Conservatism and Resistance to Change in Armed Forces

Editor’s Note
As the discussion and debate on jointness, integration, and eventual establishment of joint theatre commands swirl across the three armed forces in India, it is important to understand why it is difficult to undertake changes in organisations that are based on strict hierarchies and groupthink. As military strategist BH Liddle Hart has famously said, “the only thing harder than getting a new idea into the military mind is to get an old one out.” In this longish essay, Rear Adm Sudarshan Shrikhande (Retd), one of India’s finest military thinkers, dwells on the aspects of conservatism and resistance to change in militaries, and what can be done about them. Sunday read.

“Preserving the “Status Quo” long after the ‘Quo’ may be Losing its ‘Status’: Looking at Conservatism & Resistance to Change in Armed Forces”

Background

This article is a continuation of the theme of the first Bharatshakti Strategic Dialogue in April 2024, which was “Why Militaries Struggle to Transform for Future Wars.” The title of this article harks back to what Laurence Peter, a management teacher often referred to as an early “guru” of business management, said: “Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status.” Is this statement applicable in the world of business of warfighting, where, in the background, the management of choices about technologies, hardware, and weapon-sensor-platform development largely falls to the leadership involved in senior management decisions in and for armed forces?

As argued in the referenced episode (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Zwnts–8IM), there are historical examples of status quoism, as well as the urge to be mavericks and to risk innovation, combining new—albeit often imperfect—hardware or things, new ideas, often from maverick mindsets, and people putting these three together.

Change is Always Complex

The resistance to change is always complex, not constant, and not all pervasive. If it were so, then the changes we have seen in warfare and warfighting over time would not have occurred in the first place. The argument isn’t that change doesn’t take place. Rather, it is that change (call it combinations of reforms, transformation, innovation, experimentation, adoption, adaptation, etc.) does not happen as quickly as it could or should. Even as current military leadership may sometimes resist change, they do not necessarily realise that the status quo they defend/justify and do not wish to change is itself the outcome of earlier generations’ embrace of change, even under the pressures of earlier versions of status quoism. 

Rapidity of Airpower Development

However, there are also examples of quick adaptation. One of the strides military aviation took from the opening days of the First World War, from July 1914 to the scale and diversity by its end in November 1918. As mentioned in the linked video, there were just about a few hundred aircraft all told in July 1914; by the end of 1918, the numbers built were in six figures. Neither civil nor military aviation existed in any significant way in the early 1910s, although the potential of aviation was understood by the more imaginative military officers and civilians. In Germany, Zeppelins were expected to be useful tools of warfare, while in France, they were contemplating aircraft as such. It was the pressures of war that led to a rapid increase in the number of aircraft, their types and tactical deployment in roles that were not fully conceived.

It was less due to a lack of desire or imagination. Rather, aircraft were themselves in infancy; materials, designers, aero engines, aircraft that delivered bombs, mounted machine guns, etc., were all the result of rapid experimentation and the desperation to gain some battlefield tactical advantage that could cumulatively lead to at least some operational breakthroughs.

As said in a WW I analysis, “Combat flying was no sport or game. It was a deadly, ruthless, and capricious business, in which a man’s life depended not only upon his skill and luck, but also on aeroplanes whose engines failed, guns jammed, and wings broke with distressing frequency.”  

Aviator casualties were proportionately the highest of any arm among all European participants; most occurred during training and due to technical failures rather than in combat. The price in blood paid by intrepid aviators was a learning process, with backs to the wall. It led to rapid improvements in materials, technologies and training regimes, which enabled aviation to be really critical in WW II.

Unmanned? Not Quite Interested!

Despite the very significant role airpower played between 1939 and 1945 and in the Korean War as well, neither the US nor the Soviet air forces seemed very interested in scientists in their own countries working on satellites. As this writer noted in two articles on drones and unmanned vehicles, they did not show much enthusiasm for the idea of satellites or the role they could eventually play in intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, which are missions that have always been central to aeroplanes being used more effectively. They did get interested eventually, but were still reluctant to, so to speak, have their own skin in the game for several years after the “Sputnik moment” of 1957.

Also Read: Drones In Warfare: Measures And Countermeasures

Service cultures have immense strengths, but at times can also militate against unmanned vehicles or less striking but equally effective instruments that may not rivet eyes in parades or fleet reviews but do help deliver death and damage upon an enemy.

It is precisely what satellites were and still are. Naval uncrewed aviation was also on the slower track, mainly because the culture of manned flying, with all its excitement and capabilities, did not see merit in unmanned radio-controlled ASW helicopters developed as early as the 1960s and 1970s.

“Underhand, Unfair and Un-English!”

Another naval example comes to mind. In the years before the First World War, only a few senior officers realised the potential and the range of roles that even basic submarines could execute. These subs were more like surface vessels that submerged only briefly during attacks.

British admirals like Jackie Fisher, a champion of battleships and battle cruisers, were among the few flag officers who recognised the asymmetric damage submarines could inflict on larger ships and the value their imperfect stealth brought to naval warfare.

His contemporary, Admiral Arthur Wilson, called these small, ugly boats “unfair, underhand and un-English” in 1901, when he was, ironically, responsible for ship construction as Controller of the Navy!

In the bargain, conformism, status quoism and a love of “bigger things” meant that more money kept getting invested in battleships. As it turned out, submarines played key roles in sinking warships, in reconnaissance and scouting, and, of course, in trade interdiction.

This last role was barely on anyone’s minds before the war broke out.

The huge investment in battleships by several navies notwithstanding, their actual role was quite limited.

In fleet clashes, excessive caution led to their use only in sustained aggression, and more were lost to submarines, mines, and torpedoes launched from much smaller cruisers and destroyers.

Despite all this, and despite the evidence of the role that airpower began to have at and from the sea, the preference for most navies was still to extol the virtues of battleships, which eventually became even larger and more powerful. Political leaders who played important roles in the clauses of the Versailles treaty saw the impact of submarines more clearly and insisted that a defeated Germany could no longer have submarines because they were the instruments that had done the most to target Britain’s trade imports, as well as impacted naval forces.

One of the early decisions of Nazi Germany after it repudiated the treaty in 1935 was to restart U-boat construction. Yet, the ‘battleship admirals” in that navy rooted for more battleships and battlecruisers and even one aircraft carrier under the “Z-Plan”. While the carrier was wisely cancelled, other ships of the “prestige” fleet inflicted relatively minor outcomes on the allies and really ceased to matter totally by 1943.

The high cost but low effectiveness is especially stark when back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that the steel, man-hours, money, materials, and crew size for one Bismarck or Tirpitz could have built and put to sea, with crews, anywhere between 35-40 U-boats that Admiral Dönitz was fighting for with his fellow navy brass.

In effect, they needed to have looked at the reality and lethality measures of their own times, lessons learnt from the past and built more of the navy they needed than the one some admirals loved. For other navies, although carriers were seen as having potential, a high proportion of funds still went to battleships and heavy cruisers, while more carriers could have been built.

“Past Perfectness” is more Reassuring than Risking Future Readiness

These strains of matching force planning to strategy (that takes into account the enemy, the environment, sound estimates, and limited available funds) persist in most nations and their armed forces.

Older instruments like tanks or attack helicopters—to take examples —may not be totally redundant, but they now operate under more severe challenges from anti-tank and anti-helicopter weapons and sensors that match their use.

Equally, there are now other, cheaper, increasingly effective ways of doing what tanks and these helicopters could do. UAVs, drones, missiles, homing projectiles, and likely directed-energy weapons may be produced in greater numbers and variety, be more survivable, and serve a range of missions.

Likewise, they would continue to experience operational and tactical limitations; newer countermeasures and leaders may need to be aware of these as well. Such factors impact across the board and include, to name some, manned fighter and strike aircraft and aircraft carriers.

It is also right that no “legacy” weapon, sensor or platform becomes utterly useless in and for combat overnight. It is also true that many platforms are today better and more capable than their earlier versions.

Rather, we need to understand that there is a slow fading of earlier effectiveness in the face of newer countermeasures, newer and more effective methods and newer combinations of “people, ideas and things”, even as older things are used in different ways by different people using different ideas.

“After All, We Still Have the Infantryman”

In justifying newer versions of older platforms like tanks or aircraft carriers, an argument is sometimes made that the infantry soldier has existed for millennia and would continue to be so for centuries more. This argument, although appealing, is weak.

Of course, the infantryman will continue for a thousand more years. What is important is to see just how different the infantryman of ancient India or Rome was from the infantryman of the medieval ages, then the early industrial age, the mid-19th century, WW I, and WW II.

Consider, in our own times, how much weaponry, clothing, armour, multi-arms and multi-domain networking, tactics, anti-infantry measures, and counter-measures have evolved.

On other platforms, as mentioned earlier, the environment can and does change, as it did for the archer, pikeman, musketeer, and rifleman over the centuries. The cost of platforms, their relative declining effectiveness, especially in high-threat (or peer, or near-peer combat conditions), and better, more usable options need to be considered alongside solving the problems of using legacy platforms and weapons in different ways and slowly investing more in what might make us more future-ready instead of “past-perfect.”

Overcoming Status Quoism

Firstly, this requires a very professional and honest assessment of the operational and tactical warfare environments, as well as unbiased lessons from recent and current conflicts. It includes avoiding the tendency of several practitioners in each service to emphasise and overstate the capabilities of current equipment or those on wish lists, while minimising their limitations. Simultaneously, two tendencies also need to be recognised and avoided.

One is to minimise the current and projected capabilities of hardware coming into use while overstating their limitations. Two, and equally so, the advocates of new hardware, whether platforms, sensors and weapons, should avoid overstating the capabilities and understating the limitations of such hardware that they advocate.

For instance, both sides of the argument could, to take a good example, exaggerate the effectiveness of manned fighter aircraft in the Ukraine-Russia war, the other side their limitations; and mirror this for unmanned aircraft, vessels, and drones, or the contribution of AI in the air and sea domains.

The reality, as can be seen over the four years of this war, but also in some other conflicts, is that manned platforms like surface ships, strike aircraft, tanks and combat helicopters have all experienced greater risks, greater initial losses, and relatively lesser usage than the holdings of these would have otherwise been.

Aircraft are also operating from greater stand-off ranges, where the speed, manoeuvrability and stealth features have been of less consequence, and much lower-cost platforms could also have carried some of the ordnance. It seems only a matter of time before much lower-cost UAVs of larger size and weapon-carrying capacity could be deployed in these roles.

Caution About Game Changers

Secondly, we also see overuse of the phrase “game changer”. It is applied quite casually and incorrectly to updated generations of platforms/ the next major acquisition/ new weapon, or sometimes even a sensor. Usually, it’s hard to make a case for this or that. It is also applied to newer forms of hardware, such as unmanned vehicles, AI, and drones.

In effect, drones have been with us for decades, and newer versions have been seen since the early satellites. The operative questions to be asked before any of these are called game changers are: Explaining to ourselves what the game may be in the first place? Next, how does a particular weapon/ platform sensor individually or in combination change the game? Or, is it more the case that such hardware or a combination actually helps us play the existing game a little better or, in some cases, much better?

The latter is seen in the way unmanned systems, AI, and advanced computing are creating new possibilities in a much better way than hitherto, but not quite changing the game yet. The game could change if these systems proliferate at substantial density, over large areas, and with great precision. If at times some of them don’t work or are degraded by countermeasures, that is not new; it is a constant of warfare.

To frame a truism, from their earliest days, soldiers, aircraft, ships, tanks and even submarines have been and will continue to be targeted and destroyed in some measure. The same could be said for unmanned hardware.

An example of a game changer, however, could be if one side develops a considerable ability to sufficiently degrade the other side’s satellite capabilities at various orbits in quick time and leave quickly, leaving it paralysed or blindsided to a considerable extent.

Faster Adaptation and Decisions

Thirdly, it is likely that we could fritter precious time by making decisions that could yield future benefits, by hesitating to make evaluations, by imagining what isn’t yet, or by disregarding the maxim that perfect may be the enemy of good enough. (Besides, how would we know or define perfection?) An example from the IN’s official history is illustrative. 

In 1964, during a major visit to the USSR, the Russians offered the ministerial and naval delegation submarines and even missile boats, among other hardware. The missile boats did not find favour because they were very small, and there was no evidence that a high-subsonic missile could actually home in on and hit a moving ship using its own radar.

It was only after two  Egyptian missile boats had attacked and sunk the Israeli destroyer Eilat on 21 October 1967 (coincidentally, Trafalgar Day!) that the Israeli Navy realised its potential and then, from 1968, expedited the induction of the Type 215 missile boats.

Incidentally, this attack was in what we now call the Grey Zone, not in the Six-Day War as is often believed, and even mentioned in the IN’s official history. Had the Egyptians not obliged the world with this “demonstration”, the Indian Navy would likely have bothered to buy such missile craft.

Today, strands of such thinking can be seen in Indian (and some Western writing) that underplays the effectiveness of long- range anti-ship missiles, especially those with a ballistic trajectory and high speeds based on assumptions that homing would be very difficult; that targeting from satellites would have too many gaps and that, in any case it is not been proven in combat!

My mind goes back to the early days of OTHT (Over the horizon Targeting) when I was a young officer, where there were gaps in targeting data relayed by a helicopter, or another ship, supplemented by one’s own radar or by observing radar silence if tactically necessary. It was not perfect, but it enabled accurate exercise targeting of ship-to-ship missiles. It was akin to what later would be termed cooperative engagement capability (CEC).

Likewise, today, the cynics of what is called “kill chain” possibilities highlight the gaps in satellite coverage, not quite acknowledging that the gaps are reducing and dwell time is increasing; that supplementary data through LEOs and UAVs, as well as plot development could enable us to target adversaries’ ships at very long ranges using such missiles from land or other dimensions.

Such developments require simultaneous support for Atmanirbharta, as well as the assumption that adversaries may also be trying hard to target us and others. Such analogies are also possible for longer-range SAMs and air-to-air missiles with partial or nearly gapless guidance from some types of satellites. The long history of increasing weapon range while also improving ISR and targeting networks, as well as weapon lethality through accuracy and speed, is evident today and will assuredly continue into the future.

Using “legacy” hardware with imagination and audacity, and adapting it to changing operational and tactical risks, is necessary while simultaneously thinking multidimensionally, bringing together sensors, platforms, and weapons enabled by networking.

I suggest viewing all of these, including the networks themselves, as enablers of the objectives. Hence, terms like “network-centric”  or even “platform-centric” are inaccurate even if commonplace. All are merely enablers, and neither tactical, operational, nor even strategic-level warfare can be centred on any of them.

The big trend developing could well be that simpler, perhaps less expensive platforms, kamikaze unmanned ammo-vessels, combined with longer range weapons, could provide a variety of dispersion of forces for offensive as well as defensive tasks, yet be built in larger numbers to reinforce the advantages of distributed lethality and greater survivability.

Needed, Mavericks at All Levels

Finally, the history of evolution in warfare, especially from the mid-19th century CE onward, suggests that status quoism is a dampener, largely prevalent among older generations and senior leadership. For many seniors across countries, the past is familiar, real and comforting, even if some of them talk of reform.

In general, if history is a pointer, it would be advantageous if the tribe of status shakers at senior levels increased, and if all at these levels also listened to other, often younger voices, some of whom may not even wear a uniform.

Warriors need to consider that the quo keeps losing its status over time, and seeking more effective ways of doing things and ideas from people is an important part of military effectiveness, which could help achieve the status and benefits that military victories can help ensure.

Rear Admiral Sudarshan Shrikhande (Retd)