The force soon centered on a doctrine that would later be called the blitzkrieg, or “lightning war.” Tanks would be coordinated with air, artillery, and infantry units to create a concentrated force that could punch through enemy lines and spread shock and chaos, ultimately overwhelming the foe. This choice of doctrine influenced the Germans to build tanks that emphasized speed (German tanks were twice as fast) and reliability (the complicated French and British tanks often broke down), and that could communicate and coordinate with each other by radio. When Hitler later took power, he supported this mechanized way of warfare not only because it melded well with his vision of Nazism as the wave of the future, but also because he had a personal fear of horses.
When war returned to Europe, it seemed unlikely that the Germans would win. The French and the British had won the last war in the trenches, and seemed well prepared for this one with the newly constructed Maginot Line of fortifications. They also seemed better off with the new technologies as well. Indeed, the French alone had more tanks than the Germans (3,245 to 2,574). But the Germans chose the better doctrine, and they conquered all of France in just over forty days. In short, both sides had access to roughly the same technology, but made vastly different choices about how to use it, choices that shaped history.
And:
the [air] force will still sometimes put pilots’ career interests ahead of military efficiency, especially when those making the decisions are fighter jocks themselves. For example, many believe that the air force canceled its combat drone, Boeing’s X-45, before it could even be tested, in order to keep it from competing with its manned fighter jet of the future, the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF, a program now $38 billion over its original budget, and twenty-seven months past its schedule). One designer recalls, “The reason that was given was that we were expected to be simply too good in key areas and that we would have caused massive disruption to the efforts to ‘keep . . . JSF sold.’ If we had flown and things like survivability had been evenly assessed on a small scale and Congress had gotten ahold of the data, JSF would have been in serious trouble.”
Military cultural resistance also jibes with problems of technological “lock-in.” This is where change is resisted because of the costs sunk in the old technology, such as the large investment in infrastructure supporting it. Lock-in, for example, is why so many corporate and political interests are fighting the shift away from gas-guzzling cars.
This mix of organizational culture and past investment is why militaries will go to great lengths to keep their old systems relevant and old institutions intact. Cavalry forces were so desperate to keep horses relevant when machine guns and engines entered twentieth-century warfare that they even tried out “battle chariots,” which were basically machine guns mounted on the kind of chariots once used by ancient armies. Today’s equivalent is the development of a two-seat version of the Air Force’s F-22 Raptor (which costs some $360 million per plane, when you count the research and development). A sell of the idea described how the copilot is there to supervise an accompanying UAV that would be sent to strike guarded targets and engage enemy planes in any dogfights, as the drone could “perform high-speed aerobatics that would render a human pilot unconscious.” It’s an interesting concept, but it begs the question of what the human fighter pilot would do.
Akin to the baseball managers who couldn’t adapt to change like Billy Beane, such cultural resistance may prove another reason why the U.S. military could fall behind others in future wars, despite its massive investments in technologies. As General Eric Shinseki, the former U.S. Army chief of staff, once admonished his own service, “If you dislike change, you’re going to dislike irrelevance even more.” It is not a good sign then that the last time Shinseki made such a warning against the general opinion—that the invasion of Iraq would be costly—he was summarily fired by then secretary of defense Rumsfeld.
More (#4) from Wired for War:
And: