Why is it, these analysts ask, that some armies and navies have enjoyed prolonged periods of military supremacy? When confronted with this question, a layperson is likely to credit superior weaponry. Yet a careful reading of military history, like that offered by MacGregor Knox and Williamson Murray in The Dynamics of Military Revolutions, suggests that most technology advantages have been short-lived. In battle, one side captures the other's weapons or, better yet, those who manufactured the armaments. Bribes get paid and craftsmen defect. Foreign armies lay their hands on blueprints, or weapons get sold to allies who later become adversaries. Tactical and strategic advantages - the produce of inspired wartime leadership - are only slightly less fleeting. Successful battlefield maneuvers and new force formations are usually quickly copied and neutralized. While superior technology, tactical genius, or any of a dozen other factors may explain the outcome of a single battle, they can't account for repeated military success - the ability to emerge triumphant from the chaos of war again and again.

What, then, accounts for long-term military advantage - if not advanced armaments and brilliant commanders?  Knox and Murray contend that long-lasting leadership is most often the product of fundamental advances in military doctrine and organization. History's most consistently victorious armies and navies have been those that were able to break with the past and imagine new ways of motivating, staffing, training, and deploying warriors. They have been management innovators.

Management innovation tends to yield a competitive advantage when one or more of three conditions are met:

• the innovation is based on a novel management principle that challenges some long-standing orthodoxy
• the innovation is systemic, encompassing a range of processes and methods; and/or
• the innovation is part of an ongoing program of rapid-fire invention where progress compounds over time