You Say You Want A Revolution?

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Hoover Institute:

You Say You Want A Revolution?

by Thomas Donnelly

Wednesday, March 15, 2017

 

To paraphrase the Beatles: Well, you know, you’d better free your mind instead; you may want a revolution but ought to settle for some evolution.

 

It is an article of revealed religion among defense elites that “we live in a relentlessly changing and fiercely competitive world.” Those words were from former Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, once a physicist and someone deeply imbued with the idea that technological change and competition were the elements propelling change, and that those who failed to “innovate” were doomed to defeat: “Today’s era of military competition is characterized by the additional variables of speed and agility, such that leading the race now frequently depends on who can out-innovate faster than everyone else, and even change the game.”

 

Such attitudes took root in the late Cold War, back when the Pentagon had a “director for defense research and engineering”—a powerful post separate from the actual weapons-buying bureaucracy—and invested substantial sums in the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency.