The American military loves organizational tradition at the same time that it hungers for technological progress. Notwithstanding the stereotype of hidebound Colonel Blimps refusing to recognize revolutionary changes--army officers clinging to horse cavalry for decades after the invention of tanks, pooh-poohing the combat potential of aircraft in the face of Billy Mitchell's sinking of the Ostfriesland, and all the rest--military leadership is usually enthusiastic about technological innovation, as long as it is an add-on for which they do not have to give up other cherished equipment and doctrine.
This conservative progressivism, let us call it, is often quite sensible. It is always hard to know in peacetime how combinations of new weapons and tactics will work short of the test of combat. As with a single species in a complex ecology, interdependence and competition make it impossible to predict the effects of altering one element of the combat equation on the net result of strategic and tactical interactions. War winnows out false promises as well as hallowed but obsolete old premises. It took the experiences of the London Blitz and the Allied bombing of Germany to dispel pre-war exaggerations of the apocalyptic potential of strategic bombing, and it took the first six months of engagement in the Pacific after Pearl Harbor to confirm the revolutionary significance of aircraft carriers for naval warfare.
