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

by Christian Brose

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...