The Innovation Imperative: Why Tactical Ingenuity is Not Enough

Declining confidence in the United States (U.S.) military’s ability to defeat its peer adversaries in a protracted conflict has led many authors and leaders to feverishly make proclamations about how the force must transform. One such effort was the Army’s Transformation in Contact (TIC) concept, which sought to drive innovation with a bottom-up model, enabling units to quickly integrate new capabilities by updating their procurement, fielding, and organizational practices. In May 2025, the Army pivoted from TIC to the Army Transformation Initiative (ATI), maintaining the service’s preference for bottom-up models and integrating technical adaptations at the speed required for modern combat. While Army leaders and ATI address vital concerns and necessary changes, they focus on a common misconception: that bottom-up innovation will create lasting change. 

Given the increasing concern about future military performance and low domestic tolerance for protracted wars, the United States must ensure that future conflicts with peer adversaries such as Russia and China can be won with the capabilities available at the outset. Doing so requires the Army to recognize that innovation is driven from the top down. To create a lasting change in organizational culture, senior leadership must vigilantly oversee changes that require them to assume risk. Previous innovative efforts also demonstrate the criticality of technical expertise, which the military lacks in many respects. Current conflicts indicate that adaptation may occur as rapidly as 30-day cycles, meaning that the military must prioritize the fusion of industry and forward-deployed forces by leveraging the productive capacity of allies in theater to sustain continuous transformation.

Surveying How Military Organizations Innovate

Understanding military innovation requires an examination of the extensive current literature that purports to provide the “right” model for how militaries transform. Seven identifiable schools of thought exist within military innovation literature: civil-military relations, interservice, intraservice, cultural, principal-agent, bottom-up, and leadership. Each model has varying degrees of explanatory power, depending on the specific case study. From the existing literature, it is clear that military organizations innovate best when senior leadership drives the innovation and when technical experts are involved at the key sources of friction. Grouping the existing literature into two broad categories-leader and institutional-centric demonstrates that leaders should avoid vague proclamations of promoting bottom-up change without the necessary expertise and oversight to adopt innovations that leverage emerging trends.

In the leader-centric grouping of literature, each model broadly emphasizes the centrality of the oversight process or the leadership qualities necessary for driving innovation. According to the principal-agent model, an information asymmetry exists between the principal and agent (commanders and subordinates); the commanders rely on the agents’ expertise to implement change. The principal aims to shrink this asymmetry by being intimately familiar with the organization and possessing the necessary expertise to provide effective oversight. Like the principal-agent model, the bottom-up model focuses on leadership’s centrality in driving innovation but recognizes that members at the bottom of an organization’s hierarchy will likely identify performance gaps first. Though provided as a “model,” the original work often cited by Timothy Lupfer fails to offer an actual theory of how military organizations adopt innovations. In recognition of these shortcomings, Liam Collins demonstrates that both processes play an essential role. Collins recognizes that most theories fail to explain the innovative process and posits that senior military leaders matter most. Most importantly, Collins illustrates that despite the incessant focus on promoting transformation from our most junior leaders, military organizations will only adopt systemic change if senior leadership drives transformation.

The institution-centric models also discuss the importance of senior leadership but do so by examining the broader structure of military organizations and their cultures. In one of the better-known models, the civil-military model, Barry Posen asserts that innovation requires civilian policymakers who adopt and implement changes through a military maverick. In Posen’s work, he argues that policymakers must rely on mavericks—military professionals who agree change is necessary—to develop new doctrinal concepts because they lack the capability and knowledge to do so. In theory, these mavericks will help break the inertia inherent in military organizations. In recognition of the significant gaps in Posen’s case studies, Stephen Rosen developed the interservice model. Rosen’s findings indicate substantial changes occur under two conditions: when senior officers provide an intellectual redefinition of how their service will fight and establish paths to promotion for young officers who align with the changes.

U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth hosts a drone demonstration at the Pentagon, July 10, 2025. The event was hosted to portray the Secretary of Defense’s initiative of Unleashing U.S. Military Drone Dominance. (U.S. Marine Corps Photo by Lance Cpl. Isaac Llanez Delgado)

A second grouping of literature within the institution-centric models examines innovation from an organizational culture and capability perspective. First, Michael Horowitz identifies that state responses to innovation largely align with their geostrategic situation and what he identifies as the adoption-capacity theory. In his theory, states choose their response to major military innovations based on the financial intensity and organizational capital required to adopt. Second, a state’s innovation is likely impacted by its strategic culture. According to Dima Adamsky, American military culture is individualistic, prioritizing individual accomplishments rather than group initiatives. As a result, the American military prioritizes inductive reasoning and bottom-up approaches over those centrally driven from the top down. Such thinking explains why American senior leaders emphasize small, tactical innovations and changes developed by junior leaders.  

When combining Adamsky’s explanation of American military culture with Horowitz’s adoption-capacity theory, it becomes apparent that the Department of Defense (DoD) often pursues innovation in a haphazard way that pivots to new technologies it can exploit because it possesses the resources to do so.  Adopting these adaptations or low-level innovations should necessitate an assessment of how each service plans to fight conceptually, but the military lacks this comprehensive assessment of trends and fixates on specific weapons and programs. Additionally, an examination of Horowitz’s theory suggests a gap exists in understanding how diffusion and innovation occur when militaries operate far from their shores and in contested environments. Financial intensity fails to explain how the proliferation of anti-access/ area denial (A2/AD) systems and the speed of technological change will impact a state’s ability to implement an innovation. The United States’ distance from potential conflict zones and an increasingly contested global commons will make it challenging for the United States to maintain the pace of its innovative efforts.

Changing the Power Dynamic: Harnessing Adaptation Across the Levels of War

Military innovation literature and historical case studies expose the fallacy at the heart of arguments emphasizing bottom-up innovation’s centrality. Instead, decision-makers across the DoD should focus on the top-down changes necessary to foster innovation. Establishing a system and process that can perpetually transform will require the department to focus on three focus areas, aligning with the levels of war. Tactically, technical experts should deploy along the probable line of contact to reduce information asymmetries and facilitate rapid adaptations. Operationally, leaders should prepare to manage doctrinal change through rigorous academic study and evaluation of battlefield changes. Strategically, the United States no longer possesses the domestic economies of scale to rely on deterrence by punishment or sustain an attritional conflict. Sustaining a prolonged conflict in geographically isolated environments, such as the Indo-Pacific, will require the United States to bolster the defense production capacity of its allies abroad.

Tactical Innovation: Prioritizing Expertise at the Bottom

Ukraine’s rapid adaptation and advancement of drone capabilities over the past three years illustrate the critical role of technical expertise in tactical innovation—an area where U.S. combat formations remain comparatively deficient. As thousands of conscripts filled the ranks of Ukraine’s military, its armed forces benefited from the technical expertise they could provide to frontline units, narrowing the principal-agent gap. Software engineers and technology experts engaged in fighting the Russian military directly communicate with start-ups and technology labs to produce drones with the specific capabilities that they require. Ukraine also utilizes internal drone workshops inside its Uncrewed Aerial Vehicle (UAV) battalions to adapt to its operating environment and leverage the engineering expertise of industry professionals.

Unfortunately, the United States’ strategic situation and current military population prevent it from leveraging internal expertise to drive technological adaptation. Ukraine adopted its current drone innovation and procurement process out of existential necessity. Apartment rooms serve as drone production facilities, and civilians receive online classes to help them produce new UAVs. In contrast, the United States must adopt new innovative processes during relative peace, a daunting task based on innovation literature. Ukraine’s innovative process also benefits from an incredibly experienced and knowledgeable conscripted force, whose average age is approximately 40. The American military relies on a much younger force – with an average age of 28.5 years – and recruits in the U.S. Army typically lack extensive civilian workforce experience and an education level above a high school diploma. Simply put, the American military lacks the technical expertise within its combat formations to maintain the rapid pace of adaptation that modern conflicts require. 

Recruiting personnel in lucrative fields such as software engineers and technology development is difficult, so instead, the United States must lay the groundwork for rapidly integrating civilian expertise into combat formations. One potential avenue the military should consider is enhancing the capabilities of programs such as the Defense Digital Service (DDS) by developing a core of technical experts to surge forward during conflict, similar to the original conceptualization of the Civilian Reserve Corps. Placing civilian expertise in combat formations will alleviate the stress associated with relying on increasingly sophisticated software, limiting the innovative capacity of military personnel in combat units. Surging technical expertise, in the form of a reserve corps, into a theater is essential for the U.S. military to overcome the principal-agent gap, reduce the tyranny of distance, and outpace its competitors. A glimpse of this type of initiative recently made national news with the creation of “Detachment 201” and the direct commissioning of tech executives into the Army Reserves. 

Operational Innovation: Leaders Changing Doctrine and Concepts

Continuous adaptation and innovation at the tactical level will not lead to broader innovation without the top-down oversight and authority of senior leaders. The Army’s recent implementation of the ATI indicates a continued preference for bottom-up innovation models. A bias toward bottom-up approaches aligns with Dima Adamsky’s assessment of American military culture and its individualistic approach to innovation. Unfortunately, historical and contemporary examples suggest that broader innovations of operational concepts and doctrine are unlikely to occur without the disciplined oversight of senior leaders willing to experiment and then widely disseminate changes through a centralized process. 

Recent innovation challenges in Ukraine and Nagorno-Karabakh reinforce the importance of senior leaders in disseminating transformative doctrine and tactics across formations. The Ukrainian Army adapts rapidly across its formations but fails to standardize those changes. Ukraine’s decentralized, bottom-up innovation process enables its armed forces to outpace a more centralized power, such as Russia, technologically. Unfortunately, Ukraine’s technological adaptation fails to precipitate broader changes to its doctrine that standardize implementation across formations and limit its use of outdated doctrinal concepts. Technical adaptation will help address temporary changes to environmental conditions, but it will fail to provide lasting solutions to Ukraine’s operational and strategic challenges. Instituting conceptual changes will require Ukrainian leadership to consolidate feedback and innovate doctrine at a pace fitting the current conflict, a lesson that carries over to the U.S. military. Additionally, before the conflict in 2020, Armenia’s General Staff remained hostile to revising its military doctrine, demonstrating the difficulty of driving innovation without leadership support. 

Maintaining an enduring advantage in the next conflict requires the DoD to focus on promoting and cultivating senior leaders with the expertise and managerial skills to oversee such a process. The military should educate mid-grade and senior officers on emerging technology and doctrinal evolution to achieve this goal. Professional military education (PME) often fails to focus on the specific fields that military leaders need to study, favoring a broad and generic curriculum to maintain accreditation. Previous analysis discusses the growing need for PME to integrate with operational units and their commanders to develop innovative solutions. The DoD should also prioritize using wargames to assess leaders’ ability to manage innovation. Forcing senior leaders to compete against one another in wargames will enable the U.S. military to evaluate their fitness for command and provide a venue to see how they develop and implement innovative ideas.

Strategic: Keeping Pace with Innovation through Allies

In future conflicts, leveraging and bringing economies of scale to bear on the battlefield will be critical, reinforcing a gap in the scholarly literature. Ukraine and Russia’s rapidly evolving contest signals that innovation benefits from shorter lines of communication. Horowitz’s adoption-capacity theory explains the crucial role financial intensity (i.e., national investment) has in a country’s ability to adopt innovations. However, Horowitz’s model fails to grapple with the challenges of countering or adopting an innovation when a state does not possess the capacity to scale production and supply its forces promptly. The Ukrainian Armed Forces (UAF) benefits immensely from its scaled-up domestic drone production and its ability to resupply quickly using interior lines of communication. Shorter distances to the front provide inherent advantages for the defender, particularly in modern combat, as the timeline for adaptation cycles rapidly decreases. America’s geographic separation and potential inability to access conflict areas in its priority theater, the Indo-Pacific, will challenge the military’s ability to meet the innovation demands of modern conflict. 

Ukraine’s initial lack of preparedness and ability to rapidly scale its innovative technology reveals that the United States must do what it can now to develop its strategic innovation infrastructure. One of the DoD’s top strategic priorities – in coordination with our allies – should be to establish robust production methods, meet the demand for any tactical adaptations that may emerge in the opening period of war, produce them at scale, and field them within days or weeks. Many of America’s Indo-Pacific allies far outstrip our ability to produce in vital defense sectors. One such sector is shipbuilding, where Japan and South Korea surpass America’s production output. South Korea has also emerged as a defense production leader with dramatic increases in arms exports. A second vital sector is munitions production, where Australia has become an important player in producing missiles and artillery shells for the United States. The foundation for further integrating the United States’ industrial bases already exists, but the DoD must develop its capacity to supply a large-scale conflict. Investing in allies will not only prepare the United States for the next conflict, but it may alleviate growing concerns about America’s reliability and stymie discussions of nuclear weapons proliferation as it integrates the alliance’s capabilities into a broader defense enterprise. Without the assistance of their means of production, the United States may be unable to outpace adversaries operating near their centers of innovation and production. 

Conclusion

Recent conflicts and scholarly literature discredit the prevailing narrative that the U.S. military can achieve its innovation goals by relying solely on junior leaders. A fixation on bottom-up models permeates the American military culture and its desire to promote individualistic achievements, but future conflicts will require innovative concepts to address the growing disparity between America’s strategic interests and its military capabilities. Addressing the delta between ends and means requires the DoD to prepare for rapid innovation cycles by developing the requisite expertise to minimize the principal-agent problem and selecting leaders primed to oversee change. Seeking to integrate technologists at the tactical level, promoting leaders to oversee doctrinal change at the operational level, and integrating allied industrial capacity at the strategic level can posture the United States to innovate rapidly throughout the next conflict. Gone are the days of 20-year innovation cycles and America’s status as the arsenal of democracy. As the United States prepares for the next conflict, it must recognize strategic realities and leverage asymmetric advantages to avoid the pitfall of great power hubris. 

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this report are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.