Hammers and Nails: Military Innovation as a Strategic Dead End

In Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, John Nagl argues that the US military entered the Second Iraq War institutionally shaped by its preparation for a conventional conflict against the Warsaw Pact, rather than for the counterinsurgency it was ultimately required to fight.[1] For Nagl, the armed forces privileged their institutional preference to avoid another Vietnam above all else. As a result, in the early stages of the Iraq occupation, the Department of Defense had fashioned a conventional warfighting instrument that repeatedly reframed emerging problems to fit the tools it already possessed. Nagl neatly encapsulated this in a pithy reference to Maslow’s law of the instrument: if the only tool that was available was a hammer then every problem looked like a nail.

This paper argues that the logic Nagl identified has not disappeared but has instead re-emerged in a new form and metastasised around NATO. Two decades later, the armed forces’ preoccupation with disruptive innovation reproduces the same institutional failure. This is born out of a belief that all military problems can be solved through technology. Every new problem demands its own unique solution. This privileges the demand for change as a necessary precondition for military success. What starts out as a mandate to field new equipment eventually involves reorganising the military bureaucracy, restructuring the armed forces to make use of it and rewriting doctrine to accommodate it. Seduced by the technology’s magic, decision-makers overestimate what is achievable, and confuse technological possibility with practical reality.[2]

This is eroding the West’s capacity for strategic thought. What was once a discrete process designed to enhance military effectiveness has become an end-in-itself. Military structures are reorganised around the expectation of permanent change. The contemporary focus on artificial intelligence exemplifies this tendency: a technology promised to revolutionise war and deliver decisive strategic advantage, yet it is a technology that remains in a constant state of flux. This orientation encourages a form of tunnel vision in which innovation increasingly substitutes for strategic choice when really it ought to be viewed as a means by which to create these choices. In this respect, this mode of thinking constitutes yet another instance of military thought as technological determinism. For the purposes of this paper, technological determinism is framed as an assumption that military effectiveness primarily flows from technology rather than from political purpose, industrial capacity, organisational competence, or strategic judgement.

The determinisms underpinning this mode of thinking have a long intellectual lineage that oscillates between the language of revolution and adaptation.[3] Emerging from analyses of Soviet military innovation, the concept of a revolution in military affairs assumes a civil–military vanguard bringing about victory through technology. By contrast, where bureaucracies fail to manage change, battlefield success is framed as the product of adaptation to challenges imposed by the enemy. Revolutions, in this sense, are driven from the top of military organisations, while adaptations emerge organically from problems encountered in the field. Taken together, these frameworks share a common assumption: that military effectiveness ultimately flows from the successful alignment of organisations with technological change, rather than from sustained political clarity about the purposes for which force is employed.

More recently, the language of revolution and adaptation has been displaced by the imperative of disruptive innovation. This semantic shift does not resolve the tension between long-term planning and battlefield learning; instead, it obscures it by casting adaptation as an institutionalised experimental mindset.[4] Within this framing, the armed forces are depicted as lacking the capacity to understand the nature of technological change.[5] Militaries are cast as incapable of defining their own requirements and instead must adopt idealised innovation practices originating in the private sector.[6] Yet while the military is accountable to the polity, private firms innovate to secure market dominance rather than to defeat an enemy. This shift imports market logics into military organisation, with profound implications for strategy, authority, and the conduct of war.[7]

In the decade after the Cold War, debates about military innovation could be treated largely as historical or theoretical exercises rather than as guides for allocating defence resources. Under conditions of renewed geopolitical competition, the emphasis on perpetual innovation offers political cover for postponing difficult decisions about force structure, spending priorities, and risk. Rather than clarifying how military power underpins deterrence, innovation discourse defers commitment by projecting solutions into underspecified technological futures. In doing so, it displaces responsibility from political leaders onto processes of experimentation that promise eventual advantage without requiring present sacrifice.

It is the duty of the armed forces to prepare for the possibility of war. The question at stake, however, is how prevailing concepts of innovation obscure and displace strategic thinking. This paper argues that innovation has become an end-in-itself, supplanting the much harder challenge of defining a meaningful, justifiable and achievable strategy. The argument advances in three steps. First, discussion focuses on the origins and context behind the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). Second, it shows how approaches to this RMA were upended by counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan. Finally, the article turns to the decade after the end of the Global War on Terror (GWOT) and contextualise this against two challenges to Western military dominance: global competition and private sector innovation.

Forging the Hammer

Generating military power in ways that deliver war-winning results has long been a central concern of governments. It is therefore unsurprising that the foundational literature on military innovation was initially inspired, funded, and shaped by state institutions themselves. Nowhere was this more evident than in the United States, where Andrew Marshall, director of the Office of Net Assessment (ONA), played a pivotal role in establishing the analytical study of military innovation. Having begun his career at RAND, Marshall went on to help found the ONA within the US Department of Defense (DoD) in 1973. Stimulated by the failure in Vietnam and the continuing conventional threat posed by the Warsaw Pact, the ONA was tasked with estimating the likely performance of US forces against potential adversaries as part of a long-term defence planning process. Its objective was not prediction for its own sake, but the optimisation of investment decisions to maximise the prospects of success in future wars.

By the mid-1970s, as the US military struggled to recover from Vietnam, this approach informed what became known as the Offset Strategy. This strategy envisaged the United States would field technologies that would make it possible to fight the Warsaw Pact in Europe and win. The plans put in place by the DoD, plans underpinned by ONA research, ultimately led to the creation of the Big Five weapon systems that delivered success in the First Gulf War and now shape much of war in the early 21st century. These systems included the AH-64 Apache attack helicopter, the M-1 Abrams main battle tank, the UH-60 Black Hawk utility and transport helicopter, the M-2 and M-3 Bradley fighting vehicles, and the Patriot air defence missile system.[8]

If these systems were going to be brought into service, however, then the US DoD would have to solve the central challenge facing all defence planners: how to identify and when to back particular technologies. Innovation takes time to mature, and poor investment choices risk locking armed forces into ineffective force structures. Linking innovation to future battlefield performance therefore required clear analytical criteria. From this perspective, three conditions had to be met for change to qualify as military innovation: it had to alter how military formations operated in the field; it had to be significant in scope and impact; and it had to result in increased military effectiveness.[9]

In the early 1970s, however, the analytical tools available for assessing effectiveness were weak. Technology Readiness Levels (TRL), a method for assessing the maturing of a technology, were in use with NASA but the US Department of Defense only adopted TRLs in the 2000s. Consequently, existing approaches relied largely on comparing quantities of equipment or projecting the impact of future acquisitions on the balance of forces. Marshall argued instead that understanding military change required close attention to how decision-making processes worked in different political-military bureaucracies.[10] Developing this understanding would depend on identifying historical cases of successful and unsuccessful change across different countries and periods.[11] To this end, the ONA sponsored a major historical research programme led by Allan Millett and Williamson Murray, examining military effectiveness across seven countries from 1914 through the Second World War.[12]

Millett and Murray defined military effectiveness as the process by which armed forces convert resources into fighting power.[13] Maximum effectiveness depended on the efficient mobilisation of political will and material resources, and could be judged by the ability to destroy the enemy while limiting damage in return. Crucially, explaining effectiveness required attention not only to material capabilities but also to “non-quantifiable organisational attitudes, behaviours, and relationships” operating across political, strategic, operational, and tactical levels.[14] From the outset, then, military innovation studies were multidimensional, combining material and human factors in an effort to understand how organisations translated resources into battlefield success.

Because the ONA sought projects with strategic impact, it showed little interest in incremental change. This skewed early scholarship toward what Adam Grissom later characterised as top-down innovation: large-scale change driven by senior leaders with command authority and control over budgets. Only innovations that mobilised the full organisational capacity of the armed forces were thought capable of producing decisive effects.[15] Scholars disagreed, however, on how such top-down innovation occurred. Some emphasised civil–military interaction, with political leaders harnessing maverick officers to deliver new solutions aligned with national strategy.[16] Others pointed to resource scarcity and inter-service rivalry, arguing that competition for missions and budgets generated innovation.[17] A third approach focused on competition within services, stressing the need to align senior leadership, mid-level officers, and institutional resources to embed innovation securely.[18]

With the end of the Cold War, America’s armed forces confronted a strategic dilemma: how could military effectiveness be sustained in the face of the funding cuts that were expected to follow the collapse of bipolar competition? One influential answer emerged from the work of Andrew Krepinevich, a former US Army lieutenant colonel, Harvard-trained scholar, and analyst at the Office of Net Assessment. Drawing on his study of Soviet approaches to military innovation, Krepinevich highlighted what Russian theorists described as a Military Technical Revolution (MTR)—a transformation driven not by new weapons alone, but by the integration of emerging technologies into coherent operational systems.

At the centre of this analysis was the Soviet concept of the reconnaissance–strike complex (RSC), which envisioned the close coupling of sensors, precision-guided munitions, and command-and-control networks to produce decisive battlefield effects. In a 1992 ONA report, Krepinevich argued that such integration could fundamentally reshape warfare by collapsing the distance between detection and destruction.[19] Soviet thinkers, he suggested, believed that the effective fusion of sensors and fires could yield either temporary advantage or even decisive victory. For US defence planners, the lesson appeared straightforward: a comparable Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) promised a way to offset declining resources and restore battlefield dominance through technological integration.

From an American point of view, the origins of these ideas could be traced back to a General Westmoreland speech from 1969. In this speech he argued that “on the battlefield of the future, enemy forces will be located, tracked and targeted almost instantaneously through the use of data links, computer assisted intelligence evaluation, and automated fire control…”.[20] Making this happen in 1969 was not possible. Nonetheless, following the revolution in personal computing the prospects of networked war were explored in the seminal 1993 RAND paper Cyberwar is Coming by John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt.[21] In this paper Arquilla and Ronfeldt argued that the Military Technical Revolution implied the need for a period of re-evaluation and experimentation “…not unlike the one in the 1920s and 1930s that resulted in Germany’s breakthrough formulation of the blitzkrieg doctrine”. This was needed because “future wars will be fought mainly by ‘brilliant weapons’, robots, and autonomous computers; that man will be subordinate to the machine; and that combat will be unusually fast and laden with stand-off attacks”.[22] All of this would be made possible by a revolution in Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) underpinned by sophisticated Command, Communication, Computers and Information technology at both the strategic and tactical levels.

The ideas underpinning the MTR emerged in a particular strategic context. This was bracketed by defeat in Vietnam and the end of the Cold War. Neatly encapsulated in the Weinberger and Powell Doctrines, American foreign policy placed strict control on the use of military power.[23] Specifically, the two doctrines in effect limited the chances that the United States would find itself dragged into another low intensity war. Consequently, the only war the US DoD needed to prepare for was a high-intensity conflict against a conventional force. Given the financial constraints that followed the end of the Cold War that meant finding technological ways to do the same with less. To, in-effect, have the capacity to fight another Gulf War even if the size of America’s armed forces had been cut.

Nailing the Coffin

The war the United States was forced to fight in 2001 was, of course, not the war it had prepared for in the aftermath of the Cold War. This was not immediately obvious, given the apparent success of early operations against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. There, special forces, supported by remote fires and operating alongside local alliance partners, rapidly toppled the Taliban regime and came close to delivering a decisive blow against al-Qaeda. By contrast, the 2003 invasion of Iraq subjected the Department of Defense’s planning assumptions to far closer scrutiny. This was partly because the invasion quickly gave way to occupation, counterinsurgency, and civil war, but also because the Army Chief of Staff, General Eric Shinseki, publicly warned that the operation would require several hundred thousand more troops than the force envisioned by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.[24]

Committed to reforming the Army in line with prevailing views about the RMA and the future of war, Shinseki was responsible for introducing the experimental Stryker Interim-Force Brigade Combat Team. This medium-weight force was built around an eight-wheeled Infantry Carrier Vehicle (ICV) that exploited networked technologies for reconnaissance and strike and thus compensated for a lack of heavy protection.[25] The new formation was not ready for the initial invasion in March but was later deployed in December 2003. Facing insurgent use of Improvised Explosive Devices, the ICV was quickly upgraded with extra armour.[26] This did not mean that the Stryker brigade concept was inappropriate, but it did imply that the concept as initially conceived was not fit for the sort of fight the US military faced in Iraq.

This pointed to the limits of top-down defence contracting arrangements. Systems designed to deliver the kind of ‘Force Transformation’ envisaged by Rumsfeld and advocates of the RMA proved unable to keep pace with events in the field.[27] Picking up arguments made by Adam Grissom in his seminal paper, The Future of Military Innovation Studies,[28] scholars such as Farrell, Osinga, Russell and Serena[29] sought to highlight military–technical adaptation driven by the demands of combat. This work emerged largely from the counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, where forces adjusted existing tactics, technologies, and procedures in response to enemy action. In this framing, whereas innovation involves ‘’new technologies, tactics, strategies and structures…adaptation involves adjusting existing military means and methods”.[30]

The resulting tension between top-down innovation and bottom-up adaptation reflected a systemic problem that had to balance long-term planning with immediate operational demands. Earlier scholars often attributed resistance to innovation to military conservatism, citing historical reluctance to abandon established weapons and doctrines.[31] Thus the slow take-up of the machine gun or the desire to maintain the lance and sword over magazine rifle was the product of an officer corps or regimental system unwilling to introduce weapons that might change social structures.[32] More recent work instead emphasised military culture.[33]

Whatever the underlying causes, however, what became apparent is that DoD RMA programmes could not keep up with or account for the demands of the battlefield. This appeared to be the nail in the coffin for the RMA. At the same time, for the advocates of adaptation, localised innovation might generate tactical success but simultaneously produce contradictions, fragmentation, or inefficiencies across the wider organisation. From this perspective, adaptation alone was insufficient to deliver the war-winning outcomes envisaged by planners such as Andrew Marshall. Without institutional mechanisms to diffuse and integrate local lessons, adaptation risked becoming compatible with tactical success and strategic failure[34]—a critique frequently levelled at Western forces during the counterinsurgency campaigns of the early twenty-first century. The question facing defence planners, therefore, was how to institutionally map long-term investment programmes to immediate battlefield problems. For the answer to this, they turned to the private sector and the language of disruptive innovation.

Institutionalising Problems

If Afghanistan showed that light infantry backed by Special Forces and remote precision fires could bring about regime change then Iraq showed that the Force Transformation as understood at the beginning of 2003 was insufficient for fighting a counterinsurgency. To bridge these lessons, defence planners needed to map together, both conceptually and rhetorically, the language of the RMA with that of adaptation in the field. This stood the chance of institutionalising processes of innovation in ways that reflected the post-GWOT strategic context. In this new world, America was not preparing for air-land battle and the defeat of the Warsaw Pact but air-sea battle and the defence of Taiwan from China.[35]

Key to making these conceptual changes was the rhetorical need to avoid defining the difference between adaptation and innovation. Thus, Farrell et al. argued that accumulated adaptations could generate comprehensive innovation. They rejected the notion that innovation must be large-scale to be analytically significant, suggesting instead that small-scale changes across multiple levels of war were worthy of study.[36] This shift redirected attention to how local conditions shaped organisational change. By choosing to avoid drawing distinctions between adaptation and innovation, Farrell et al. sidestepped the question of where innovation originated. This in turn made it possible to put aside ten years of failed counterinsurgency and instead introduce a new conceptual framework that allowed the US armed forces to move on from defeat in Iraq.

Broadly speaking, then, the scholarship that emerged from the first ten years of the GWOT emphasised the importance of adaptation through in-field experimentation as a source of military change.[37] This was subsequently reconfigured by the DoD and institutionalised as the third offset strategy and embodied in technology incubators, such as the Defense Unit Experimental(x), controlled by the services.[38] These incubators would help introduce new technologies and drive change into the armed forces by shortening the time required to field militarily relevant systems. This shift recast the battlefield as a site of experimentation, where equipment is deployed, evaluated in combat, and modified on the basis of experience gained under fire.[39] US special operations forces figured prominently in this literature, reflecting their continued centrality to the conduct of the GWOT following withdrawal from Iraq and the drawdown in Afghanistan. To support more agile forms of technology adoption, these forces established their own specialist innovation incubator, SOFWERX. According to Nina Kollars the goal was, “to improve the agility and performance of its technology acquisitions process”.[40] This was going to be achieved by leveraging, “commercial off-the-shelf technologies to extend the battlefield and win the fight for information”.[41]

Advantageously, the scholarly interest in SOFWERX also made it possible for those who had been in favour of networked remote fires and the RSC to reassert their arguments. John Arquilla, for example, addressed the matter of the MTR, developing situational awareness and gaining information dominance through networked ISR platforms in his 2021 book Bitskrieg.[42] Lamenting the GWOT as a wasted decade, Arquilla drew attention to the work of Stanley McChrystal’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in Iraq. Specifically, this considered JSOC’s approach to intelligence collection and analysis and JSOC targeting.[43] Whereas earlier accounts of military adaptation prioritised mass and force protection, analyses of this period reframed innovation in terms of accelerating the production of military analysis and decision-making through automation and AI.[44]

Much of the ambition behind the Third Offset Strategy has been centred on technologies that render the battlefield transparent. In military doctrinal terms this is intimately connected with the emergence of Multi-Domain Operations (MDO) and the Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) technologies that support MDO.[45] Here the objective is to gain information dominance, that is to say to have total situational awareness such that US forces have a complete picture of adversary units wherever they are located across the battlefield. This then makes it possible to target an enemy with fires and thereby enable ground forces to manoeuvre.[46] Built out of Palantir’s Maven Smart System, JADC2 puts a premium on having the military platforms, weapon systems, munitions supply chain and industrial capacity to not only find targets but also to service them. By definition, this means collecting, integrating, synthesising and then visually representing enormous amounts of data in such a way that commanders can take decisions at speed and at the pace of events on the ground. At the same time, and as we are discovering from Operation Epic Fury, the US air assault on Iran, identifying 1000 targets a day is the easy part.[47] Sustaining the operation, even when the country is a superpower like the United States, depends on munition supply and what is needed to maintain conventional deterrence across multiple theatres.[48] This ought to remind us that war is a matter of strategy not simply innovation.

Nonetheless, in this context, data processing and the application of AI for pattern recognition continue to be the focus of attention given their role in JADC2 and for MDO. Indeed, the growing importance of these technologies has generated a body of scholarship focused on optimising information flows, flattening organisational hierarchies, and developing novel approaches to problem-solving, including hackathons and other forms of open innovation.[49] Unlike earlier RMA scholarship, this more recent literature has engaged critically with the role of dual-use technologies and the ways in which existing civilian data infrastructures are increasingly being integrated into military operations.[50] The strategic significance of these infrastructures was highlighted by Iran’s recent attacks on data centres across the Middle East, which the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps justified on the grounds that they were supporting “the enemy’s military and intelligence activities.”[51]

The growing importance of dual-use technologies has created new forms of military dependency. Critical data and battlefield functions increasingly flow through commercially developed networks and platforms rather than state-controlled systems.[52] This matters because these systems lie at the heart of military command and control (C2) and thus shape military strategic decision making. At present many of these systems are proprietary and have few, if any, substitutes. There is, for example, no functioning market in digital military operating systems comparable to Palantir’s Maven Smart System (MSS). Once adopted, such systems become embedded across military organisations, making them difficult and costly to replace. Technological adoption therefore creates dependencies that can lock armed forces into particular vendors, architectures and development pathways.

These dependencies raise a second problem concerning sovereignty. When critical military functions depend upon privately owned software, infrastructure and expertise, states no longer exercise exclusive control over the systems through which military power is organised. Corporate actors instead acquire significant influence over how armed forces operate. Military institutions and Big Tech can reinforce this relationship because both increasingly privilege optimisation, integration and technological mastery, encouraging war to be understood as a technical management problem.[53] Software updates consequently become both battlefield requirements and commercial imperatives.[54] Military hardware can then begin to resemble consumer technology: networked, expendable and rapidly replaced. If militaries develop along these lines, sovereign military power becomes increasingly contingent upon commercial contracts and privately controlled infrastructure.[55]

The acquisition of MSS illustrates the sovereignty problem. NATO’s Communications and Information Agency acquired the AI-enabled situational-awareness platform in April 2025.[56] Yet NATO cannot compel member states to adopt particular technologies. European governments must therefore decide whether to integrate a critical command-and-control capability supplied by an American company. This question has acquired additional political significance because Palantir has close connections to Donald Trump,[57] whose administration has questioned support for Ukraine[58] and challenged Danish sovereignty over Greenland.[59] Dependence upon MSS therefore potentially places core European C2 capabilities within commercial and technological relationships that European governments do not themselves control.

The third problem goes beyond dependency or sovereignty. It concerns whether technological innovation is beginning to displace strategic choice itself. Once a proprietary system becomes embedded across an alliance, interoperability and technological development create powerful incentives for further adoption. Decisions about military organisation can consequently become framed as questions of technological effectiveness—whether states can adopt and integrate the newest systems—rather than political questions about what capabilities governments actually want and under whose control they should operate.

The European response to MSS illustrates this displacement. Admiral Pierre Vandier, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Transformation, has argued that European companies must produce an equivalent to MSS as quickly as possible. This framing is revealing. The strategic question is no longer whether armed forces should organise command and control around this particular technological model. Instead, the assumed requirement is the technology itself; the remaining choice concerns who supplies it. Without a European alternative, governments face proprietary dependence and interoperability lock-in. But even with one, the deeper issue remains: technological and market-driven cycles may increasingly determine the direction of military transformation, narrowing the space in which governments can exercise strategic choice.

Arguably, however, a more important challenge for European powers does not lie in acquiring situational awareness technology like MSS but in rebuilding their munitions capacity.[60] Software by itself cannot produce battlefield results. To achieve victory in war, nations need sufficient kinetic effect to produce military outcomes. At its core that depends on propellant production, ordnance assembly lines and the recruitment of sufficient personnel to make it possible to hold ground. Yet, Europe’s governments have shown themselves to be unwilling to place contracts for armaments even when they claim to be rebuilding European security.[61] Nor have they been especially effective at overcoming the challenge of recruiting service personnel into the ranks.[62] The implication, then, is that Western governments are ducking the political and economic costs of re-engaging with civil society and rebuilding European defence and instead assuming that optimised decision-support technology will substitute for poor strategic choices.

Underlying these developments is a broader political mechanism through which innovation becomes a substitute for strategic choice. The promise of future technological advantage creates the expectation that military effectiveness can be secured without confronting the costs of preparing for war in the present. Investments in software, artificial intelligence, experimentation, and digital transformation offer the prospect of increased capability while avoiding more politically contentious questions concerning mobilisation, industrial capacity, force structure, and societal resilience. Because emerging technologies are assumed to generate future solutions, governments face reduced pressure to make immediate sacrifices or articulate clear strategic priorities. Innovation therefore performs an important political function: it manages uncertainty without resolving it. Rather than determining what military power is intended to achieve and allocating resources accordingly, policymakers can defer difficult decisions by projecting advantage into an increasingly technological future. The result is not the absence of strategy, but the gradual displacement of strategic judgement by the expectation that technological change will compensate for unresolved political and military problems.

Taken together, the post-GWOT turn has not so much resolved the tension between innovation and adaptation as dissolved it through a new organising logic: experimentation.[63] By treating combat and operational practice as an iterative testbed for software-enabled solutions, the literature recast military effectiveness as a problem of speed—accelerating data, targeting, and acquisition cycles—rather than of strategy, mass, munition production, or political purpose. This imperative was first identified by the RMA scholars working on ISR and RSC. Yet the rhetorical synthesis of RMA and adaptation has carried a cost. By blurring the distinction between learning and transformation, it has imported private-sector imaginaries of disruption into questions of force design and authority and encouraged the assumption that advantage could be engineered through software, data processing and AI rather than secured through hard choices about missions, resources, and risk. In this sense, “institutionalised adaptation” became a way to move on from Iraq without confronting what Iraq revealed: that technological dynamism cannot compensate for strategic choice, and that innovation, however agile, cannot substitute for a coherent theory of victory.

Conclusion

This article has argued that contemporary military thinking is increasingly shaped by a form of technological determinism that privileges innovation over strategy. Innovation is clearly an important way to overcome adversary capabilities. While the Revolution in Military Affairs and later adaptation literature emerged from different historical experiences, both ultimately shared a belief that military effectiveness could be generated through successful alignment with technological change. In the post-GWOT period, this logic has been reformulated through the language of disruptive innovation, experimentation, and digital transformation. However, what appears at first glance to be a more flexible and adaptive approach to military change has instead institutionalised the expectation of permanent transformation.

The consequence is not simply a growing dependence on emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, and data infrastructures. More fundamentally, it is the displacement of strategic judgement by technological possibility. The promise of future technological advantage provides a powerful justification for organisational reform, procurement programmes, and new operational concepts, while simultaneously deferring difficult debates about force structure, deterrence, mass, and political purpose. In this respect, innovation functions as a substitute for strategic choice, promising military and political outcomes that cannot be claimed given the complexities of war.

This tendency is particularly visible in contemporary concepts such as Multi-Domain Operations and Joint All-Domain Command and Control. These approaches assume that information superiority and accelerated decision-making can compensate for uncertainty and complexity in war. Yet the pursuit of ever-greater transparency risks encouraging the belief that strategic problems can be reduced to technical ones.

As the experience of Iraq demonstrated, however, technological sophistication cannot compensate for the absence of coherent strategic objectives. Political leaders have invoked AI and innovation as enablers of control, while avoiding decisions about mobilisation, industrial capacity, and sustained readiness. The result has been a strategy of postponement, sufficient to manage uncertainty rhetorically, but insufficient to shape outcomes materially. As in Nagl’s account of Iraq, the problem is not a matter of innovation, tools or data, but a political move to avoid making tough choices. The growing role of private-sector actors further amplifies these dynamics. As military capability becomes increasingly dependent on commercial software, cloud infrastructure, and data services, the boundaries between public authority and private enterprise become blurred. The result is a model of military power shaped not only by strategic necessity but also by commercial imperatives that prioritise continual innovation and market expansion.

The challenge facing Western armed forces is therefore not whether to innovate, but how to subordinate innovation to strategy. Preparing for future war undoubtedly requires technological innovation. Yet military effectiveness ultimately depends on the ability to connect means to political ends. Without that connection, innovation risks becoming little more than a technologically sophisticated version of Nagl’s hammer: a solution searching for a problem.