by LTC Yu-Sheng (Dave) Chen
Military organizations operate with finite money, time, manpower, equipment, and leader attention. Picture those resources as a single pie. Every slice allocated to one priority inevitably comes at the expense of another. Today’s readiness, tomorrow’s modernization, and taking care of people all compete for the same finite pie.
Innovation complicates those tradeoffs. It may solve an immediate problem, build future capability, or consume scarce resources without delivering either. Yet while countless articles encourage military leaders to innovate, far fewer address a commander’s responsibility to govern innovation.
Innovation is not guaranteed to generate readiness, therefore, every innovation effort must justify the resources it consumes. Every innovation effort also competes against other priorities and introduces some level of risk. Military units often evaluate innovation by asking whether a new capability solves the problem in front of them. That is an important question, but it is not the only question. A capability can work exactly as intended and still prove to be a poor investment later. The commander’s role is not simply to encourage innovation, but to ensure innovation serves the unit rather than the other way around. Commanders must provide direction, establish priorities, and ensure innovation efforts remain aligned with the mission.
While my experience comes primarily from expeditionary military medicine, the underlying challenges are not unique to medical formations. Across the force, leaders routinely face the same tension between innovation, readiness, and limited resources. Based on my experience as a commander, as well as lessons learned from other leaders, three common icebergs repeatedly appear when leaders attempt to navigate the sea of innovation. Any one of them can turn a promising initiative into a tragedy if leaders fail to properly steer the ship through a sea full of opportunities and risk.
Iceberg #1: Better Is Not Always Worth It
Technology advances every day. If leaders intentionally or unintentionally fall into the habit of chasing the newest device, the latest software, or the next highly rated product simply because it is better than the current one, they risk crippling their organization under the weight of their own modernization efforts. This tendency is especially common in medical units. We are fortunate to have talented providers who continuously pursue education, research, and professional development to improve patient care. As a result, many innovation proposals are supported by the latest research, the newest technology, or positive experiences from the private sector. Most are well-intentioned. Many are backed by peer-reviewed evidence. The leaders advocating for them are often motivated by concepts such as modernization and putting soldiers first.
There is nothing inherently wrong with that. The danger emerges when leaders stop asking whether the improvement is worth the investment.
As commanders, we must see the entire formation, not just the capability being presented. Is the newer version significantly better, or merely marginally better? Will it dramatically improve outcomes, or simply save one minute during a procedure without changing the final result? More importantly, does that improvement justify the cost?
There are many mouths to feed within a unit. A modernization effort that costs a fortune to improve one section’s performance from 92 percent to 95 percent may be a poor investment if another section is struggling to reach 75 percent and requires resources to accomplish its mission. Commanders must constantly evaluate opportunity cost. Every dollar, hour, and ounce of leader attention invested in one project is unavailable for another.
A unit can acquire the latest equipment while failing to strengthen the formation as a whole. This challenge is not unique to medicine. Across the force, leaders must ask the same question: Does this improvement justify the resources it will take from other priorities?
The commander’s responsibility is not merely to identify what is better. It is to determine what matters most.
Iceberg #2: Capability Without Infrastructure
In military medicine, there is no shortage of opportunities for modernization. In fact, as of today, I still have equipment and supplies sitting in my unit’s warehouse that I previously only saw in textbooks from dental school 15 years ago. This is not a nostalgic compliment—it is a reminder that some of our equipment is long overdue for replacement. However, before leaders enthusiastically pursue the next capability upgrade, they often overlook a critical question: Can the current infrastructure actually support the upgrade?
During my current command, I discovered several modern dental systems sitting unused in storage. On paper, they offered impressive new capabilities. In reality, they demanded an infrastructure our expeditionary environment could not reliably support. A dental crown crystallization furnace, for example, is only one piece of a much larger system requiring digital scanners, design software, milling equipment, computers, and the electrical power to operate them all. Individually, each component appears manageable. Together, they place significant demand on the same limited power grid supporting every critical function inside a field dental operation.
Now consider the environment. Sterilizers, X-ray systems, field sinks, ultrasonic cleaners, lighting, and water distillers are already competing for power from a single authorized 15 kW Tactical Electric Power (TEP) generator. Experienced NCOs carefully sequence equipment use and monitor demand to keep the system running, but even disciplined load management cannot always prevent power interruptions. Add a furnace, scanner, and milling machine into that same tent, and the question is no longer whether the capability works. The question becomes whether your infrastructure can support it without compromising everything else.
The moment you irreversibly burn out your generator, your mission is over.
That is the difference between a clinician’s focus and a commander’s perspective. A capability that performs flawlessly inside a modern hospital may fail completely in an austere environment where electricity, maintenance support, transportation, or trained personnel become limiting factors. Before investing in a new capability, commanders must first determine whether their infrastructure can sustain it.
While this example comes from expeditionary dentistry, the lesson extends across the force. New capabilities often arrive faster than the infrastructure required to support them. A capability that exceeds the system supporting it can quickly become a liability rather than an advantage.
Check your infrastructure before you check out your shopping cart. Otherwise, the capability you worked so hard to acquire may become the very thing that chokes your mission.
Iceberg #3: The Future Day of Reckoning
In another article, Single Point of Failure: Rethinking Medical Sterilization on Tomorrow’s Battlefield, I proposed the M-D-S Trifecta—mobility, durability, and sustainability—as a framework for evaluating expeditionary capability. Any innovation effort that cannot satisfy those three requirements should be carefully scrutinized before adoption. While all three matter, the sustainability and durability portions are often where the true bill eventually comes due.
Sometimes, the acquisition cost may actually be the smallest bill you will ever pay.
Across the military, new capabilities often generate second-and third-order sustainment requirements that receive far less attention than the new capability itself.
Many innovation efforts focus heavily on what a new capability can do today while overlooking what it will require tomorrow. New capabilities frequently bring new equipment, specialized maintenance requirements, unique repair parts, software updates, training requirements, and vendor dependencies. Before adopting a new capability, leaders should ask several questions. Can maintenance personnel realistically support it? If not, will they be trained to do so? How much and how long is the training? Do you need to buy special tools to maintain your equipment? Does the equipment depend entirely on civilian manufacturers for repair? If deployed, can maintenance support be obtained within a realistic timeframe? Even if repair capability exists, how difficult will it be to acquire replacement parts? Are those parts readily available, or are they controlled by a single manufacturer?
Durability presents a similar challenge. Using medical equipment as an example, most modern medical equipment is designed to sit safely inside a hospital and generate value in a controlled environment. It is rarely designed to be loaded into trucks, packed into connexes, transported across rough terrain, exposed to desert heat, frozen in winter conditions, soaked in humid, mold-friendly environments for months, and repeatedly moved from one location to another. Any soldier who has watched equipment being loaded for deployment understands that movement is not always gentle. In fact, almost never gentle. If a capability cannot survive the realities of field operations, then leaders must honestly question whether it is truly expeditionary.
The challenge becomes even greater when innovative systems depend on stable internet access, cloud-based software, or frequent vendor support. Those assumptions are unrealistic during large-scale combat operations. A capability that performs flawlessly in garrison may become ineffective the moment communications are disrupted or support networks become unavailable. During large-scale combat operations, you should not ask whether your communications will be compromised. You should ask when.
As leaders and planners, we must look beyond the immediate benefits of an innovation effort and examine the long-term sustainment burden it creates. The question is not whether the capability works today. The question is whether it can survive tomorrow. Otherwise, a promising innovation effort can easily become a one-time dog-and-pony show whose greatest accomplishment is generating a storyboard rather than generating combat power.
Two Sides of the Same Coin: Risk and Readiness
So far, I’ve focused heavily on the boundaries commanders should consider when evaluating innovation. However, an uncomfortable question deserves equal attention:
What if the commander is part of the problem?
Many good ideas have died because saying “no” is often easier and safer than accepting risk. Excessive gatekeeping can be just as damaging as reckless enthusiasm. Some leaders embrace every new idea without asking hard questions. Others reject innovation simply because doing things the way they have always been done feels safer. Neither approach serves the organization.
Instead of asking whether an idea is new, exciting, or technologically impressive, commanders should ask different questions. Does it solve a meaningful problem? Can the organization realistically sustain it? Does the expected benefit justify the cost? A disciplined evaluation process is not about killing ideas—it is about separating promising ideas from expensive distractions.
That is why I believe organizations should establish a recurring innovation board as part of their long range training calendar. Its purpose is not to approve every idea or reject every idea. Its purpose is to create a forum where subject matter experts challenge assumptions, expose hidden costs, and provide informed recommendations before resources are committed.
The final decision still belongs to the commander. However, a transparent process makes it more difficult to dismiss a promising idea simply because it feels risky—and equally difficult to support one simply because it sounds exciting.
Over time, the Army has taught me an important lesson: do not rely on individuals alone. Good leaders eventually leave. Bad leaders eventually leave. What endures are the systems and standards organizations establish. The goal is not to create a culture that blindly accepts every idea or rejects every idea. The goal is to build a system that consistently evaluates innovation through the lens of readiness, sustainability, and mission requirements.
Innovation is a coin with two sides. One side carries the risk of wasting limited resources. The other carries the possibility of improving readiness today or tomorrow.
Before we flip that coin, shouldn’t we all want a system that reduces risk while improving readiness?
One Last Slice
Innovation is essential for both today’s readiness and tomorrow’s modernization. But innovation without stewardship can easily become a distraction, waste, or liability. Commanders do not need to understand every technical detail, but they must ask the right questions: Does this capability solve a meaningful problem? Is it worth the resources it consumes? Can the organization support and sustain it? The commander’s responsibility is to encourage good ideas while ensuring innovation remains aligned with readiness, mission requirements, and the needs of the formation. Innovation must serve the unit—not the other way around —because the pie is never big enough for every project.
Lieutenant Colonel Yu-Sheng (Dave) Chen is a board-certified comprehensive dentist (63B) in the US Army and currently serves as the commander of the 257th Dental Company Area Support, 44th Medical Brigade, Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
