Understanding the Military Design Movement: War, Change and Innovation

This book explains the history and development of the military design movement, featuring case studies from key modern militaries.

Written by a practitioner, the work shows how modern militaries think and arrange actions in time and space for security affairs, and why designers are disrupting, challenging, and reconceptualizing everything previously upheld as sacred on the battlefield. It is the first book to thoroughly explain what military design is, where it came from, and how it works at deep, philosophically grounded levels, and why it is potentially the most controversial development in generations of war fighters. The work explains the tangled origins of commercial design and that of designing modern warfare, the rise of various design movements, and how today’s military forces largely hold to a Newtonian stylization built upon mimicry of natural science infused with earlier medieval and religious inspirations. Why does our species conceptualize war as such, and how do military institutions erect barriers that become so powerful that efforts to design further innovation require entirely novel constructs outside the orthodoxy? The book explains design stories from the Israel Defense Force, the US Army, the US Marine Corps, the Canadian Armed Forces, and the Australian Defence Force for the first time, and includes the theory, doctrine, organizational culture, and key actors involved. Ultimately, this book is about how small communities of practice are challenging the foundations of modern defence thinking.

This book will be of much interest to students of military and strategic studies, defence studies, and security studies, as well as design educators and military professionals.

Ben Zweibelson is a retired U.S. Army Infantry Officer with over 21 years’ service including multiple combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is the director for the U.S. Space Command’s Strategic Innovation Group, and previously educated design, innovation and strategic change for the U.S. Special Operations Command. He has a PhD from Lancaster University (UK) and lectures worldwide to defense organizations and militaries.