Military Innovation's Dialectic: Gun Trucks and Rapid Acquisition

Abstract

In times of war, the routes to innovation are often brutally radical instead of starry-eyed and fantastical. Still, compared with all the hype and hoopla about revolutionary technologies, little scholarly ink has been spilled over these “low-end” military innovations. “Field mods,” as they are often called, are not the sexy computerized drones and robotic sensations we associate with military innovation. This article recovers the process by which one such military innovation was created and argues that the seemingly bottom-up process of Gun Truck development was in fact a dialectical outcome that emerged from two different suborganization types: a learning organization and a bureaucratic stasis model. The findings from the case carry implications for innovation theory, our understanding of the nature of military organizations in war, and the challenge of technological change in wartime.