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

by Christian Brose

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.