> This can negatively impact areas like innovation; logistics is not generally a friend to novelty.
I don't see why not. Any advance in transportation or communication has an impact. If drones could deliver everything that would be major for example. And obviously gps, computer path/packing optimization, and warehouse automation have been big.
Drones by themselves just reduce cost and exposure of a human pilot. The weather profile and flight envelope are similar to a conventional plane or helicopter. A heavy-lift 'logistics drone' is just a pilotless plane or helicopter.
However, the last km to the infantryman has more impact for innovation, whether by drone or robot mule.
The business model for drones has been innovative. The bases are often not in the combat zone, so companies can offer Surveillance-as-a-Service to the military.
Similarly, Amazon-ian supply-chain management and automated logistics warehouses have also pushed towards the front, and often remain under commercial control. New equipment deliveries are now often contracted to be in-theatre, not to the 'Purple Gate' military distribution system starting in the home country.
Even though it's still famously not cool to logisticians, who tend to have favorite desk calculators (as do I), novelty within logistics, I hope you can see, is quite different from novelty without. Novelty without logistics often appears as pure chaos to the logistician, because their entire order of things can be destroyed with the stroke of a pen.
Also, imagine that your supreme leader is a logistician by psychology, and is presented with a choice: Cast the solution to the current problem as a logistics and force stabilization issue, or cast the solution as novel strategy. Human trait psychology shows us that they will tend to err on the side of logistics and sameness (sameness preserves logistics efficiency and is its friend). This gives their enemy the upper hand to the degree that the enemy can nurture broad and dynamic conflict while tricking the logistically-advanced side into wasting logistics resources and getting comfortable. The enemy ends up forcing short-lived novelty onto the logistical opponent in order to cause paralysis.
yes! I have two HP48G calculators. And still use them (and an emulator on my phone). I even have my laminated cribsheet of trig identities in the pocket. Two giants who came out of HP's calculator divsion: Woz and Jeff Hawkins.
I don't see why not. Any advance in transportation or communication has an impact. If drones could deliver everything that would be major for example. And obviously gps, computer path/packing optimization, and warehouse automation have been big.