| Institution: | Professor of War in the Modern World in the Department of War Studies at King's College London.
Between the autumn of 2007 and the spring of 2008 draft versions of this article were presented at the annual conventions of ISSS/ISAC in Montreal and the International Studies Association in San Francisco, and to the Oxford University Strategic Studies Group, the Joint Services Command and Staff College (UK) and NATO's Allied Command Transformation in Norfolk, VA. I am grateful to the participants at all these fora for their comments. For feedback on earlier drafts, I should also like to thank Richard Applegate, Jaz Azari, Tim Bird, Andrew Figgures, Mark Gaunt, Monty Long, Thomas Mahnken, Alistair Roxburgh, Pascal Vennesson, Andrew Walton and especially Terry Terriff. In gaining access to information for this article, I gratefully acknowledge the support of DCDS(EC), PJHQ, JSCSC, the Land Warfare Centre and the many officers who agreed to be interviewed, who shared documents with me and who completed the JSCSC survey. I thank Rachel Hayes and Rudra Chaudhuri for their research assistance. The research for this article was funded by a generous grant under the ‘New Security Challenges’ programme of the Economic and Social Research Council (UK). Finally, I thank the anonymous reviewer for pushing me to dig deeper, and Caroline Soper for her editorial guidance. |
| Abstract: | The British military have embarked on a comprehensive process of transformation towards a network-enabled, effects-orientated, and expeditionary force posture. This has involved developing brand new military doctrine, organizational concepts, and technology. The US military are also transforming, and American military ideas about network-centric and effects-based warfare have influenced the British military. But the British have not simply aped their US ally. Rather, British military transformation has followed a different path. Hence, this article proposes a dynamic model of military innovation involving two international drivers: new operational challenges and military emulation; and three national shapers: resource constraints, domestic politics and military culture. This model is then applied to a detailed empirical analysis of the process and progress of British military transformation. |
