The complexity of military change: Counterinsurgency adaptation in the British Army, 1899-1960

How do large, conventional militaries adapt to the challenges of modern counterinsurgency? While answering this question remains vitally important for augmenting U.S. national security, the academic community has paid relatively little attention to it, preferring instead to focus on military reform for conventional combat.;This dissertation argues that counterinsurgency adaptation is a long and complex process which occurs in two distinct stages. In the first, innovations are made in the area of command, intelligence, and strategy. This dissertation develops a comprehensive theoretical framework which shows how several factors, including civilian intervention, military leadership, and systemic pressures, logically combine to produce innovation in these areas.;The second stage deals with how innovations are embedded in a military's routines, norms, and historical memory. It is argued that institutionalization occurs through a process of organizational learning As the result of organizational preferences, the production of normative standards in a field, or the influence of lawmakers, military's learn by embedding the lessons of counterinsurgency in their doctrine and training programs, and by redefining their core competencies in terms of unconventional warfare.;This dissertation tests these claims through the method of sequence elaboration and the process-tracing of counterinsurgency adaptation in the British army from 1899-1960. The British case reveals that adaptation took an extensive period to complete, and did not result from any one factor alone. Civilian intervention combined with growing international pressures to force a change in the army's methods. These innovations were institutionalized in the organization through a process of professionalization in the military field. The construction of a set of normative standards of counterinsurgency caused the army to embrace key innovations as the "British way" of counterinsurgency.;This dissertation reveals important lessons for conventional forces which seek to adapt to unconventional war. These include the tenets that adaptation does not occur over the course of one campaign; that innovation and institutionalization are separate enterprises; that finding the right personnel to lead a campaign is a key to innovation; that mechanisms for political leverage must be devised and sustained; and that organizational biases are deeply embedded and difficult to change.