Kendrick Kuo, the 2020-21 CGS Predoctoral Fellow, published the article “Military Innovation and Technological Determinism: British and US Ways of Carrier Warfare, 1919–1945” in the Journal of Global Security Studies.
The central claim in the article is that theories of military innovation are often based on a form of technological determinism: an assumption that there is a predetermined performance trajectory embedded in new technology. This has led innovation scholars to misinterpret critical cases. Kuo shows how the Royal Navy’s interwar carrier program, a touchstone case consistently criticized as non-innovative and ineffective, was in fact a creative solution for Britain’s geostrategic challenges that proved effective for the first couple of years of World War II.
