اريدك ان تكون مترجم سياسي وتترجم للغة العربية هذا    This partnership is also necessary for reasons of time. Senior leaders in
the Department of Defense stay in their jobs for only a few years at most—
sometimes less than that in recent years. This is why the Pentagon’s
communities of interest often view them as the Christmas help. Members of
Congress, however, may remain in their jobs for decades. By the time John
McCain passed away, he had been in the Senate for thirty-one years. There
are drawbacks to this kind of political longevity, to be sure, but there are
also huge benefits. While civilian and military leaders in the Department of
Defense come and go, members of Congress can provide the institutional
continuity and impetus to sustain big, multiyear changes to America’s
military.
This is exactly what is needed now. Getting from the military we have to
the military we need will be a long transition. It cannot occur all at once.
There are no technological miracles or deus ex machina to save us. Betting
on such immediate deliverance is precisely how we got stuck with so many
“transformational” procurement debacles over the past two decades. The
only way to succeed is how Admiral William Moffett got the Navy to
embrace aircraft carriers between the world wars and how General Bernard
Schriever developed intercontinental ballistic missiles during the early Cold
War: rapid but incremental pursuits of transformational goals.
I am confident that the next Moffett and the next Schriever are serving
in the US military today, and senior leaders need to create incentives that
empower them. This starts with defining the problems that need to be
solved in more exacting detail. Schriever succeeded because he knew
exactly what problem his leaders wanted him to solve: deliver a nuclear
weapon on a missile to the other side of the planet in minutes. Defense
reforms tend to fail when they cease to be anything more than vague
buzzwords. At one point those buzzwords were transformation and
revolution in military affairs. Now they are concepts such as great-power
competition, defense innovation, multidomain operations, and joint alldomain
command and control. Military mavericks cannot do much with
these vague ideas. If senior leaders do not define their top problems more
clearly, defense buzzwords actually become obstacles to real change
because the bureaucracy simply rebrands everything it has long been doing
using these new terms.
To avoid falling into this trap, senior leaders in the Pentagon and
Congress need to get on the same page about how to translate generalities
such as great-power competition into specific operational problems that
military mavericks and engineers can understand and solve. Further, the
problems should not be framed around the prerogatives of specific military
services, such as the Army or the Navy, or around the roles of military
platforms, such as fighter jets or combat vehicles, or around military
domains, such as air, land, or sea. They should be framed around the kill
chain—how to gain better understanding, make better decisions, and take
better actions faster and more often than specific military competitors.
Denying China military dominance is a clearer definition of the US
military’s most pressing problem, but we have to be even more clear.
Former deputy secretary of defense Robert Work has suggested that
defending the people, places, and things that matter most to America in the
Asia-Pacific region requires the ability to deny China’s means of projecting
power and committing acts of aggression. More specifically, Work assesses
that US and allied forces would have to close the kill chain against 350
Chinese ships during the first three days of a conflict.3 To do so means
understanding where all of those ships are as they move across a vast
expanse of ocean, sharing that information in real time with decision
makers, and taking thousands of actions in an environment where it will be
very hard to hide, communicate, and project power very far.
This is an extremely difficult operational problem to solve, and there is a
host of others just like it. Many of those problems will relate to China, but
many will relate to other challenges that the United States must build forces
to address. Translating general challenges and objectives into clear
operational problems is necessary across all of the threats that the US
military must defend against, because it enables military mavericks and
technologists to devise practical solutions. We must then demonstrate some
of those solutions for our competitors, because that is actually how we deter
war. By sowing doubt in the minds of our opponents about whether they
could gain the benefits of war and aggression, we can make them less
inclined to try.