Military innovation in the U.S. Army: Anarchy, bureaucracy, and the forging of doctrine, 1975--1995

This dissertation charts the constellation of processes and practices shaping military innovation at the organizational level. From 1975 to 1995, the U.S. Army released four new editions of its capstone doctrinal manual, FM 100-5 Operations. Given the prevalence of theories in international relations and security studies characterizing military actors as resistant to anything but incremental change, these publications, approximately one every five years, present a puzzle. How did the U.S. Army initiate and sustain reform absent overt civilian intervention?;I argue that military innovation reflects the interaction of anarchy and bureaucracy. In this, I establish a neoclassical realist framework hypothesizing six propositions explaining defense reforms. Perceptions of external threat function as a competition-logic mechanism shaping how elite brokers within an individual service (re)imagine war. As such these organizational actors do not rely on civilian officials to initiate reform.;This process is then filtered through a series of institutional modifiers reflected in a synthesis mechanism. Through the use of incubators that protect new concepts, advocacy networks, and derivative force design initiatives reform advocates lock in organizational change. Even in entrenched hierarchies like a military, bureaucratic reform can be partially analyzed in terms of its endogenous characteristics.;To examine the descriptive validity of this framework, three episodes of doctrinal change in the U.S. Army between 1975 and 1995 are evaluated using process tracing. The cases include the introduction of Active Defense in 1976, the publication of AirLand Battle in 1982, and the emergence of Full-Dimensional Operations in 1993. The observations are drawn from archival documents, confidential interviews, and secondary sources. In each episode the emphasis is on uncovering the ways in which threat perceptions were translated into concepts and institutional forms that defined the context of bureaucratic change absent significant civilian intervention.