IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/joudef/v22y2025i3p321-335.html

Adapting military doctrine in the shadow of the future

Author

Listed:
  • Todd C Lehmann

Abstract

Strategic competition creates significant evolutionary pressures on conventional militaries to improve their doctrines and overall military effectiveness. Why are some militaries more effective at evolving their doctrine than others? This paper develops a theory which argues that complex security environments force militaries to optimize their organizations for the commitment horizon they possess for a security issue. This optimization drives militaries to take on particular organizational characteristics, such as the amount of delegation and the tolerance for experimenting with new tactics, which affect their performance in systematic ways as a result. Using an agent-based model, this study evaluates the theory by simulating different organizational characteristics and evaluating how doctrinal effectiveness changes based on different commitment horizons. Results from the simulations suggest a typology of militaries according to their commitment horizon. Contrary to existing arguments that military effectiveness is determined by a particular set of strategies or by a favorable military culture, the results also suggest that doctrinal effectiveness follows a U-shaped curve as the commitment horizon increases. To illustrate the logic of the model, this study describes the typology and its implications.

Suggested Citation

  • Todd C Lehmann, 2025. "Adapting military doctrine in the shadow of the future," The Journal of Defense Modeling and Simulation, , vol. 22(3), pages 321-335, July.
    • Handle: RePEc:sae:joudef:v:22:y:2025:i:3:p:321-335
    DOI: 10.1177/15485129231189286
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/15485129231189286
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1177/15485129231189286?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. James G. March, 1991. "Exploration and Exploitation in Organizational Learning," Organization Science, INFORMS, vol. 2(1), pages 71-87, February.
    2. J. A. Hartigan & M. A. Wong, 1979. "A K‐Means Clustering Algorithm," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series C, Royal Statistical Society, vol. 28(1), pages 100-108, March.
    3. Charrad, Malika & Ghazzali, Nadia & Boiteau, Véronique & Niknafs, Azam, 2014. "NbClust: An R Package for Determining the Relevant Number of Clusters in a Data Set," Journal of Statistical Software, Foundation for Open Access Statistics, vol. 61(i06).
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Staněk Gyönyör, Lucie & Horváth, Matúš & Stašek, Daniel & Stachoň, Martin, 2025. "The role of ESG factor in stock clustering based on risk-return-liquidity dimensions," The North American Journal of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 76(C).
    2. John A Stanturf & Scott L Goodrick & Melvin L Warren Jr. & Susan Charnley & Christie M Stegall, 2015. "Social Vulnerability and Ebola Virus Disease in Rural Liberia," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 10(9), pages 1-14, September.
    3. Paulina Pankowska & Daniel Oberski & Mauricio Garnier-Villarreal & Dimitris Pavlopoulos, 2025. "The effect of measurement error on clustering," Quality & Quantity: International Journal of Methodology, Springer, vol. 59(5), pages 4825-4860, October.
    4. Arman Avadikyan & Gilles Lambert & Christophe Lerch, 2016. "A Multi-Level Perspective on Ambidexterity: The Case of a Synchrotron Research Facility," Working Papers of BETA 2016-44, Bureau d'Economie Théorique et Appliquée, UDS, Strasbourg.
    5. Henri A. Schildt & Markku V.J. Maula & Thomas Keil, 2005. "Explorative and Exploitative Learning from External Corporate Ventures," Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, , vol. 29(4), pages 493-515, July.
    6. Insoo Cho & Peter F. Orazem, 2021. "How endogenous risk preferences and sample selection affect analysis of firm survival," Small Business Economics, Springer, vol. 56(4), pages 1309-1332, April.
    7. Tomasz Helbin & Amy Van Looy, 2021. "Is Business Process Management (BPM) Ready for Ambidexterity? Conceptualization, Implementation Guidelines and Research Agenda," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 13(4), pages 1-25, February.
    8. Son K. Lam & Thomas E. DeCarlo & Ashish Sharma, 2019. "Salesperson ambidexterity in customer engagement: do customer base characteristics matter?," Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Springer, vol. 47(4), pages 659-680, July.
    9. Jonathan H. Reed, 2022. "Operational and strategic change during temporary turbulence: evidence from the COVID-19 pandemic," Operations Management Research, Springer, vol. 15(1), pages 589-608, June.
    10. Alan Hevner & Isabelle Comyn-Wattiau & Jacky Akoka & Nicolas Prat, 2018. "A pragmatic approach for identifying and managing design science research goals and evaluation criteria," Post-Print hal-02283783, HAL.
    11. Felipe A. Csaszar & Nicolaj Siggelkow, 2010. "How Much to Copy? Determinants of Effective Imitation Breadth," Organization Science, INFORMS, vol. 21(3), pages 661-676, June.
    12. Bruneel, Johan & Clarysse, Bart & Bobelyn, Annelies & Wright, Mike, 2020. "Liquidity events and VC-backed academic spin-offs: The role of search alliances," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 49(10).
    13. Sylvie Héroux & Mélanie Roussy, 2020. "Three cases of compliance with governance regulation: an organizational learning perspective," Journal of Management & Governance, Springer;Accademia Italiana di Economia Aziendale (AIDEA), vol. 24(2), pages 449-479, June.
    14. Anne Corcos & Yorgos Rizopoulos, 2011. "Is prosocial behavior egocentric? The “invisible hand” of emotions," Post-Print halshs-01968213, HAL.
    15. Freeman, Steven F., 1997. "Good decisions : reconciling human rationality, evolution, and ethics," Working papers WP 3962-97., Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Sloan School of Management.
    16. Zhang, Feng & Jiang, Guohua & Cantwell, John A., 2015. "Subsidiary exploration and the innovative performance of large multinational corporations," International Business Review, Elsevier, vol. 24(2), pages 224-234.
    17. Avimanyu Datta, 2016. "Antecedents To Radical Innovations: A Longitudinal Look At Firms In The Information Technology Industry By Aggregation Of Patents," International Journal of Innovation Management (ijim), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 20(07), pages 1-31, October.
    18. Liu, Zhiqiang & Yan, Miao & Fan, Youqing & Chen, Liling, 2021. "Ascribed or achieved? The role of birth order on innovative behaviour in the workplace," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 134(C), pages 480-492.
    19. Nicolai J. Foss, 1996. "Firms, Incomplete Contracts and Organizational Learning," DRUID Working Papers 96-2, DRUID, Copenhagen Business School, Department of Industrial Economics and Strategy/Aalborg University, Department of Business Studies.
    20. Deng, Yumiao & Ding, Yongling & Li, Chen & Ma, Sichao, 2025. "Shareholding by industry peers, firm size, and innovation quality," Finance Research Letters, Elsevier, vol. 80(C).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sae:joudef:v:22:y:2025:i:3:p:321-335. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.