
Technological Surprise and Resilience in Military Systems
Resilience, organizational restoration, technological marvel, task impact *Corresponding creator: alexander.Kott1.Civ@mail.Mil Introduction This paper makes a speciality of procedures to build resilience and advantage from it when an sudden unfavourable event get up. The unique interest is in strategies – ideally supported with the aid of historical proof of success – that would assist an organization triumph over a massive poor impact on its capacity to preserve its venture.
To make the discussions extra concrete, the paper specializes in a specific magnificence of unfavourable activities – technological surprises in struggle. A technological marvel in struggle frequently unfolds as follows. One of the rims in an armed conflict (allow’s call that aspect Red) introduces a weapon machine that the opposite side (let’s call it Blue) did now not anticipate to look at the battlefield.
The new weapon may additionally considerably lessen the capability of Blue to fight Red. As a result, Blue may additionally moreover experience big losses in employees, device, territory, and plenty of others. If Blue is sufficiently resilient, after a time body it develops countermeasures – regularly a mixture of recent strategies and new technical technique – that negate the impact of the latest weapon, and restore the initial ratio of capabilities among Red and Blue.
Two commonly used examples are (1) inside the summer time of 1941, the advent of the Soviet T-34 tank which changed into almost invulnerable to the German tanks of the time, and served as unwelcome marvel to the Germans; and (2) additionally in 1941, using the German effective 88 mm Flak gun toward the improvised British tanks in North Africa. (Finkel & Tlamim, 2011) Next the above description, and for the reason of this paper, let’s define resilience due to the fact the potential of a military corporation to (a) keep away from complete destruction in face of a technological marvel, and then to (b) get higher and go back to powerful average overall performance in the direction of the adversary.
This definition is constant with how resilience is described through the National Academies of Science (2012) and Executive Orders thru every the Obama (The White House, 2013) and Trump Administrations. For have a look at of resilience, technological surprises are mainly convenient cases: the cause (e.G., a brand new weapon), the outcomes (the handicap and the losses), and the resiliency-restoring actions (countermeasures) are typically really understood, well documented, and frequently even quantifiable. For many nations, technological surprise is turning into a growing challenge as technology and science are spreading ever broader all through the globe.
While generally, this is a reasonably welcome phenomenon, i U.S. Army Research Laboratory, Adelphi, Maryland, USA Suggested citation: Kott, A. (2018). Technological marvel and resilience in military structures. Trump, B. D., Florin, M.-V., & Linkov, I. (Eds.). IRGC useful useful resource manual on resilience (vol. 2): Domains of resilience for complicated interconnected structures. Lausanne, CH: EPFL Global Risk Governance Center. Available on irgc.Epfl.Ch and irgc.Org. 2 the propagation of information approximately constructing today's weapons maintains to boom the variety of states and non-country actors that would spring a technological surprise at a given u.S.A..
The limits of danger-based methods
By their very nature, technological surprises are rarely amenable to hazard-control techniques. Risk-based totally strategies require identification of threat, vulnerability and consequences. The area of cutting-edge technology is so extensive and numerous that Red has nearly unlimited possibilities to pick out a particular research and development direction, and to construct a novel effective weapon machine. If Blue’s intelligence provider fail to hit upon the improvement (a commonplace occurrence).
Blue has no manner to recognize the character of the modern-day Red weapon, and can not pursue any meaningful risk-mitigation techniques that might assist in competition to the future come across with the but-unknown weapon. In theory, Blue may additionally try to undertake a completely tremendous portfolio of R&D applications in order to research the abilities and the countermeasures in competition to all probably future Red guns. In exercise, such an exhaustive exploration and mitigation is unaffordable even for the wealthiest international locations. Read More beinghealthylife
Therefore, resilience-primarily based totally methods are possibly to be an awful lot much less pricey than threat-primarily based strategies. Instead of (or possibly further to) making an investment in a totally extensive (and simply steeply-priced) style of mitigation mechanisms towards an infinitely big spectrum of feasible technological surprises, the united states of a may additionally opt to invest in abilities and property that might allow resilient responses to an inevitable technological marvel. Although such investments are sizable, they're maximum likely to be significantly smaller that doubtlessly infinite spending on retaining off all feasible dangers.