Military innovation in the age of austerity: why I love budget cuts.

• Author: Ward, Dan
• Position: Viewpoint

What win the projected military budget cuts do to the defense technology environment? Despite the widespread chorus of concern from industry and government alike, the cuts may actually do everyone--particularly American war fighters--a lot of good.

I have spent much of the last decade researching and advocating austere innovation. The data I've uncovered show that "innovation is not necessarily or even primarily a function of budget" as a pair of Navy commanders so eloquently explained in a 1994 Joint Force Quarterly article. They went on to state that innovation is generally driven "by the need to make more efficient use of shrinking resources," and concluded that many "innovations came at a time of low budgets and small forces." Other research corroborated these findings, supporting the idea that a new weapon's effectiveness is inversely proportional to its funding levels. To put it plainly, smaller budgets lead to better systems.

This apparently counterintuitive observation is solidly supported by a significant body of data, much of which I documented in a 2009 master's degree thesis at the Air Force Institute of Technology. Rather than recap all the data, let's examine the relationship between austerity and innovation by briefly looking at the dynamics of budgetary restraint.

When money is easy to come by, there is a natural tendency to try-to solve problems by adding dollars. Unfortunately, big budgets can lead to lazy thinking. Restraint, on the other hand, fosters creativity/ by taking obvious (but expensive) options off the table and forcing technologists to pursue lower-cost alternative approaches--which tend to perform as well if not better than the business-as-usual technologies. And yes, extensive combat experience shows that when we solve problems using intellectual capital instead of financial capital, the resulting solutions are usually better--more effective, more reliable and more likely to be available on an operationally relevant timeline.

Next, a restrained budget keeps programs focused on actual priorities, avoiding the unaffordable delays and expenses associated with unwarranted departures from the core mission. A tight budget is a good excuse to reject requirements creep, and when there is no money available to pay for new components, we end up with an elegantly streamlined tool that simply does what it needs to do, with minimal friction or excess weight.

Because time is money, small budgets tend to drive short...