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

by Christian Brose

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.