In December 1925, a court martial in Washington found Colonel Billy Mitchell guilty of insubordination. Mitchell, the loudest air-power advocate in the US Army, had spent the autumn publicly accusing the leadership of the Army and Navy of something close to treason in their neglect of aviation; the trial was the institution’s answer. He resigned and spent his last decade preaching the bomber gospel as a civilian. He died in 1936, five years before Pearl Harbor appeared to vindicate everything he had said. In 1955 Hollywood canonized him: Gary Cooper as the man who saw, and was punished for seeing.
That courtroom is the founding scene of a story military culture still tells about itself. The template is fixed: the institution is blind; the lone visionary sees; the institution punishes him; history delivers the verdict the promotion board refused. It is the story behind every profile of a defence disruptor and, in updated dress, behind the contemporary cult of the innovation hub and the accelerator — all resting on the same premise: new ways of war come from outside the machine, against the machine.
The man who counted
The scholar who actually counted found the opposite. Stephen Peter Rosen, a Harvard political scientist and former Naval War College professor, examined twenty-one cases of military innovation in the American and British services in his 1991 study Winning the Next War. The innovations that took hold were not carried by outside critics or colourful rebels. They were carried by respected senior officers who formulated a new theory of victory — a statement of what the next war would look like and how officers must fight it — and who then did the decisive, unglamorous thing: they opened promotion pathways for the young officers who practised the new specialty. “Power is won through influence over who is promoted to positions of senior command,” Rosen writes, and closes the loophole: “No ‘maverick,’ by definition, has that kind of power.”
Mitchell is in the study, and not as its hero. In the judgement of the airmen who followed him — the men who then built American air power — his crusade damaged the cause it advertised. The court martial made a martyr and lost the argument; the argument was won later, by men with none of his fame, who sat on the promotion boards.
The cleanest case in the record belongs to the Royal Air Force. The fighter defence system that won the Battle of Britain — reporting lines, control procedures, squadrons directed from the ground — was the era’s most consequential defensive innovation, and no outsider forced it on the RAF. It was an internal, mainstream development line running from 1923, into which radar, arriving later, fitted in Rosen’s phrase like “a round technological peg going into a round doctrinal hole.” And this was the same air force whose bomber staff had, in 1924, formally declared its doctrine exempt from the lessons of military history. The era’s most disciplined innovation and its most catastrophic dogma lived inside one service. What separated them was not rebels versus establishment. It was which part of the establishment adopted the new practice as a career.
Hugh Dowding, who built that system, is sometimes retailed as a maverick, and the label misreads him precisely. Dowding was a career loser — shunted to the unfashionable defensive branch of an air force whose doctrine held that defence was pointless. But a setback is not an exile. He stayed inside, kept his rank, controlled budgets and postings, and used them. Dowding, unlike Mitchell, kept the institutional power to make his vision a career for other men; Mitchell traded that power for an audience.
Innovation is promotion policy
The mechanism underneath is brutally simple. A military career is a twenty-to-thirty-year bet, placed by ambitious people who read odds well. A new specialty that leads nowhere near senior command repels exactly the officers it needs most — the talented, who have options — and no chief-of-staff speech compensates: the signal that matters is the promotion list. A hub can produce prototypes. Only a career structure produces colonels who have spent twenty years thinking in the new grammar, and generals entitled to command with it. Peacetime innovation is promotion policy.
That is the standard against which to read the present enthusiasm for innovation outposts — the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit, NATO’s defence-innovation accelerator DIANA, and their national imitations. They do real work: prototypes, procurement doors, translation between start-ups and staffs. What they cannot do is the decisive thing. The comparative history of interwar innovation that stands beside Rosen’s book put the warning in one line: the bureaucratization of innovation, Williamson Murray wrote, guarantees its death. The successes ran through mainstream career structures, not hived-off futurology shops. The tell is not the hub’s demo day but its alumni. Where does the successful hub officer go next? If the answer is back to a conventional track, with the detour quietly counted against him, the institution has answered the only question that matters: the new specialty is not a way to become a general.
The mechanism is observable in real time. In June 2024, Ukraine stood up the Unmanned Systems Forces — a separate service branch with its own commander, units and career structure for drone warfare. Whatever its wartime record proves worth, the organizational meaning is unambiguous: in Ukraine, uncrewed systems are now a career. In most Western forces the same specialty remains an additional duty, a short course, a secondment to a hub — a niche without a path. Rosen’s framework does not predict which drone tactics will survive contact. It predicts which military will still have its best drone officers in uniform in 2035.
One caution, because the finding is quotable in bad faith. Every officer defending yesterday’s doctrine can recite “no maverick wins” against his critics, and the finding will feel like cover. It is not. Rosen’s senior innovators were no guardians of the old theory of victory; they were insiders who used the establishment’s own power — boards, billets, budgets — to replace it. The test of an institution is not whether it silences its rebels. It is whether its establishment is building paths for the practice its rebels are shouting about. An army that fails that test has not refuted the maverick. It has manufactured him.
The claim breaks if the coming decade produces repeated cases of hub-grown innovation scaling into force-wide doctrine in armies that never open career pathways for the practitioners — or if forces that build such pathways show no advantage over those that keep the new specialty in accelerators. The twentieth-century record contains no case of the first kind; ours could yet produce one. An earlier essay on this site argued that the decisive bottleneck of the coming decade is organizational rather than technical. Rosen’s finding names the organ. So the question to put to the next defence-innovation announcement is not how many start-ups the hub has engaged. It is when the first officer whose entire career has been uncrewed systems will pin on a general’s stars — and what the majors watching that answer are deciding, this year, about the next twenty years of theirs.