators understand their customers’ particularities and peculiarities. In defense, that means that the systems integrators that make complex weapons systems need to know a little bit about warfighting, the jargon that the military uses to talk about its unusual missions, and the political deal-making (organizational and electoral) that chooses which projects get funded and survive to eventual deployment with the operational military.³⁹ The commercial technology companies are already in the mix of weapon systems’ supply chains, along with defense-unique suppliers; there is no real lack of technology access. And the commercial technology companies will never specialize in the defense-unique aspects of the weapons or be responsive enough to the military customers’ quirks to produce cutting-edge military systems or to keep the demanding military customers happy and to work gracefully with them in the complex political ballet of defense acquisition. DIU and the rest are just a veneer, a new part of that political dance.

Perhaps the perceived decline in American power that worries some is due to failures in the acquisition system, problems with its structure and the inflexibility of its regulations. The Congress obviously thinks so, as it often prescribes changes in both. For example, it recently required that the jurisdiction of the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics be divided into separate undersecretaries for research and engineering and for acquisition and sustainment on the argument that technology and innovation needed their own high-level champion within the Defense Department. Of course, it was not too long ago that predecessor offices were combined because, as the argument went, technology development, weapon system acquisition, and the maintenance of complex equipment need to be thought of as one continuous activity and closely coordinated. It is striking that the recent reorganization takes the wiring diagram of the Department of Defense more or less back to what it was in the late-1950s.⁴⁰

There is no more common project in defense than acquisition reform. There have literally been dozens of congressionally mandated and secretarially commanded studies of the weapons acquisition process over the years. Changes in bureaucratic structure and regulatory detail have been constant. Too often unacknowledged in all of this is the difficulty gaining agreement within the fragmented American political system on the value, schedule, and cost of particular weapons. The defense budget is cyclical, with periods of rapid growth and inevitable decline as war fears grow and decline. Advocates of particular systems push for quick commitments on the upside, increasing the likelihood of project cost growth and performance failures, while opponents seek delays, hoping to catch the budget downside, when new starts and regular progress are hard to make. Proponents are optimists, and rivals are pessimists. Disappointments beset all complex undertakings, weapon acquisitions included. There are no reform cures for most acquisition problems.⁴¹

Some believe the problem lies in the Congress itself, its lack of regular order, the reliance on continuing resolutions and the threat of shutdowns. All of this is said to harm defense, disrupting planning, slowing modernization, and hurting force readiness. There certainly have been important changes in Congress in recent years. The growth of party extremes, weakening greatly the opportunity for compromise, is one. Another is the elimination of earmarking, which was a way to gather votes in exchange for funding favorite projects in particular districts. And a third is the weakening of the power of committee chairmen, who used to rule with iron fists.

But the incoherence in Congress on defense matters likely reflects more the disagreement over the nature and saliency of the threats the United States faces than it does the general political cleavages in the society. The partisan divide on defense is in fact weaker than it has been in past.⁴² Gone also, though, is the imminent danger posed by the Soviet Union. Instead there is just a long list potential dangers – a resurgent Russia, a rising China, diffusing technologies, cyber hacking, terror threats, climate change – none galvanizing in the way the Soviet Union once was, all hidden off in some distant part of the globe, and many more potential than realized.⁴³

The source of discontent

Why the insecurity, when the United States is a very secure country? Although American force structure was cut by about a third (from about 2.1 million to 1.4 million), little else in the security infrastructure created for the Cold War was downsized after the Soviet Union collapsed and the Warsaw Pact disbanded. Some Soviet experts left the field for new occupations, fleeing the unexpected wreckage that was suddenly their careers. But many other defense analysts did well by becoming ethnic-conflict experts or democracy-promotion specialists, the business of the day. Likely the threat assessment meetings were more relaxed sessions than in the past, and fewer serious military exercises were conducted, but nearly all of America’s Cold War-focused think tanks, academic research institutes, and contract study groups stayed in place and began searching the globe for other security problems that could possibly replace the East/West one that had served so well as the source of their livelihoods for so long.

Business was good from the start because the American military did not go home, finding missions in Europe, Africa, and Asia trying to prevent ethnic slaughter or staving off famine and political chaos. The National Command Structure expanded rather contracted, adding four-star commands for North America and Africa to complete the globe-spanning regional listing and adding subordinate commands to the functional commands to raise the status of space or to give strategic warfare its due. As new developments occurred, accommodations were made for them: counter-terrorism operations and cyber defense joined the top tier along with nuclear proliferation.

The threat/policy opportunity radars have kept turning.⁴⁴ There is reward for identifying new dangers. Terrorism, cyber, and climate change threats have an endless quality to them, ideal to justify continuing planning efforts and making new budget requests.⁴⁵ The United States built up a large threat assessment apparatus to ask ‘what if’ questions for the Cold War. That apparatus, like the defense research and innovation establishment, was not disbanded at war’s end. It finds the threats for the others to solve.

The United States pays a lot to avoid being surprised. Part of that price pays for people and organizations that constantly call out dangers, potential gaps, or failures in its multiple layers of defenses. Analysts warn that America is not ready for biological warfare, that its cyber defenses are inadequate, and that it hasn’t been paying enough attention to space. Worse, they say, the Defense Department is too slow in fielding this system or that, there is too much red tape, and there is not enough initiative. They call for a defense budget big enough to build the 355-ship Navy, a new strategic bomber, and a new generation of modernized nuclear weapons. These continuing calls for defense investment, especially in new technologies, keep the U.S. defense R&D system on its toes, well supplied with inputs and opportunities to capitalize on the incentives to generate innovations.

The result of such vigilance about strategy and policy maintains a vast network of laboratories, institutes, test ranges, and development centers – public and private, secret and open – that is working on every frontier trying to build better weapons. The network is bigger than everyone else’s, and it is better funded. No nation devotes more resources to defense innovation, and no nation has stronger pro-innovation institutions and incentives. The United States spends a lot to make sure that it will continue to be able to respond to every imaginable threat – and to be able to threaten everyone else.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by, or in part by, the U.S. Army Research Laboratory and the U.S. Army Research Office under contract/grant No. W911NF-15-1-0407. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. Army Research Office.

Notes on contributors

Eugene Gholz

Eugene Gholz is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame.

Harvey M. Sapolsky

Harvey M. Sapolsky is Professor of Public Policy and Organization, Emeritus, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the former Director of the MIT Security Studies Program. Together with Caitlin Talmadge, they are the co-authors of US Defense Politics: The Origins of Security Policy, 4th edition (New York: Routledge, 2021).

Notes

¹ Michael Beckley, Unrivaled: Why America Will Remain the World’s Sole Superpower (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018).

² See, for example, Aaron Mehta, ‘Pentagon Tech Advisers Want Special Career Track, “Innovation Elevator” for Big Thinkers’, Defense News, 26 Oct. 2017; Jill Aitoro, ‘The Next Sputnik: Here’s Why U.S. Stands to Lose Technological Edge to China’, Defense News, 2 Dec. 2017; Tim Greeff, ‘The Pentagon can’t develop technology quickly enough to thwart enemies. Here’s one way to help’, Defense News, 1 Aug. 2018; David Ignatius, ‘The Chinese threat that an aircraft carrier can’t stop’, Washington Post, 7 Aug. 2018; Joe Gould, ‘Reform panel warns Congress to overhaul Pentagon acquisitions, or lose technical edge’, Defense News, 16 Jan. 2019; Noah Smith, ‘U.S. Tech Lead Over China May Not Matter’, Bloomberg Opinion, 29 Jan. 2020; Christian Brose, The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare (New York: Hachette, 2020). For extensive discussion of China’s possible innovative edge, see the January/February 2019 special issue of Technology Review, notably including an article that speculates about China’s future military capability: Martin Giles, ‘The Father of Quantum’, Technology Review 122/1 (January/February 2019), 59.

³ Tai Ming Cheung, ‘A Conceptual Framework of Defence Innovation’, (2021),12.

⁴ For more on the potential barriers that soft innovation factors create for the diffusion of military technology, see Leslie C. Eliason and Emily O. Goldman, ‘Introduction: Theoretical and Comparative Perspectives on Innovation and Diffusion’, in Emily O. Goldman and Leslie C. Eliason, eds., The Diffusion of Military Technology and Ideas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 1–30, and other essays in the same volume; Emily O. Goldman, ‘Introduction: Military Diffusion and Transformation’, in Emily O. Goldman and Thomas G. Mahnken, eds., The Information Revolution in Military Affairs in Asia (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004), 1–21.

⁵ Harvey M. Sapolsky, Eugene Gholz, and Caitlin Talmadge, U.S. Defense Politics: The Origins of Security Policy [3^rd ed.] (New York: Routledge, 2017), 25–29.

⁶ For the distinction between the closely related concepts of ‘institutions’ and ‘organizations,’ see Cheung, ‘A Conceptual Framework’, (2021), 4.

⁷ Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr., ‘How to Deter China: The Case for Archipelagic Defense’, Foreign Affairs 94/2 (March/April 2015), 78–86.

⁸ Eugene Gholz, ‘Why U.S. Strategy Must Adapt to Technological Change’, World Politics Review, 18 April 2017; Eugene Gholz, Benjamin Friedman, and Enea Gjoza ‘Defensive Defense: A Better Way to Protect U.S. Allies in Asia’, The Washington Quarterly 42/4 (Winter 2019–2020), 171–89.

⁹ In 2008 the United States spent more than six times what the entire European Union spent on defense R&D. Finding data on what Russia and China spend on defense R&D is very difficult. See Keith Hartley, ‘Defense R&D Spending: A critical review of the economic data’, World Economics 12/1 (January-March 2011), 103–114.

¹⁰ International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), The Military Balance 2018 (London: Taylor & Francis, 2018).

¹¹ John A. Alic, ‘The Origin and Nature of the US “Military-Industrial Complex”’, Vulcan 2/1 (June 2014), 63–97, esp. 83.

¹³ Adam P. Liff and Andrew S. Erickson, ‘Demystifying China’s Defense Spending: Less Mysterious in the Aggregate’, China Quarterly 216 (December 2013), 805–30, esp. 820. For arguments about the difficulty of catching up to the cumulative effort to create military-technological capabilities, see Andrea Gilli and Mauro Gilli, ‘Why China Has Not Caught Up Yet: Military-Technological Superiority and the Limits of Imitation, Reverse Engineering, and Cyber Espionage’, International Security 43/3 (Winter 2018/2019), 141–89.

¹⁴ Harvey M. Sapolsky, Science and the Navy: The History of the Office of Naval Research (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).

¹⁵ Peter J. Dombrowski and Eugene Gholz, Buying Military Transformation: Technological Innovation and the Defense Industry (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 115–32.

¹⁶ Harvey M. Sapolsky, Eugene Gholz, and Allen Kaufman, ‘Security Lessons from the Cold War’, Foreign Affairs 78/4 (July/August 1999), 77–89.

¹⁷ Harvey M. Sapolsky, ‘Models for Governing Large Systems Projects’, in Guy Ben Ari and Pierre A. Chao, eds., Organizing for a Complex World (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2009).

¹⁸ Frances Fitzgerald, Way Out There in the Blue (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000).

¹⁹ David T. Burbach, Brendan Rittenhouse Green, and Benjamin H. Friedman, ‘The Technology of the Revolution in Military Affairs’, in Harvey M. Sapolsky, Benjamin H. Friedman, and Brendan Rittenhouse Green, eds., US Military Innovation since the Cold War (New York: Routledge, 2009), 14–42.

²⁰ ‘U.S. Military Technological Edge Challenged’, Army (July 2017), 61.

²¹ Cheung, ‘A Conceptual Framework’, (2021), 4.

²² Harvey M. Sapolsky and Jeremy Shapiro, ‘Casualties, Technology, and America’s Future Wars’, Parameters 26/2 (July 1999), 119–27.

²³ Tensions over manpower are a major theme in American military history. See, for example, Allan R. Millett, Peter Maslowski, and William Feis, For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States from 1607 to 2012 [3^rd ed.] (New York: The Free Press, 2012); Joseph Glathaar, The American Military: A Concise History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018); Paula G. Thornhill, Demystifying the American Military: Institutions, Evolution, and Challenges since 1789 (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2019).

²⁴ Eliot Cohen, ‘The Mystique of U.S. Air Power’, Foreign Affairs 73/1 (January/February 1994), 109–24.

²⁵ Marshall L. Michel, III, Clashes: Air Combat over North Vietnam 1965–1972 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1997).

²⁶ Benjamin S. Lambeth, The Transformation of American Air Power (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000).

²⁷ This logic is extensively discussed, especially under the rubric of the ‘enduring question’ of the appropriate balance between markets and planning in defense policy, in Sapolsky et al., U.S. Defense Politics.

²⁸ Michael H. Armacost, The Politics of Weapons Innovation: The Thor-Jupiter Controversy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969); Owen R. Coté, Jr., ‘The Politics of Innovative Military Doctrine: The U.S. Navy and Fleet Ballistic Missiles’ Ph.D. Dissertation (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1995).

²⁹ Sandra Erwin, ‘Analyst predicts Space Force will fuel infighting among military services’, Space News, 24 Oct. 2018.

³⁰ ‘Immigration and America’s National Security’, Defense and Aerospace Report, 17 Sept. 2018.

³¹ Zolan Kanno-Youngs, ‘As Trump Barricades the Border, Legal Immigration Is Starting to Plunge’, New York Times, 24 Feb. 2020, A1; Nick Miroff and Josh Dawsey, ‘Mulvaney says U.S. is “desperate” for more legal immigrants’, Washington Post, 20 Feb. 2020.

³² Remco Zwetsloot and Dahlia Peterson, ‘The US-China Tech Wars: China’s Immigration Disadvantage’, The Diplomat, 31 Dec. 2019.

³³ Ashton Carter, ‘Remarks Announcing DIUx 2.0,’ Mountain View, California, 11 May 2016. Silicon Valley leaders are happy to parrot these arguments, as in Joe Gould, ‘How the Pentagon’s fear of risk is stifling innovation’, Defense News, 28 Jan. 2019.

³⁴ Heather Somerville, ‘China Has “Concerning” Leads Over U.S. in Tech, Defense Department Official Says’, Wall Street Journal, 23 Oct. 2019; Ankit Panda, ‘Getting Critical Technologies into U.S. Defense Applications’, National Interest (Online), 1 Feb. 2010.

³⁵ For detailed analysis of the subcontractor network supporting U.S. defense acquisition, based on data on hundreds of defense-oriented and commercially oriented facilities as many as five tiers down in the supply chain, see Eugene Gholz, Andrew D. James, and Thomas H. Speller, ‘The Second Face of Systems Integration: An Empirical Analysis of Supply Networks to Complex Product Systems’, Research Policy 47/8 (October 2018), 1478–94.

³⁶ For extensive explanation of the defense science and technology (S&T) system, encompassing basic research, applied research, and advanced technology development, see Hugh Montgomery, Bureaucratic Nirvana: Life in the Center of the Box (Washington: Potomac Institute Press, 2010).

³⁷ For optimistic discussion of DARPA, see William B. Bonvillian, ‘DARPA and its ARPA-E and IARPA Clones: A Unique Innovation Organization Model’, Industrial and Corporate Change, 27/5 (October 2018), 897–914. For more skeptical discussion, see Sharon Weinberger, The Imagineers of War (New York: Knopf, 2017).

³⁸ ‘Defense Innovation Board Chair: Recommendations Making an Impact’, Defense-Aerospace.com, 25 Oct. 2017, http://www.defense-aerospace.com/articles-view/release/3/187880/pentagon%E2%80%99s-defense-innovation-board-sees-advances.html.

³⁹ Dombrowski and Gholz, Buying Military Transformation.

⁴⁰ Russell Rumbaugh, ‘DoD Plan to Split Acquisition Duties’, CRS Insight, 18 Aug. 2017.

⁴¹ Sapolsky et al., U.S. Defense Politics, 144–46, 148–52.

⁴² Stephen M. Walt, The Hell of Good Intentions: America’s Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giraux, 2018); Barry R. Posen, Restraint: A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014), 4–9.

⁴³ Benjamin H. Friedman and Harvey M. Sapolsky, ‘You Never Know(ism)’, Breakthroughs (Spring 2006), 1–11.

⁴⁴ David M. Edelstein and Ronald R. Krebs, ‘Delusions of Grand Strategy: The Problem with Washington’s Planning Obsession’, Foreign Affairs 94/6 (November/December 2015), 109–16; Michael A. Cohen and Micah Zenko, Clear and Present Safety: The World Has Never Been Better and Why that Matters to Americans (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019).

⁴⁵ Alexander Osipovich, ‘Pentagon Pits Traders vs. Hackers’, The Wall Street Journal, 16 Oct. 2017, B1.