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

by Christian Brose

A change that would make it easier for Washington defense leaders to create the various new incentives that are needed is to bring back the practice of congressional earmarks. John McCain would blast me for saying this. He led the charge to ban earmarks in 2011 because he believed they had become a form of corruption, and they had. Members of Congress doled out money in non-transparent ways to programs and projects that the Department of Defense did not request and that often benefited their campaign contributors. Rather than cleaning up the earmarking process and making it fully transparent to the public, however, Congress banned the practice altogether. The unintended consequence was that the legislative branch yielded to the executive branch one of its most important prerogatives: the power to make its own independent determinations about defense programs that merit government investment. Instead, Congress relegated itself to funding only those programs that the Department of Defense deemed worthy. The problem is that the Pentagon misses things and gets things wrong as much as the next large institution. In the past, earmarks helped members of Congress correct these errors. The Predator drone, for example, was created with funding earmarked by Congress after the Air Force consistently refused to invest in unmanned aircraft. A reformed earmarks process could play this role again by giving members of Congress a powerful tool to invest in emerging technologies for our mili...