High Seas: The Naval Passage to an Uncharted World Review

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(More customer reviews)This book is about change and innovation in military institutions.
Military organizations, especially successful ones, normally tend to resist change. Order reigns, and there are reasons why this is so. In a very real sense, the lives of the individuals who serve in military organizations depend on other military personnel to act predictably, to be where plans say they should be, at the appointed time, doing what their doctrine and training say they should do...As a result, military organizations view change and innovation with great caution. The wrong change, after all, can be fatal, not just for those in uniform but also for their societies.
But sometimes caution leads to stagnation; and failure to adjust to global changes, advances in military technology, or innovations in the conduct of war can lead to the same kind of disasters that cautious bias about change and innovation was supposed to prevent.
I think we are in such a period...Technology pushes beyond the frontiers we took to be inpenetrable limits only a few years ago...In this new era, it is far more dangerous for American military institutions, and for the U.S. Navy in particular, not to change. -- excepts from book's preface

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Admiral William Owens, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs ofStaff, evaluates military resistance to change and argues that failure to respond to shifting global imperatives can lead to the same disasters caution intends to prevent Acknowledging the life and death qualities of military decisions, Ow