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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.
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