The concept of "adaptation"

[marct]

Is there a correlation between ease (meaning mentally or culturally accepting) of change and how long a war lasts?

I would have to say "no" on the whole since what seems to happen is that the workspaces ("environments") tend to generate successful adaptations within them in fairly short order (say 5-10 years). What does seem to happen is that you will develop an isomorphic vector along certain lines of variant selection.... think of that as the competition to be "the biggest and the best at X".

On the other hand, that only holds if you are dealing with a stable environment - shift the environmental factors and you will see another flurry of adaptive changes. this is what SJ Gould calls "punctuated equilibrium" and there is some indication from the neo-institutionalist literature that it holds up in organizations.

Do we innovate and justify as we find out what works and does not? Maybe that is why the most effective change seems to be bottom up and more of a gradual evolution?

"Success" is always tricky to measure, and this is probably most apparent in organizations like the military in a democratic society. For example, there are three major environments that the military has to adapt to: the battlespace (broadly conceived), the bureaucracy required for a large organization, and the civilian political environment. What "works best"in one probably does not "work best" in the others, so there is a constant toing and froing between models.

How long is does this continue to occur after the war ends and we become more resistant to change (where an organization becomes stable and change resistant?)

Basically, what happens is that the relative weighting of the importance of the three environments I mentioned earlier changes. This shifts the primary basis of selection from the battlespace and civilian political environment in wartime to the bureaucracy and civilian political environment in peacetime. Innovation and change are encouraged in the battlespace environment (individual level of survival), while they are discouraged in the bureaucracy (replication; population level of survival). The bureaucracy is the interface between the battlespace and the civilian political environment (which is probably one of the reasons they are clamping down on military bloggers - but that's another thread).

How does this impact our ability to inculcate the required changes to remain successful, while not abandoning the ability to recognize new requirements?

This is really tricky. "Adaptation" is, in general, a result of the production and replication of variant patterns while replication at the population level (think training) is the result of selecting individual variants rather than groups. Think of it like this; you have a large variety of possible patterns that can be replicated. Some of them are discarded ("selected against") by the civilian political environment (e.g. torture, indiscriminate carpet bombing, nuking Iraq, etc.). These types of possible patterns are basically considered as "toxic mutations" - they don't (generally, there are exceptions) live long enough to replicate inside the population.

Then we have a group of patterns that, in a hot war, are selected for in the battlespace - i.e. they promote individual survival. Some of these will "die" (i.e. be classed as toxic mutations) while others will work their way back into the bureaucratic environment for possible selection for replication in training or new FM's etc. Sometimes, you will see multiple centres of variation showing up in the battlespace - the convention vs. COIN is an excellent example of this. This may lead to a situation were population level selection (i.e. training and doctrine) are, de facto, selected by the civilian political environment - the new COIN manual is one case, Lincoln's firing loosing generals is another. The responsibility for implementing the population level selection is still in the hands of the bureaucracy.

Now we come to the second part of your question "the ability to recognize new requirements". This is really tricky. Under he current model where most variations are produced in the battlespace, the only way to do so is to be continuously at war - which is sort of self defeating on the whole. One way the Romans solved that problem was by grabbing a whole bunch of task areas that we would consider "civilian" or, at least, "non-military" (e.g. infrastructure construction). The move to create a Corps of Advisers is a move in this direction.

Another way to do to is to create a counter balance to the bureaucracy whose sole purpose is to act as if they were a permanent Red Team and who have the political authority to control the careers of bureaucrats, including firing them. Strangely enough, that was the role played by a number of priests in the various armies of the 16th and 17th centuries (usually done very badly). It was also the role played by the priesthood of Anubis in ancient Egypt - they could tell Pharoah (at least in the early and middle kingdoms) when he would die. This option isn't used much in industrial societies for a number of reasons.

Another option, similar to this, is to develop a group operating in the civilian political environment that has both civilian and military people who act as a Red Team watch dog. Again, they have to have some power / authority, but the influence would be on the political leadership rather than on the bureaucracy. Tricky.

Anyway, I've run on far too long so I'll leave it there.

Marc