Military Innovation and Technological Determinism: British and US Ways of Carrier Warfare, 1919–1945

Abstract

AbstractMajor theories of military innovation suggest that military organizations will converge on the proper employment of new weapons if they are responsive to strategic threats and overcome cultural, bureaucratic, and material constraints. Using a comparison of British and US interwar carrier programs, I show how these standard intuitions about military innovation wrongly assume that there is a predetermined performance trajectory embedded in new technology. The Royal Navy employed carrier technology differently from its American counterpart, not because of cultural biases, bureaucratic parochialism, or resource scarcity, but because the British possessed in-theater military bases and faced the threat of land-based enemy aircraft in the North Sea, the Mediterranean, and the Far East. British carrier warfare, which the field of military innovation studies roundly criticizes as non-innovative and ineffective, was in fact a creative solution for Britain's geostrategic challenges that proved effective for the first couple of years of World War II. Since carrier warfare is a canonical case for military innovation studies, revising our understanding of Britain's interwar carrier program has significant implications for the way scholars conceptualize military innovation and its relationship to wartime military performance.