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

by Christian Brose

spaces. It requires a sweeping redesign of the American military: from a military built around small numbers of large, expensive, exquisite, heavily manned, and hard-to-replace platforms to a military built around large numbers of smaller, lower-cost, expendable, and highly autonomous machines. Put simply, it should be a military defined less by the strength and quantities of its platforms than by the efficacy, speed, flexibility, adaptability, and overall dynamism of its kill chains.

“Last War-itis” only intensified under President Barack Obama. His overriding belief was that America remained militarily dominant, that our traditional assumptions about how and with what we would fight were valid, and that our greatest threat was not foreign rivals with new kill chains but the misuse of our own power. The top priority was to end the wars that Bush began, cut military spending, and focus on “nation-building at home.” The new president did call for a “pivot to Asia,” which was code for competing more seriously with China. And his Pentagon did begin work on a new operational concept called “AirSea Battle,” which sought to combine air and maritime forces to confront the kinds of military challenges that China was increasingly posing in the Western Pacific. However, shortly into his presidency, Obama embarked upon a series of decisions that would render these nascent initiatives largely hollow.

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.

Although some details of China’s military uses of advanced technology are known, such as experiments involving swarms of more than one hundred autonomous fixed-wing aircraft, it is unclear how far the Chinese military has progressed in its pursuit of intelligentized warfare. But if there was any doubt about the Chinese Communist Party’s likely ambitions, China’s Military Museum features a depiction of an aircraft carrier being overwhelmed by a “swarm assault” of unmanned combat aircraft.4

In the competition over biotechnology, it is hard to believe that the United States would cross certain ethical lines, but it is less clear whether the same can be said of the Chinese Communist Party. It has already turned the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region into what the United Nations has called “something resembling a massive internment camp” for the minority population there.18 It has allowed researchers to produce the world’s first genetically edited human babies.19 It condones genetic experimentation on animals, including non-human primates, that is far more restricted in the United States. It is not a significant moral leap to imagine China genetically engineering superhumans who are optimized for certain military tasks or developing precision biological warfare agents that, like designer drugs in reverse, infect specific groups of people or individual members of a rival military. Indeed, biotechnology could be one area, more than others, where values differences between America and China have the greatest military ramifications.

I first learned about barrel bombs in January 2013 on a trip with John McCain to the Zaatari refugee camp, a massive city of canvas tents sprawled across the sandy moonscape of northern Jordan that was then home to tens of thousands of Syrians who had fled the civil war raging in their country. It was there that we met a Syrian mother who had recently lost all five of her children in a barrel bomb attack by forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad. She fled the country with nothing more than her own life. As a parent myself who had just had my second child, I was haunted by the emptiness in her eyes. So was McCain, who had seen more of death and suffering in war than anyone I have ever known. In the nearly one hundred foreign trips that I took with him, I cannot recall a single meeting that affected McCain more deeply. “Fathers, brothers, sisters—they all move on after the loss of a child,” McCain said to me afterward as we drove back to Amman. “But not the mothers. The mothers never move on.”

I do not want to live in a world where the Chinese Communist Party is the only power with lethal autonomous weapons any more than I wanted to live in a world where the Soviet Union was the only power with nuclear weapons. The reason to build weapons is not because we want to but because we believe we have to, because we do not want to live disarmed and defenseless in a world full of predators. We should not build weapons because we are eager to use them but because we intend to make it so we never have to. We should build the most capable weapons we can because we want to prevent conflict and use of violence but also because, if that tragic day ever comes when peace breaks down and the men and women of America’s military are sent to war, we do not want them going into harm’s way with anything less than the best technology that our nation can provide. To do otherwise would only increase the risk that more of those Americans would not return home. That would be unethical.

The essential function of any military machine is to facilitate human understanding, decision making, and action, which it enacts by sensing, shooting, and sharing information. But if a machine has to carry people or cater to human preferences and limitations, that becomes its most important mission, as it must, and the machine must be built completely differently. Aircraft, for example, require all kinds of additional complexity to support the life of the pilot, and their performance is limited by the human body’s tolerance for gravitational forces in flight. The same is true of sensors. Because it has mainly been a human task to operate sensors, most sensors are built around human preferences and limitations. Optical sensors, for example, have taken increasingly exquisite forms, such as high-resolution imagery and full-motion video, because that is what humans need to see things and understand the world. The problem is that these exquisite sensors often consume a lot of the precious resources that militaries will always find scarce, such as money, power, and network bandwidth.

June 20, 2019, Iranian forces shot down a US RQ-4 Global Hawk, a nearly $220 million surveillance drone,6 with a precision surface-to-air missile.

There will be new ways for humans to oversee their battle networks and communicate with their growing numbers of intelligent machines. It might start with virtual or augmented reality and could progress to brain-computer interface—the ability for humans to send commands to intelligent machines using only their minds. This seems far-fetched, but it already exists in limited forms. DARPA demonstrated in 2018 that it was possible for one person to control three drones using surgical implants that communicated that person’s brain signals directly to the aircraft. What’s more, the drones were able to send information they collected directly back to the person’s brain, enabling the human user to perceive the drone’s environment.

abilities to understand events, make decisions, and take actions.

having machines perform the tasks machines do best and communicate

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.

What Trump gets wrong is that the United States does not have allies because we are suckers. We have allies because it benefits America.

The US military now plans to start each fiscal year without an appropriation of funding. Pentagon planners painstakingly negotiate contracts and structure programs to avoid critical payments in the first quarter of each fiscal year so they do not end up in breach of contract when they inevitably get stuck on a continuing resolution. Even then, problems arise. When Congress failed to pass a budget for six months at the start of the 2018 fiscal year, for example, the Navy had to renegotiate roughly ten thousand contracts, which senior Navy leaders estimated cost them roughly $5.8 billion in wasted buying power. That could have bought three destroyers. And yet this is exactly how the Department of Defense began the fiscal year for 2020—once again on a continuing resolution with no clarity of when it would end. The reason was the fight between the White House and Congress over funding for a southern border wall. But if it had not been this fight, it would have been something else, just as it has been each year for the past decade. This is how previously deviant behavior has now become all but normalized. It cannot be blamed narrowly on the behavior of Trump or Congress, Democrats or Republicans. These are just symptoms of a deeper failure of imagination and leadership in Washington—a failure to grasp the true stakes for America in the strategic competition with China and to subordinate typical political gamesmanship to the broader need to prepare our nation to succeed in the f...