Military Innovation

 

 

 

 

 

Understanding how militaries innovate and how technological progress creates opportunities is central to understanding contemporary power distributions. Within these processes questions of agency, change, and structure feature heavily, as do challenges to the integration of emerging technologies with existing or new war-fighting doctrines. Much of the existing military innovation literature deals with this technology/doctrine interrelationships in great power innovation projects prior to WWII, after which a scholarly vacuum emerges. More recent literature emphasizes the need to understand military adaptation in response to insurgencies, while neglecting issues of technologically-intensive conventional military innovation.

The project “Military Innovation During the Long Peace” enriches innovation studies by examining the post-1945 European militarized peace. The Military Innovation workshop on December 3-4 was one of the starting points of that project, bringing together a diverse body of scholars from Scotland and further afield to discuss the challenges ahead. The panel members were Samuel Faure (Sciences Po, St. Germaine-en-Laye), Malena Britz (Swedish Defense University), Caglar Kurc (Middle Eastern Technical University), Peter Dombrowski (US Naval War College), Niccolò Petrelli (Rome III), Annabelle Vuille (University of Southern Denmark), Michael Haas (ETH Zurich) and from the University of St Andrews: Catherine Jones, Luke Middup, Matt Warren, Sneha Reddy, Marc DeVore, Anneleen Van Der Meer & Kristen Harkness.