The concept of "adaptation"

[TT]

There is a reasonably substantial literature that focuses on what I would call ‘change in military organizations’.

But a first question that needs to be asked is what do you mean by ‘adaptation’?

I know, I know, a picky semantic question but important nonetheless. ‘Adaptation’ has many meanings in this literature, which does lend to a degree of confusion about what is being discussed/analyzed. ‘Innovation’ is the other widely used term that often lacks semantic clarity.

To give you a starting point, some authors define ‘innovation’ (as in military innovation) as major change in the aims, strategies (ie warfighitng concepts) and/or structure of a military organization’. The emphasis here is on ‘major’. So, as an example, the adoption of the warfighting concept of maneuver warfare by the US Army and Marine Corps would be innovation in this schema.

Adaptation would, in contrast, be minor changes or alterations that improve (or not, as the case may be) something that the military does but that does not have significant.major implications for aims, strategies and/or structure. Hence adaptation covers a wide range of adjustments that military organizations and military organizations constantly undertake. As some examples, developing new foot patrol techniques would be adaptation; equally, the Army’s FCS as it was originally conceived be would be adaptation - to my mind but I am still working on this - for ultimately while the FCS entails the wholesale rethinking of the character of the platforms the Army uses, it was still be to based on a ‘division’ structure, the new platforms would do pretty much what the old ones did, only differently, and it would be used for the much the same purpose as traditional heavy armour divisions were to be used (to fight a peer on a conventional battlefield). So adaptations can small or large.

The foregoing is probably more confusing than enlightening (typically academic, then), but it does get at some of the distinctions. But the extant literature is substantial enough that even this somewhat rough and ready semantic nit-picking helps to distinguish what is of interest to you.

Also, of course, are you interested in organizational adaptation (or adaptability) or individual adaptability?

And if there is some 19th Century German military thinker who has dealt with this, I would be keen to know about him or her as well – though preferably with the reference to an English version. My Deutsche is pretty restricted to ordering a large beer, asking where the bathroom is and saying ‘thank you and ‘please’ …..

[SteveMetz]

There is a reasonably substantial literature that focuses on what I would call ‘change in military organizations’.

But a first question that needs to be asked is what do you mean by ‘adaptation’?

I know, I know, a picky semantic question but important nonetheless. ‘Adaptation’ has many meanings in this literature, which does lend to a degree of confusion about what is being discussed/analyzed. ‘Innovation’ is the other widely used term that often lacks semantic clarity.

To give you a starting point, some authors define ‘innovation’ (as in military innovation) as major change in the aims, strategies (ie warfighitng concepts) and/or structure of a military organization’. The emphasis here is on ‘major’. So, as an example, the adoption of the warfighting concept of maneuver warfare by the US Army and Marine Corps would be innovation in this schema.

Adaptation would, in contrast, be minor changes or alterations that improve (or not, as the case may be) something that the military does but that does not have significant.major implications for aims, strategies and/or structure. Hence adaptation covers a wide range of adjustments that military organizations and military organizations constantly undertake. As some examples, developing new foot patrol techniques would be adaptation; equally, the Army’s FCS as it was originally conceived be would be adaptation - to my mind but I am still working on this - for ultimately while the FCS entails the wholesale rethinking of the character of the platforms the Army uses, it was still be to based on a ‘division’ structure, the new platforms would do pretty much what the old ones did, only differently, and it would be used for the much the same purpose as traditional heavy armour divisions were to be used (to fight a peer on a conventional battlefield). So adaptations can small or large.

The foregoing is probably more confusing than enlightening (typically academic, then), but it does get at some of the distinctions. But the extant literature is substantial enough that even this somewhat rough and ready semantic nit-picking helps to distinguish what is of interest to you.

Also, of course, are you interested in organizational adaptation (or adaptability) or individual adaptability?

And if there is some 19th Century German military thinker who has dealt with this, I would be keen to know about him or her as well – though preferably with the reference to an English version. My Deutsche is pretty restricted to ordering a large beer, asking where the bathroom is and saying ‘thank you and ‘please’ …..

Good point. The U.S. military, at least, uses the concept of "transformation" rather than "adaptation." Nagl's work on militaries as "learning organizations" (as well as Sullivan's Hope Is Not a Method) might be useful.

On the U.S. military's approach to transformation, Fred Kagan's Finding the Target is good. I published an essay entitled, ""America's Defense Transformation: A Conceptual and Political History" in Defence Studies last year. (I can send a .pdf if anyone wants it).

[marct]

Hi Steve,

On the U.S. military's approach to transformation, Fred Kagan's Finding the Target is good. I published an essay entitled, ""America's Defense Transformation: A Conceptual and Political History" in Defence Studies last year. (I can send a .pdf if anyone wants it).

I'd like a copy of that one.

[SteveMetz]

Hi Steve,



I'd like a copy of that one.

So send my your email already.

[Tom Odom]

I would also suggest going to the Combat Studies Institute and CGSC Press page

There are a number of books and papers that speak to adaptation, transformation, and learning. For starters look at:

Leavenworth Paper (LP) No. 1: The Evolution of U.S. Army Tactical Doctrine, 1946-76, Major Robert A. Doughty. (HTML) (PDF)

LP No. 4: The Dynamics of Doctrine: The Changes in German Tactical Doctrine During The First World War, Timothy T. Lupfer. (HTML) (PDF)

LP No. 12: Seek, Strike, and Destroy: U.S. Army Tank Destroyer Doctrine in World War II, Dr. Christopher R. Gabel. (PDF)

LP No. 16: Deciding What Has To Be Done: General William E. Depuy and the 1976 Edition of FM 100-5, Operations, Major Paul H. Herbert. (HTML) (PDF)

Research Survey (RS) No. 5: Standing Fast. German Defensive Doctrine on the Russian Front During World War II: Prewar to March 1943, Major Timothy A. Wray. (HTML) (PDF)

RS No. 6: A Historical Perspective on Light Infantry, Major Scott R. McMichael. (PDF)

CSI Report (CSIR) No. 1: The Evolution of the Tank in the US Army, 1919-1940, LTC Kenneth M. Steadman. (HTML)

CSIR No. 8: Discussions on Training and Employing Light Infantry, MAJ Scott R. McMichael. (HTML) (PDF)

CSIR No. 14: Sixty Years of Reorganizing for Combat: A Historical Trend Analysis, CSI Faculty. (HTML) (PDF)

Secret of Future Victories, Paul F. Gorman, General, U.S. Army, Retired. (HTML)

Watershed at Leavenworth- Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Command and General Staff College, MAJ Mark C. Bender. (HTML)

In Tribute to General William E. DePuy, Generals Thurman, Talbott, & Gorman. (HTML) (PDF)

Center for Military History U.S. Army GHQ Maneuvers of 1941.

Understanding the "victory disease" from the Little Bighorn to Mogadishu and beyond, Timothy Karcher. Paper #3. (PDF)

[TT]

RJO,

Tom has given you an excellent list of works. I can offer more but it would be helpful if I had an idea of what is of most interest to you. The literature is fairly extensive (as Tom's list makes evident) and some of it is very focused on particular aspects of change in military organizations (ie, a number of works on the role of organizational culture in military change, among other aspects). Some of it is historical, some is what might be termed 'analytical narratives' (they analyse a particular case, past and near present) and some of it is theoretical (or somewhat so). So the problem I have (looking around my office) is where to start.

TT

PS. Steve is quite right that the current buzz term for the US military is 'Transformation' but I did not want to go there.

[TT]

It is a dreary day and I am stuck gutting an index as the publisher informed me that having a user friendly, helpful index is not acceptable. Not fun (sigh).

To add to Toms list, some of the central academic works are:

[Health Warning: you are now entering the realm of academic dispute]


Barry Posen, The Sources of Military Doctrine (Cornell, 1984) Neorealist explanation of interwar period

Steven Peter Rosen, Winning the Next War (Cornell, 1991)

Deborah D. Avant, Political Institutions and Military Change: Lessons from Peripheral Wars (ie Malaysia and Vietnam) (Cornell, 1994)

(these are on opposite sides of the question of whether mil orgs require civilian intervention to change or will change on their own).

Organizational Culture

(these include culture as organizational structure – promotion pathways, hierarchy and so on – or as self identity).

Jack Snyder, Ideology of the Offensive (Cornell, 1984) – lead up to WWI

Kimberly Marten Zisk, Engaging the Enemy: Organization Theory and Soviet Military Innovation, 1955-1991 (Princeton 1993)

Peter J. Katzenstein, Culture Norms and National Security (Cornell, 1996)

Elizabeth Keir, Imagining War (Princeton, 1997) Interwar period

Isabel V. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Cornell, 2005)

(Second health warning: the foregoing are theoretical or theoretical leaning, except Rosen’s book)



Adaptation/Learning (mainly at tactical level)

Michael Doubler, Closing with the Enemy: How GIs Fought the War in Europe, 1944-45 (Uni of Kansas Press, 1994)

James Jay Carafano, GI Ingenuity: Improvisation, technology and Winning WWII (Praeger 2006).

(these two are analytical narratives)


Beware, there are other books, and there are many articles as well (including articles that are drawn from the books above).



And not to neglect History (well, more or less history)…..

Williamson Murray and Allan Millett, ed, Military Innovation in the Interwar Period (Cambridge 1996)

Harold R. Winton and David r. Mets, eds, The Challenge of Change: Military Institutions and New Realities, 1918-1941 (Uni of Nebraska Press, 2000)

David E. Johnson, Fast Tanks and Heavy Bombers: Innovation in the US Army, 1917-1945 (Cornell, 1998)

Victor David Hanson: Why the West has Won: Carnage and Culture from Salamis to Vietnam (Faber & Faber, 2001)

And the counter arguments to Hanson:

John A. Lynn, Battle: A History of Combat and Culture (Westview 2003)

J.E. Lendon, Soldiers & Ghosts: A History of Battle in classical Antiquity (Yale 2005)

(poli types are not the only ones who engage in internecine fights)


PS. Yes, the interwar period has been flogged to death and then flogged yet again, and then again - and no doubt it will be flogged even further in future.

[RJO]

I thank you all indeed for these excellent ideas and references. It's just what I was looking for, and I can see it could keep me busy for a long time.

One of the difficulties (and so one of the greatest delights) when jumping from a familiar field into an unfamiliar one is learning to line up your old vocabulary and conceptual world with the vocabulary and conceptual world of the new territory -- like being dropped onto the far side of a mountain range that you know, but one that you have to study for a while to figure out where you now are in relation to where you were before.

"Adaptation" as a keyword in evolutionary biology has been subject to technical debate for generations. It can refer to a state-of-being (fitted to one's environment) as well as to a process of change (the process of becoming fitted to one's environment). As an historical aside: "adaptation" as a state-of-being had been observed by naturalists from time immemorial, and the apparent fit of organisms to their environments was classically seen as evidence for a Designer (God) who created the fit, since it couldn't possibly have arisen by chance. (In philosophy this is called "the argument [for the existence of God] from design"). The historical reason that Darwin's Origin of Species was so important was that it provided a third alternative: "adaptation" was understood to be the result neither of (a) chance, nor (b) design, but (c) natural selection, the process that adapts populations of organisms to their environments over generational time.

So, coming back to our comparative disciplinary context, I guess there are two items I may want to explore further. First is the essential local-ness of adaptation. This is a basic idea from evolutionary biology: natural selection doesn't result in adaptation-in-general, but rather in adaptation to the immediate conditions right where you are. Whether a change is adaptive depends entirely on the local environment, and something that is adaptive at one moment may not be at the next if the environment changes out from under you.

A second item I may explore further concerns that conditions that promote adaptation. Darwin described a variety of general characteristics of populations that permit selection to work more effectively and rapidly. These can be extended to various other non-biological learning/adapting processes, and this I think might be a useful exercise. The practical bottom line would be something like, "Advice from Darwin: Ten ways to make your organization more adaptive."

Thanks again for all the excellent references.

Bob