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

by Christian Brose

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.