In Clausewitzian terms, war is a contest, a complex, interactive duel between two opponents. It is a phenomenon of indeterminant length, which presents the opportunity for the contestants to adapt to their enemy’s strategy, operations and tactical approach. Williamson Murray, Military Adaptation in War.
Over the past four and a half years, I have observed and written about the war in Ukraine, as well as the wars in the Middle East, and explored how different nations and military institutions have learned and adapted. Nations like Ukraine, Russia, Israel, Iran and others learned how to learn and adapt better. At the same time, a global adaptation war has emerged, with an authoritarian learning and adaptation bloc of Russia, China, Iran and North Korea learning and sharing insights into tactics, technology and strategy faster than has ever been possible before.
In a report last year, I characterised this new era global adaptation environment as one with significant concurrency, where intellectual rather than technological innovation is pre-eminent, and where new technologies like AI, social media and others have sped up and compressed learning cycles. And while all participants in this adaptation war have imperfect insight into their adversaries, and learning can be unevenly distributed between military services and nations, the modern adaptation environment is transforming force generation, force structures, the employment of military forces and the development of national security policy in peace and war.
In his book Race to the Swift, Richard Simpkin inverted a passage from Ecclesiastes (”the race is not to the swift”) with an argument that in modern war, the race is to the swift. This would be achieved through a focus on manoeuvre over attrition, momentum and tempo, application of the indirect approach and deep operations, and precision warfare. In modern war, particularly the ones we have observed in the past half decade, it has also been argued that strategic, operational and tactical advantage accrues to those who are fastest to learn and adapt.
There is a large body of literature that covers learning and adaptation in military institutions. This corpus of knowledge covers both war and peace. But in much of the literature there is an implication that the best learning and adaptation systems are those that move first and fastest on the battlefield and in the strategic realm. And while that is often the case, sometimes there is also a complementary approach to this in peace and war that is effective: fast following.
The aim of this two-part article is to examine the theory of fast following in learning and adaptation, and the rationale for such an approach in military institutions. The first part will conclude with an examination of historical examples of fast following in war. The second part of the article will take up the argument by examining how Ukraine and Russia have deliberately fast followed each other during the war since 2022. I will conclude with recommendations for Western military institutions and how they might better institutionalise fast following.
Fast following in the innovation literature
The idea of the “fast follower” emerged as a corrective to a more famous concept: first-mover advantage. In a 1988 article that shaped a generation of business strategy, Marvin Lieberman and David Montgomery argued that the firm which brings an innovation to market first can capture durable advantages through technological leadership, the pre-emption of scarce assets, and customer switching costs. The concept was seized upon, particularly in technology markets, as something close to a law of nature: be first, at almost any cost.
The evidence proved less kind to pioneers. In a study of 500 brands across 50 categories, Peter Golder and Gerard Tellis found that first movers failed roughly 47 per cent of the time, against an 8 per cent failure rate for the early followers who entered soon after. By 1998 Lieberman and Montgomery had themselves published a retrospective conceding that going first was more dangerous than their original work had implied.
From this grew the case for the fast follower. A fast follower is not a passive imitator. It is an organisation that deliberately lets a pioneer absorb the cost and uncertainty of proving a new concept, watches closely what works and what fails, and then enters at speed with an improved version, often just as the market begins to scale. Constantinos Markides and Paul Geroski captured the logic in Fast Second: smart firms frequently decline to be the radical innovator, preferring to arrive second and consolidate the new market with superior execution, scale and refinement.
The advantage lies not in the original idea but in the speed and quality with which it is copied, adapted and improved. The approach is most powerful where imitation cycles are short, the barriers to copying are low, and product lifecycles are brief, so that a head start decays quickly and the capacity to iterate matters more than the capacity to invent. These are not the conditions of every market. They are, however, an almost exact description of the modern battlefield.
Rationale for Fast Following
The rationale for fast following is founded upon an assessment of risk and information. The first mover must pay, in full and in advance, for the discovery of a new concept: they fund failed prototypes and the dead-ends (but also learn from them), they educate the market (or military institution) that does not yet know it needs the thing, and they do all of this under uncertainty about whether the concept will work at all.
