Steven den Beste, redoubtable skipper of the USS Clueless, holds forth at length on the subject of military innovation in the US and UK armed forces, and the role that the cultural values of those two countries affect their performance.

Now, I realize that by disagreeing with Steven, I'm taking my life in my hands here, or at least my reputation; but given that I don't have a reputation, here goes.

The Brits have a point; it makes sense to institutionalize the means by which military research and development is done.

Good old Yankee ingenuity has certainly produced visible, and justifyably famous, success stories. But those major successes have all been with front-line weaponry, which is actually a fairly small part of the technology brought to bear in a war, and may not be the decisive part. As Steven has pointed out elsewhere, victory may hinge on some decidedly unglamorous technology. Will such drudgework engineering as transportation and communication -- where the connection to the success of the war effort, while manifest, is less obvious -- attract the same attention as does actual weaponry?

An institutionalized research organization can allocate resources to development projects that matter the most to the war effort, and can direct the attention of engineers and innovators to where their ingenuity will do the most good. Larger projects can be contemplated, with a level of planning and management that is flatly impossible when dealing with individual tinkerers.

Such tinkerers, drawn from the general population of soldiers and sailors in a self-selecting fashion, may devote themselves to some project, or not, pretty much on their own volition; will they be there when cruch time comes? Can such a process be relied upon when time is short and lives are at stake?

In civilian economy and society, entrepreneurship is a clear win. But military operations are fundamentally different; logistics -- which is to say, planning, at both the tactical and strategic scale -- is everything. It is essential that military leadership be able to plan as far in advance as possible, and allocate resources accordingly. Institutionalized research and development lends itself to this need; it allows for the possibility that new technology can be managed and tracked as it is developed, even on a very tight timetable.

And the importance of the quality of personnel at work on those innovations is not to be brushed off. Weapon systems are complex, and involve design tradeoffs that are not obvious without intensive study; and certain fields of study are put to use in defense that are used nowhere else in the economy. An institutional development organization can find and attract the most qualified people, focus their efforts, and if necessary, spend the time and resources needed to train them in the deep knowledge required for this work.

The alternative, a chaotic and unreliable system of innovation that is Open to any Source of ideas available, cannot possibly produce a superior alternative, can it?

(Heh. Just kidding. Obviously, it can. Freedom and innovation go hand in hand, whether in warfare or software.)