Hill, Andrew, and Stephen Gerras

Abstract
Successful organizations can be extraordinarily persistent and creative in denying the obvious, ignoring signals that suggest a need to challenge key strategic assumptions. The U.S. military has been the world’s unrivaled force for twenty-five years, even lacking a peer competitor in some domains—naval operations, for example—since 1943. A danger of such sustained success is that the military might come to view these strategic assumptions not as ideas requiring continual reassessment but as enduring laws. The current and future strategic environments demand that the military innovate and question its strategic assumptions, not because we know that they are wrong, but because every theory of competition eventually succumbs to new facts. The military should be extremely sensitive to the risks of believing things that are no longer (or may never have been) true; yet it is particularly vulnerable to persistent denial, and the wartime consequences of such errors are dire.
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