Courses

This course is a foundational one for the future strategist as it provides the opportunity for you to think through the answers to the following questions: 

• What is war? What purpose can and should it serve? What is war’s nature? What is war’s character? What, if anything, causes that nature or character to change over time? Is war an art, a science, both, neither?

• Are military theories timeless or are they a product of their context? What drives the creation of theory? What makes for useful theory? What aspects of which theories endure and which no longer do?

• What is strategy? Is strategy best conceptualized as a theory of victory, a plan to accomplish a goal, both, more? What separates effective from ineffective strategies? Why is strategy easy to comprehend in concept but difficult to do in execution? 

The course consists of sixteen seminars divided into four conceptual groupings and a capstone discussion of students’ personal theories of war. The first group of seminars offer competing and complementary definitions of war and theories about war’s nature, character, characteristics, and conduct. The second section of the course builds on this foundation to explore theories of naval, maritime, and air war; both to think through the similarities and differences between operational domains and to assess how theorists in the past grappled with the emergence of new domains and capabilities. The third group of readings, consisting of modern comprehensive theories of war and strategy, considers war in environments that reflect changing social, political, economic, and technological paradigms following the First World War. The final group of seminars connects theory to strategy, or theory in practice, through consideration of the issue of war termination, and the contemporary military theory animating the national strategies of Russia and China.

This course revolves around the concept of military innovation, the components of its success and failure, and the impact of successful military innovations on strategy and war. For the purposes of this course, we define a military innovation as a change in warfighting that produces a significant increase in military effectiveness. These changes are often technological in character, so an undercurrent of the course is technology, technological systems, and ideas about the implementation of technology and technological systems in war. Yet, it will become apparent very quickly that technological development must interact with the social characteristics of war: politics and politicians, interservice competition, bureaucratic compromise, intelligence, enemy countermeasures, and the cultural cleavages of states, militaries, and services. How you assess the relative importance of these characteristics on new technologies will vary, and that variation will inform your perspective on how military innovation occurs. 

Importantly, the course distinguishes military innovations from other types of innovation in that military innovations are directly connected to a state’s warfighting capabilities. Two disclaimers are therefore in order. First, while innovations that increase administrative or bureaucratic efficiency are important, such as acquisition reform, we do not consider these military innovations unless a clear link can be drawn to a military’s warfighting effectiveness. Second, military innovations are broad in scope and significant in impact on a state’s warfighting capability. The course does not consider minor reforms or those that have had ambiguous effects on a military organization. 

On the opposite end of the spectrum, the course engages two kinds of “revolutions,” moving seamlessly between its two conceptions: “military revolutions” and “revolutions in military affairs” (RMA). Military revolutions are the more extreme of the two, as they are thought to “fundamentally change the framework of war,” recasting “society and the state as well as military organizations.” Examples of these are the creation of the modern state and the nuclear and ballistic missile revolutions. RMAs, on the other hand, simply “implement a new conceptual approach to warfare” that provides a significant warfighting advantage to the military that adopts it. Military organizations and leaders are more likely to be able to generate RMAs than military revolutions, but the latter often produce the former, and military innovations are designed, developed, and implemented within both. 

As such, this course seeks to answer the following questions:

• When does military innovation occur and how does it happen?

• What shapes military innovation and how does this impact the character of war?

• What are the causes and consequences of technological revolutions?

The course is organized in such a way as to present an analytical framework to assess the barriers and determinants of military innovation. The course consists of twelve seminars, divided into three phases, with the last day of the course dedicated to the exam in a presentation format. The first phase of the course considers two major interpretations of the role of technology in warfare—deterministic and socially constructed—and considers the primary causes of military innovation given technological development. The second phase identifies four intervening factors (organizational design, culture, cognition, and law and ethics) that might shape the character of military innovation. The final phase concludes the course with competing accounts of the causes and consequences of technological revolutions.