The B-52 and Jet Propulsion: A Case Study in Organizational Innovation is a coherent and nonpolemical discussion of the revolution in military affairs, a hot topic in the national security arena. Mark Mandeles examines an interesting topic, how can the military better understand, manage, and evaluate technological development programs. We see Murphy's Law (anything that can go wrong, will go wrong) in operation. No matter how carefully the military designs, plans, and programs the process of technological development, inevitably, equipment, organizations, and people will challenge the desired expectations. Mandeles argues convincingly that recognizing the inevitability of error may be the single most important factor in the design of effective organizations and procedures to foster and enhance innovative technology and concepts. The book focuses on the introduction of jet propulsion into the B-52. This case study illustrates the reality that surprises and failures are endemic to development programs where information and knowledge are indeterminate, ambiguous, and imperfect. Mandeles' choice of the B-52 to illustrate this process is both intriguing and apt. The military had no coherent search process inevitably leading to the choice of a particular technology; nor was decision making concerning the B-52 development program coherent or orderly. Different mixtures of participants, problems, and solutions came together at various times to make decisions about funding or to review the status of performance projections and requirements. Three aspects of the B-52's history are striking because they challenge conventional wisdom about rationally managed innovation. First, Air Force personnel working on the B-52 program did not obtain the aircraft they assumed they would get when the program began. Second, the development process did not conform to idealized features of a rational program. While a rationally organized program has clear goals, adequate information, and well-organized and attentive leadership, the B-52 development process exhibited substantial disagreement over, and revision of, requirements or goals, and ambiguous, imperfect, and changing information. Third, the "messy" development process, as described in the book, forestalled premature closure on a particular design and spurred learning and the continuous introduction of new knowledge into the design as the process went along. Military innovations involve questions about politics, cooperation and coordination, and social benefits, and like other development efforts, there appears to be no error-free method to predict at the outset the end results of any given program. This study offers a major lesson to today's planners: improving the capacity of a number of organizations with overlapping jurisdictions to interact enhances prospects to innovate new weapons and operational concepts. We can mitigate bureaucratic pathologies by fostering interaction among government and private organizations.

In a widely noted speech to the Navy League Sea-Air-Space Expo in May 2010, Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates warned that "the Navy and Marine Corps must be willing to reexamine and question basic assumptions in light of evolving technologies, new threats, and budget realities.We simply cannot afford to perpetuate a status quo that heaps more and more expensive technologies onto fewer and fewer platforms-thereby risking a situation where some of our greatest capital expenditures go toward weapons and ships that could potentially become wasting assets." Secretary Gates specifically questioned whether the Navy's commitment to a force of eleven carrier strike groups through 2040 makes sense, given the extent of the anticipated superiority of the United States over potential adversaries at sea as well as the growing threat of antiship missiles. Though later disclaiming any immediate intention to seek a reduction in the current carrier force, Gates nevertheless laid down a clear marker that all who are concerned over the future of the U.S. Navy would be well advised to take with the utmost seriousness. We may stand, then, at an important watershed in the evolution of carrier aviation, one reflecting not only the nation's current financial crisis but the changing nature of the threats to, or constraints on, American sea power, as well as-something the secretary did not mention-the advent of a new era of unmanned air and sea platforms of all types. Taken together, these developments argue for resolutely innovative thinking about the future of the nation's carrier fleet and our surface navy more generally. In Innovation in Carrier Aviation, number thirty-seven in our Newport Papers monograph series, Thomas C. Hone, Norman Friedman, and Mark D.Mandeles examine the watershed period in carrier development that occurred immediately following World War II, when design advances were made that would be crucial to the centrality in national-security policy making that carriers and naval aviation have today. In those years several major technological breakthroughs-notably the jet engine and nuclear weapons-raised large questions about the future and led to an array of innovations in the design and operational utilization of aircraft carriers. Central to this story is the collaboration between the aviation communities in the navies of the United States and Great Britain during these years, building on the intimate relationship they had developed during the war itself. Strikingly, the most important of these innovations, notably the angled flight deck and steam catapult, originated with the British, not the Americans. This study thereby also provides interesting lessons for the U.S. Navy today with respect to its commitment to maritime security cooperation in the context of its new "maritime strategy." It is a welcome and important addition to the historiography of the Navy in the seminal years of the Cold War.

Published by the Naval War College Press. This study is about innovations in carrier aviation and the spread of those innovations from one navy to the navy of a close ally. The innovations are the angled flight deck; the steam catapult; and the mirror and lighted landing aid that enabled pilots to land jet aircraft on a carrier's short and narrow flight deck. Illustrated.

The B-52 and Jet Propulsion: A Case Study in Organizational Innovation is a coherent and nonpolemical discussion of the revolution in military affairs, a hot topic in the national security arena. Mark Mandeles examines an interesting topic, how can the military better understand, manage, and evaluate technological development programs. We see Murphy's Law (anything that can go wrong, will go wrong) in operation. No matter how carefully the military designs, plans, and programs the process of technological development, inevitably, equipment, organizations, and people will challenge the desired expectations. Mandeles argues convincingly that recognizing the inevitability of error may be the single most important factor in the design of effective organizations and procedures to foster and enhance innovative technology and concepts. The book focuses on the introduction of jet propulsion into the B-52. This case study illustrates the reality that surprises and failures are endemic to development programs where information and knowledge are indeterminate, ambiguous, and imperfect. Mandeles' choice of the B-52 to illustrate this process is both intriguing and apt. The military had no coherent search process inevitably leading to the choice of a particular technology; nor was decision making concerning the B-52 development program coherent or orderly. Different mixtures of participants, problems, and solutions came together at various times to make decisions about funding or to review the status of performance projections and requirements. Three aspects of the B-52's history are striking because they challenge conventional wisdom about rationally managed innovation. First, Air Force personnel working on the B-52 program did not obtain the aircraft they assumed they would get when the program began. Second, the development process did not conform to idealized features of a rational program. While a rationally organized program has clear goals, adequate information, and well-organized and attentive leadership, the B-52 development process exhibited substantial disagreement over, and revision of, requirements or goals, and ambiguous, imperfect, and changing information. Third, the "messy" development process, as described in the book, forestalled premature closure on a particular design and spurred learning and the continuous introduction of new knowledge into the design as the process went along. Military innovations involve questions about politics, cooperation and coordination, and social benefits, and like other development efforts, there appears to be no error-free method to predict at the outset the end results of any given program. This study offers a major lesson to today's planners: improving the capacity of a number of organizations with overlapping jurisdictions to interact enhances prospects to innovate new weapons and operational concepts. We can mitigate bureaucratic pathologies by fostering interaction among government and private organizations. The B-52 and Jet Propulsion integrates a detailed historical case study with a fine understanding of the literature on organization and innovation. It is a story of decision making under conditions of uncertainty, ambiguity, and disagreement. In the pages that follow those who plan, manage, and criticize technological development programs will find new insights about the process of learning how to make new things.

Transformation has become a buzz word in today's military, but what are its historical precursors--those large scale changes that were once called Revolutions in Military Affairs (RMA)? Who has gotten it right, and who has not? The Department of Defense must learn from history. Most studies of innovation focus on the actions, choices, and problems faced by individuals in a particular organization. Few place these individuals and organizations within the complex context where they operate. Yet, it is this very context that is a powerful determinant of how actions are conceived, examined, and implemented, and of how errors are identified and corrected. The historical cases that Mandeles examines reveal how different military services organized to learn, accumulate, and retrieve knowledge; and how their particular organization affected everything from the equipment they acquired to the quality of doctrine and concepts used in combat. In cases where more than one community of experts was responsible for weighing in on decisionmaking, the service benefited from enhanced application of evidence, sound inference, and logic. These cases demonstrate that, for senior leadership, participating in such a system should be a strategic and deliberate choice. In each of the cases featured in this book, no such deliberate choice was made. The interwar U.S. Navy (USN) aviation community and the U.S. Marine Corps amphibious operation community were lucky that, in a time of rapid technological advance and strategic risk, their decisions in framing and solving technological and operational problems were made within a functioning multi-organizational system. The Army Air Corps and the Royal Marines wereunfortunate, with corresponding results. It is characteristic of 20th-century military history that no senior civilian or military leader suggested a policy to handle overlapping responsibilities by multiple departments. Today's policymakers have not learned this lesson. In the present time, while a great deal of thought is devoted to proper organizational design and the numbers of persons required to perform necessary functions, there is still no overarching framework guiding these designs.

During Desert Shield, the Air Force built a very complicated organizational architecture to control large numbers of air sorties. During the air campaign itself, officers at each level of the Central Command Air Forces believed they were managing the chaos of war. Yet, when the activities of the many significant participants are pieced together, it appears that neither the planners nor Lt. Gen. Charles A. Horner, the Joint Force Air Component Commander, knew the details of what was happening in the air campaign or how well the campaign was going. There was little appreciation of the implications of complex organizational architectures for military command and control. Against a smarter and more aggressive foe, the system may well have failed.