Abstract
Military innovation matters more today than at any point in the last thirty years, yet innovation studies have reached an impasse: the military-innovation literature remains rich in hypotheses but poor in definitive findings about which actors — political leaders, military officers, technologists or firms — drive the process, while political economists agree that institutions shape how firms innovate but cannot demonstrate how. Combining actor- and institution-centred approaches through a focused comparison of three states' post-Cold War tank projects — France's Leclerc, Russia's T-14 Armata and the United Kingdom's Challenger 2 — this paper argues that a state's procurement institutions, distinct from its overarching economic institutions, determine both the level of innovation it attempts and the technical risks it runs. Procurement institutions do so by setting the relative authority of different actors and structuring how they interact: technologists consistently champion novel technologies, while military officers generally prefer reliable, proven weapons, a preference that is malleable through interaction with technologists. When uniformed services formulate requirements without technologists' input the outcome is conservative (the Challenger 2); radical innovation results when institutions empower technologists to shape projects from the outset (the Leclerc and the T-14). The paper finds, counterintuitively, that competitive procurement produced the least innovative tank, and that these institutions are neither immutable nor inferable from regime type or ‘varieties of capitalism’.
Panel: European Defense and Security
Cite this presentation
@inproceedings{eiss-2021-building-the-best-tank-institutions-and-the-choice-to-embrace-radical-change,
author = {Marc DeVore},
title = {Building the Best Tank: Institutions and the Choice to Embrace Radical Change},
booktitle = {European Security Studies Conference 2021},
year = {2021},
url = {https://eiss-europa.com/papers/2021-building-the-best-tank-institutions-and-the-choice-to-embrace-radical-change.html}
}