اريدك ان تكون مترجم سياسي وتترجم للغة العربية هذا                                                                                                                                                                                   
TWELVE
HOW THE FUTURE CAN WIN
In February 2018, Secretary of Defense James Mattis and Secretary of the
Air Force Heather Wilson tried to do the right thing. They proposed to
Congress, in the Department of Defense’s budget request for the upcoming
fiscal year, to abandon a prior Air Force plan to buy a new version of a
thirty-year-old aircraft called the Joint Surveillance and Target Attack Radar
System, or JSTARS. This system had been one of the central capabilities
developed as part of Assault Breaker in the 1980s. The plane itself is a
variant of a standard commercial aircraft, but it hosts a powerful radar that
can find moving targets on the ground, such as enemy tanks and vehicles,
and then pass that targeting information to other systems that can close the
kill chain.
JSTARS had played a critical combat role in all of the wars of the prior
decades, from the Gulf War in 1991 to the Balkans campaign to the
invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the Air Force had been planning for years to
recapitalize the entire fleet for billions of dollars. By 2018, however, the
world was looking different. Air Force leaders had belatedly but
nonetheless realized that JSTARS would not survive in a conflict against
China or Russia. It was a business jet. It was not stealthy and had no means
of defending itself. Even a new version of JSTARS would be found by
Chinese or Russian radars and then shot out of the sky by their advanced
missiles.
The new plan called for disaggregating the JSTARS mission. Rather
than putting all of its eggs in one vulnerable platform, the Air Force wanted
to develop a network of unmanned aircraft and satellites that could find
moving targets and then fuse all of their streams of intelligence into a
common picture of the battlefield. This new capability would be more
resilient and survivable than JSTARS. Instead of one defenseless aircraft,
adversaries would have to find and attack multiple systems spread across
wide swaths of air and space. This kind of Military Internet of Things was
the right idea, and I became a strong supporter of the new plan on Capitol
Hill.
There was a big problem with all of this, however. Powerful members of
Congress were counting on the new JSTARS aircraft to be based in their
states. Influential companies stood to make billions of dollars over decades
building and maintaining that new JSTARS system. And these forces
mobilized quickly to try to kill the Air Force’s revision of the JSTARS plan
in the budget process.
The reason the Air Force was ultimately successful in shifting to a new
program was that it did a number of key things right—things that the Navy,
for instance, failed to do with its plan to retire the Truman. The Air Force
devised a political strategy. It engaged candidly and early in the budget
process with key stakeholders in Congress. It provided detailed information
about the threat to JSTARS and how the new program would be better. It
made sure the defense industry was informed so the companies that thought
they might benefit under the new plan could conduct their own private
lobbying on Capitol Hill. The Air Force also threw a bone to those
members of Congress who stood to lose the most by committing to base
elements of the future program in the same state that would have hosted
JSTARS, thereby turning potential spoilers into strong supporters of the
new plan.
Even then, this was one of the single most contentious fights in the
budget process that year. The Air Force’s plan faced strong and vocal
opponents both in Congress and outside of it. Indeed, of the more than eight
thousand individual provisions that the House of Representatives and the
Senate had to resolve in their annual defense legislation that year, what to
do with JSTARS was literally the last decision to get made, and it ultimately
came down to the four bipartisan leaders of the defense committees. I was
in that room. If not for the tenacity of some of those leaders, the decision
could easily have gone the other way, and Congress could have required the
Air Force to spend billions of dollars on an outdated capability that would
not survive in a future war.
One way to look at the JSTARS saga is as representative of everything
that is frustrating and even rotten with the “military-industrialcongressional
complex” or “the swamp.” A good idea rarely wins on its
merits alone. Its success too often comes down, instead, to the trading of
favors and the political dark arts.
I take a different view on my JSTARS experience, and it is this: If the
future is going to win, it will have to win inside our current system. It will
have to win in a system comprising parochial military services, selfinterested
companies, and largely distracted political leaders—all of whom
will continue to be consumed more by present concerns than future ones.
Those are the people, interests, and political realities that matter, and none
of them can be hand-waved away. This system makes it exceedingly
difficult for America’s military to change, or change quickly, but as I have
said from the start, I would not be writing this book if I thought all hope
was lost.