The Technology Triad: Reimagining the Relationship Between Technology and Military Innovation

Existing models of military innovation assume general resistance to change within militaries that necessitates an outside influence to induce military innovation. Within these approaches, the complex relationship between technology and innovation is normally addressed by either minimizing the importance of technology or separating it from the social process of innovation. Yet these approaches struggle to reflect emerging dynamics between technology and military innovation, and as a result, potentially contribute to wasted national resources and unnecessarily bloody wars. Reframing the relationship between technology and military innovation can provide novel insights into the apparent inability of militaries to align technology with strategic goals and inform more effective future alignment. This dissertation leverages the insights of constructivist science and technology studies concepts to develop a novel model of military innovation: referred to here as the technology triad. The technology triad describes military sociotechnical systems in a way that highlights change and innovation within militaries. The model describes how doctrine, materiel, and “martial knowledge,” a new concept that relates to socially constructed truths about the conduct of war, interact to produce change and innovation within militaries. After constructing the model and exploring an in-depth application to the development of armored warfare in the United States Army prior to World War II, the case from which the model was developed, the dissertation explores the logical extension of the technology triad to establish a deductive framework against which to test the generalizability of the model. Nuclear weapons innovation in the United States military through the end of the Vietnam War provides a test of the model at the strategic level, and the development and employment of armed drones in the United States, Russia, Israel, and Azerbaijan provide a test of a contemporary innovation for the technology triad. Together, these three cases demonstrate that framing the relationship between technology and military innovation in terms of the technology triad can inform concrete actions that military leaders can take related to the types of technologies that are most likely to be useful in future conflicts and ways to manage military innovations to increase opportunities to achieve strategic objectives.