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

by Christian Brose

Do not think that these Americans are stupid, malevolent, or venal. Most are doing their best to do right as they understand it. They are elected officials trying to stand up for their constituents, who build or operate amazing capabilities for the US military and want to keep their jobs. They are military officers who believe in the utility of their current systems and that having more of them will make their troops more likely to succeed in their missions and return home safe and sound. They are business leaders who have a responsibility to do right by their workers and to make money for their shareholders, most of whom are ordinary Americans. The problem is not the people involved. Nor is it the mere existence of what John McCain used to call “the military-industrial-congressional complex” or what Donald Trump and others have more recently called “the swamp.” After all, that system is not going anywhere. The bigger problem is how power and incentives have come to be structured over many decades within America’s defense establishment. That structure overwhelmingly favors the present at the expense of the future.

Seeing through change of this magnitude—from a military standpoint, let alone a social, economic, and political one—would be exceedingly difficult in normal times. And these are hardly normal times. We need leadership in Washington that can manage the political risks and fallouts associated with nothing less than a generational change of America’s national defense. What Washington is providing instead is a level of political dysfunction that is unique in modern American history and that is bleeding into national defense in a way that makes everything harder. This problem is bigger than Donald Trump, but he is at the center of it. This is not to say that the Trump presidency has been uniformly bad for our military. It has not. But in a broader sense, the past four years have been tumultuous ones for national defense. Trump has routinely dragged the US military into his broader political agenda, sending troops to the southern border largely for symbolic reasons and raiding billions of dollars of military funding to pay for the border wall. After prioritizing strategic competition with China, Trump then proceeded to heighten tensions with Iran and Venezuela in ways that diverted military funding and focus. His personal attacks on Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos have hindered the Pentagon’s attempt to procure enterprise cloud computing services, which are a prerequisite for any serious development of artificial intelligence. These and other present burdens all come at the expense of our...

Unfortunately, the Trump presidency has only exacerbated the state of dysfunction and distraction that was already consuming Congress. In the nearly one decade that I worked in the Senate, I watched a radicalization of political discourse occur that was frightening in its speed and severity. Republicans shifted sharply to the right, and now Democrats are reacting by shifting sharply to the left. There are many reasons for this, but the result is a hollowing out of the political center and a total incapacity to come together to do much at all. And increasingly, some of the best and brightest members of Congress are just opting out altogether and leaving.

But here is the good news: The United States is not lacking for any of the key elements that a change of this magnitude requires. We have plenty of money. We have amazing, world-leading technology. We have creative and talented people. If America lacked any of these elements—which many of our foreign competitors do—the prospect of us adapting for the future would be much bleaker.

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...