Creating the capacity for innovation : U.S. Army 1945-1960

This dissertation argues that in the years immediately following the Second World War, the United States Army created a set of intellectual, organizational, and ultimately institutional processes, which are essential to military innovation. Prior to the Second World War, innovation in the army had remained isolated, ad hoc, and difficult to harness towards a common goal. That changed substantively in the period after the war. Unlike most studies of military innovation, this work does not follow the efforts of a single genius but rather three interrelated activities that when fully developed provide the institutional foundations for an ability to change. First, the army adopted the field of operations research as an essential element of military analysis and decision-making. Second, the army created a set of activities known collectively as 'combat developments', where new ideas moved through a deliberate process of deliberation, analyses, testing, and prototyping in order to deliver a new military capability to the field. Finally, this dissertation describes the modernization of officer education and the change in doctrine development from a focus on near-term doctrine for a mobilizing force to forward-looking doctrine appropriate to a standing force in a time of technological change. Most historians have judged the army of early Cold War to be an innovative failure with a readiness crisis at the beginning of the Korean War, a spectacular failure with its Pentomic concept, and its supposed inability to anticipate and prepare for large-scale counterinsurgencies in the 1960s. However, as this dissertation demonstrates, it was during this same period that more fundamental changes occurred that set the pattern for how the institution would change over the course of the remainder of the century.