Managing Military Transformations: Agency, Culture, and the U.S. Carrier Revolution

Abstract

How did the U.S. Navy successfully manage the carrier revolution? This hallmark case challenges traditional explanations of organizational change. Decisive reforms were enacted. The new vision of naval warfare thrived before the “old” battleship-centric orthodoxy was discredited, before it was fully understood, and before its champions seized power within the service. This article posits a modified principal-agent framework to explicate systematically the interplay between new interests and ideas that lie at the crux of managing the diffusion of innovations within military organizations. The main finding is that the nebulous exploration and outcome of transformation rests on strategies employed by service entrepreneurs for lowering the material cost of oversight and invoking established managerial norms that align incentives and “common knowledge” for change within military hierarchies. Evidence from the U.S. Navy's interwar experience with carrier aviation illustrates this administrative dimension to organizational change. The conclusion reviews directions for extending the argument, and lessons for managing contemporary military transformation.