Military innovation and adaptation are made more difficult because the nature of any bureaucracy is to resist change, not promote it. Military bureaucracy and culture are especially conservative, and not without reason. The wrong kind of change can cost lives. At its most extreme, however, this rigidity leads to what Norman Dixon famously called “the psychology of military incompetence,” which includes “clinging to outworn tradition,” a “failure to use or tendency to misuse available technology,” a “tendency to reject or ignore information which is unpalatable or which conflicts with
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