Can’t Buy Me Progress: The Paradox of Military Innovation

Abstract

Why and how do states innovate militarily? More importantly, why and how do those innovations spread, and how might we predict when and where those innovations will be picked up and carried forward? These are some of the driving questions of the burgeoning field within security studies known as military innovation (Avant 1994(Avant , 2007Rosen 1994;Kier 1997;Dombrowski and Gholz 2006; Brooks and Stanley 2007). Michael Horowitz's first book-length study of the topic sets a high bar and for the most part achieves the aims its author intended. A wide-ranging work that attempts to ''[address] the broad puzzle of why some military innovations spread and influence international politics while others do not'' (p. 3), The Diffusion of Military Power is centered around a new theoretical take on the transmission of military technology from one state to another. To support the theory, Horowitz employs historical case studies of carrier and battlefleet operations, as well as statistical treatments of nuclear policies and suicide terrorism. As such, it is difficult to easily recap the breadth of the book in the space available here. But its central premise is clear and logical, and it is worth summarizing.Horowitz crafts a new theoretical approach, which he calls ''adoption-capacity theory,'' to understand both the spread of military technology and its adoption by actors in the international arena. As defined by Horowitz (p. 209), adoption-capacity theory is ''the combination of financial intensity and organizational capital possessed by a state, influences the way states respond to major military innovations and how those responses affect the international security environment.'' Essentially, adoption-capacity theory holds that mere innovation in the development of military technology and doctrine does not guarantee success in international affairs. Innovations often benefit precisely those states who were not involved in the innovations themselves, but who were able to better implement them into their own cultures and bureaucracies.Moreover, not every state has the ability to seize on the advantages offered to them by major military innovations. Rather, a state must have the capacity to recognize, utilize, and inculcate within the ranks of its military and policy community innovations that arise in the international arena. Further, innovation is costly, in terms of both monetary expenditures and the costs of organizational restructuring. Viewed in this light, innovation would naturally seem to favor large and powerful actors in the international system.At this point, a reader may be forgiven for assuming that Horowitz has written yet another book restating the Melian dialogue. But he wisely does not fall into that trap. Instead, he adds a new twist to the classic tale of power begetting power. He argues that there is a paradox in military innovation: neither big and