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

by Christian Brose

The problem is that our ability to deter conventional war is deteriorating. If we reimagine our defense strategy and restore conventional deterrence, the price of success will be fighting increasingly pitched battles in the gray zone. However, if China comes to believe that it could defeat America in a conventional war, it could embolden the Chinese Communist Party to confront us more directly. Then the gray zone would be the least of our problems.

Washington spends more than $730 billion each year on national defense, and this is what most of that money goes toward—developing, procuring, operating, maintaining, and crewing these kinds of traditional military systems.

The United States needs to build a different kind of military. And we cannot afford to repeat recent mistakes. Our focus must be on building and buying integrated networks of kill chains, not individual platforms and systems. We need to buy outcomes, not things. Those military things will matter less than the broader battle network that they add up to and its ability to facilitate human understanding, decision, and action. If we think about the problem this way, we can ask the right questions: How would we build the US military differently? What attributes should it have?

Trump is not wrong to demand that wealthy allies of the United States contribute more to our common defense. Indeed, friends who want America to help defend them if they are attacked have a special obligation to make themselves more defensible. And if they do not, they should not expect Americans to fight wars on their behalf that may have little prospect of victory.

What Trump gets wrong is that the United States does not have allies because we are suckers. We have allies because it benefits America. We want allies because it is better than being alone. We need allies because maintaining a favorable balance of power is not possible without them.

For example, we have often refused to sell offensive strike weapons and advanced defensive capabilities to frontline allies in Asia and Europe because we have believed that to do so would be destabilizing and provocative.

The reason the Air Force was ultimately successful in shifting to a new program was that it did a number of key things right—things that the Navy, for instance, failed to do with its plan to retire the Truman. The Air Force devised a political strategy. It engaged candidly and early in the budget process with key stakeholders in Congress. It provided detailed information about the threat to JSTARS and how the new program would be better. It made sure the defense industry was informed so the companies that thought they might benefit under the new plan could conduct their own private lobbying on Capitol Hill. The Air Force also threw a bone to those members of Congress who stood to lose the most by committing to base elements of the future program in the same state that would have hosted JSTARS, thereby turning potential spoilers into strong supporters of the new plan.

If the future is going to win, it will have to win inside our current system. It will have to win in a system comprising parochial military services, self-interested companies, and largely distracted political leaders—all of whom will continue to be consumed more by present concerns than future ones. Those are the people, interests, and political realities that matter, and none of them can be hand-waved away. This system makes it exceedingly difficult for America’s military to change, or change quickly, but as I have said from the start, I would not be writing this book if I thought all hope was lost.

There is good news and bad news. The bad news is that those who want to change America’s military face huge obstacles and opposition. But here is the good news: The United States is not lacking for any of the key elements that a change of this magnitude requires. We have plenty of money. We have amazing, world-leading technology. We have creative and talented people. If America lacked any of these elements—which many of our foreign competitors do—the prospect of us adapting for the future would be much bleaker.

Senior leaders in the Pentagon and Congress should set aside a large sum of money every year at the start of the budget process and then hold competitions to determine who has the best solutions to the US military’s highest-priority operational problems. These competitions must be real-world events featuring operationally relevant problems, like Work’s scenario involving the real-time targeting of 350 ships, albeit on a smaller scale. These competitions should be open to the military services, defense industry, technology companies, government laboratories, and anyone else who can bring real solutions to the table—not PowerPoint presentations but working components of an integrated battle network. The goal should be to evaluate which capabilities generate superior understanding, decisions, and actions under highly dynamic conditions, and do it all faster and more frequently than the US military can today.

Over time, if the future is given fair chances to compete on the merits of solving the right problems, new technologies such as intelligent machines could transition from enhancing traditional platforms to replacing them. The same incremental experimentation will also help to define important new roles and missions for our more traditional systems. One that stands out is homeland defense. Short-range, manned fighter jets, for example, may become less relevant in a potential war against China. But those aircraft could find a vital new role closer to home as the need to strengthen our homeland defenses grows. It would not be the power projection mission these aircraft were designed for, but it would be an essential and enduring mission. Similar transitions to homeland defense or other high-priority roles could occur for a host of other legacy platforms. The benefits of picking winners through open competitions are as much political and bureaucratic as they are military. The only way to convince our conservative and risk-averse defense establishment to adopt different kinds of military capabilities is to build these new technologies and show people what they can do under real-world conditions. Just as we must demonstrate new solutions to our competitors because of the deterrent value of doing so, we must also demonstrate them to ourselves in order to build domestic political support for new military concepts and capabilities.

and I have come to believe that we are radically overthinking this problem. Much of the answer hinges on basic supply and demand. Again, it is a question of incentives. On any given day, billions of dollars of private capital sit on the sidelines in America, looking for promising new ventures that could yield big returns. More of that money does not flow into the defense sector because most venture capitalists have come to believe that defense is a lousy investment, and plenty of empirical evidence supports that assumption. For decades, too many defense technologies have failed to transition from promising research and development efforts to successful military programs fielded at scale. Too many small companies doing defense work have become casualties in the “valley of death” rather than billion-dollar “unicorns.”

The best start-ups regularly raise large infusions of private capital that are multiple times greater than the present revenue of their companies. Those private investors are not betting on what the companies are doing now but on what they could do and could become in the future, with greater resources.

A big reason why many Silicon Valley engineers are frustrated with Washington is because they think America’s defense leaders too often act like hypocrites. And they are not wrong. Senior leaders in the Department of Defense and Congress have a tendency to talk a big game about the importance of new technologies for the US military. But when push comes to shove, most of the biggest contracts continue to flow by the billions to legacy military platforms and the traditional defense companies that manufacture them. If Washington leaders put more of their money where their mouths are, this could entice a lot more of America’s leading engineers and innovators to start working on military problems.