Masks Of War

Organizations develop tradition, heritage, and culture as they establish roots in a bureaucratic system. These qualities allow for a myriad of possibilities, and in the Department of Defense, there is a tendency toward inertia to mitigate risk. In Masks of War, Carl Builder extols the principle that technology created the USAF and the USAF tends to rely on technological solutions for its problems. However, even in an organization that embraces technology as a founding principle, the USAF tends to resist change because of its bureaucratic nature. Merriam-Webster defines bureaucracy as: “a system of administration marked by officialism, red tape, and proliferation.” If a goal of a strategist is to “manage context for continuing advantage,” …show more content…
The role of individuals in organizing, training, motivating, and incentivizing cannot be overstated. In the interwar years, Posen posits that civilians operated as prime movers providing an external shock to stagnant military organizations; “civilians must carefully audit the doctrines of their military organizations to ensure that they stress the appropriate type of military operations, reconcile political ends with military means, and change with political circumstances and technological developments.” Additionally, he proposes that when a military maverick teams with the civilian leaders, the opportunity to succeed in change is the highest. Rosen sees the value of individual members of teams as well, but he discounts the virtue of a maverick by highlighting the large organizational resistance to pioneers such as Billy Mitchell and Hyman Rickover. To overcome resistance to change, strategic innovation is most effective when there is backing …show more content…
At the genesis of the Atlas program, rocketry was not a novel technology—the Germans were successfully launching V-2 rockets in WWII; however, using rockets to propel weaponized objects into space with a nuclear yield was new. The idea