The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare

by Christian Brose

McCain had directed me to set up a briefing for all one hundred US senators about the problem that had haunted us and motivated our work together for the past several years: the accelerating erosion of the US military’s technological advantage over other great powers, primarily China, which was rapidly building up arsenals of advanced weapons with the explicit purpose of being able to fight and win a war against the United States. McCain wanted his fellow senators to know that America was falling behind and at risk of losing a race that most of them did not even know was being run. For years, McCain and I had been pleading with Pentagon leaders to be clearer and more forthcoming with Congress and the American people about how bad things really were. They did not want to encourage our competitors by sounding defeatist, which was an apt concern. But it was a concern we had to overcome because it is impossible to solve a problem that no one knows exists. As it stood, the Chinese Communist Party knew far more about the US military and its vulnerabilities than the American people and their elected representatives did.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph Dunford, had testified to McCain’s committee in June. “In just a few years,” he said, “if we do not change our trajectory, we will lose our qualitative and quantitative competitive advantage.”

The information revolution created the prospect of what became known in the 1990s as networked warfare.

From 1990 to 2017, the Chinese military budget increased by 900 percent.

The Chinese Communist Party aims to become the dominant power in Asia and in the world, and it believes that for China to win, America must lose. We have to lose the race for advanced technology. We have to lose jobs and influence in the global economy. We have to lose partners who share our interests and values. We have to lose the ability to stand in the way of the Chinese Communist Party’s desire to make more of the world safe for its model of high-tech authoritarianism.

I think the rise of China is the central challenge facing the United States today.

The biggest way that 9/11 changed everything was in one of the least desirable ways: amid the shift toward counterterrorism, the emerging focus on China and the anti-access and area denial threats it was creating faded into the background. The Bush administration said that the two priorities were not mutually exclusive—but that is what they became, especially as the mistake of invading Iraq proved costlier with each passing year. In retrospect, the response to the September 11 attacks marked a strategic detour deeper into the Middle East that consumed much of the attention and imagination of the US military for nearly two decades, and largely still does.

The new government in Kyiv soon evacuated its troops, and on March 21, Moscow annexed Crimea to the Russian Federation. It was the first time since World War II that an international border on the continent of Europe had been changed through the use of violence.

One story from a Ukrainian officer stuck with me. His fellow commander was known to the Little Green Men as a highly effective fighter. One day during the conflict, the man’s mother received a call from someone claiming to be the Ukrainian authorities, who informed her that her son had been badly wounded in action in eastern Ukraine. She immediately did what any mother would do: she called her son’s mobile phone. Little did she know that the call she had received was from Russian operatives who had gotten a hold of her son’s cell phone number but knew that he rarely used the phone for operational security reasons. This Ukrainian commander, being a good son, quickly called his mother back, which enabled the Little Green Men to geolocate his position. Seconds later, while still on the phone, he was killed in a barrage of precision rocket artillery.

The events of February 26, 2014, were the culmination of Russian military modernization and growing geopolitical ambition that had been under way for more than a decade—a threat that many in Washington had overlooked and at times actively downplayed. The larger significance of these events was that they awoke US leaders to the similar but far greater military challenge that had emerged in China. Russia was just the wake-up call.

What each president was slow to learn was that Russia was more interested in restoring the great-power status it lost in 1991 than in becoming the partner the United States hoped it would be. This was especially true once Vladimir Putin became president on New Year’s Eve 1999. As Putin deepened his hold on power in the early 2000s, he accelerated Russia’s military modernization. A ruler who referred to the demise of the Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century” set about restoring what he believed was Russia’s rightful place in the global balance of military power.

An early trial run for both Putin’s ambitions and the new military he was building came in August 2008, when he sent Russian forces into the former Soviet republic of Georgia.

The United States and NATO did not intervene to save Georgia, as they had with Kosovo, but Putin knew that if the West had stepped in, the Russian military would not have been able to stop it. Rather than backing down, Putin doubled down. Russian planners had been studying the US military for a long time. They knew that US forces would fight a future war on Russia’s periphery in much the same way they had fought past wars in Kosovo and Iraq. So, as the Obama administration was going out of its way to “reset” US relations with Russia, Putin was pouring money into the construction of an arsenal of technologically sophisticated weapons: long-range missiles and rockets, highly capable special operations forces, advanced air defenses, electronic warfare, cyber weapons, lasers to blind satellites, missiles to shoot them down, and tactical nuclear weapons. All of this military modernization had one explicit purpose: to render the United States incapable of projecting military power into Europe and defending its NATO allies, especially the many parts of Europe that Putin still believed should be part of a greater Russia.

It soon became clear that Russia’s new approach to warfare would also extend beyond traditional battlefields to the internal affairs of rival nations. In February 2013, Russia’s chief of the general staff and highest-ranking military officer General Valery Gerasimov outlined the stakes in an article that became required reading in the Pentagon after the Little Green Men appeared in Ukraine and Syria the next year. “The very ‘rules of war’ have changed,” Gerasimov wrote. “The role of non-military means of achieving political and strategic goals has grown, and, in many cases, they have exceeded the power of force of weapons in their effectiveness.”2 Put another way, the reconnaissance-strike complex now included the ability to surveil the political and social fault lines in countries and strike directly at the heart of them through “military means of a concealed character.” This included misinformation campaigns, political subversion, assassination, cyberattacks, and “active measures” using social media to tear at the fabric of diverse and democratic societies. The battlefield would now be everywhere.

And in 2016, it was used directly against the United States when Russia intervened in the US presidential election in an attempt to delegitimize American democracy in the eyes of its own citizens. This, too, caught Washington by surprise, and the US government failed yet again to respond in a timely way to a threat that had been building in plain sight and that had been deployed against others for more than a decade. Most of America’s leaders had assumed it could not happen to us.

China had long claimed as its own possession the entire South China Sea, the 1.35-million-square-mile portion of the Pacific Ocean in the center of Southeast Asia. China’s government regularly told ships of the United States and other nations that they needed Beijing’s permission to transit the sea.

In 2014, China sent fleets of large dredger ships far from its shores into the South China Sea to transform shallow reefs and atolls into man-made islands. This was an assertive demonstration of Beijing’s claim that the South China Sea belonged to China, especially because all of this construction occurred on territory claimed by China’s neighbors. As the islands took shape, so too did other things: runways, control towers, aircraft hangars, and military-looking bases. In time, the US government began to observe and publicly call out China for arming these man-made islands with long-range radars, surface-to-air missile batteries, fighter aircraft, and other weapons. When President Obama raised these facts, Chinese president Xi Jinping denied them. The president of China stood before the world and lied through his teeth.

By plundering intellectual property and trade secrets from US military and defense contractors, China saved years of painstaking work and a small fortune in military research and development, much like a runner hitchhiking through the middle miles of a marathon.

By 2012, General Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Agency and commander of US Cyber Command, estimated that the United States was losing a quarter of $1 trillion every year to cyber-enabled industrial espionage, much of it by China. He called it “the greatest transfer of wealth in history.”

As early as 1993, China declared that its military’s goal would be “fighting local wars under high technology conditions.” Chinese leaders openly spoke of the September 11 attacks as a “moment of strategic opportunity” that China had to seize while America was distracted. In 2007, China took the extraordinary, and quite public, step of blasting an aging weather satellite out of low-earth orbit with one of its new antisatellite missiles.

The reason America’s leaders so underestimated the threats that the Russian and Chinese militaries posed ultimately had less to do with them and more to do with us. We have been blinded by the myths we have told ourselves—that, with the end of the Cold War, the world had transcended great-power competition and conflict, that, in the words of The 9/11 Commission Report, transnational threats such as terrorism, not great-power rivalry, were “the defining quality of world politics.”

The major lesson of World War II, Eisenhower said, was that “while some of our Allies were compelled to throw up a wall of flesh and blood as their chief defense against the aggressors’ onslaught, we were able to use machines and technology to save lives.”

More and more of America’s defense spending shifted from developing new things to operating and maintaining old things. Ambitious young engineers who wanted to design new military aircraft and other systems faced the very real prospect that they might only get one or two chances of doing so in their entire careers. This created a powerful incentive for them to take their talents elsewhere, and many of them did.

Nvidia’s core technology is called a graphics processing unit, which its founders created not with militaries in mind but video games. The gaming world had an insatiable appetite for ever greater computing power to run the increasingly high-resolution, high-speed, and large-scale games that developers wanted to develop and players wanted to play. Nvidia’s miniaturized graphics processing units were the answer, and they enabled the explosion of modern gaming in recent years that brought to gamers’ screens rich, virtual worlds filled with thousands of hyper-realistic artificial agents, all running at lifelike speeds with little to no latency. What Nvidia soon realized was that the same computing engines that enable humans to navigate artificial worlds could also enable intelligent machines to navigate the real world. The company’s graphics processing units were soon helping to lead a new revolution in artificial intelligence and machine learning with wide-ranging applications.

Unlike some leading American technology companies, Nvidia is open to doing business with the Department of Defense. I asked how many of its graphics processing units were operating on fielded US military systems. I was not surprised by the answer: none. As the answer suggests, most US military systems are many years behind the state-of-the-art technology that commercial companies such as Nvidia are developing. The most capable computer onboard a US military system is the core processor in the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which has earned it the nickname “the flying supercomputer.” The processor can perform 400 billion operations per second.1 By comparison, the Nvidia DRIVE AGX Pegasus can conduct 320 trillion operations per second right onboard a commercial car or truck.2 That is eight hundred times more processing power.

When they are off-duty, they may use Nvidia’s technology to play video games or even assist them on their drive home. But in uniform, they are essentially doing the same jobs that their grandparents did in World War II.

This has led to some striking contrasts. Many American homes are now fitted with a network of low-cost sensors made by companies such as Nest and Ring that give one person with a mobile device real-time situational awareness of their most important places, whereas the average US military base is still defended by large numbers of people either standing watch or staring at rows of video surveillance monitors, stacked up like Hollywood Squares. Similarly, many Americans drive vehicles equipped with sensors that tell them everything that is going on around the vehicle at all times, whereas most American military vehicles do not have the same capabilities.

Indeed, it is estimated that 90 percent of the data in the world today did not exist two years ago.

What has made the next chapter of the information revolution possible is a fundamentally new approach to developing software that Silicon Valley pioneered long ago. It is a never-ending process of building, testing, and releasing the computer code that makes information technology work. This is why the apps and operating systems in our mobile devices are being updated around the clock. That simply does not happen with US military systems, where hardware has always been king and software largely an afterthought. For most military systems, the schedule for hardware updates determines the schedule for software updates. After all, most of the companies building these systems are hardware companies, not software companies. This has created multiyear software development cycles that are doomed to failure. Think of how well your mobile device would work if its software and apps were updated only every several years. That’s how it is for military systems.

SpaceX’s vision for Starlink is unsurprisingly ambitious for the company that pioneered reusable space launch vehicles: build a constellation of small satellites in low-earth orbit that can deliver high-speed communications and data networks to every part of the planet at all times. Since the dawn of the space age six decades ago, humankind has launched a total of roughly eight hundred satellites into low-earth orbit. Over the coming years, SpaceX plans to launch as many as twelve thousand and has sought government approval to launch thirty thousand more.

Another application is quantum communications, which seek to use the property of entanglement to secure information. The idea is that, because two entangled particles mirror one another’s behavior, and because external interference destroys the entanglement, particles could be used to build “unbreakable” encryption. An additional application is quantum computers, which use quantum particles to encode and process information. In classical computers, information takes a binary form. It is encoded either with ones or zeros. In quantum computers, because of superposition, quantum particles can also be encoded as both ones and zeros at the same time. It sounds preposterous, but it works, and it makes it possible to encode information in three units, not just two. This makes quantum computers exponentially faster and more powerful than classic computers and enables them to solve problems that are beyond the reach of even the best supercomputers. For example, traditional encryption is based on complex math problems that classical computers would take millions of years to solve. Quantum computers could solve those problems in minutes.

The defense world in Washington often did not help matters. It was repeatedly ambushed by many of the technological disruptions flowing out of Silicon Valley and the rest of the commercial world. It missed the commercial space revolution. It missed the move to cloud computing. It missed the advent of modern software development. It missed the centrality of data. And it missed the rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Of course, plenty of actors in Washington had a vested interest in ensuring that the Department of Defense never capitalized on these disruptive technologies, but it is hard to overstate the degree to which Washington missed these major developments because it simply did not understand them, or even that they were possible. But it is worse than that: When the Washington defense world eventually did become aware of these revolutions in commercial technology, it did not immediately embrace them. In many cases, it resisted them.

The top five artificial intelligence companies in the United States—Amazon, Alphabet, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple—spent a total of $70.5 billion on research and development in 2018. That is money they are investing in the future. In contrast, the top five defense companies—Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon Technologies, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman—spent a total of $6.2 billion. Indeed, Apple regularly sits on around $245 billion of “cash on hand,” enough money to buy all five of those top US defense companies outright. The Department of Defense thus finds itself in a terrible dilemma when it comes to the core technologies that it now admits are the most important to its future effectiveness: The companies that are most able to help are not always willing to do so, whereas the companies that are willing to help are not always able to do so. And this is perhaps the greatest irony of all: with all respect to Eisenhower, the biggest problem with the military-industrial complex is not that it became a threat to American liberty and self-government at home, as Eisenhower warned in his famous Farewell Address of 1961. The bigger problem is that over time the military-industrial complex has failed at the one job it had: to get the absolute best technology the nation has to offer into the hands of the US military so that America can stay ahead of its strategic competitors.

It can also be difficult for Americans to appreciate fully the extent to which the leaders of China’s ruling Communist Party are, in fact, ideologically motivated communists. This may have been debatable in the past, but it is harder to argue since Xi Jinping became president in 2012. Xi, who has set himself up as the ideological torchbearer of Mao Zedong, has led a renaissance of communist orthodoxy in government and culture, strengthened party control over businesses and the military, sidelined or purged many of his political rivals, and consolidated power in his hands more than any Chinese leader since Mao himself.7 Indeed, after the removal of presidential term limits from China’s constitution in 2018, Xi is poised to rule China indefinitely.

Leaked Communist Party documents suggest that the people ruling China, starting with Xi himself, are deeply paranoid and ideologically hostile to all forms of liberal influence. They see Western notions of constitutional democracy, human rights, free journalism, civil society, and open dissent as weapons that Western powers—above all the United States—use to weaken the Communist Party and China, which party leaders view as one and the same thing.8 “Without the conspiracy of Western liberalism,” Australian journalist-turned-policymaker John Garnaut has written, the Chinese Communist Party “loses its reason for existence.

In this way, it is the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party that makes China’s inherently unobjectionable desire for advanced technologies so troubling. Since becoming president, Xi has mobilized China in an unprecedented and comprehensive pursuit of 5G communications networks, biotechnology, artificial intelligence, and other advanced capabilities. Xi and other Chinese leaders seem convinced that these new technologies will enable China to “leapfrog” the United States and become the world’s preeminent power. Indeed, under Xi’s rule, Beijing sees advanced technologies as inextricably linked to China’s national identity and the Communist Party’s sense of destiny in restoring China to its rightful place at the center of world order.10 China’s ambitions to become the world’s technology superpower have been spelled out in a recent series of sweeping national strategies and industrial policies. Made in China 2025, issued in 2015, seeks to establish China as a world leader by 2025 in ten high-technology industries, including robotics, aerospace manufacturing, biotechnology, and advanced communications and information technologies, such as 5G networks.

Even more worrisome are the unsettling ends to which the Chinese Communist Party is putting advanced technologies. What started with the “great firewall,” an elaborate project to restrict the free flow of information into China, has developed into an all-encompassing and dystopian form of techno-authoritarianism by the Chinese state. A nationwide system of online monitoring and surveillance cameras, enhanced with artificial intelligence and facial recognition, oversees everything that Chinese citizens say, do, write, and buy, both online and in the real world. All of this personal information is used to build a comprehensive “social credit” system, in which the Chinese state rates the patriotism, loyalty, and adherence to government policy of every citizen, like an Uber rating system for human virtue as defined by the state. Those who “score” well would be rewarded with access to credit, government services, scholarships, better schools, and other perks. Those who do not score well could be denied these benefits. This is the most determined and expansive effort in human history to use technology to perfect dictatorship.

The centerpiece of the Chinese Communist Party’s military buildup is the Chinese Navy. With an estimated 400 ships and submarines, the Chinese Navy is already larger than the US Navy, which currently consists of 288 combatants. Between 2015 and 2017, Chinese shipyards launched twice as many tons worth of naval vessels as their US counterparts.15 China is turning out nearly a dozen new ships per year toward its goal of putting to sea a total fleet of 550 ships and submarines in ten years.

China’s government exports advanced weapons and the tools of high-tech authoritarianism to aspiring police states that want to surveil their citizens, regulate their thoughts, and crush dissent. It is using bribery, corruption, and other forms of coercion to interfere in the domestic affairs of other countries, including the United States and its closest allies.

A shadow cyber war has raged for years, especially between America and its great-power rivals.

Nine of the world’s top twenty internet companies are Chinese. The country is producing five times as many engineers as we do and is beginning to equal the United States in the skill of its researchers. More than half of the most-cited research papers on artificial intelligence in the world in 2018 were produced in China. And in recent years, Chinese teams have been winning major international competitions in facial and voice recognition. China’s technological progress extends well beyond advances in artificial intelligence. Its companies represent 80 percent of the commercial drone market.

Americans in uniform are often the first to joke about the inadequacies of many of the technologies they have to use, but I think it is a way of coping with their knowledge of the fact that these inadequacies could have deadly consequences.

In 2014, for example, the Russian government emphatically denied what most of the world knew to be true: that Russia’s Little Green Men had actively intervened in Ukraine. What revealed the truth (though Moscow never admitted it) was a flurry of pictures and videos of Russian forces and equipment that had been captured and shared on social media, including by Russian soldiers posing for selfies. This was also how it was revealed that Russia had supplied Ukrainian separatists with the surface-to-air missile system that shot down Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 on July 17, 2014. Civilians with smartphones captured the weapon moving away from the scene of the crime, which revealed its Russian military markings, and then they photographed the same system on its way back toward the border of Russia.3 Similarly, when the Chinese government denied in 2016 that it was installing military capabilities on reclaimed islands in the South China Sea, commercial satellite imagery showed the truth in high resolution.

A future conflict could involve persistent cyberattacks, advanced cruise missiles, hypersonic weapons, and other more intelligent machines all striking targets in the United States. They could be launched from the territories of our rivals or from submarines and aircraft that could slip in close to US territory. As a result, for the first time since the nineteenth century, real homeland defense will have to become an American goal that consumes far more of our defense budget.

In recent decades, US leaders have given our military too many missions and have prioritized US military “presence” in too many places across the world that deliver too little benefit to our national defense. American leaders must tell our military what it no longer has to do. And they will certainly need to avoid saddling our military with costly and unnecessary new missions, such as a war with Iran, an intervention in Venezuela, or preemptive military action against North Korea. Certain other missions, such as limited counterterrorism operations, can and should continue, and US leaders must realize that inattention to certain problems might allow them to metastasize into larger, more demanding threats. But overall, the US military will have to do less. This will require hard choices with real consequences, but we must make them. Put simply, conserving US strategic resources—not just our military power but also our money, our leaders’ time, and our allies’ goodwill, among other things—must become a goal of US defense strategy.

These new shadow wars are already being fought in cyberspace, in outer space, in the public information domain, and between opposing forces of Little Green Men and other clandestine operatives.

I must emphasize that this future force will not be cheap. It cannot be purchased with a radically slashed defense budget.

Trump is not wrong to demand that wealthy allies of the United States contribute more to our common defense. Indeed, friends who want America to help defend them if they are attacked have a special obligation to make themselves more defensible. And if they do not, they should not expect Americans to fight wars on their behalf that may have little prospect of victory. Having higher expectations of our allies, however, should not be confused with deriding the value of having allies at all. This is one of the most fundamental problems with Trump’s worldview, which he summed up in June 2019: “Almost all countries in this world take tremendous advantage of the United States,” he said.5 Trump sees America’s allies solely as freeloaders and free-riders, and unfortunately, he has done more to damage America’s relationships with our closest allies and to drive wedges between us than our adversaries ever could hope to achieve on their own. What Trump gets wrong is that the United States does not have allies because we are suckers. We have allies because it benefits America. We want allies because it is better than being alone. We need allies because maintaining a favorable balance of power is not possible without them. If we want our allies to be more capable and to share more of the burden of our collective defense, as we should, we should start by recognizing how the United States has intentionally contributed to our allies being less militarily capable. For example, we have often...

We must require a lot more from both our allies and ourselves.

In 2019, Secretary of Defense James Mattis and Secretary of the Navy Richard Spencer tried to do the right thing. They wanted to free up room in the Navy’s budget to invest in new capabilities, such as unmanned vessels like the Orca. And though they did not know how many aircraft carriers America would need in the future, they believed it would be fewer than today. Mattis and Spencer set about trying to reduce the amount of money the Navy would ask Congress to spend on aircraft carriers in the 2020 fiscal year. One idea was to curtail the Navy’s plan to purchase two new carriers at once, especially considering that the Navy was still wrestling with how it would defend these massive ships against a growing Chinese threat. This idea made strategic sense, but the Pentagon leaders eventually discarded it because canceling the “block buy” of two new carriers would have resulted in massive layoffs at the one American company that builds the ships. Once those workers were gone, there was no getting them back, which would harm the Navy’s ability to build different kinds of ships in the future. The shipbuilders needed ships to build, so the carrier block buy was left untouched. What Mattis and Spencer settled on instead was a plan to retire one existing carrier, the USS Harry Truman, halfway through its service life. The nuclear reactor that powers a carrier like the Truman can last fifty years, but it needs to be refueled after twenty-five years. By retiring the Truman, Pentagon l...