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

by Christian Brose

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.