We Cannot Go On: Disruptive Innovation and the First World War Royal Navy

Abstract Insights from Disruptive Innovation theory (DI) are often used in the formulation, implementation, and evaluation of national security policy. DI explains why successful companies are sometimes defeated by new competitors with relatively unsophisticated products. Although DI is highly influential in the business literature, its applicability to military doctrine has not been persuasively shown. Proposed here is a more abstract and general version of DI, which improves its foundations, adapts it to militaries, and suggests a framework for the reliable identification of disruptive innovations. This new theory is tested by examining the Royal Navy before and during World War I and evaluating how well it explains the Royal Navy's success at developing Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) to protect the battlefleet from submarine attacks and the near failure at implementing convoy tactics to protect merchant shipping. This generalized version of DI successfully explains several key features of the case. For helpful feedback on this article, the author would like to thank Kenneth Oye, Barry Posen, Clayton M. Christensen, Harvey Sapolsky, Charles J. McLaughlin IV, William Wohlforth, Michael Desch, Theo Farrell, Owen Coté, Sean Lynn-Jones, and the editors and anonymous reviewers of Security Studies. Partial funding for this research was provided by the Paul and Daisy Soros Foundation for New Americans and the National Science Foundation. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2009 International Studies Association Annual Convention. Notes 1 Arthur Herman, To Rule the Waves, 1st ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 2004). 2 Robert K. Massie, Castles of Steel: Britain, Germany, and the Winning of the Great War at Sea (New York: Random House, 2003). 3John Terraine, Business in Great Waters (London: Leo Cooper, 1980), 57. 4 Angus Ross, “Losing the Initiative in Mercantile Warfare: Great Britain's Surprising Failure to Anticipate Maritime Challenges to Her Global Trading Network in the First World War, ” International Journal of Naval History 1, no. 1 (2002). 5 Correlli Barnett, The Swordbearers: Studies in Supreme Command in the First World War (New York: Morrow, 1964), 11, quoted in, Adam Grissom, “The Future of Military Innovation Studies, ” The Journal of Strategic Studies 29, no. 5 (2006): 907. 6 George W. Bush, “A Period of Consequences” (address, The Citadel, South Carolina, 23 September 1999), http: //www. citadel. edu/pao/addresses/presbush. html (accessed 30 August 2007). 7 David H. Petraeus and James F. Amos, “FM 3–24: Counterinsurgency” (Washington, DC: Department of the Army, 2006), http: //www. fas. org/irp/doddir/army/fm3-24. pdf. 8 See, for example, Barry R. Posen, The Sources of Military Doctrine: Britain, France, and Germany between the Wars (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984). 9 David Braybrooke and Charles E. Lindblom, A Strategy of Decision (London: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1963) ; Anthony Downs, Inside Bureaucracy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991) ; Grissom, “The Future of Military Innovation Studies, ” 919–20; James G. March and Herbert A. Simon, Organizations (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1959) ; Herbert A. Simon, Administrative Behavior (New York: The Free Press, 1968) ; John D. Steinbruner, The Cybernetic Theory of Decision (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974) ; James D. Thompson, Organizations in Action (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967). 10 James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras, Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies (New York: HarperCollins, 1997) ; Richard N. Foster, Innovation: The Attacker's Advantage (New York: Summit Books, 1986). 11 Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics, 1st ed. (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 1979). 12 Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma (New York: HarperBusiness Essentials, 2003), 3. 13 Erwin Danneels, “Dialogue on the Effects of Disruptive Technology on Firms and Industries, ” The Journal of Product Innovation Management 26, no. 1 (2006) ; Erwin Danneels, “Disruptive Technology Reconsidered: A Critique and Research Agenda, ” The Journal of Product Innovation Management 21, no. 4 (2004) ; Vijay Govindarajan and Praveen K. Kopalle, “The Usefulness of Measuring Disruptiveness of Innovations Ex Post in Making Ex Ante Predictions, ” The Journal of Product Innovation Management 23, no. 1 (2006) ; Kenneth Oye, personal communication to author, 28 August 2007; Terry C. Pierce, Warfighting and Disruptive Technologies: Disguising Innovation (London: Frank Cass, 2004) ; Gerald J. Tellis, “Disruptive Technology or Visionary Leadership? ” The Journal of Product Innovation Management 23, no. 1 (2006). 14 Although Christensen differentiates between “low-end” and “new market” disruptions, the dynamics driving them are similar—so much so that the two categories are not separated in The Innovator's Dilemma—and the difference disappears when examined using this modified version of the theory. Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma; Clayton M. Christensen and Michael E. Raynor, The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2003), 33, 44. 15 Christensen and Raynor, The Innovator's Solution, 34. 16 One way to understand this is to think of the organization as solving an optimization problem. Imagine that the organization's properties can be represented as a point on a plane. An organization with the ideal properties to accomplish each task would be at different places on this plane. When it is founded, the organization is at the origin. Because the tasks have some properties in common, all of the ideal points can be thought of as in the same quadrant of the plane. Over time the organization moves toward the point representing the ideal for the primary mission. Because all of the missions are in the same quadrant, at first, this improves performance (proximity to an ideal point) at all missions. As the organization advances steadily toward the point representing the primary mission, however, it will eventually stop getting closer to all the points and, in fact, even begin to move away from some of them. It will have overshot performance requirements. The lower the priority of the mission, the farther it is likely to be from the highest priority mission and the sooner this will begin to occur. To improve its performance on secondary missions, the organization would have to move in a different direction—improve on a new performance metric—and this would sacrifice its performance on the primary task. 17 Overshoot is different from simple diminishing returns. Returns for further improvements in performance may not be diminishing for the organization as a whole; it could still be rewarded for performance improvements by further progress on its primary objectives. Returns diminish at different points for different tasks and start to diminish earliest for those the organization values least. 18 Rebecca Henderson, “The Innovator's Dilemma as a Problem of Organizational Competence, ” The Journal of Product Innovation Management 23, no. 1 (2006). 19 The 2006 QDR classifies one of the four major challenges facing the United States as “disruptive”—“capabilities designed to disrupt or negate traditional U. S. military advantages. ” This appears to have been inspired by Christensen. Christensen's ideas are used explicitly by Maj. Gen. David A. Fastabend in his influential article “Adapt or Die. ” They are also used by Douglas MacGregor, Paul Bracken to explore the implications of the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Asian states, and by Mark Johnson and Charles J. McLaughlin regarding anti-terrorism strategies. See Office of the U. S. Secretary of Defense, 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review Report (Washington, DC: Department of Defense, 6 February 2006) ; David A. Fastabend and Robert H. Simpson, “Adapt or Die, ” Army, February 2004; Douglas A. MacGregor, Transformation under Fire: Revolutionizing How America Fights (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003) ; Paul Bracken, Fire in the East (New York: HarperCollins, 1999) ; Mark Johnson and Charles McLaughlin, “To Defeat Terrorists, Military Services Must Innovate, Disrupt, ” National Defense, January 2007. 20 Pierce, Warfighting and Disruptive Technologies; Rebecca M. Henderson and Kim B. Clark, “Architectural Innovation: The Reconfiguring of Existing Product Technologies and The Failure of Established Firms, ” Administrative Science Quarterly 35, no. 1 (March 1990): 9–30. 21 Owen R. Coté, “The Politics of Innovative Military Doctrine: The U. S. Navy and Fleet Ballistic Missiles” (PhD diss. , Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1995) ; Peter Dombrowski and Eugene Gholz, Buying Military Transformation: Technological Innovation and the Defense Industry (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006) ; Grissom, “The Future of Military Innovation Studies”; Posen, The Sources of Military Doctrine; Stephen Peter Rosen, Winning the Next War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991) ; Harvey M. Sapolsky, The Polaris System Development: Bureaucratic and Programmatic Success in Government (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972). 22 Dombrowski and Gholz, Buying Military Transformation. 23 Ibid. , 18. 24 Ibid. , 27–28. 25 Christensen and Raynor, The Innovator's Solution, 66, 41–62. 26 Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma, 134. 27 Ibid. , 101–06. 28 See below for a detailed examination of the RN's priorities, but Marder, among others, states this unequivocally. Sir Arthur J. Marder, From Dreadnought to Scapa Flow: The Royal Navy in the Fisher Era, 1904–1919, vol. 1, The Road to War 1904–1914 (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), 344; Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr. , The Army and Vietnam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). 29 Jon Tetsuro Sumida, “British Capital Ship Design and Fire Control in the Dreadnought Era: Sir John Fisher, Arthur Hungerford Pollen, and the Battle Cruiser, ” The Journal of Modern History 51, no. 2 (1979) ; Jon Tetsuro Sumida, In Defense of Naval Supremacy (London: Routledge, 1993). 30 Krepinevich, The Army and Vietnam; Sumida, In Defense of Naval Supremacy. 31 Christensen and Raynor, The Innovator's Solution, 188–89. Christensen does not state whether this is a survivor effect in which the companies that succeed are those that just happen to have the culture best suited to serving the needs of high-end customers or a maturation effect in which successful companies are those that best adapt their culture to fill those needs. 32 Ibid. , 34. 33 Two rival fire control systems, one developed by an outside inventor, Arthur Pollen, and one by a Royal Navy officer, Frederic Dreyer, could have been adopted by the Royal Navy. The merits of the competing systems are matters of spirited debate. Dreyer's was eventually chosen and used during the First World War. Whichever system was better, it is clear that Dreyer's system was superior to its predecessors and that gunnery improvements were crucial to the RN's new tactics and ships. John Brooks, Dreadnought Gunnery at the Battle of Jutland: The Question of Fire Control (London: RoutledgeFalmer, 2005) ; William M. McBride, “Review of Dreadnought Gunnery and the Battle of Jutland: The Question of Fire Control, ” Technology and Culture 48, no. 3 (2007) ; Sumida, “British Capital Ship Design and Fire Control”; Jon Tetsuro Sumida, “British Naval Administration and Policy in the Age of Fisher, ” The Journal of Military History 54, no. 1 (1990) ; Jon Tetsuro Sumida, “Gunnery, Procurement, and Strategy in the Dreadnought Era, ” The Journal of Military History 69, no. 4 (2005) ; Sumida, In Defense of Naval Supremacy; Jon Tetsuro Sumida, “A Matter of Timing: The Royal Navy and the Tactics of Decisive Battle, 1912–1916, ” The Journal of Military History 67, no. 1 (2003) ; Jon Tetsuro Sumida, “Sir John Fisher and the Dreadnought: The Sources of Naval Mythology, ” The Journal of Military History 59, no. 4 (1995). 34 Raymond E. Franck and Terry C. Pierce, “Disruptive Military Innovation and the War on Terror: Some Thoughts for Perfect Opponents, ” Defense Charles McLaughlin, personal communication to author, 12 November 2005. 35 Krepinevich, The Army and Vietnam. 36 Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma, 133–35. 37 Elizabeth Kier, Imagining War: French and British Military Doctrine between the Wars (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 28. 38 Grissom, “The Future of Military Innovation Studies, ” 919. 39 Kier, Imagining War, 31. 40 Carl H. Builder, The Masks of War: American Military Styles in Strategy and Analysis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989) ; Theo Farrell, The Norms of War: Cultural Beliefs and Modern Conflict (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2005) ; Theo Farrell, Weapons without a Cause: The Politics of Weapons Acquisition in the United States (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997) ; Theo Farrell, “World Culture and Military Power, ” Security Studies 14, no. 3 (2005) ; Theo Farrell, “World Culture and the Irish Army, 1922–1942, ” in The Sources of Military Change, ed. Theo Farrell and Terry Terriff (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2002) ; Theo Farrell and Terry Terriff, “The Sources of Military Change, ” in The Sources of Military Change: Culture, Politics, Technology, ed. Theo Farrell and Terry Terriff (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2002) ; Kier, Imagining War. 41 Farrell, “World Culture and Military Power”; Lynn Eden, Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge, and Nuclear Weapons Devastation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004). 42 Farrell, The Norms of War, 4. 43 Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma, 3. 44 Eden, Whole World on Fire, 58. 45 Farrell, “World Culture and Military Power”; Farrell, “World Culture and the Irish Army. ” 46 Eden, Whole World on Fire. 47 Andrew Gordon, The Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command (London: John Murray, 2005), 19; Robert K. Massie, Dreadnought: Britain, Germany, and the Coming of the Great War, 1st ed. (New York: Random House, 1991), 150–85. 48 Stephen Van Evera, Guide to Methods for Students of Political Science (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 77–88. 49 Jan S. Breemer, “Chasing U-Boats and Fighting Insurgents, ” Joint Forces Quarterly 40 (First Quarter, 2006). 50 Sir Arthur J. Marder, From Dreadnought to Scapa Flow, vol. 4, 1917: Year of Crisis (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), 204. 51 One of the finest Sherlock Holmes stories, “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans, ” published in 1912 and set in 1895, concerns Holmes's attempt to recover stolen plans for a submarine so advanced that “naval warfare becomes impossible within the radius of a Bruce-Partington's operation. ” The effects of a Bruce-Partington on merchant shipping go unmentioned—apparently even Sherlock Holmes could be disrupted! Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans, ” in The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, vol. 2, The Return of Sherlock Holmes, His Last Bow, the Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, ed. Leslie S. Klinger (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005). 52Marder, From Dreadnought to Scapa Flow: The Road to War 1904–1914, 344, 344–95. 53Ibid. , 347, 350, 356–57. 54 Ibid. , 367. 55 Ibid. , 368; Nicholas A. Lambert, “Admiral Sir John Fisher and the Concept of Flotilla Defense, ” in Technology and Naval Combat in the Twentieth Century and Beyond, ed. Philips Payson O'Brien (London: Frank Cass, 2001), 79. 56 Marder, From Dreadnought to Scapa Flow: The Road to War 1904–1914, 360. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid. , 360–62. 59 Herman, To Rule the Waves, 243. 60 Nicholas A. Lambert, “British Naval Policy, 1913–1914: Financial Limitation and Strategic Revolution, ” The Journal of Modern History 67, no. 3 (1995): 595; Nicholas A. Lambert, Sir John Fisher's Naval Revolution, (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999), 18–19. Note that even if raiders slipped through the blockade, the Admiralty relied on dreadnoughts to defeat them. The British won the Battle of the Falklands Islands because their dreadnought battlecruisers crushed Germany's cruisers. Massie, Castles of Steel, 257–86. 61 The Grand Fleet took more casualties than the High Seas Fleet, but it was ready for action the next day, which its opponent certainly was not. Castles of Steel, 553–684. 62 Sir Arthur Hezlet, The Submarine and Sea Power (New York: Stein and Day, 1967), 43; Massie, Castles of Steel, 244–86. 63 Bernard A. Brodie, Sea Power in the Machine Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941), 295–97. 64 Lambert, “Admiral Sir John Fisher, ” 652–53. 65 Marder, From Dreadnought to Scapa Flow: The Road to War 1904–1914, 334. 66 Ibid. , 331. Note the emphasis on submarines. 67 Ibid. , 335–36, 371–32. 68 Herman, To Rule the Waves, 286. 69 Marder, From Dreadnought to Scapa Flow: The Road to War 1904–1914, 371–72. 70 Hezlet, The Submarine and Sea Power, 29–30; Sir Arthur J. Marder, From Dreadnought to Scapa Flow: The War Years to the Eve of Jutland, 5 vols. , vol. 2 (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), 62–70. 71 Marder, From Dreadnought to Scapa Flow: The War Years to the Eve of Jutland, 75–76; Sumida, “A Matter of Timing. ” 72 Churchill famously deemed Jellicoe, “The only man on either side who could lose the war in an afternoon. ” He could lose the war, but he could not win it. Had Jellicoe pursued the High Seas Fleet into an ambush and taken enough losses to threaten Britain's naval superiority in pursuit of a victory that could not have ended the war, historians would surely be unqualified in their condemnation; Gordon, The Rules of the Game, 554; James L. Stokesbury, A Short History of World War I (New York: Harper Paperbacks, 1981), 83. 73 Terraine, Business in Great Waters, 5 (parentheses in original). 74 Ibid. 75 Marder, From Dreadnought to Scapa Flow: 1917: Year of Crisis, 132. 76 Philip K. Lundeberg, “The German Naval Critique of the U-Boat Campaign 1915–1918, ” Military Affairs 27, no. 3 (1964): 106–07. 77 Bernard A. Brodie, A Layman's Guide to Naval Strategy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1942), 119. 78 R. H. Gibson and Maurice Prendergast, The German Submarine War 1914–1918 (London: Constable Messimer, Find and Destroy, 112. 89 Marder, From Dreadnought to Scapa Flow: The War Years to the Eve of Jutland, 367. 90 Sir John Jellicoe, Crisis of the Naval War (London: Cassell and Company, 1920), 10, 54–55; Marder, From Dreadnought to Scapa Flow: 1917: Year of Crisis, 70. 91 Herman, To Rule the Waves, 496. 92 Marder, From Dreadnought to Scapa Flow: 1917: Year of Crisis, 102; Terraine, Business in Great Waters, 40, 46. 93 Sir Edwyn Gray, The U-Boat War 1914–1918 (London: Leo Cooper, 1994), 182. 94 Ibid. , 198; Messimer, Find and Destroy, 127–29. 95 Marder, From Dreadnought to Scapa Flow: 1917: Year of Crisis, 116. 96 Ross, “Losing the Initiative in Mercantile Warfare. ” 97 Rudyard Kipling, “The Destroyers, ” in The Collected Poems of Rudyard Kipling (Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 2001). 98 Terraine, Business in Great Waters, 51. 99 Marder, From Dreadnought to Scapa Flow: 1917: Year of Crisis, 138–39, 132. 100 Ibid. , 120. 101 Messimer, Find and Destroy, 148–49; Jellicoe, Crisis of the Naval War, 102–05, 111. 102 Marder, From Dreadnought to Scapa Flow: 1917: Year of Crisis, 150–51; Terraine, Business in Great Waters, 53–54. 103 Marder, From Dreadnought to Scapa Flow: 1917: Year of Crisis, 128–32. 104 Jellicoe, Crisis of the Naval War, 111–12. 105 Marder, From Dreadnought to Scapa Flow: 1917: Year of Crisis, 123. 106 Ibid. , 125. 107 Ibid. , 122–126. 108 Jellicoe, Crisis of the Naval War, 105–06. 109 Marder, From Dreadnought to Scapa Flow: 1917: Year of Crisis, 128. 110 Ibid. , 131–32. 111 Ibid. , 130–32, Terraine, Business in Great Waters, 55. 112 Marder, From Dreadnought to Scapa Flow: 1917: Year of Crisis, 118. 113 Terraine, Business in Great Waters, 55. 114 Marder, From Dreadnought to Scapa Flow: 1917: Year of Crisis, 145. 115 Ibid. , 145, 189–90. 116 Ibid. , 146. 117 Ibid. , 145–63, Terraine, Business in Great Waters, 58–59. 118 Gordon, The Rules of the Game, 532. 119 Marder, From Dreadnought to Scapa Flow: 1917: Year of Crisis, 182–88. 120 Ibid. , 189–90. 121 Ibid. , 197–209, 218, 225–55. 122 Ibid. , 256–63, 277–79, 282. 123 DI has been formally modeled and computer simulated. See Ron Adner, “When Are Technologies Disruptive: A Demand-Based View of the Emergence of Competition, ” Strategic Management Journal 23 (2002) ; Ron Adner and Peter Zemsky, “Disruptive Technologies and the Emergence of Competition, ” RAND Journal of Economics 36, no. 2 (2005). 124 Lambert, Sir John Fisher's Naval Revolution, 216. 125 Farrell, The Norms of War. 126 Jack Snyder, The Ideology of the Offensive: Military Decision Making and the Disasters of 1914 (Ithaca: Cornell Paperbacks, 1984) ; Stephen Van Evera, “The Cult of the Offensive and the Origins of the First World War, ” International Security 9, no. 1 (1984). 127 Brooks, Dreadnought Gunnery at the Battle of Jutland; John Brooks, “Notes and Comments, ” The Journal of Military History 70, no. 1 (2006) ; Sir Edwyn Gray, The Devil's Device (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1991) ; Sumida, “Gunnery, Procurement, and Strategy in the Dreadnought Era”; Sumida, In Defense of Naval Supremacy. 128 Terraine, Business in Great Waters, 58. 129 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “Silver Blaze, ” in The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, vol. 2, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, ed. Leslie S. Klinger (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005).