Mars Adapting: Military Change During War

Transforming War

by Frank G. Hoffman

As Clausewitz observed, “In war more than anywhere else, things do not turn out as we expect.” The essence of war is a competitive reciprocal relationship with an adversary. Commanders and institutional leaders must recognize shortfalls and resolve gaps rapidly in the middle of the fog of war. The side that reacts best (and absorbs faster) increases its chances of winning. Mars Adapting examines what makes some military organizations better at this contest than others. It explores the institutional characteristics or attributes at play in learning quickly. Adaptation requires a dynamic process of acquiring knowledge, the utilization of that knowledge to alter a unit’s skills, and the sharing of that learning to other units to integrate and institutionalize better operational practice. Mars Adapting explores the internal institutional factors that promote and enable military adaptation. It employs four cases, drawing upon one from each of the U.S. armed services. Each case was an extensive campaign, with several cycles of action/counteraction. In each case the military institution entered the war with an existing mental model of the war they expected to fight. For example, the U.S. Navy prepared for decades to defeat the Japanese Imperial Navy and had developed carried-based aviation. Other capabilities, particularly the Fleet submarine, were applied as a major adaptation. The author establishes a theory called Organizational Learning Capacity that captures the transition of experience and knowledge from individuals into larger and higher levels of each military service through four major steps. The learning/change cycle is influenced, he argues, by four institutional attributes (leadership, organizational culture, learning mechanisms, and dissemination mechanisms). The dynamic interplay of these institutional enablers shaped their ability to perceive and change appropriately.

Genres: Military Fiction

368 pages, Hardcover

Published March 15, 2021

Reviews

[Andrew Carr · Rating 4 out of 5]

Few organisations take the idea of learning as seriously as the military. They will take their best people out of work for a year (or 3 or 5) to study. They will produce endless briefings before acting, and endless paperwork reviewing what occurred. This all makes sense when the stakes for failing to learn can literally be death, or at best failing at your job and extending a long conflict. For all that importance, being a learning organisation is hard. Really hard.

Across four case studies (US Navy in WW2, US Air Force in Korea, US Army in Vietnam, US Marines in Iraq), Hoffman shows how difficult that challenge is in war. All of these services had distinct cultures and leaders, and yet even the best of them took at least 18-24 months to go from some bright platoon leader having an idea, to an organisation which had adopted wholesale that idea.

The field of military innovations has blossomed over the past decade, and Hoffman's Mars Adapting provides a useful one-stop overview of the field. He writes engagingly in explaining how past scholars have tried to explain innovation (Does it come from external pressure such as a new adversary, does it only work when particular institutional arrangements are in place, such as the right leaders, the new fresh-thinking generation or the right kind of competition for resources?). He contributes to this by adapting Organisational Learning Theory (OLT) from the Business literature. This highlights four themes, Leadership, Organisational Culture, Learning Mechanisms and Dissemination Mechanisms. Each is crucial and provides a useful set of signposts to pull apart these complex case studies (most covering many years, actors, settings and technologies) into coherent assessments of how well they learned and adapted.

Though the focus is on the military and particularly war time adaption, I could see many applications of OLT to peacetime organisations. Indeed I'd picked up this book partly on the strength of the author and hoping to better understand the organisations he described, but came away impressed by the theoretical foundations and its utility.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a fascinating look at learning cultures and environments within the US military. I appreciated how Hoffman chose four branches (Navy, Air, Army, Marines) within four specific case studies (WWII Pacific theatre, Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq) to illustrate his point. His claim that learning happens best as a bottom-up mechanism with top-down support and encouragement certainly rings true to my own (limited) experiences with how such organizations function. The eternal challenge, of course, will be maintaining the fine line between discipline/orthodoxy and creativity, both of which are necessary for a military to function.