Ren Zhengfei has long regarded the military—both Chinese and Western—as a critical source of organizational and managerial insight, and this influence has deeply shaped Huawei’s development. While Western media often fixates on Ren’s past service in the People’s Liberation Army, Huawei is criticized less for being “military” in nature than for learning exceptionally well from military systems, including those of the U.S. Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force, as well as from civilian analogues such as Ford Motor Company’s “Whiz Kids.” For Ren, the military has consistently served as a long-term model and benchmark rather than a political identity.
This orientation is inseparable from Ren Zhengfei himself. His military experience gave him a firsthand appreciation of disciplined management and organizational resilience, while his exceptional capacity for learning enabled him to systematically absorb military thinking and translate it into corporate practice. Over decades, Ren has infused Huawei with military concepts through speeches and internal writings rich in strategic and operational language, making “learning from the military” a core corporate value. Huawei’s approach, therefore, reflects not militarization, but an enduring commitment to studying and adapting the most effective organizational models available.
Forging Corporate Resolve: Huawei’s Learning from the Army’s Fighting Spirit
Huawei’s engagement with the military goes beyond organizational structure or management technique; at its core, it is an effort to internalize the army’s fighting spirit. The military, in Ren Zhengfei’s view, embodies dedication, idealism, heroism, and disciplined rationality under extreme pressure. By treating the military as a cultural and spiritual reference point, Huawei has drawn on it as an external force to shape its internal values, strengthen cohesion, and cultivate a collective willingness to endure hardship in pursuit of long-term goals.
This learning is most visible in how Huawei builds its organizational atmosphere. Military narratives and symbols are deliberately used to reinforce shared purpose and resilience, transforming abstract values into emotionally resonant examples. The objective is not militarization, but the forging of a team that is united, battle-ready, and capable of sustained effort—an “iron army” defined by high standards, strong morale, and a sense of mission larger than the individual.
A striking illustration appeared in July 2021, when Huawei displayed a poster in its canteen depicting a young Chinese soldier from the War of Resistance Against Japan. In the image, an American journalist interviews the sixteen-year-old soldier before he heads to the front lines. Asked whether China would win, the boy answers without hesitation: “China will definitely win.” When asked about his plans after victory, he replies calmly that he would already have died on the battlefield. Huawei later adopted this image for its “Little Soldier Medal,” part of its Rising Star Award, with Ren Zhengfei remarking that this selfless resolve precisely reflected Huawei’s contemporary spirit.
Ren often reinforces this ethos by invoking historical moments of collective endurance. He has drawn parallels between Huawei’s trials and the Soviet Red Army’s 1941 parade in Moscow, where poorly equipped soldiers marched directly from Red Square to the battlefield under the belief that retreat was impossible. To Ren, such episodes exemplify how order, discipline, and courage can emerge from chaos and panic—much as Huawei, under intense external pressure, reshaped itself into a more focused and resilient organization.
The theme of sacrifice has long been explicit in Ren Zhengfei’s language. As early as 2000, speaking to employees facing adversity, he emphasized the necessity of dedication through vivid metaphor: even a desert can become fertile soil if individuals are willing to turn themselves into “fertilizer.” Without such sacrifice, he argued, collective success remains an illusion. This uncompromising view of commitment underscores Huawei’s expectation that personal comfort must sometimes yield to shared survival and progress.
Huawei’s current symbolic totem further reinforces this fighting spirit: the Soviet IL-2 attack aircraft from World War II. Known for returning home despite being riddled with bullet holes, the IL-2 represents endurance under fire. Huawei associates it with mottos such as “without scars, there is no tough skin” and “one more hole doesn’t matter—maintain formation.” The message is clear: suffering is neither hidden nor denied, but accepted as the price of resilience and eventual strength.
Taken together, these narratives, symbols, and metaphors reveal why Huawei’s culture carries unmistakable military and quasi-military characteristics. Learning from the army’s fighting spirit—its willingness to sacrifice, its composure under pressure, and its unwavering belief in ultimate victory—has become a central pillar of Huawei’s core value system and a defining feature of its organizational identity.
Military-Inspired Organizational and Process Transformation at Huawei
Over the past two decades, Huawei has pursued a long-term program of organizational and process development that consciously draws on military theory, language, and reform practices. By learning from modern military organizations—particularly the transformation of the U.S. armed forces—Huawei has sought to continuously enhance organizational efficiency, operational resilience, and strategic flexibility. This military-inspired approach has enabled the company to adapt to uncertain external environments while maintaining high levels of execution and goal alignment.
A key inflection point came in 2009, when Ren Zhengfei delivered his speech “Who Calls for Artillery Fire, and How to Provide Timely Artillery Support.” Using U.S. military operations in Afghanistan as a reference, Huawei began to redesign its frontline market operations around the principle of empowering those closest to the battlefield—its customer-facing teams. These frontline processes were subsequently integrated with established management systems such as IPD, ISC, and IFC, forming a comprehensive, end-to-end operational framework across all business lines. This framework mirrored core elements of modern military transformation, including decentralized command, joint operations, elite force construction, and rapid resource mobilization.
Within this evolving system, Huawei selectively adopted and localized military organizational concepts such as the “iron triangle” command structure, continuous empowerment, regional joint command mechanisms, and strategic reserve forces. Ideas like “letting the front line call for artillery fire,” “building command posts that can hear the artillery,” and “everything for the front line and for victory” became guiding principles in organizational design. These concepts emphasized responsiveness, accountability, and the primacy of operational effectiveness over bureaucratic formality.
Ren Zhengfei further deepened this military analogy in 2014 by explicitly referencing the U.S. military’s shift from large, rigid units to smaller, more flexible combat formations. Drawing on the notion of “squad leader warfare,” he argued that shrinking organizational units while significantly enhancing their capabilities leads to greater agility and overall effectiveness. For Huawei, this translated into streamlining frontline organizations, reducing back-office complexity, strengthening strategic mobile forces, and limiting the number of decision-makers at headquarters. The long-term objective was to build a lighter, more flexible organization suited to future competitive environments.
This transformation was not envisioned as an overnight change. Ren emphasized the need for foundational work in leadership training, accurate financial accounting, and end-to-end process connectivity before full authorization could be decentralized. Only after these management fundamentals were in place could Huawei systematically close redundant institutions, curb bureaucratic expansion, and fully realize a frontline-driven operating model inspired by military command principles.
Huawei’s learning from the military also extended to talent and human resource systems. Drawing inspiration from the Chinese military’s reform of the sergeant major system, the company explored mechanisms to elevate experienced practitioners—technical experts, instructors, and operational specialists—into influential roles regardless of rigid rank structures. This approach aimed to better integrate practical expertise with formal management, creating a more balanced and combat-ready organizational talent structure.
By 2020, these ideas were further refined into a differentiated “three-tier combat system” comprising frontline combat units, support and supervisory forces, and logistics and platform teams. Each tier was assigned distinct roles, risk profiles, and human resource policies, thereby clarifying value creation across the organization. Collectively, Huawei’s sustained and systematic borrowing from military organizational and process development demonstrates an exceptional capacity for organizational learning—and highlights how military principles, when thoughtfully adapted, can inform effective management in complex, high-uncertainty business environments.
Adapting Military Principles to Cadre Management and Leadership Development
Huawei’s approach to cadre management and leadership development has been profoundly shaped by systematic learning from the military. Rather than borrowing isolated techniques, the company has absorbed military concepts of command, discipline, selection, and accountability to build a high-caliber leadership corps capable of sustaining long-term competitiveness. As Ren Zhengfei has repeatedly emphasized, ambition alone is insufficient; global leadership requires a disciplined, combat-ready team supported by rigorous systems of management and development.
A central pillar of this approach is the clear differentiation between “commanders” and “supervisors,” a distinction drawn directly from military organization. Commanders are accountable for overall strategic direction and final results, concentrating their attention on uncertainty, mission success, and victory. Supervisors, by contrast, focus on tasks with higher certainty, execution, and professional management, particularly in human resources. This separation reinforces both strategic accountability and operational rigor, ensuring that leaders are judged not by intent but by outcomes. Huawei further institutionalizes this accountability through mechanisms such as mandatory bottom-ranking elimination, reinforcing the expectation that leaders must continually improve and lead their teams to success.
Another defining feature of Huawei’s cadre philosophy is its emphasis on grassroots experience and “zigzag” growth. Leadership is expected to emerge from the front lines, especially from difficult and high-pressure environments analogous to military training grounds. Hardship assignments are seen as necessary but not sufficient conditions for producing leaders; learning, reflection, and demonstrated capability remain essential. By promoting cadres who have endured and excelled in challenging contexts, Huawei seeks to ensure that its leaders possess both resilience and practical judgment forged through real struggle.
Huawei also rejects rigid seniority-based allocation of leadership roles, adopting a flexible, capability-driven approach reminiscent of military rank and deployment. The notion of “major general company commanders” captures this philosophy: individuals of exceptional ability may be placed in critical frontline roles regardless of formal hierarchy, while high-ranking cadres may be redeployed to operational positions where their impact is greatest. This dynamic allocation of talent prioritizes mission success over status and enables the organization to concentrate its strongest leaders where they are most needed.
Equally important is the emphasis on leadership by example. Drawing inspiration from military theory and cultural narratives, Huawei expects its cadres to inspire confidence and fighting spirit, especially in times of uncertainty. Leaders are called upon to demonstrate perseverance, selflessness, and unwavering commitment, serving as visible sources of direction and morale. Through references to literary, historical, and popular figures known for execution, responsibility, and resolve, Huawei reinforces the belief that true leadership is expressed through action rather than rhetoric.
Finally, Huawei has strengthened cadre evaluation by learning from military reform practices, particularly the testing of commanders. Promotion and selection increasingly depend on demonstrated “battlefield” experience—whether individuals have faced real challenges, delivered results under pressure, and made tangible contributions. This results-oriented evaluation system aims to eliminate mediocrity, promote continuous learning, and ensure that leaders remain closely connected to the company’s core business and future direction. In doing so, Huawei has translated military principles into a distinctive, disciplined, and execution-driven model of cadre management and leadership development.
Learning from Military-Rooted Scientific Management: Huawei’s Enduring Commitment to Rational Discipline
Huawei’s management philosophy has not only drawn inspiration from military leadership and cadre systems, but also from the military’s tradition of scientific, data-driven management. This commitment was formally highlighted on June 17, 2014, when Huawei held its first “The Whiz Kids” Awards Ceremony, the company’s highest honor in management system development. On that occasion, Ren Zhengfei delivered a speech entitled “Why We Still Need to Learn from ‘The Whiz Kids’ Today,” reaffirming Huawei’s belief that disciplined, fact-based management is essential for long-term success.
Ren Zhengfei emphasized that the significance of “The Whiz Kids” lies not in historical admiration, but in their embodiment of scientific management principles rooted in military practice. He summarized their core contributions as rational analysis based on data and facts, standardized management control systems built on planning and processes, and customer-oriented product development that relentlessly pursues simplicity and efficiency. These principles, he argued, remain foundational to modern enterprises operating in complex and competitive environments.
At the heart of this learning is a respect for data, facts, and rigorous analysis. Ren Zhengfei praised “The Whiz Kids” for their almost religious devotion to evidence-based decision-making, their professionalism in constructing management systems from the ground up, and their rationalism in conducting thorough investigation before reaching conclusions. Equally important was their collectivist teamwork, which reflected a military-influenced discipline and a shared sense of mission rather than individual heroism.
The historical origins of “The Whiz Kids” further illustrate the deep link between military experience and scientific management. All ten members graduated from leading American universities and served in the U.S. Army Air Corps’ Statistical Control Service during World War II. After the war, they joined Ford Motor Company in critical roles spanning planning, finance, operations, and quality management. By applying data analysis, market orientation, and strict management control, they led a sweeping transformation that restored Ford’s competitiveness and profitability, laying the foundation for modern American corporate management.
Their influence extended far beyond Ford itself. Members of “The Whiz Kids” later became a U.S. Secretary of Defense, President of the World Bank, President of Ford Motor Company, Dean of Harvard Business School, and prominent business leaders. Their careers demonstrate how military-rooted analytical discipline can shape not only corporate success, but also national and global governance institutions.
For Huawei, learning from “The Whiz Kids” is ultimately about sustaining the spirit of scientific management. Ren Zhengfei has stressed that Huawei’s international success stems from its long-term, respectful study of Western management practices, following the same evolutionary path that leading global companies once took. Continuing to learn from military-influenced scientific management, he argues, is not optional but inevitable—an ongoing process to strengthen managerial capability, enhance efficiency, and ensure that rational discipline remains at the core of Huawei’s growth.
Institutionalizing Dissent through Military-Inspired Red–Blue Mechanisms
Huawei has consciously learned from the military’s institutionalized dissent system to embed critical thinking into its organizational and business operations. The company emphasizes that cadres at all levels must not only think independently, but also help build formal mechanisms that legitimize challenge, debate, and opposition within the organization. Ren Zhengfei has repeatedly stressed that without structured dissent, organizations risk strategic blind spots and gradual decline.
Drawing inspiration from military training practices, Huawei has adopted a Red Army–Blue Army confrontation model similar to that used in armed forces exercises. Ren Zhengfei has called on cadres to learn from Man Guangzhi, commander of China’s first Blue Army brigade, by forming parallel teams that operate simultaneously. In this system, the Blue Army is tasked with doing everything possible to “defeat” the Red Army—systematically identifying weaknesses, loopholes, and hidden risks in plans and assumptions. Leadership roles are not fixed; even the Red Army commander may be selected from the Blue Army, reinforcing the principle that authority must remain open to challenge.
To institutionalize this dissent, Huawei established the Blue Army Staff Department in 2006 within its strategic marketing system. Although small in size, the department is composed of elite personnel and exists specifically to strengthen the organization’s self-critical capabilities. Its mission is not episodic criticism, but the normalization of disciplined opposition as part of everyday management and strategic decision-making.
The Blue Army Staff Department performs several core functions. It promotes Red–Blue confrontation mechanisms across different levels of the company, ensuring continuous self-correction. Under the direction of senior leadership, it conducts reverse analysis and structured debate on major strategic choices through methods such as simulated confrontation and scenario exercises. It also examines Huawei’s strategies, technologies, products, and solutions from alternative perspectives, using reverse thinking to expose weaknesses that may be overlooked internally.
In addition, the Blue Army simulates competitors’ strategies and offerings to challenge Huawei’s own assumptions and approaches. By pointing out vulnerabilities and gaps, it pushes the organization toward differentiated and potentially disruptive innovation. Through this military-inspired, institutionalized dissent system, Huawei transforms internal opposition into a disciplined capability—one that strengthens strategic clarity, enhances resilience, and supports sustained long-term competitiveness.
Beyond Labels: Why Military Terminology Does Not Equal Military Management
Ren Zhengfei has repeatedly clarified that Huawei’s frequent use of military terminology does not signify the adoption of a military-style management system. Rather, such language is employed because conventional business vocabulary is sometimes insufficient to precisely express complex organizational realities. Military terms, in this sense, function as metaphors—practical linguistic tools borrowed to convey ideas more vividly, not as indicators of institutional imitation.
In practice, Huawei has never implemented military-style management. The company has no military ranks, no compulsory service, and no ideological control mechanisms. Its operational foundation remains firmly rooted in market-based contracts, an engineering-driven culture, and strong customer orientation. Decision-making, incentives, and accountability are governed by commercial logic rather than command-and-control structures characteristic of armed forces.
Huawei’s benchmarking philosophy further underscores this distinction. While the military is indeed one of Huawei’s most frequently referenced benchmarks—owing to its long history of organizational discipline, execution, and resilience—it is far from the only one. Huawei also studies political parties, social organizations, corporations, individuals, and even biological systems such as animals and plants. The military represents one important source of insight among many, not a comprehensive template for corporate governance.
Mislabeling Huawei’s management system as “military-style management” reflects a superficial and incomplete understanding of how the company actually operates. This simplification ignores the selective, adaptive nature of Huawei’s learning process, in which practical experience from diverse domains is absorbed, transformed, and integrated into a distinctly commercial framework. Reducing this complex system to a single label is both crude and misleading.
Some critics further attribute Huawei’s management style to Ren Zhengfei’s personal military background, assuming a direct causal link between the two. Ren himself has explicitly rejected this logic, emphasizing that borrowing military terminology does not imply copying military organization. When business concepts lack precise expressions, he has explained, military terms are sometimes borrowed for clarity and convenience. They are linguistic devices, not structural prescriptions.
Ultimately, Huawei’s use of military language should be understood as a matter of expressive necessity rather than managerial identity. As a commercial enterprise, Huawei differs fundamentally from the military in goals, operating mechanisms, and internal systems. Recognizing this distinction is essential to understanding Huawei’s management philosophy accurately—one that draws insight from many sources while remaining firmly grounded in the realities of business.
The Asymmetric Advantage in the Long-Term U.S.–China Rivalry
Ren Zhengfei has repeatedly emphasized that Huawei does not define itself in opposition to the United States, but rather through disciplined learning from it. His approach reflects a rare form of cognitive openness: even amid intensifying geopolitical and ideological confrontation, he insists on stripping away political labels to directly study and absorb the systemic strengths of the strongest competitor. From U.S. military joint-operations doctrine and professional non-commissioned officer systems to civilian examples such as Ford’s “Whiz Kids,” Huawei’s learning focus has consistently been on rational organization rather than ideological alignment.
This approach challenges the long-standing Western monopoly over the “discourse of modernity,” in which Western systems are often presented as universal templates—for example, the notion that the Silicon Valley model represents the sole path to innovation. Ren Zhengfei’s method follows a distinct logic: first, openly acknowledge the superiority of leading U.S. institutions in specific domains; second, deconstruct the underlying drivers of their success, such as data-driven rationality or mission-oriented execution; third, reconstruct these principles within a Chinese organizational and cultural context; and finally, generate a new paradigm that cannot be neatly categorized as either “American” or “Chinese.” The result is not imitation, but transformation.
Military metaphors such as “artillery support,” “Shangganling,” and the “scarred IL-2” serve as cognitive tools in this process. By translating abstract systems-engineering challenges into vivid and shared language, these metaphors significantly reduce organizational complexity and cognitive load. Beneath this language lies a modern philosophy of engineering governance: clear objectives centered on survival and sustained value creation; alignment between authority and accountability; closed-loop feedback through rigorous post-action evaluation; and redundant system design to ensure resilience under extreme stress.
This logic is fundamentally non-ideological. It represents the underlying grammar of efficient collaboration in industrial societies, regardless of political system. Ren Zhengfei has astutely observed that while technological leadership can be blocked through sanctions or chokepoints, organizational evolutionary capability is far more difficult to contain or replicate. Huawei’s practices—such as the legion system, strategic reserve teams, commander assessments, and red–blue confrontation mechanisms—are localized adaptations of this logic, designed to turn the organization into an iterative, fault-tolerant, and self-correcting system.
As the U.S.–China rivalry shifts from isolated technological bottlenecks to broader questions of systemic resilience, the strategic focus for Chinese enterprises must also evolve. The challenge is no longer simple leapfrogging in individual technologies, but the patient construction of alternative pathways that build depth, redundancy, and long-term adaptability. In this context, the decisive factor is not “who looks more military,” but who can more effectively convert sustained external pressure into internal momentum for organizational evolution.
Both sides face structural constraints. In the United States, financial short-termism and political polarization have weakened the capacity for large-scale, coordinated reform reminiscent of World War II mobilization, the Manhattan Project, or the Apollo program. In China, the challenge lies in preventing organizational resilience from degenerating into excessive rigidity, ensuring that discipline does not eliminate experimentation, error tolerance, and emergent innovation.
Ultimately, Ren Zhengfei’s military learning methodology should be understood as a crisis-driven approach to institutional innovation. The deepest asymmetric advantage in the long-term U.S.–China competition lies in the willingness of one civilization-scale organization to systematically learn from its strongest adversary and convert that learning into its own evolutionary genes. Over long time horizons, such asymmetric learning capacity may prove more decisive than any single technological breakthrough.
Transforming U.S. Experience into Localized Systemic Advantage
The United States has sought to contain Huawei by restricting its access to advanced technologies, citing national security concerns. Semiconductors, operating systems, cloud services, and other critical inputs have been placed beyond Huawei’s reach in an effort to slow its technological ascent and preserve American leadership. From a conventional perspective, these measures aim to weaken Huawei by cutting off material and technical supply chains.
Yet an apparent paradox lies beneath this strategy. While access to American hardware and software is being constrained, Huawei has continued to study the United States with remarkable intensity. Under Ren Zhengfei’s leadership, this learning extends beyond leading American corporations to the U.S. military itself. Joint operations doctrine, command and control structures, and the professionalization of non-commissioned officers have all become reference points, alongside civilian examples such as Ford Motor Company’s “Whiz Kids” and their legacy of data-driven, scientific management.
This distinction between material containment and intellectual absorption is critical. Physical technologies can be embargoed; organizational knowledge and management logic are far harder to restrict. Huawei has recognized that durable competitive advantage often lies not in any single component or tool, but in the ability to organize people, processes, and decision-making under sustained pressure. In this sense, learning from U.S. experience becomes a long-term strategic asset rather than a short-term dependency.
Importantly, Huawei does not simply copy American methods. It systematically translates them into its own organizational context, embedding them into its internal operating logic. Concepts such as frontline empowerment—captured in the phrase “let those who can hear the gunfire call for artillery fire”—adapt military decentralization into a corporate setting. Red–blue team simulations institutionalize self-criticism and stress-testing of strategies, while the principles of scientific management pioneered by the “Whiz Kids” are woven into Huawei’s planning, evaluation, and accountability systems.
Through this process of localization and integration, Huawei often moves beyond its original sources of inspiration. Individual ideas drawn from U.S. military or corporate practice are refined, combined, and reinforced within a disciplined, iterative, and crisis-driven ecosystem. The result is a form of systemic resilience that is difficult to dismantle from the outside and, in some respects, more robust than the original models when applied in a commercial environment.
Ultimately, the contrast is striking: while the United States attempts to constrain Huawei by limiting access to tangible technologies, Huawei converts U.S. experience itself into an internal, renewable source of advantage. By transforming external knowledge into localized organizational capability, Huawei demonstrates that the most enduring strengths in modern competition are not imported components, but deeply embedded systems of learning, execution, and adaptation.
The Asymmetry of Learning in U.S.–China Competition
A defining feature of the U.S.–China technological rivalry lies in the asymmetry of learning. American restrictions on Huawei, intended to curb its growth, have instead created powerful adaptive pressure. By cutting off access to semiconductors, software, and other critical technologies, the United States has unintentionally reinforced Ren Zhengfei’s long-held belief that crisis is the most effective driver of organizational evolution.
Confronted with external constraints, Huawei has been compelled to accelerate self-reliance. The company has invested heavily in alternative operating systems such as HarmonyOS, enterprise platforms like Euler, and domestically developed EDA tools. At the same time, it has strengthened internal resilience by ensuring teams are trained, empowered, and capable of operating independently under uncertainty. What was designed as containment has, in practice, functioned as a prolonged stress test that hardens organizational capabilities.
This pressure has also reshaped Huawei’s internal operating model. The emphasis on “squad-level combat” encourages smaller, highly capable teams with clear authority and accountability. Such structures often enable faster iteration and decision-making than more layered and bureaucratic organizations. In this sense, sanctions have served as a form of enforced discipline, pushing Huawei to refine execution speed and adaptability in ways that are difficult to replicate without similar pressure.
The deeper asymmetry, however, lies in learning itself. Huawei has demonstrated an ability to study the United States with remarkable openness, stripping away ideological framing and extracting the core principles of organizational and systemic effectiveness. American military doctrines, corporate management practices, and scientific rationality are analyzed, localized, and integrated into Huawei’s own system without regard for their political origin.
By contrast, the United States faces structural barriers in learning from Huawei. Ideological narratives, cultural distance, and simplified characterizations of Chinese organizations as inherently “unlearnable” make reverse-engineering Huawei’s system far more difficult. As a result, while the U.S. blocks Huawei materially, it inadvertently accelerates Huawei’s learning and adaptation—training its competitor in ways that are uniquely hard to counter.
Over the long term, this asymmetry of learning may prove more consequential than any single technological restriction. The side that can better convert external pressure into internal evolution, and that can learn across ideological boundaries, is likely to gain the decisive advantage in sustained competition.
Summary & Implications
The long-term irony of the U.S.–Huawei dynamic lies in the divergence between intention and outcome. Washington seeks to contain Huawei by restricting access to advanced hardware in order to preserve technological dominance, assuming that physical denial will be decisive. Huawei’s response, however, has been to absorb and internalize U.S. intellectual and organizational lessons—transforming them into a system that is increasingly resilient, disciplined, and innovative, and in some areas surpassing its original sources of inspiration in execution. As a result, while the United States constrains exports of technology, Huawei converts ideas, process design, and organizational learning into an asymmetric advantage. This illustrates a strategic paradox: in the long run, systemic adaptability and the ability to learn from an adversary’s strengths may outweigh short-term technological superiority.