|
|
|
|
The Politics of Strategic Adjustment: Ideas, Institutions, and Interests
Peter Trubowitz, Emily O. Goldman, and Edward Rhodes (ed.)
1999
8. Mission Possible: Organizational Learning in Peacetime
Emily O. Goldman, University of California at Davis
Do military organizations adjust to changes in their strategic and technological environments in peacetime, particularly when their main enemies have been vanquished or disappeared? If they do so, how and why? The dominant view of military organizations is that they resist change—that, like other entrenched bureaucracies, they seek first and foremost to preserve organizational health. 1
In peacetime, threats to the organization are more likely to come from within the state, from other bureaucratic actors or from budget cuts, than from enemies abroad. Responding to bureaucratic incentives, the services will stick to current routines, 2 altering them incrementally at most, even at the expense of performing their missions. Only civilian intervention can overcome these obstacles to change.
Several works challenge this pessimistic prognosis. 3 One approach that has not been explored sufficiently in the literature is the organizational learning perspective. 4 It provides an interpretation of strategic adjustment 5 as a process of encoding inferences from experience into organizational routines to achieve targets. 6 My use of the term innovation does not imply that the change is necessarily good. A learning perspective demonstrates how military organizations can adjust to their strategic environment in peacetime without being forced to by civilians.
I examine three instances of U.S. strategic adjustment—mechanization, amphibious warfare, and carrier aviation 7 —between the two world wars, a period when the international environment was, like today, similarly under- determining. 8 The 1920s and 1930s are particularly interesting because the U.S. military is credited with having made important strategic strides in this period. The Navy came to appreciate the centrality of air power in the achievement of naval objectives. The Marine Corps dramatically revised its understanding of the organization’s role in providing security and adopted as its new core task the amphibious assault mission. 9 Contemporary policymakers are trying to replicate the processes associated with these “innovations.” 10 So it is important to engage in a systematic analysis to understand more fully how adjustment unfolded. Examining the Army’s approach toward mechanization is instructive as a negative case because adjustment was minimal. If the factors identified by the learning perspective as stimulants to adjustment are fewer or absent in the case of mechanization, we can have greater confidence in our conclusions about how adjustment occurs, what triggers and impedes it at the organizational level, and in the policy prescriptions derived from the analysis.
The findings support the claim that military organizations can innovate in response to a dynamic peacetime environment, provided they have the right sorts of pressures and resources to reduce the level of ambiguity that confronts them in peacetime. Three factors are key to reducing ambiguity: domestic political inducements; international vulnerability; and credible knowledge that supports the proposed innovation. 11 Pressure or support from civilians or other military actors can reduce ambiguity by increasing the political incentives and opportunities (or desirability) for reevaluating service tasks. Although civilian intervention can play a role, it is a far more modest one than the bureaucratic approach requires and it is not necessary for innovation. Strategic vulnerabilities (or urgency) refer to the pressures created by specific geopolitical circumstances and that reduce ambiguity by permitting military professionals to focus their planning and simulation activities. Finally, credible knowledge about the proposed innovation (or possibility) reduces ambiguity by providing optimism about the prospects for change. The credibility of the knowledge base depends on the limits and capabilities of technologies, and the opportunities for bringing experience to bear to expand the knowledge base over time. These findings challenge the dominant bureaucratic explanation that characterizes the military in peacetime as unresponsive to external threats to national security and preoccupied with internal threats to organizational interest.
Organizational Perspectives on Innovation
The most popular paradigm of organizational behavior is the organizational process model, which lies at the heart of bureaucratic interpretations of military behavior. 12 The organizational process model views government action as the outputs of organizational processes. The model makes three key assumptions. First, organizations define goals in terms of constraints, or imperatives to avoid falling beneath certain performance levels. The central goal is health, defined as maximizing resources and autonomy, and preserving the organization’s essence, or self-concept. Second, organizational activity has a programmed character that constrains the ability of the organization to change. 13 Behavior is an enactment of preestablished routines built on standard operating procedures (SOPs). 14 SOPs are not the enemy of the organization but its essence. They help the organization do what it was designed to do: “replace the uncertain expectations and haphazard activities of voluntary endeavors with the stability and routine of organized relationships.” 15 In nonstandard situations, organizations search for new options but search is constrained by existing routines, training, and experience. Changes that do occur reflect adaptation of existing procedures in the face of threats to organizational equilibrium, or the addition of new tasks without sacrificing core tasks. 16 Third, organizational behavior is driven by the quest to avoid uncertainty by solving problems of immediate urgency in response to short- run feedback from the environment. 17
Several hypotheses flow from these assumptions. 18 First, organizations will be risk averse and develop alternatives that support existing goals, defined in terms of protecting resources, autonomy (jurisdiction and independence), and organizational essence (the views of the dominant group in the organization on what missions and capabilities should be). 19 Second, when these goals conflict, organizations privilege autonomy because monopoly jurisdiction (few or no bureaucratic rivals) means fewer competitors for resources, while independence enhances the organization’s control over how it spends its resources. 20 Third, because action is determined by routines and SOPs, change will produce incremental adjustments to programs that are consistent with existing tasks. 21
From the perspective of the organizational process model, we would expect that in peacetime the U.S. services will be risk averse, sticking to current routines or marginally adapting them in support of existing roles and missions; to search for ways to protect and maintain existing roles and missions; to resist adoption of dramatically new roles and missions; and to seek to increase resources and autonomy by adding new missions to repertoires while not jeopardizing the central position of existing missions. Overall, we would expect organizational inertia to be high.
Under the conditions that prevailed during the interwar period, we would expect the Army to be interested in mechanization as a way to augment resources but determined to fit armor doctrine into traditional infantry and cavalry SOPs. We would expect naval leaders to have developed air power but to fit it into standard doctrine and practice by using air power for spotting and scouting to support the battleship, not for independent strikes. Finally, we would expect the Marines to cling to their traditional peacetime missions, which afforded them a great deal of autonomy, perhaps gradually adding new missions but not totally displacing traditional ones. The organizational process model will be falsified if we see the displacement of core missions rather than the expansion of repertoires; the adoption of strategies or doctrines that threaten resources, autonomy, or essence in important ways, particularly autonomy; and support of change by members of sub-branches when it undermines the organization’s self-concept.
An alternative model of organizational behavior—the organizational learning model 22 —posits different types of obstacles to adjustment in peacetime. It makes three key assumptions. First, the basic motivating goal of an organization is to achieve an optimal result in the outside world. 23 Second, to achieve this goal, organizations will reevaluate beliefs about causation that define their tasks, and redefine tasks, skills, and procedures accordingly. Third, organizations redefine tasks based on observations and interpretations of experience. 24 This is the context in which organizations “learn.” 25 The conditions most likely to promote learning emanate from the organization’s external environment. They are “the desirability of finding new cause-effect chains, the possibility of finding them, and the urgency for finding them.” 26
Desirability refers to the domestic political incentives motivating bureaucratic actors to engage in soul-searching. Pressure from civilians can trigger learning, as George Breslauer notes, “by providing the impetus, political incentive, and political opportunity for a significant reevaluation of assumptions.” 27 Lack of civilian support can restrict opportunities for such reevaluation. 28 Pressures from other military actors can also stimulate learning. If one organization in the process of addressing an international vulnerability needs another organization to fulfill its military mission, political pressures will rise, thus heightening the desirability for reevaluating organizational tasks.
Haas notes, however, that “the existence of political incentives may not be enough to trigger learning.” 29 The possibility must also exist, and this is a function of the state of knowledge or available pool of experience that the organization can draw upon. The pool of experience, in turn, is affected by the capabilities and limitations of technology and by the opportunities for gathering necessary data to develop a credible knowledge base in peacetime. Possibility is less a question of resources than of credible knowledge that supports the proposed innovation. 30
Finally, learning is stimulated by urgency, which is the result of pressures in the international environment. In peacetime, short of crisis, urgency is greatest where interests are most vulnerable. Even during periods of low external threat, geostrategic vulnerabilities created by geography, international agreements, and technological developments influence strategic adjustment. Urgency reduces ambiguity in two ways. First, it aids the identification of the problem by making it clear which vulnerabilities need to be addressed. Second, it increases actors’ motivations to pay attention to certain problems and arrive at solutions. 31 By enhancing strategic focus in these ways, urgency helps clarify the organization’s strategic priorities so experience can be brought to bear.
Urgency is tied to the scope of a nation’s international responsibilities and the vulnerability of its interests. If the nation is a global power, responsibilities will be broad and diffuse, reducing opportunities for leaders to focus on particular problems and bring experience to bear. Problem identification will be more difficult. 32 Moreover, if vulnerability is low, there will be less incentive and motivation to reevaluate the tasks of the organization and to produce new knowledge. Between the wars, an insular United States could easily withdraw militarily from continental Europe. However, the vulnerability of regional interests heightened strategic sensitivity in the Pacific and motivated actors to direct their attention there to devise ways to reduce vulnerabilities. Geopolitical circumstances presented focal points around which learning could take place.
A favorable conjunction of desirability, possibility, and urgency enhances opportunities for learning in two key ways: by increasing the pressure on the organization to focus its strategic priorities and bring experience to bear on the strategic problem in question; by increasing the organization’s ability to examine past experience, augment it with new information, and reevaluate programs and tasks accordingly.
Several hypotheses flow from this model. First, organizations accept risk in order to achieve the most desirable result in the outside world. They do so even when they understand that by doing so they may lose some autonomy and resources. Second, organizations can overcome inertia provided there is a favorable conjunction of desirability, possibility, and urgency.
From the organizational learning model, we would expect U.S. service leaders to respond to the external security environment rather than to bureaucratic interests, to adopt new missions to enhance military effectiveness in the future, and to relinquish missions no longer deemed relevant. Nonincremental change should be tied to learning and the acquisition of new knowledge, and there should be a strong correlation between the credibility of the experiential base that supports the innovation and learning. Finally, adjustment should be greatest for the services that face the most favorable conjunction of desirability, possibility, and urgency. Overall, we would expect organizational inertia to be low.
In the interwar period, advances in mechanization, amphibious warfare, and carrier strike forces should be linked to a credible experiential base and a growth in consensual knowledge. The constraints on adjustment should be higher for the Army than for the Navy and Marine Corps, because the North American continent was nearly invulnerable while the U.S. insular Pacific possessions were very vulnerable. Urgency was higher for the Navy and Marine Corps than for the Army. The organizational learning model would be confirmed if we see nonincremental changes in organizational process; far-reaching changes in training and education, which would indicate reevaluation of the theory of causation that defines the organization’s tasks; changes in core tasks; the voluntary relinquishing of missions, even if it jeopardized autonomy and resources; and changes in organizational routines in the face of experience, despite a negative impact on bureaucratic interests. 33 Alterations in tasks that jeopardize autonomy yield the strongest evidence for the organizational learning model.
Mechanization
Following World War I, the War Department adhered to the conviction that man remains the fundamental instrument in combat. Mechanized forces should operate in close support of the infantry, more efficiently performing the scouting role. To the extent that armor development proceeded, it was tailored to existing infantry doctrine. Adjustment was adaptive, a change consistent with existing roles and missions.
The organizational process model asserts that organizational health is the foremost concern of military organizations, even more so when the probability of war is remote. But only by protecting the turf of one sub-branch— the infantry—was the Army’s mechanization strategy one that preserved organizational health. Mechanization was tied to the continental defense mission and this defensive frame of mind only justified the budget reductions Congress was imposing. 34 Continental defense undercut any strategic rationale for an aggressive mechanization policy which would have given the Army an offensive potential and a legitimate claim to more resources.
Were Army leaders simply following standard operating procedures? Did Army leadership identify with the parochial sub-branch concerns of the infantry for protection of its turf? Marginally perhaps, but the evidence is not conclusive. There was broad support among the Army leadership for mechanization. In 1928, Secretary of War Dwight Davis ordered the organization of the first experimental mechanized force to serve as a technical and tactical laboratory. 35 Davis also organized a board of General Staff officers to begin planning for long-range mechanization. The board recommended the creation of a follow-on experimental mechanized force since the first was disbanded in September 1928 after completing its mission. With the exception of Chief of Infantry, Major General Stephen Fuqua, who perceived a threat to the infantry’s control over tanks, the board members supported the reconstitution of a mechanized force and they prevailed over narrow branch rivalries. 36 This point is important for assessing self-concept-related claims made by the organizational process model because the infantry was firmly entrenched as the dominant fighting arm in the Army. 37 The chiefs were acting against the Army’s organizational essence. They did not identify with the narrow views of the infantry. 38
Obstacles to armor development are better explained by the absence of factors deemed important by the organizational learning model. How urgent was learning? Were there strategic pressures encouraging the Army to mechanize? General John Pershing articulated the Army’s primary mission in 1919: defense of the American continent against invasion. 39 As an insular nation with no great powers contiguous to its borders and no imperial commitments, this defensive mission made perfect sense. Operating on the North American continent made mobility necessary. 40 Yet since tank doctrine had evolved in a static warfare situation, tanks were viewed as siege weapons. Pershing endorsed the view that tanks had no role to play in continental defense.
How desirable was learning? Were there domestic pressures on the organization to reevaluate core tasks as they related to mechanization? Pershing’s testimony went beyond simply articulating the Army’s core mission. It was instrumental in Congress’s decision under the National Defense Act of 1920 to disband the tank corps as an independent organization and place it under the Chief of Infantry. 41 Pershing’s recommendation dovetailed with Congressional concerns over the affordability of a separate tank service. 42 With reduced military budgets, the consensus was that the United States could not afford an independent tank organization. The reorganization constrained tank development severely. It was not the result of bureaucratic inertia but Congress’s decision did make it easier for the infantry to pursue its parochial interests of ensuring that tanks conformed to infantry tactics. Furthermore, once the infantry was designated as the using arm, all design work on heavy tank models was canceled. 43 Fiscal stringency influenced the development of equipment and organization, making it difficult to augment the experiential base. This situation reinforced the opinions of the tank skeptics over the tank enthusiasts.
Mechanization development met further fiscal obstacles in the 1920s. The existence of surplus wartime equipment gave Congress an excuse for limiting appropriations for equipment. Wartime equipment was obsolete and suitable tanks were crucial to organization of a mechanized force. The Great Depression sealed further the fate of armor development. Tank modernization and reequipment of a mechanized force were not high on the priority list of War Department leaders searching for ways to maintain the Army with ever more limited funds. 44 And mechanization was very expensive. 45 When the second mechanized force was finally constituted in 1930, it was forced to use obsolete equipment. At a variety of crucial turning points, fiscal stringency squelched armor development. It shaped decisions about organization and equipment appropriations, constraining the experiential base and reinforcing traditional Army task definitions. Up to this point, the evidence can be interpreted to support the organizational process model. Civilian support seems a key factor. But the logic of the organizational process model falters when we examine what shaped civilian decisions and when we see how Army leaders responded when incentives from civilians changed in the 1930s.
How possible was learning? What was the nature of the experiential base for armor development at the close of World War I? There were competing views on how to incorporate mechanization into Army doctrine, which reflected differing experiences among units during World War I. Divisions that had an opportunity to train and fight with tanks were enthusiastic supporters while those with no experience were unenthusiastic. 46 In the end, two aspects of wartime experience overwhelmed the tank enthusiasts: the limited nature of that experience; and the static warfare situation which framed that limited experience. U.S. ground forces were in the war too short a time to conduct extensive tests and accumulate sufficient combat data. So the Army accepted British and French concepts of tank use, which linked the tank to trench warfare as a close support weapon for the infantry. 47 That role for the tank was judged to be largely irrelevant to what the Army perceived as its postwar mission: continental defense. 48 The course of American armor development was affected considerably by subsequent domestic political decisions but the lessons of the war provided the initial set of experiences that framed decisions about armor. 49 From the organizational learning perspective, the World War I experience created the interpretive frame through which subsequent tank experience was viewed. Most Army officers saw the role of the tank through a static rather than a mobile warfare frame. This accounts for obstacles to adjustment better than the bureaucratic model because there was not sufficient experience to overturn the dominant frame, while bureaucratic incentives for change (e.g., Congressional appropriations) did exist. This point is key to mediating between the two models of organizational behavior because the World War I experience informed Pershing’s 1919 testimony to Congress, and that testimony was instrumental in Congress’s decision to disband the tank corps. Possibility preceded desirability at the outset; subsequently the two fed on each other, stunting opportunities for learning.
The possibility for armor development was curtailed further by the limited mechanical capabilities of tanks in the 1920s. Slow moving tanks could support infantry assaults, though with difficulty; yet they were incapable of performing the mobile independent missions tank enthusiasts envisioned for them. The adaptive approach to armor development was reinforced by the capabilities of the tanks that were available at any particular time for maneuvers. Limited capabilities limited experimentation, and, as the Chief Ordnance Department historians point out, “Doctrine depended upon what tests proved tanks could do.” 50
One final decision ensured that mechanization would be grafted onto existing service missions. In 1931, Chief of Staff General Douglas MacArthur disbanded the second mechanized force. The practical effect was to further delimit the experiential base for armor development. The first experimental mechanized force had been disbanded after two months. Now, the second mechanized force, organized in November 1930, was disbanded in June 1931. MacArthur’s decision governed Army mechanization policy for the rest of the decade. The General wanted to promote mechanization while also assuaging the infantry and the cavalry. 51 While he recognized the importance of mechanization and sought to promote it, his funding priorities were conditioned by the tank’s technical limitations and the limited experiential base it had produced. 52 MacArthur remained convinced that mechanized combat was inherently limited by weather, terrain, and availability of fuel.
In a vicious cycle, MacArthur’s priorities angered Congressional supporters of mechanization who feared the General would spend additional appropriations on men rather than modernization. In 1932, they opposed any increase in War Department appropriations. 53 This point is critical for assessing resource-related claims made by the organizational process model. It is difficult to account for the failure of Army leaders to respond to resource incentives, particularly at the height of the depression. At this juncture, mechanization was the only way to increase War Department appropriations. 54 Political incentives for bureaucratic actors to reevaluate core tasks existed, but they were not enough because the possibility for reevaluation, which was a function of the state of knowledge, barely existed.
Strategic adjustment in mechanization was adaptive. But by only the most narrow definition, protecting infantry turf, was it a strategy that preserved organizational health. More telling are the insights provided by the organizational learning model, which direct attention to the absence of any of the factors that might have stimulated a reevaluation of existing missions. Insularity, the absence of great power competitors, and continental security negated urgency. Desirability did not begin to rise until the early 1930s in the guise of Congressional pressure for mechanization. By then, possibility was minimal. Fiscal and technological constraints had already converged to limit an already limited experiential base from which learning could proceed. The static warfare frame persisted. While the parochial interests of the infantry were served, these were not the sole, nor even dominant, factors behind the Army’s adaptive approach to tank warfare. Budgetary limitations, which severely constrained the experiential base, played a far more significant role in shaping roles and missions than did vested organizational interests and standard operating procedures. The organizational process model underestimates leadership support for mechanization. It also elevates a secondary level factor (infantry parochialism) to a primary level cause by overlooking the process by which wartime experience shaped Pershing’s views on the tank and his subsequent testimony, which in turn influenced Congressional decisions that only then resulted in increased infantry control over mechanization.
Amphibious Warfare
In 1933, the Marine Corps created the Fleet Marine Force and adopted the amphibious assault mission as the service’s new core task. Strategic adjustment was innovative, something the organizational process model has difficulty explaining. The result was not, however, entirely antithetical to the goals of organizational health as defined by that model. The amphibious assault mission is frequently characterized as an institutional panacea: it gave the Corps a much needed and desired raison-d’être, a singular identity; it restored marine pride and confidence after an onslaught of negative press over the barbarous conduct of some Marines serving in Hispaniola; 55 it gave the service a prominent military role, one essential to national defense and obviously distinct from the Army’s and Navy’s, particularly since the Army periodically threatened to absorb the Corps. 56 Moreover, amphibious assault was a role the Corps did not hold in contempt like it did colonial duty; and it required the Corps to maintain a permanent force in readiness. The Marines finally found a solution to their historic problem of bureaucratic survival by staking out a mission unique to that service. The amphibious assault mission would ensure bureaucratic survival and escape from legislative parsimony.
On the other hand, the Marines engaged in a very risky strategy, choosing ultimately to displace their traditional missions with a new mission rather than simply expanding their repertoire. 57 Moreover, the amphibious assault mission sacrificed autonomy to the Navy and at a time when Congress was unwilling to devote resources to the Fleet Marine Force because of its interventionist and overly provocative character. The Marine Corps, though ostensibly a fully autonomous service within the Department of the Navy, had always depended on the Navy for missions. Amphibious assault did not change that; on the contrary, it sacrificed autonomy. By contrast, the Corps’s traditional missions were important sources of autonomy and particularly relevant to peacetime. Moreover, expeditionary duty, a mainstay of the Corps between the wars, was not under serious threat from the Army. 58
How urgent was learning? Following World War I, political developments raised the nation’s geostrategic vulnerabilities, heightened urgency, and brought the advanced base mission to the forefront of American military planning in the Pacific. 59 The Treaty of Versailles gave the Japanese possession of former German Pacific islands that lay astride U.S. supply routes to the Philippines. The Washington naval treaties restricted the number and size of U.S. battleships and the fortification of certain bases in the Pacific while placing no limits on mobile forces that could seize and defend advanced bases. In the Navy’s revised War Plan Orange, the Marines’ wartime role of accompanying the fleet became essential.
How desirable was learning? The desirability of reassessing service missions dated back to 1900 when the Navy’s General Board began pushing the Marines to accept the advanced base role. 60 The General Board continued applying pressure, despite the reluctance of Headquarters Marine Corps (HQMC) to provide men if it meant detracting from other duties, and the failure of Congress to provide necessary appropriations. 61 The advanced base mission gained a temporary boost when U.S.-Japanese diplomatic relations soured in 1906&-;1907 and again in 1913, and the Corps prospered by relating its manpower requests to the advanced base mission. 62 But Corps leaders refused to sacrifice traditional duties, even while accepting the advanced base mission as the service’s principal war mission. When one-third of Corps strength was tasked to serve as infantry in Europe during World War I, the advanced base force was maintained at full strength, but the mission remained one of many tasks Corps leaders sought to preserve. 63 Moreover, expeditionary duty in Haiti (1915) and in the Dominican Republic (1916) prevented designation of any permanent advanced base units. 64
After World War I, many senior officers continued to believe the Corps flourished in direct relation to its distance from the Navy. 65 Colonial infantry duties provided important peacetime missions that were more likely to enhance the Corps’s claim to scarce resources. 66 There were also those who argued that preparing for large-scale ground maneuvers like in World War I was the Corps’s main duty in peacetime. 67 So the Corps initially embraced the advanced base mission as an expansion of its repertoire, a behavior consistent with the expectations of the organizational process model.
By 1931, however, the Corps had committed itself to serving the fleet in wartime by seizing bases for naval operations and preparing in peacetime for the successful execution of that wartime function. How do we account for this shift? Following World War I, heightened urgency had reduced ambiguity in the Corps’s strategic environment while political incentives to engage in a reevaluation of service missions also climbed. Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) Robert E. Coontz pressed CMC Barnett in January 1920 to provide a West Coast expeditionary force built around the advanced base force concept. 68 Plan Orange called for the capture of bases in the Caroline and Marshall Islands which the Japanese now occupied. 69 The mission was not only to defend advanced bases but also to seize them from the enemy. Naval leaders needed the Marines to create the units and develop the doctrine to conduct amphibious landings against defended shores. The most recent experience with amphibious landings was the unsuccessful British assault on Turkish defenses in 1915. The disastrous Gallipoli campaign convinced naval planners the world over that amphibious landings in the face of heavy opposition could not succeed. This was hardly a doctrine upon which to stake an organization’s identity. But the Navy’s War Plans Division could see no way to prosecute Plan Orange other than by amphibious assault.
Civilian support, however, was uneven throughout the 1920s and amphibious warfare doctrine developed slowly. The onset of the Great Depression tightened resources further. But CMC Ben Fuller (1930–1934) steadfastly held that the Corps’s primary duty was the wartime role of seizing and defending bases. In 1931 he persuaded the CNO to establish the Fleet Marine Force (FMF), a permanent unit composed of base defense and amphibious assault units. In Holland Smith’s estimation, the FMF “firmly established the Marine Corps as part of the organization of the U.S. Fleet, available for operations with the Fleet ashore or afloat.” 70
How possible was learning between the wars? When Corps Headquarters officially embraced the base seizure mission as part of its repertoire in 1920, 71 CMC John A. Lejeune (1920–1929) began the process of redirecting the Corps’s role from colonial infantry to amphibious assault in support of the fleet. 72 Broadening the experiential base was one important component. 73 In Marine Corps schools, Lejeune increased the time spent studying amphibious warfare and the British landings at Gallipoli. 74 In-depth studies revealed that flaws in the Gallipoli operation could be corrected, a critical step in building credible knowledge around the feasibility of amphibious assault. Training exercises in 1923–24 and 1925 demonstrated that seizing advanced bases from an enemy was possible. By 1931, theoretical instruction at Marine Corps schools was overhauled and three years later, a detailed manual entitled “Tentative Manual for Landing Operations” was adopted as official doctrine. From this point forward until the outbreak of war, a series of Fleet Landing Exercises (FLEXes) provided continuous practical training for the Marines to test their doctrine and make improvements. The FLEXes were critical to the progress made in developing amphibious warfare doctrine. Through trial and error, they provided a body of knowledge and experience that further reduced ambiguity about the possibility of adjustment. Experience proved the main principles of the doctrine sound. 75
Adopting the amphibious assault mission would be consistent with the organizational process model if the Marines had embraced it as an additional mission. But instead of seeing amphibious assault as an additional mission, as an incremental growth in responsibilities, they saw it as a replacement for traditional core missions. Moreover, this shift is not consistent with the interpretation of organizational goals that the model advances. It was not clear that resources would rise given prevailing views in the White House and Congress. By the early 1930s, the Depression was well underway and despite the Manchurian incident of 1931, President Hoover did not regard Japan as a threat and remained committed to nonintervention and hemispheric defense. Although the election of Franklin Roosevelt in 1933 gave the Corps an ally for the amphibious assault mission in the White House, 76 by that time, isolationism in Congress had grown and, with it, the perception of the FMF as provocative and interventionist. Moreover, Congress and the Navy remained unsympathetic to Marine Corps pleas for more landing craft to facilitate peacetime training.
Most critically, the strategy sacrificed autonomy to the Navy, autonomy the Corps had derived from its traditional peacetime missions. The Navy was not seriously interested in addressing the naval gunfire problem to support the base seizure mission. 77 Moreover, the admirals who controlled naval aviation were more interested in building the Navy’s carrier force then in developing close air support techniques for the “less crucial” amphibious assault mission. After all, amphibious assault was distinctly secondary to the problems of fleet action on the high seas.
There was little consensus among Corps leaders at the time about how or even whether the Corps should adjust given its repertoire of peacetime responsibilities. Yet amphibious assault ultimately prevailed because it was linked to a pressing geostrategic challenge that confronted the United States at the close of the First World War. Steady growth of the experiential base revealed that success was possible, and a new more optimistic consensus emerged from careful analysis of Gallipoli. A favorable conjunction of desirability, possibility, and urgency reduced ambiguity in the Corps’s environment and stimulated a fundamental rethinking of its core tasks. Even if one allows that the adoption of amphibious assault was an institutional panacea for the Marine Corps, the organizational process model cannot explain the decision to sacrifice autonomy, particularly when civilian and Navy support were waning. Moreover, Corps leaders pursued a very risky strategy by pinning the service’s future on a mission that experts worldwide had deemed hopeless.
Carrier Aviation
Carrier aviation represents a hybrid form of strategic adjustment. The foundations of aerial victory were laid in the 1920s and 1930s, easing the way for the U.S. Navy to substitute the carrier task force for the battle line. But the aircraft carrier did not come into its own as the “main striking force of the fleet until well into World War II.” Up until then, naval aviation “remained a distinctly auxiliary service, charged with scouting, long-range patrol, raiding, and protection of the battle line.” 78 Unlike the Marines, who embraced amphibious assault in peacetime and refocused their education, training, and doctrine around it, the Navy did not place the carrier strike force at the center of its doctrine and operations until the destruction of the U.S. battle line at Pearl Harbor by a Japanese carrier strike. The key questions are how to account for the extent of adjustment that did occur, and what factors hindered further adjustment.
In his analysis of the U.S. Navy between the wars, Waldo Heinrichs claims that bureaucratic inertia was the culprit. 79 Arguing from the organizational process model perspective, Heinrichs writes that in peacetime, precedent and routine take hold. The Navy is conservative and incrementally adaptive; it is in its organizational interest to be so because the most pressing engagement is the battle of the budget. Here intraorganizational compromise and consensus is the name of the game. Adjustment occurs in piecemeal fashion and only extreme financial pressure or the imminent threat of war will produce innovation.
Heinrichs contends that the Navy failed to innovate; that this failure stemmed from organizational inertia; and that Navy planning served a bureaucratic rather than a strategic function. His interpretation contrasts sharply with Stephen Rosen’s. 80 Rosen argues that Rear Admiral William Moffett, the battleship commander who became the first Chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics, transformed the place of aviation in the Navy between the wars. 81 Moffett redefined the role of carriers as independent strike forces, and won a power struggle within the organization to create a career path for aviators, keeping them in the organization where they could develop strategy, tactics, and doctrine for the effective use of air power. 82
Both Rosen’s and Heinrichs’s versions contain elements of truth. The U.S. Navy did make significant strides in carrier aviation between the wars but did not fully adopt the carrier strike force concept. Heinrichs, however, mischaracterizes the obstacles as bureaucratic. It was not the presence of bureaucratic inertia deemed critical by the organizational process model but rather the weakness of key stimulants deemed crucial by the organizational learning model that produced the hybrid result.
How urgent was learning? By restricting the fortification of insular possessions in the western Pacific, the Washington Five Power treaty heightened urgency. It denied the U.S. Navy the advanced fleet bases necessary to operate land-based aircraft in the western Pacific, producing the paradox of defending Far Eastern commitments with inadequate power projection capabilities. 83 Fleet aviation, centered on the carrier concept, offered a way for the U.S. Navy to remedy this deficiency within treaty constraints. Despite the pro-battleship biases that existed, the changing security and technological environments created new pressures and possibilities for U.S. naval planners to adjust.
How desirable was learning? What were the domestic and bureaucratic incentives and obstacles? As early as 1919, there was support for aviation among the Navy leadership, particularly the General Board, to develop aviation to the fullest. 84 There was significant gun-club opposition, but battleship commanders appreciated the value of carrier aircraft for spotting and scouting. Moreover, the moving force within the Navy behind a more independent role for the carrier—Moffett—was a successful battleship admiral. Some of his biggest allies were other battleship admirals like Joseph Reeves and then-President of the Naval War College William Sims.
How possible was learning? The answer to this question provides the greatest insight into the development of carrier strike forces between the wars. A main hindrance to learning was technological uncertainty about aircraft capabilities and the effectiveness of different types of carriers. 85 These hindered the development of new consensual knowledge, raised ambiguity, and limited prospects for learning. The limitations of carrier aircraft continued to reinforce the pro-battleship sentiment of many admirals until after the battles of the Coral Sea and Midway. 86 Moreover, while the value of the large fast fleet carrier as a separate offensive striking force was demonstrated in Fleet Problem IX of 1929, 87 it was still not clear how to make the most effective use of the carrier, nor how to achieve an optimal number within the limits imposed by international treaties.
Exercises with the Lexington and Saratoga in 1929 demonstrated the advantages of large carriers. But they were far larger than needed to accommodate the small air groups anticipated for the future. Proponents of small carriers argued for a large number of platforms to fight a war that might not be decided in a decisive fleet engagement but over the course of a lengthy war of attrition. 88 Given treaty limits on total carrier displacement, building as many carriers as possible meant building small ones. Given the treaty restrictions on tonnage then in effect, it was not self-evident that large carriers represented the best possible investment.
There were lively disputes over the relative merits of small and large carriers, yet no way to resolve those arguments short of actual testing and operational experience. Hone and Mandeles conclude that “the ‘delay’ in obtaining the Essex type was not the result of bureaucratic conservatism or lethargy. It was instead the result of a lack of sufficient experience.” 89 Those who challenged Moffett’s claim that the primary function of the main body of carriers was to increase the attack power of the fleet did so in the course of realistic exercises; 90 there was simply insufficient evidence that carriers had become the dominant type of ship. They were vulnerable to attack, had greater difficulty operating at night and in bad weather, and were particularly susceptible to dive bomb attacks. Doubts about carrier potential were grounded in reasonable assessments of technological uncertainties raised in the course of experience. From the organizational learning perspective, the results of exercises were too ambiguous to entirely overturn the dominant interpretive frame that saw the carrier as supporting the battleship rather than displacing it as the organizations’ core offensive weapon system.
The learning that did occur stemmed from Navy efforts to war-game Plan Orange. Between the wars, a body of knowledge grew up around planning exercises conducted at the Naval War College. 91 The perplexing problems of a Pacific campaign provided grist for simulation exercises which took on a greater air of strategic reality by the late 1920s as a direct consequence of brutally realistic gaming. Previously, a Pacific campaign was envisioned as swift, offensive, and decisive; after 1928, a vision of a protracted war of attrition predominated in which numerical inferiority in battleships was compensated for by air superiority. 92 The assumptions underlying the Navy’s view of strategy and warfare were challenged and transformed. From a mere transit itinerary, the Navy produced a doctrine of progressive transoceanic offensive operations. 93
These intellectual breakthroughs highlighted the importance of the carrier as an independent offensive striking force and the need to mass aircraft for strikes rather than assigning aircraft to each battleship to act as its eyes. 94 As Hone and Mandeles point out, “continuing advocacy is insufficient in itself for successful innovation. The organization must also be able to gain experience with the innovation and alter its methods on the basis of that experience.” 95 It needs a means of testing new ideas that provides evidence to show what works and what does not.
The Navy’s experiential base also received a boost, paradoxically, from the Washington naval treaties. 96 Two battle cruiser hulls were converted into large carriers and the results of fleet exercises with them opened up new operational possibilities for naval planners. Moreover, by restricting carrier displacement, the treaties made it impossible for designers to provide sufficient flight-deck armor to repel dive-bomb attacks. Major fleet exercises revealed the ease of spotting the battle fleet from the air and destroying any carrier operating with the battle fleet. This was an important consideration in the decision to detach the carrier from the battle fleet and let carriers operate independently.
In the final analysis, Navy planning did respond to heightened urgency. U.S. leaders had made extensive political commitments in the Far East. Should they decide to make good on those promises, the Navy would have to execute a strategic offensive against Japan. Revisionists maintain the Philippines were really not important and that naval leaders called for their defense because it justified a large battle fleet and the Mahanian-type engagement they hoped to fight. 97 But it was civilians who defined the national interest as defense of the Philippines and the Open Door in China. The fact remained that Japan could not menace the continental United States nor the western hemisphere. It could, however, close the Open Door.
Learning did occur but the Navy did not fully develop the doctrine of multicarrier task forces. Full-fledged innovation was hindered less by bureaucratic inertia than by experiential obstacles. The organizational process model underestimates the support of battleship admirals for aviation, overlooks the progress made through simulation at the Naval War College, and does not pay sufficient attention to the debates over carrier development which hinged on questions of technical feasibility. The experiential base was constrained by treaty restrictions and technological uncertainties, each of which introduced considerable ambiguity into the organization’s environment.
Conclusions
Strategic adjustment is a process that is shaped by organizational constraints. Organizations can adjust provided the appropriate stimulants are present. Moreover, service organizations can be the originators of innovative approaches to providing security. They are neither mere passive recipients of new ideas nor necessarily conservative obstructionists. This does not mean that learning and innovation occur easily. But when they do not occur, we would be hasty to attribute the cause to bureaucratic inertia. In fact, the organizational process model does not get one very far at all. It asserts that innovation in peacetime is rare and when it does occur, it is to serve some bureaucratic interest. The empirical findings demonstrate that the claims made by the organizational process model do not square with the historical record. Adjustment responded to strategic needs and to the quality of the knowledge base. By some estimates, bureaucratic interests were served; by others they were harmed. But in no sense were they singularly decisive. This is an important finding because recent historiography champions the organizational process model’s interpretation and most scholars continue to pay lip service to it. 98
Table 8.1: Adjustment Stimulants
| Desirability | Possibility | Urgency | Adjustment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mechanization | low(a) | low(b) | low(c) | adaptive |
| Amphibious Warfare | moderate(d) | high(e) | high(f) | innovative |
| Carrier Aviation | moderate(g) | moderate(h) | high(i) | hybrid |
Key: (a)Infantry opposition; funding cuts and mechanization expensive; Congressional pressure rises only in 1932.
(b)Limited mechanical capabilities of tanks; limited WWI experience; Experimental Mechanized Forces short-lived.
(c)Insular; no great power adversaries; continental defense priority.
(d)Congressional isolationsism and view of Fleet Marine Force as interventionist and provocative; Hoover pro-continental defense; but declining civilian interest in colonial intervention; CNO desire for advanced base mission.
(e)FLEXes; though inadequate landing craft and amphibious troop carrier; learning from Gallipoli.
(f)War Plan Orange; geopolitical vulnerabilities; Washington treaty limits; Japanese retention of mandates.
(g)Gun club opposition; few funds because battleship modernization expensive; General Board support.
(h)FLEXes; Naval War College simulations; availability of large carriers; but technical limits of carrier aircraft; battleship improvements proceeding.
(i)Geopolitical vulnerabilities; regional orientation; Washington treaty limits; Japanese retention of mandates.
The organizational learning model fares better. A favorable confluence of stimulants for learning accounts for the process of task reorientation in the Marine Corps. The absence of these stimulants provides a better explanation for the Army’s adaptive approach to mechanization and the Navy’s embryonic development of the carrier strike force than does the organizational process model’s hypotheses about organizational health. Table 8.1 lays out the stimulants and summarizes the findings of the case studies about how the confluence of these stimulants affected strategic adjustment.
What do these general theoretical findings suggest for the United States today? The U.S. military today is being asked to do more with less. One strategy to accomplish this is to capitalize on new technologies, or novel combinations of existing technologies, as force multipliers. Existing or nascent technologies promise a dramatic revision in the way security and military planners will think about and plan for future hostilities. But will the military be able to take advantage of that promise? Doing so will involve accepting some risk in changing the way the services execute their tasks and in the determination of what tasks they should plan to execute. The ability to capitalize upon the potential promise of new technologies will greatly depend upon the ability of military organizations to adjust.
Urgency is important for reducing ambiguity, focusing strategic priorities so experience can be brought to bear, and fostering innovation. But overall, urgency is now low. The nation’s interests are broad, diffuse, and reasonably secure; ambiguity is high so setting strategic priorities will be difficult. A weak hierarchy of strategic priorities means adaptation will be the likely pattern of adjustment.
There are, however, those who would opt for innovation and press the U.S. military to make a revolutionary leap in the way it provides security because, they argue, U.S. defense requirements have changed. The security environment of today differs fundamentally from that of the Cold War when there was a clear military threat to plan against. The number of traditional interstate wars is declining while the number of irregular factional conflicts is rising. Given that the United States is more likely to face situations that call for neutral applications of force, policing duties, and other military operations short of war, it must design its military forces more specifically in terms of their political purposes. It is no longer sufficient to think in terms simply of countering a defined military threat, particularly since there is evidence that other states and non-state actors are changing their notions of war. Intrastate and nonconventional wars employing low-intensity conflict, guerrilla, and terrorist operations are far more in evidence than middle range conflicts pitting Clausewitzian armies against each other. 99 In sum, as advocates of the revolution in military affairs (RMA) argue, the United States can no longer depend solely on attrition-based models of conflict.
For proponents of the RMA, important insights from this analysis hinge on the nature of possibility. The possibility of learning is critically important for innovation and the high level of interest in supporting simulation and testing raises optimism about innovation at present. The cases together demonstrate that only sustained augmentation of the experiential base can build credible knowledge, a crucial stimulant to innovative adjustment. New ideas may readily be generated but unless they are rigorously tested and proven sound, they have little chance of prevailing. This is precisely the logic underlaying the Joint Staff’s proposal to establish a “Vanguard Force” in the U.S. military today. This joint standing task force, comprised of one-fifth of the active force structure, would be charged with working out in detail the organizations and doctrine to meet the new organizational concepts outlined in Joint Vision 2010. The Vanguard Force would serve as a development base for the American revolution in military affairs, based on the notion, born out by these interwar cases, that innovative adjustment requires experimentation so that military forces can work out how to do things differently. 100
Acknowldedgments
I would like to thank the following people for helpful comments on this and earlier drafts: Jan Breemer, Michael Desch, Lynn Eden, Colin Elman, Theo Farrell, Ted Hopf, Chaim Kaufman, Miko Nincic, Edward Rhodes, Mark Shulman, Bartholomew Sparrow, and Peter Trubowitz. An earlier version of this chapter appeared as “Organizations, Ambiguity, and Strategic Adjustment,” Journal of Strategic Studies 20 (June 1997), 41–74. I am grateful to the Journal of Strategic Studies for permission to publish this version of that article.
Endnotes
Note 1: See Barry R. Posen, The Sources of Military Doctrine: France, Britain, and Germany Between the World Wars (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984). Other works in this tradition include Richard Betts, Soldiers, Statesmen, and Cold War Crises (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977) and Timothy David Moy, “Hitting the Beaches and Bombing the Cities: Doctrine and Technology for Two New Militaries, 1920–1940,” PhD Dissertation, University of California at Berkeley, 1987. Despite some provocative recent scholarship that casts serious doubt on bureaucratic and organizational interpretations of the military [see in particular Edward Rhodes, “Do Bureaucratic Politics Matter? Some Disconfirming Findings From the Case of the U.S. Navy,” World Politics 47 (October 1994), 1–41], this model continues to hold tremendous sway in the academic and policy communities. A survey of recent writings on military behavior reveals that scholars always feel the need to engage the bureaucratic interpretation, regardless of what particular perspective they are championing. Rhodes discusses some of the reasons why this may be so. Back.
Note 2: Routines guide the behavior of organizations. They include “the forms, rules, procedures, conventions, strategies, and technologies around which organizations are constructed and through which they operate.” Barbara Levitt and James G. March, “Organizational Learning,” Annual Review of Sociology 14 (1988), 320. Back.
Note 3: The classic statement of the professional military is Samuel P. Huntington, The Soldier and the State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957). The military is a profession that strives to achieve efficiency in attaining its goals. For the military, this means maximizing its ability to secure the state. Military organizations respond to the dictates of strategic geography, technological developments, and enemy behavior in rational pursuit of their goals. Rosen builds on this perspective and argues that military organizations do not need to be pressured by civilians to innovate. Visionary officers can lead campaigns to innovate in peacetime. See Stephen Peter Rosen, “New Ways of War: Understanding Military Innovation,” International Security 13 (Summer 1988), 134–68; Stephen Peter Rosen, Winning the Next War: Innovation and the Modern Military (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). Kimberly Marten Zisk, Engaging the Enemy: Organization Theory and Soviet Military Innovation, 1955–1991 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993) also denies that military organizations have to be forced to innovate. She attempts to construct a model that combines the bureaucratic and professional approaches, arguing that while officers react to domestic threats to their organization before foreign military threats, they can innovate in reaction to shifts in enemy doctrine. critiques of the bureaucratic approach from a cultural perspective include Jeffrey W. Legro, Cooperation Under Fire: Anglo-German Restraint During World War II (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), and Elizabeth Kier, “Culture and Military Doctrine: France Between the Wars,” International Security 19 (Spring 1995), 65–93. Back.
Note 4: The literature on organizational learning is extensive. For an overview, see Levitt and March, “Organizational Learning,” 319–40. Back.
Note 5: Adjustment is operationalized as alterations in the combat tasks—or “roles and missions”—of service organizations. Roles and missions define how the military services provide security and reflect the organizations’ estimates of present and future threats and challenges. By identifying the tasks the services will train for and prepare to execute, roles and missions reflect service priorities about how to fight. It is also useful to think in terms of different patterns of strategic adjustment. Adjustment may be innovative (adoption of new goals, or new strategies and structures in pursuit of existing goals); or it may be adaptive (minor changes consistent with existing goals, strategies, and/or structures). I adopted these definitions from Theo Farrell, “Innovation in Military Organizations Without Enemies,” paper presented at the International Studies Association Annual Convention, San Diego, April 16–20, 1996, 1–2. While the tendency has been to view innovation as positive and forward- looking, and adaptation as a negative attachment to outmoded ideas or procedures, neither is inherently good nor bad. James Q. Wilson notes that there are as many bad innovations as good ones, that executives are particularly prone to adopt innovations that enhance their own control and power, and that the military is rich in such examples. James Q. Wilson, Bureaucracy: What Government Agencies Do and Why They Do It (New York: Basic Books, 1989), 227–28. My use of the term innovation does not imply that the change is necessarily good. For an excellent discussion of why doctrine is not a useful way to operationalize innovation in military organizations see Theo Farrell, “Figuring Out Fighting Organizations: The New Organizational Analysis in Strategic Studies,” Journal of Strategic Studies 19 (March 1996), 122–35. Back.
Note 6: Following the lead of Levitt and March, my interpretation of organizational learning builds on some classical observations about organizations: organizational behavior is routine-based, history-dependent, and target-oriented. Levitt and March, “Organizational Learning, 320. Back.
Note 7: By selecting cases of adjustment in the United States between the wars, we can control for systemic factors like relative power position of the state, the domestic environment of financial stringency, national attributes that encouraged military disengagement, and the nature of civil-military relations. Future research should examine different countries, to explore the impact of different political systems and different civil-military relations. In addition, a longitudinal study of the United States would be useful because as Farrell hypothesizes, “as organizations and their environments change, so change occurs in the way organizations innovate.” Farrell, “Figuring Out Fighting Organizations,” 127.
The cases have also been selected to provide variance on the dependent variable to explore the factors associated with different patterns of adjustment. The adoption of amphibious warfare by the Marine Corps represents an innovation, a change in the service’s core task. This is indisputably the consensus among historians. See Allan R. Millett, Semper Fidelis: The History of the United States Marine Corps (New York: Macmillan, 1980); Jeter A. Isely and Philip A. Crowl, The U.S. Marines and Amphibious War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951); Craig M. Cameron, American Samurai: Myth, Imagination, and the Conduct of Battle in the First Marine Division, 1941– 1951 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). There is also scholarly consensus that the Army adopted mechanization in a way consistent with traditional task definitions, to support the infantry and cavalry rather than as an independent offensive force in its own right. See Russell F. Weigley, The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy (New York: Macmillan, 1973); Constance McLaughlin Green, Harry C. Thomson, and Peter C. Roots, The Ordnance Department: Planning Munitions for War, U.S. Army in World War II: The Technical Services, 6, part 3 (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Chief of Military History, 1955). This provides an opportunity to investigate an undisputed case of adaptation. Carrier aviation represents a hybrid case of adjustment. There is dispute among scholars about whether Navy policy is best characterized as innovative (e.g., the adoption of a new mission for carriers as an offensive striking arm of the fleet) or as adaptive (e.g., aviation developments grafted onto existing doctrine to support the battleship by spotting and scouting). Rosen (1988 and 1991) emphasizes the progress made in developing the carrier into an independent strike force between the wars, while Waldo H. Heinrichs, Jr., “The Role of the United States Navy,” in Dorothy Borg and Shumpei Okamoto, ed., Pearl Harbor as History: Japanese-American Relations, 1931–1941 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973), 197–223, argues that naval aviation remained distinctly subordinate to the battleship until Pearl Harbor. These three cases span the adaptation-innovation continuum. In principle, coding the dependent variable along this continuum implies that there should also be a “do nothing” coding. The case of mechanization comes closest to this end of the continuum, but even the Army adapted to the tank. Back.
Note 8: See Emily O. Goldman, “Thinking About Strategy Absent the Enemy,” Security Studies 4 (Autumn 1994), 40–85 for an analysis of British strategic adjustment between the wars. Back.
Note 9: The Army also came to recognize that industrialization was as important to military success as tactics and strategy. For a detailed discussion of the mobilization planning case, see Emily O. Goldman, “The U.S. Military in Uncertain Times: Organizations, Ambiguity, and Strategic Adjustment,” The Journal of Strategic Studies 20 (June 1997), 41–74, especially pp. 59–63. This case allows us to examine competing claims about how organizations approach long-range planning and how they adjust when planning requires changing standard procedures. Back.
Note 10: The CNO Executive Panel’s Naval Warfare Innovations Task Force Briefing to Admiral Boorda identifies three past naval warfare innovations, two of which come from this period, carrier air and amphibious warfare, and seeks to replicate the process that produced those innovations. (June 16, 1995), 11 (author’s copy). Back.
Note 11: See James G. March and Johan P. Olsen, “The Uncertainty of the Past: Organizational Learning under Ambiguity,” in James G. March, ed., Decisions and Organizations (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 335–58. The factors I focus on correspond roughly to what March and Olsen call learning incentives and information exposure. Back.
Note 12: Graham T. Allison, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971), 78–94. See also Richard Cyert and James March, A Behavioral Theory of the Firm (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice- Hall, 1963). For a discussion of Allison’s models, see David Welch, “The Organizational Process and Bureaucratic Politics Paradigms: Retrospect and Prospect,” International Security, 17 (Fall 1992), 122–46; Jonathan Bendor and Thomas H. Hammond, “Rethinking Allison’s Models,” American Political Science Review, 86 (June 1992), 301–22. Back.
Note 13: Herbert Kaufman, The Limits of Organizational Change (University, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 1971). Back.
Note 14: The classic case study is Edward L. Katzenbach, Jr., “The Horse Cavalry in the Twentieth Century: A Study in Policy Response,” in The Use of Force: International Politics and Foreign Policy, eds. Robert J. Art and Kenneth N. Waltz, 2d ed. (Latham, N.Y.: University Press of America, 1983), 203–22. Back.
Note 15: Wilson, Bureaucracy, 221. Back.
Note 16: Richard H. Hall, Organizations: Structure and Process, 2d ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1977), 56. Back.
Note 17: A strategy of insulating or hedging against uncertainty by planning for all possible events is one that Kurt Lang contends military organizations are predisposed to pursue. Kurt Lang, “Military Organizations,” in Handbook of Organizations, ed. James G. March (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1965), 856. Such an approach may be the preferred one but it is immensely costly. A cheaper strategy is to monitor external sources of uncertainty and react after the event. James D. Thompson, Organizations in Action (New York: McGraw- Hill, 1967), 67; Chris C. Demchak, Military Organizations, Complex Machines (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 32–33. Back.
Note 18: A big conceptual problem plagues the organizational process model. Many hypotheses can be derived from it and it is possible to deduce contradictory values on the dependent variable so that the theory is nearly unfalsifiable. For example, preserving self-concept or essence by protecting vested interests may jeopardize resources, while grabbing additional missions may increase resources but sacrifice autonomy and identity. If any change serves some interpretation of parochial interests, the theory would be validated. The question then becomes what type of change does not support the theory. To address the falsifiability issue, I examine a series of hypotheses, each of which is separately falsifiable since they do not always point to the same value on the dependent variable. Back.
Note 19: Morton H. Halperin, Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1974), 28. Back.
Note 20: Wilson, Bureaucracy, 195. Halperin also notes that bureaucracies “are often prepared to accept less money with greater control than more money with less control” because of the high priority attached to turf. Halperin, Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy, 51. Back.
Note 21: For military organizations, this hypothesis is an unusually strong one because the armed forces in peacetime are the quintessential “procedural organization.” Outcomes cannot be observed short of war, so activities in peacetime become means oriented. As Wilson writes, “How the operators go about their jobs is more important than whether doing those jobs produces the desired outcomes.” In procedural organizations, SOPs are pervasive. Wilson, Bureaucracy, 163–64. This attribute makes the case of innovation in military organizations a most likely case for the organizational process model and a least likely case for alternative models that hypothesize a greater propensity for innovation. Back.
Note 22: There is no agreed upon definition of learning. See Philip E. Tetlock, “Learning in U.S. and Soviet Foreign Policy: In Search of an Elusive Concept,” in Learning in U.S. and Soviet Foreign Policy, eds. George W. Breslauer and Philip E. Tetlock (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1991). I adopt Jack Levy’s minimalist definition of learning as a “change of beliefs, skills, or procedures based on the observation and interpretation of experience.” The pool of ideas drawn upon can include simulated as well as historic experiences. This definition of learning as experience-induced belief change does not require that actors make the correct inferences from experience. Jack S. Levy, “Learning and Foreign Policy: Sweeping a Conceptual Minefield,” International Organization 48 (Spring 1994), 291, 296. Back.
Note 23: Ernst B. Haas, “Collective Learning: Some Theoretical Speculations,” in Learning in U.S. and Soviet Foreign Policy ed. Breslauer and Tetlock, 81–82; John D. Steinbruner, The Cybernetic Theory of Decision (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 64. Back.
Note 24: Learning is an individual cognitive exercise. Organizations learn “only through the individuals who serve in those organizations, by encoding individually learned inferences from experience into organizational routines.” Levy,“Learning and Foreign Policy,” 287–88. Individual interpretations of experience depend upon the frames through which events are comprehended. An organization’s interpretive frameworks tend to be resistant to experience. Levitt and March, “Organizational Learning,” 324. Back.
Note 25: Learning and strategic adjustment are not synonymous. Strategic adjustment may occur as adaptation or learning. Adaptation involves developing better ways to do the same task without reevaluating one’s entire program, often by taking advantage of new technology. The conversion of battleships from coal to oil and modification of their guns for substantial increase in firepower are examples of adaptation. Learning involves questioning the theory of causation that defines the organization’s tasks, and shifting means or ends based on new knowledge derived from observations and interpretations of experience. See Haas, “Collective Learning,” 72–74. Back.
Note 27: George Breslauer, “Ideology and Learning in Soviet Third World Policy,” World Politics 39 (April 1987), 443. Back.
Note 28: The inclusion of civilian pressures and incentives in the organizational learning model as part of desirability does not count against the learning model and concede the argument to the organizational process model. The key point is how civilian pressure operates, namely whether it is necessary for surmounting organizational inertia as the organizational process model stipulates, or whether it provides modest incentives and creates modest obstacles. Desirability is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for learning. Back.
Note 29: Haas, “Collective Learning,” 85. Back.
Note 30: If possibility referred only to resources, it might be considered a bureaucratic variable, and thus count against the learning model (i.e., organizations adjust in response to resource incentives in order to enhance organizational health). But possibility hinges on the state of credible knowledge, to which resources contribute but are not determinative. Back.
Note 31: Colin Elman pointed out these distinct arguments to me. Back.
Note 32: This is a similar argument to that made by Andrew Krepinevich in his explanation for why certain military organizations are better able to exploit the advantages of military revolutions than others: because of their ability to focus more precisely on specific contingencies and competitors. See Andrew F. Krepinevich, “Cavalry to Computer: The Pattern of Military Revolutions,” The National Interest 37 (Fall 1994), 39. Back.
Note 33: The learning model assumes the causal importance of inferences from experience. Research shows that individuals make systematic errors in interpreting experience. See Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic, and Amos Tversky, eds., Judgement under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Individuals, however, may also use history and experience instrumentally, interpreting it in a way that reinforces existing beliefs or serves their interests. Levy, “Learning and Foreign Policy,” 306–07. Back.
Note 34: Robert K. Griffith, Jr., Men Wanted for the U.S. Army: America’s Experience With An All-Volunteer Army Between the World Wars (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982), 53–58; Mark Skinner Watson, United States Army in World War II, Chief of Staff: Prewar Plans and Preparations (Washington, D.C.: Historical Division Department of the Army, 1950), 26. Back.
Note 35: Timothy K. Nenninger, “The Development of American Armor 1917–1940, Part III, The Experimental Mechanized Forces,” Armor 78 (May–June 1969), 33–39. Back.
Note 37: George F. Hofmann, “The Demise of the U.S. Tanks Corps And Medium Tank Development Program,” Military Affairs 37 (February 1973), 24. Back.
Note 38: In another example, Timothy K. Nenninger, “The Development of American Armor 1917–1940, Part IV, A Revised Mechanization Policy,” Armor 78 (September–October 1969), 45, describes how Fuqua also disagreed with War Department mechanization policy in 1931, which authorized all branches to mechanize, because this challenged the designation of tanks as infantry weapons. Nevertheless, Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur’s 1931 directive governed Army mechanization policy through the decade. Back.
Note 39: Hofmann, “The Demise of the U.S. Tanks Corps,” 21, 23. Back.
Note 40: Ibid., 23; Timothy K. Nenninger, “The Development of American Armor 1917–1940, Part I, The World War I Experience,” Armor 78 (January–February 1969), 49. Back.
Note 41: Pershing’s testimony was highly valued at the time. According to an Army and Navy Journal report, as quoted in Hofmann, “no one officer in the Army has wider knowledge or more complete grasp of the military lessons learned through the war.” Hofmann, “The Demise of the U.S. Tanks Corps,” 23. Back.
Note 42: Timothy K. Nenninger, “ The Development of American Armor 1917–1940, Part II, The Tank Corps Reorganized,” Armor 78 (March–April 1969), 35. Back.
Note 43: Green et al., The Ordnance Department, 195–96. Back.
Note 44: That manpower was privileged over tank modernization does not mean that the Army leadership identified with the parochial priorities of the infantry. It takes years to train an officer. It is always easier to reopen production lines than it is to restore deactivated forces. This is true even today for the high tech U.S. armed forces. Back.
Note 45: Between 1925 and 1939, the average allotted to tank development was approximately $60,000 per year. In 1931, the cost of a single Christie tank, without armor, engines, guns, or radios was $34,500, and seven years later, The Ordnance Department estimated the cost of a medium tank to be $50,000. As a result, only one experimental model could be built in any one year. Green, et al., The Ordnance Department, 195. Back.
Note 46: In 1920, the Chief of the Tank Corps noted that differences of opinion about the advantages of tanks ran “from enthusiastic support of the two divisions with whom we had an opportunity to train and to fight, to damning by those who did not get us (tanks).” Quoted in Hofmann, “The Demise of the U.S. Tanks Corps,” 23. Back.
Note 47: Nenninger, “The Development of American Armor,” Part I, 46–51. Back.
Note 48: The infantry and cavalry were also expected to develop greater mobility to support the Army’s defensive mission. Hofmann, “The Demise of the U.S. Tanks Corps,” 23. Back.
Note 49: Weigley finds the experiential argument convincing. He writes, “Perhaps part of the explanation for the absence of an American Fuller, Liddell Hart, or Guderian after the World War is that, despite some worrying about the futility of warfare on the Western Front, the brief American participation in the war, with no Verdun or Passchendaele, did not provide so much inducement to American soldiers as to British or German to look for ways to avoid repetition of the deadlock in the trenches.” Weigley, The American Way of War, 219. Back.
Note 50: Green, et al., The Ordnance Department, 192. Ordnance Department engineers did have access to a great deal of technical intelligence about foreign tank developments and experimentation. Green, et al. discuss the role of technical intelligence and conclude that “utilization of technical intelligence was at times both prompt and intelligent, at other times laggardly and unimaginative” (214). They attribute limitations on research and development to the small size of the staff in the Office, Chief of Ordnance, which meant each person was overburdened and so could not devote any extensive amount of time to any one problem; lack of funds; dictates from above that specified characteristics of any new item which curtailed experimentation; and the temper of the American people which made involvement in war so unthinkable that vigorous pursuit of new munitions developments hardly seemed urgent. Lack of funds, in particular, prevented the testing of new devices, which might have challenged existing doctrine for the tactical use of tanks. Green, et al. (205) describe how research funds were spread very thinly because The Ordnance Department had to serve all the branches of the Army and no branch would acquiesce to the needs of another. So existing doctrine persisted which further obstructed tank design. Back.
Note 51: Nenninger, “The Development of American Armor,” Part IV, 45–49. Back.
Note 52: Weigley notes that MacArthur’s impact on mechanization was mixed. He did not accept Fuller’s and Liddell Hart’s ideas, but he did encourage the use of the internal combustion engine, releasing the cavalry from the constraints that infantry speed had placed on tank motion. Weigley, The American Way of War, 218. Back.
Note 53: Nenninger “The Development of American Armor,” Part IV, 47. Back.
Note 54: Not all members of Congress supported mechanization, but the Chairman of the Subcommittee on Military Affairs of the House Appropriations Committee, Ross Collins, Democrat from Mississippi, was an aggressive advocate and his committee championed an independent mechanized organization. Collins was sensitive to the need to keep mechanization costs down, yet was willing to appropriate more funds for it. However, the War Department determined priorities and during the early 1930s mechanization received only a small share of military appropriations. Ibid., 46–47. Back.
Note 55: Cameron, American Samurai, 31–33; Merrill L. Bartlett, Lejeune: A Marine’s Life, 1867–1942 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991), 149– 51. Back.
Note 56: Under the constraints of postwar demobilization and drastic budget cuts, the Army relinquished any role in amphibious warfare. Cameron, American Samurai, 37. Back.
Note 57: The Marine Corps historically assumed multiple responsibilities: guarding ships, shore installations, consulates, and embassies; serving as shore parties, boarding parties, and gun crews; as hemispheric policemen, colonial light infantry, and as regular infantry during World War I. Millett, Semper Fidelis, 147–263, 318; Moy, Hitting the Beaches, 20. With America’s acquisition of an insular empire after the Spanish-American War, the Marines also adopted the advanced base mission to defend the Navy’s coaling stations and bases. Jack Shulimson, The Marine Corps’s Search for a Mission, 1880–1898 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993), 207. Back.
Note 58: Particularly after the Philippine Insurrection of 1899, the Army was not eager to participate in other military occupations. Millett, Semper Fidelis, 164. After World War I, the War Department focused on preparing to fight another conflict pitting mass armies against each other. Back.
Note 59: Moy, Hitting the Beaches, 25. Back.
Note 60: Millett, Semper Fidelis, 270–79; Moy, Hitting the Beaches, 23. Back.
Note 61: Millett, Semper Fidelis, 275. Back.
Note 64: Ibid., 285–286. Back.
Note 65: Ibid., 325; Bartlett, Lejeune, 123, 199. Back.
Note 66: The impact of the colonial infantry phase (1898–1941) on the Corps, according to Millett, is “elusive.” Interventions helped recruiting, kept the Corps in the popular press, increased Corps effectiveness as infantry in small units, and provided a mission more important than sea duty. It also increased the Corps’s reputation for “peacetime” utility and strengthened its claims for more manpower. On the negative side, growing Congressional distaste for reform occupations threatened fiscal requests, though by the early 1930s, when the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations renounced military occupation as a tool of U.S. foreign policy, the Corps had already embraced the amphibious assault role. Millett, Semper Fidelis, xvi, 263. Back.
Note 67: Isely and Crowl, U.S. Marine and Amphibious War, 29. Back.
Note 68: Millett, Semper Fidelis, 320. Back.
Note 69: Quoted in ibid., 29. Back.
Note 70: Holland Smith and Percy Finch, Coral and Brass (New York: Scribner’s 1949), 60. Back.
Note 71: Amphibious assault, up to this point, had not superseded traditional peacetime functions in practice. Millett, Semper Fidelis, 321–22. Back.
Note 72: See ibid., 322–26; Moy, Hitting the Beaches, 32–37. Back.
Note 73: A counter-argument might be made that amphibious warfare was very old, and the new technologies developed between the wars were minor application level changes. Hence, the emergence of a new core task, and the ideas that underlay it, cannot be attributed to technology and experience. However, Isely and Crowl dissent. They write, “Although the germs of later amphibious training may be found in this early [1901] advance-base activity, it is clear that the great weight of the emphasis was not on offensive landing operations. In fact there is little resemblance between this early concept of the main function of the marine corps and its subsequent role as a military organization specially trained for amphibious assault against enemy shores. Although in theory the advance-base force was supposed to be prepared to seize as well as to defend bases, in practice all of the training concentrated on the defense.... Some spade work had been done in the field of advance-base work, but it is clear that this did not imply landings against defended shores....The advance-base force was in actuality little more than an embryo coastal artillery unit.” Isley and Crowl, U.S. Marine and Amphibious War, 23–24. Back.
Note 74: Moy, Hitting the Beaches, 44. Back.
Note 75: Isely and Crowl, U.S. Marine and Amphibious War, 14–71; Millett, Semper Fidelis, 337–41. Back.
Note 76: Moy, Hitting the Beaches, 49–50. Back.
Note 77: Millett, Semper Fidelis, 332–33. Back.
Note 78: Heinrichs, “The Role of the United States Navy,” 205–6. Back.
Note 79: Ibid., 197–223. Back.
Note 80: Rosen is best known in both policy and social science circles for articulating some of the organizational requirements for peacetime innovation. “New Ways of War” and Winning the Next War. Back.
Note 81: See Thomas C. Hone and Mark D. Mandeles, “Interwar Innovation in Three Navies: U.S. Navy, Royal Navy, Imperial Japanese Navy,” Naval War College Review 40 (Spring 1987), 73–74. Back.
Note 82: Rosen, Winning the Next War, 69–71; Hone and Mandeles, “Interwar Innovation in Three Navies,” 73–75. Back.
Note 83: The Japanese Navy, unlike its western counterparts, could make extensive use of long-range land-based bombers which were subject to no arms control limits by operating them from the island chains mandated to Japan at the end of the war. Back.
Note 84: Thomas C. Hone and Mark David Mandeles, “Managerial Style in the Interwar Navy: A Reappraisal,” Naval War College Review 32 (September–October 1980), 97–98; Thomas C. Hone, “Navy Air Leadership: Rear Admiral William A. Moffett as Chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics,” in USAF Warrior Studies—Air Leadership: Proceedings of a Conference at Bolling Air Force Base April 13–14 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1984), 89–90. Back.
Note 85: From the organizational process perspective, one might argue that carrier limitations were due to decisions by the battleship-dominated Navy leadership not to invest in carrier development. The evidence does not support the claim. First, the low proportion of the Navy’s property investment in carriers (10% from 1919 to 1941) largely owed to the Washington treaty limits on aircraft carrier tonnage. From this, we cannot impute Navy desires. Second, there was clearly a movement of resources toward naval aviation during the same period as evidenced by the growth in the percentage expended on naval air strength. Finally, money for modernization was spent primarily on battleships but advances in battleship design introduced the possibility that the battleship could retain its armor and endurance levels while increasing its speed; not incidentally, the speed of destroyers and cruisers to screen the battle line would have to rise. Given treaty limits on individual displacement, the only way to build faster warships was to increase the efficiency of engineering designs to meet rising technical demands. This was more costly. Nor does the argument hold up that the Navy was responding to civilian incentives. The Navy submitted appropriation requests based on functional category (operating expenses, equipment, alterations, etc.), not on individual unit needs, and could shift funds from one program or vessel to another without a special congressional appropriation. In sum, obstacles to learning cannot be traced to a Navy leadership that did not support carrier development; nor can it be blamed on civilian constraints. See Thomas C. Hone, “Spending Patterns of the United States Navy, 1921–1941,” Armed Forces and Society 8 (Spring 1982), 443–62. Back.
Note 86: Emily O. Goldman, Sunken Treaties: Naval Arms Control Between the Wars (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 96–102. Back.
Note 87: The fleet problems were developed in the 1920s as a means of testing scenarios and throughout the 1920s and 1930s, they were a valuable testing ground for aviation concepts. In Fleet Problem IX in 1929, which included participation of the converted battle cruisers Lexington and Saratoga, Admiral Pratt’s carrier task force achieved a devastating surprise attack on the Panama Canal. Archibald Turnbull and Clifford Lord, History of United States Naval Aviation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949), 271–73; Hone and Mandeles, “Interwar Innovation in Three Navies,” 75–76. Back.
Note 88: George W. Baer, One Hundred Years of Sea Power: The U.S. Navy, 1890– 1990 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 142–43. Back.
Note 89: Hone and Mandeles, “Managerial Style in the Interwar Navy,” 91. Back.
Note 91: Michael Vlahos, The Blue Sword: The Naval War College and the American Mission, 1919–1941 (Newport, R.I.: Naval War College Press, 1980) remains the authority on the subject. Back.
Note 92: Michael Vlahos, “Wargaming, an Enforcer of Strategic Realism: 1919–1942,” Naval War College Review 39 (March–April 1986), 10–12. Back.
Note 94: Rosen, Winning the Next War, 69–71. Back.
Note 95: Hone and Mandeles, “Interwar Innovation in Three Navies,” 78; Hone and Mandeles, “Managerial Style in the Interwar Navy,” 98. Back.
Note 96: Goldman, Sunken Treaties, 158–62. Back.
Note 97: See, for example, Heinrichs,“The Role of the United States Navy,” 201–2. Back.
Note 98: In particular see Moy, Shulimson, and Cameron on the Marine Corps. For a popular contemporary rendition, see Michael Klare, Rogue States and Nuclear Outlaws: America’s Search For A New Foreign Policy (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995). Back.
Note 99: Mark R. Shulman, “Project 2015: Reconstituting for the New World Disorder,” draft (February 24, 1995), 9. Back.
Note 100: For a discussion of the Vanguard Force concept, see James R. Blaker, “A Vanguard Force: Accelerating the American Revolution in Military Affairs,” Progressive Policy Institute, forthcoming. Back.
Email this citation