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

by Christian Brose

when he was chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, I was his staff director. That meant I led a team of defense policy experts who supported McCain and his colleagues in authorizing and overseeing the entire US defense program—every policy and activity of the Department of Defense, every weapon it developed and bought, every dollar of the roughly $700 billion that it spent each year. McCain and I had access to the Pentagon’s most highly classified secrets and programs,

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph Dunford, had testified to McCain’s committee in June. “In just a few years,” he said, “if we do not change our trajectory, we will lose our qualitative and quantitative competitive advantage.”1 In other words, the US military would no longer be the best.

David Ochmanek. A year later, he spoke publicly about the many war games—what are essentially simulations of future wars—that he has conducted for the Department of Defense upon leaving government. The US military uses them to model actual campaigns against rival powers in which each side fights with the military forces that it realistically expects to have in the near future.

The truth is even worse than Ochmanek describes. Over the past decade, in US war games against China, the United States has a nearly perfect record: we have lost almost every single time. The American people do not know this. Most members of Congress do not know this—even though they should. But in the Department of Defense, this is a well-known fact.

Leaders too often seem to lose sight of the larger objective—the reason why we would want any platform in the first place. For the goal of a military should not be to buy platforms. The goal is to buy deterrence, the prevention of war. And the only way to deter wars is to be so clearly capable of winning them that no rival power ever seeks to get its way through violence.

The kill chain is a process that occurs on the battlefield or wherever militaries compete. It involves three steps: The first is gaining understanding about what is happening. The second is making a decision about what to do. And the third is taking action that creates an effect to achieve an objective. And though that effect may involve killing, more often the result is all kinds of non-violent and non-lethal actions that are essential to prevailing in war or military contests short of war. Indeed, better understanding, decisions, and actions are what enable militaries to prevent unnecessary loss of life—both their own people and innocent civilians.

Killing is something that few members of our military are actually called upon to do. The vast majority do jobs focused on generating understanding, facilitating decisions, and implementing a multitude of different actions, most of which have nothing to do with killing. All of these tasks, however, are fundamentally focused on succeeding in a deadly business that is unlike any other in America. No one understands that unique burden and the sense of otherness it entails more viscerally or takes it more seriously than the men and women whom the rest of the nation asks to do its killing and dying. The kill chain is a helpful reminder, both for Americans in uniform and for all of us, that the stakes of our military’s ability to understand, decide, and act are often life and death.

The result is that the US military is far slower and less effective at closing the kill chain than it can and must be. The process is heavily manual, linear, undynamic, and impervious to change. Specific military systems may be able to work together to facilitate understanding, decisions, and actions for one specific purpose, but they cannot be recomposed in different ways for other unforeseen purposes. Put simply, the means by which the US military generates understanding, translates that knowledge into decisions, and then takes actions in war have not been built to adapt.

core pillar of the Chinese Communist Party’s plan is harnessing emerging technologies to “leapfrog” the United States and become the world’s preeminent power. It is undertaking an unprecedented effort, backed by hundreds of billions of dollars of state investment, to become the world leader in artificial intelligence, biotechnology, robotics, and other advanced technologies. The Chinese Communist Party is already using these technologies to build the most intrusive system of mass surveillance, social control, and totalizing dictatorship the world has ever seen. And its leaders clearly view these technologies as equally indispensable in their race to develop a “world-class military” that can “fight and win wars.”

bigger issue is that most of these allegedly information age military systems struggle to share information and communicate directly with one another to a degree that would shock most Americans. For example, the F-22 and F-35A fighter jets cannot directly share basic airborne positioning and targeting data despite the fact that they are both Air Force programs and built by the same company. They were architected with different means of processing and transmitting information that are not compatible.

This behavior stems not from malice but a rational pursuit of self-interest in a platform-centered defense market. And that is the tragic irony of what happened to the revolution in military affairs. The military procurement programs that the Pentagon and Congress prioritized under the banner of revolution were often the opposite of what Marshall and others had envisioned. As many of those programs became costly disasters, Washington turned against the entire idea of a military revolution.

The real affliction ailing the defense establishment was “Last War-itis,” the belief that the concepts and weapons that had succeeded in the past would remain successful in the future, and the willingness of that defense establishment to spend tons of money trying to optimize the past.

China accelerated work to build a different kind of military. It continued to spend money on traditional military systems, such as ships and tanks, but its priority was to develop what it called “Assassin’s Mace” weapons. The name refers to special weapons that were used in Chinese history to defeat more powerful adversaries. It would be like David and Goliath: the goal was not to beat the giant at its own game but to render it unable to fight by confronting its vulnerabilities. These were exactly the kinds of weapons that Andrew Marshall’s office imagined in 1992, and they came to be known by the same name from that earlier thought experiment: anti-access and area denial weapons. The idea was that, rather than fighting America directly, China would seek to attack the underlying systems and assumptions upon which the entire US military enterprise rested—to break its kill chains. China knew how Washington planned to fight, and it very methodically began building new weapons to counter America’s approach to warfare.

Defense companies spent less money on research and development and more on armies of lawyers, lobbyists, accountants, and consultants to help them comply with the Pentagon’s growing acquisition bureaucracy and win more of the shrinking number of large contracts.

The most capable computer onboard a US military system is the core processor in the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which has earned it the nickname “the flying supercomputer.” The processor can perform 400 billion operations per second.1 By comparison, the Nvidia DRIVE AGX Pegasus can conduct 320 trillion operations per second right onboard a commercial car or truck.2 That is eight hundred times more processing power.

In 2020, that is the full-time job of literally tens of thousands of members of the US military. When they are off-duty, they may use Nvidia’s technology to play video games or even assist them on their drive home. But in uniform, they are essentially doing the same jobs that their grandparents did in World War II. The

with all respect to Eisenhower, the biggest problem with the military-industrial complex is not that it became a threat to American liberty and self-government at home, as Eisenhower warned in his famous Farewell Address of 1961. The bigger problem is that over time the military-industrial complex has failed at the one job it had: to get the absolute best technology the nation has to offer into the hands of the US military so that America can stay ahead of its strategic competitors.

After all, managing competing priorities and determining their appropriate rank order is the essence of strategy.

Military innovation and adaptation are made more difficult because the nature of any bureaucracy is to resist change, not promote it. Military bureaucracy and culture are especially conservative, and not without reason. The wrong kind of change can cost lives. At its most extreme, however, this rigidity leads to what Norman Dixon famously called “the psychology of military incompetence,” which includes “clinging to outworn tradition,” a “failure to use or tendency to misuse available technology,” a “tendency to reject or ignore information which is unpalatable or which conflicts with preconceptions,” and a “tendency to underestimate the enemy and overestimate the capabilities of one’s own side.”

In reality, true military innovation is less about technology than about operational and organizational transformation.

Adopting new capabilities and concepts inevitably means divesting of old ones, and most people can only be convinced to give up what they have when they see with their own eyes that the new ideas actually work better. Even then, they may still cling to the status quo and resist change.

Nothing, not even the September 11 attacks and all of the mistakes and heartache that followed, fundamentally jarred us out of our delusions, and over time, our arrogance begat ignorance, leading gradually to a contraction of strategic imagination and a profound forgetfulness about the persistence of tragedy in human affairs. Ultimately, this is why we failed to do so many of the things that we said were necessary.

China’s ambitions to become the world’s technology superpower have been spelled out in a recent series of sweeping national strategies and industrial policies. Made in China 2025, issued in 2015, seeks to establish China as a world leader by 2025 in ten high-technology industries, including robotics, aerospace manufacturing, biotechnology, and advanced communications and information technologies, such as 5G networks. The National Innovation-Driven Development Strategy seeks to make China the world’s “innovation leader” in science and technology by 2030, ranging from microelectronics and nuclear power to quantum technologies and space exploration, among other industries. In July 2017, China issued its New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan, the goals of which Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google and chairman of Alphabet, described this way: “By 2020, they will have caught up. By 2025, they will be better than us. And by 2030, they will dominate the industries of AI.”11 What makes these national plans and industrial policies significant is their breathtaking scale and urgency. The US government, for example, has issued its own artificial intelligence plans. The Obama administration did so before China, and the Trump administration did so after. But these documents are more aspirational than directive. They were written largely by midlevel US officials. And they have done little to meaningfully shift US government investment. In contrast, China’s plans are top ...

Even more worrisome are the unsettling ends to which the Chinese Communist Party is putting advanced technologies. What started with the “great firewall,” an elaborate project to restrict the free flow of information into China, has developed into an all-encompassing and dystopian form of techno-authoritarianism by the Chinese state. A nationwide system of online monitoring and surveillance cameras, enhanced with artificial intelligence and facial recognition, oversees everything that Chinese citizens say, do, write, and buy, both online and in the real world. All of this personal information is used to build a comprehensive “social credit” system, in which the Chinese state rates the patriotism, loyalty, and adherence to government policy of every citizen, like an Uber rating system for human virtue as defined by the state. Those who “score” well would be rewarded with access to credit, government services, scholarships, better schools, and other perks. Those who do not score well could be denied these benefits. This is the most determined and expansive effort in human history to use technology to perfect dictatorship.

The Chinese Communist Party’s aims are evident not just in Xi’s rhetoric and its legal doctrines governing the private sector but most alarmingly in its breathtaking military expansion. China’s military budget has increased by 400 percent since 2006,14 and though Beijing does not reveal the exact amount of its annual military spending, that number will surely continue to grow along with China’s GDP. This money is buying far more than what Chinese planners call “counter-intervention forces,” such as dense layers of air defenses and advanced missiles of all ranges to deny US forces the ability to operate in the international waters and airspace of the Asia-Pacific region. The Chinese Communist Party is also investing more in advanced capabilities to project military power, such as expanded marine forces equipped with capable amphibious ships that could facilitate island seizures, as well as modernized fighter and bomber aircraft armed with ship-killing cruise missiles and other advanced weapons.

The greater danger now is where things are headed—which is toward the continued erosion of not only US military dominance but also America’s ability to deter conventional war with China. If that deterrence disappears, what would likely fill the vacuum is a Chinese form of military dominance over much of the Asia-Pacific region—a region that is home to some of America’s closest allies and that is the center of the global economy, on which the jobs, security, and well-being of millions of Americans depend. If that were to happen, Americans will be living in a world where the ultimate check on China’s military or other ambitions is either the prudence and magnanimity of the Chinese Communist Party—or the willingness of the president of the United States to escalate every crisis with China, no matter how big or small, to the brink of nuclear war, which is hardly believable and even less desirable.

Most Americans have lived blissfully free from the many kinds of privation, injustice, aggression, and depredation that countries through history have suffered at the hands of more powerful rivals that realized they could prevail in war if push came to shove. I have no desire to see how dangerous the future could become for Americans if we lose the ability to deter conventional war against the Chinese Communist Party or any other competitor. This situation should compel us to build different kinds of military forces that can defend Americans and our core interests in the absence of military dominance.

Quantum sensors, for example, could illuminate the battlefield better and generate unprecedented understanding for the militaries that possess them. As classical computers reach the physical limits of their power, quantum computers could become vital to processing all of the data that intelligentized militaries create and collect. And as traditional forms of encryption are threatened, quantum-resistant encryption could become indispensable.

The bigger question is whether Google would allow its quantum computer to solve problems for the US military.

This sounds creepy, but human performance assessment and enhancement are already common in the US military. Elite special operations units, for example, regularly use these kinds of technologies to assess candidates and identify the ones who are predisposed to bearing the cognitive and physiological loads of close-quarters combat, where individuals must understand, decide, and act precisely and repeatedly in split seconds. Similarly, enhancing human performance has become routine in the US military. Pilots, for example, regularly take modafinil and dextroamphetamines, central nervous system stimulants, to remain sharp and better able to understand, decide, and act during long flight operations.

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.

The proliferation of satellites, however, is only the beginning of the new space race. Spacecraft have always been limited by the impracticality of refueling them. They have only as much fuel as they could carry into space, and when it is gone, they cannot actively propel themselves any farther. This has restricted spacecraft to orbiting Earth, but emerging space technologies are changing that. Indeed, the new space race will also be a competition to build the infrastructure off of Earth that enables and secures a spacefaring future.

The US military is drowning in data. It uses powerful and exquisite sensors, all machines, to suck up oceans of information about the world, but then it leaves the job of making sense of it to humans. There simply are not enough people in the US military to interpret all of this data, nor will there ever be. As a result, most of the information that the US military collects either goes unused or is thrown away—a complete waste that results in people making less-informed decisions, often about matters of life and death.

While it is certainly true that any lethal autonomous weapons would be intelligent machines, militaries will be able to use non-lethal intelligent machines for a multitude of purposes that do not involve violence, from intelligence gathering to automated logistics.

When it comes to the military competition for artificial intelligence, China has one big advantage that Americans should not discount, and that is its enormous size. One of the most important development tasks of artificial intelligence is using recent breakthroughs, especially in deep learning, to deploy artificial intelligence at scale.20

The greater danger for the United States is failing to recognize the true gravity of the kind of military technology race with the Chinese Communist Party that we are facing and falling behind because of our lack of urgency to run it. From President Xi Jinping down, China’s senior leaders are fully mobilized and moving with awe-inspiring speed to become the world leader in emerging technologies. They, too, seem to value the enabling potential of these technologies, and for Chinese leaders, the most important thing these technologies will enable is China’s ability to “leapfrog” the United States and establish itself as the world’s preeminent power.

Many defense and technology experts, such as Paul Scharre, Heather Roff, and Joe Chapa, have written extensively on the serious ethical and technical challenges involved in the military use of intelligent machines—challenges that the deepening strategic competition between the United States and China is only exacerbating.1 Artificial intelligence, at present, can be brittle, opaque, unreliable, unpredictable, and prone to error. It struggles to contextualize information. But as the technology becomes more capable, which is happening quickly, the possibility of relying on increasingly intelligent machines to perform military tasks will grow, as will the pressure to do so amid an intensifying race to develop faster, more effective kill chains.

It is important here to make another key distinction: What machines are capable of doing (automation) and what humans permit machines to do (autonomy) are very different things. There is no such thing as an “autonomous” machine, technically speaking, because autonomy describes a relationship, not a thing. It is the relationship between a superior actor that delegates tasks to subordinate actors under certain parameters. This kind of relationship is pervasive in militaries. Indeed, it is the foundation of effective and ethical military conduct in war and peace.

test those subordinates, over and over again, to determine whether their subordinates can reliably, predictably, and effectively perform the tasks they are given. And it is through that repeated experience of training and testing that human commanders determine whether they can trust their subordinates with autonomy to act on their orders. In fact, commanders would be held accountable for failing to properly train and test their subordinates. Accountability is a core component of trust.

The same process of trust and accountability also applies to machines. When servicemembers are issued weapons, they are able to trust the safety and effectiveness of those weapons because other humans have tested them extensively to determine that they will perform as intended under the many conditions in which they might be used. If machines—or human beings, for that matter—perform in unsafe or ineffective ways in combat, the accountability for that failure lies with the trainer and tester, not the user.

For the many military tasks that do not fall into this category, however, the prospect of human commanders delegating more to intelligent machines opens a huge ethical opportunity: the opportunity to better differentiate between jobs that machines can do and jobs that humans should do. Human decision making has an inherent ethical value that derives from the human capacity to make highly complex decisions about right and wrong in different contexts.

This becomes especially problematic if, as opponents of autonomous weapons fear, humans use those weapons over time for more expansive purposes and in less proportionate and discriminate ways. This is a legitimate cause for concern, and it highlights the critical question at the center of our current debates over artificial intelligence and warfare—whether humans could ever train and test intelligent machines enough to trust them to close the kill chain without a person in the loop or directly in control. I believe we can. In fact, we already have. But even framing the issue in this way does not readily convey the vast extent to which human choices and values are engineered into the deepest recesses of even those machines capable of acting with the greatest degrees of autonomy.

The US Navy, for example, has used the Phalanx gun and Aegis missile defense systems to defend its ships for decades. Though far less capable than the intelligent machines of today and tomorrow, these systems can be switched into a fully automatic mode that enables them to close the kill chain against incoming missiles without human involvement.

A complicating factor is that the decision-making process of current intelligent machines can be highly opaque. The classic case is of the theoretical house-cleaning robot that concludes the best way to keep the house clean is to lock the family in the basement—the wrong decision, but not necessarily illogical from the machine’s perspective.

artificial intelligence programs that have mastered games such as chess and Go eventually achieve a superior level of gameplay where the reasoning behind their moves and strategies is seemingly inexplicable to their human creators. For this reason, researchers are already working to develop more explainable artificial intelligence, machines that could reveal the reasoning behind their decisions and actions. Being able to follow the reasoning process of intelligent machines will not only help improve human trust in them but also make those machines more effective.

been the greatest limiting factor in the history of warfare. Hence the old saying: “Amateurs talk tactics; professionals talk logistics.”

we will need to relearn a lesson of history that we largely forgot during our three decades of uncontested dominance: that great powers are capable of limiting one another’s ambitions and rendering many of each other’s goals impractical or unachievable, regardless of how desirable those goals may be for one side or the other. Great powers force each other to define their core interests, the things each is truly willing to fight over, and then make compromises and accommodations as necessary over the rest, lest competition descend into conflict. This is the messy, unsatisfying, and oft-neglected other side of great-power competition. Call it the management of strategic rivalry.

And that should be our goal: preventing China from achieving a position of military dominance in Asia, which might be accompanied by a growing global assertiveness that could lead to even more detrimental consequences for the United States and our closest allies.

This way of warfare would be much less about maneuvering offensively, penetrating into an opponent’s space, attacking, and dominating an adversary in its own territory—all of which could be impractical against a peer competitor. It would instead be, more modestly, about denying the Chinese Communist Party the ability to impose its will militarily in US territory and on the people, places, and things that matter most to America in the world. The purpose would be to deter acts of aggression and war by demonstrating to potential aggressors that the US military can destroy any forces they send on the offensive, prevent opponents from projecting military power beyond their own territory, replenish our losses faster and more cheaply than they can, sustain the fight for as long as necessary, and halt their ability to keep attacking.

Indeed, that is exactly how China plans to win a future war in Asia and how Russia plans to prevail in Europe: strike rapidly, consolidate their gains before US forces can respond effectively, harden their victory into a fait accompli, and force the United States to escalate the conflict to attack and dislodge their forces. This kind of rapid aggression will only become easier when future war is moving at the speed of hypersonic weapons and intelligent machines.