Ike saw JLENS coming from half a century away

In 1960, a career soldier and two-term president named Dwight D. Eisenhower left a warning for his fellow Americans about something he dubbed the "military-industrial complex." He defined it as "the conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry" leading to "the disastrous rise of misplaced power."

The last half-century has not merely proven Eisenhower right, but has shown on occasion an even worse consequence than (or perhaps a consequence of) misplaced power: war not as a tragic necessity, but as a growth industry.

That degree of absolute moral corruption has, fortunately, been the exception. The misplaced power has not.

There can hardly be a clearer snapshot (wordplay incidental) than JLENS -- the 17-year, $2.7 billion blimp boondoggle that demonstrated its utter uselessness this spring in a way that would be comical if the stakes (not to mention the cost) weren't so high.

JLENS was designed as an early warning system of electronically equipped blimps to detect low-flying craft in a possible attack. But on April 15 -- tax day, appropriately enough -- a Florida man flew a single-seat aircraft through 30 miles of restricted airspace and landed it on Capitol Hill. (Also, one might say, appropriate.)

The head of the defense command responsible told a congressman, who not unreasonably demanded to know how "a dude in a gyrocopter 100 feet in the air" got through the United States defense apparatus, that JLENS was, in classic Govspeak, "not operational" that day.

Finding out just when it has been, or will be, "operational" is proving to be quite a challenge. A Los Angeles Times investigation revealed that JLENS has trouble distinguishing between friendly and threatening aircraft, and a 2012 report by the Pentagon's own testing division rated the system's reliability as "poor." It can be disabled by bad weather, and by its very physical nature is vulnerable to enemy sabotage.

The Army's own leaders tried to kill the program five years ago. But the then-vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine Gen. James Cartwright, defended the program and persuaded the Pentagon (and, consequently, Congress) to fund it again.

Cartwight retired soon thereafter and joined the board of directors of Raytheon Co. -- the manufacturer of JLENS. By the end of 2014, the Times reported, he had been paid more than $800,000 in cash and stock.

Historians say that in earlier drafts of Eisenhower's famous address, the president alluded to the threat as the military-industrial-political complex; and indeed, neither the Pentagon nor the contractors write and approve military budgets -- at least, not officially. Without the politicians and the lobbyists who court them, it's a whole different picture.

JLENS does have one quality that, if successfully adapted, would be an invaluable defense asset: It's apparently impossible to destroy.

This story was originally published September 28, 2015 at 5:40 PM with the headline "Ike saw JLENS coming from half a century away ."