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

by Christian Brose

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.