اريدك ان تكون مترجم سياسي وتترجم للغة العربية هذا
There is good news and bad news. The bad news is that those who want
to change America’s military face huge obstacles and opposition. But here
is the good news: The United States is not lacking for any of the key
elements that a change of this magnitude requires. We have plenty of
money. We have amazing, world-leading technology. We have creative and
talented people. If America lacked any of these elements—which many of
our foreign competitors do—the prospect of us adapting for the future
would be much bleaker.
America’s main problem lies in Washington. It rests in the choices and
decisions we have made. It encompasses our increasingly dysfunctional
political system that too often appears unwilling and unable to perform even
the basic functions it is supposed to do, let alone the more ambitious and
vital tasks that it needs to do now. And it relates to our failure to imagine
how our national defense can and should change and our lack of urgency to
bring this about. None of these issues is beyond our control to make better.
Ultimately, it comes down to two things: incentives and imagination.
America’s defense problems result from incentives that Washington has
created over many decades—incentives that have favored better legacy
platforms over integrated networks of faster kill chains, familiar ways of
fighting over new ways of war, offense over defense, present needs over
future ones, hardware over software, acquisition compliance and cost
accounting over rapid development of new capabilities, traditional defense
companies over new technology developers, industrial consolidation over a
diversified ecosystem of defense technology. These outcomes are the direct
result of how America’s defense establishment has defined its priorities,
spent its money and time, and rewarded and punished its people. We have
gotten what we have paid for. And if we want different outcomes, we must
create different incentives.
This will not happen quickly or easily. It amounts to a sweeping
restructuring of our defense establishment. But it is entirely within our
power to do. The question is how.
To prepare America’s military for the future, we must want to change, and
there is reason to be encouraged. The impetus to change is stronger now
than it has been for a long time among many defense leaders, especially the
US military itself. More “military mavericks” are rising to the fore, and
they want to use their unique authority and legitimacy to change their
institutions. The JSTARS decision, for example, was driven by Air Force
officers and was embraced by their civilian leaders. More recently, the
Army’s two highest-ranking generals, together with its top two civilian
leaders, convened what became known as “night court,” regular after-hours
meetings in which the four of them sorted through every early-stage
development program in the Army to identify—and cut—the ones that did
not align with the new defense strategy. The result was $25 billion in
savings over five years that the Army asked Congress to shift toward
higher-priority programs.1
Not to be outdone, in July 2019, just one month after being confirmed as
Commandant of the Marine Corps, General David Berger laid out a vision
to change his service that was bolder than anything put forward in a
generation.2 For decades, it had been holy writ for the Marine Corps that it
required thirty-eight amphibious ships, which are better versions of the
platforms that sent Marines ashore at the start of the Korean War in 1950.
Berger jettisoned that requirement, suggesting that these big multi-billiondollar
ships might not survive against technologically advanced militaries.
He sought instead to redesign the Marine Corps, less to project power than
to counter the ability of competitors to do so, and he directed that the future
force be built around smaller, lower-cost, more expendable, and more
autonomous systems.
Developments such as these are encouraging, but they are only initial
steps in what will be a long and arduous journey. Washington is more than
capable of squandering the opportunity it now has. We have done it before.
To translate this current opening into lasting change, America’s leaders
must create a new set of incentives that can enable the future to win within
a political system and a budget process that will remain dominated by the
needs of the present.
Carrying through a change of this magnitude is something that senior
leaders must own. They are the only ones who can do it and should do it.
Plenty of officials and staff at lower levels want to initiate sweeping
changes to US defense policy, and they often know better than their leaders
what is needed. But Pentagon bureaucrats and congressional staff have
neither the authority nor legitimacy to initiate the kinds of changes that are
required, which will disrupt the livelihoods of working Americans and the
functioning of the US military. That power and responsibility rest only with
those leaders who have been elected by the American people or confirmed
by the Senate for positions of public trust within our government.
Restructuring the incentives of America’s defense establishment is not
something that senior leaders in either the Department of Defense or
Congress can do on their own. They must do it together. These leaders are
equal under the Constitution and must deal with each other as such. They
will inevitably check and balance each other’s power, as they should, but
what America needs now is less adversarial checking and balancing and
more making of common cause. This means that Pentagon leaders must
resist the temptation to treat their counterparts on Capitol Hill like children
—listening and nodding while they talk but then refusing to include them as
grown-ups in meaningful deliberations about the future. This also means
that congressional leaders must resist the temptation to act like children—
grandstanding when it suits while shirking hard decisions that involve real
political risk and pain—and refrain from micromanaging the military
simply because they can.
For the future to win, senior leaders in the Pentagon and Congress must
forge a relationship of closeness and transparency to a degree that could
make each deeply uncomfortable. But in the absence of this kind of
partnership, which is most of the time, a wide rift opens between America’s
civilian defense leaders that makes it easier for other self-interested actors,
from the military services and defense industry to special interest groups
and foreign partners, to play each side off the other. By closing that gap
between them, senior civilian leaders in the Department of Defense and on
Capitol Hill can present a unified front to all other stakeholders and create a
shared set of expectations about what is required for the future.