The Origins of Victory is a hefty book coming in at 443 pages without end matter. Presented in two major parts, Part I, “identifies the emerging competitive environment’s prospective characteristics” (Krepinevich, p. 5). In Part II the book, “addresses the strategic importance of being the first military organization to identify and exploit a military revolution’s potential and the danger of failing to develop proficiency in the new ways of war” (Krepinevich, p. 6).
Rapid changes in the development of conventional mans of destruction and the emergence in the developed countries of automated reconnaissance-strike complexes . . . make it possible to sharply increase, by at least an order of magnitude, the destructive potential of conventional weapons, bringing them closer, so to speak, to weapons of mass destruction in terms of effectiveness.
Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, 1984
Though Origins of Victory was published in 2023, the text was almost certainly submitted in late 2021. As such, the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 goes unmentioned. That is not a necessarily a negative; the four significant findings from Krepinevich are nonetheless valid:
- “First, the world is in a period of disruptive change in the character of warfare, or what has come to be known as a military revolution” (Krepinevich, p. 442).
- “Second, under these conditions of radical change in the competitive environment, the need to engage in disruptive innovation is both compelling and profound” (Korepinevich, p. 443).
- “Third, analysis of military organizations that succeeded in engaging in acts of disruptive innovation in periods of revolutionary change in warfare reveals a number of common attributes…. At a minimum, military organizations attempting disruptive innovation would benefit from examining how well they embody these attributes” (Krepinevich, p. 443).
- “Finally, we have a preliminary assessment of the U.S. military’s efforts at disruptive innovation…. [T]he United States’ armed forces exhibit few, if any, of the characteristics of military organizations that succeed in this endeavor” (Krepinevich, p. 443).
For wargame practitioners, Origins of Victory provides a framework for research and analysis. Commercial hobby wargamers will likely need to wait for a wargame in the future to further explore the impact of disruptive innovation on the battlespace.
Recommended.
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Rocky Mountain Navy Gamer 
“[T]he United States’ armed forces exhibit few, if any, of the characteristics of military organizations that succeed in this endeavor”“
-This is a bit of a red flag to me as, for the most part, they haven’t had to be that. It’s why you didn’t see much innovation or disruption from the 1950s New York Yankees.
Considering Krepinevich’s analysis of the US Army in Vietnam was deeply flawed, and more often than not talks of military revolutions are empty and wrong, I am not so sure the 4 main conclusion are indeed valid. For all the talks of military revolution, Ukraine as shown more an evolutionary pattern than a revolutionary one. A lot of the ‘revolutionary’ changes we had taken for granted before, had been challenged.