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

by Christian Brose

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 ...