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Focusing on the kill chain can also help us avoid other common errors: the fetishization of new technology and the temptation to believe that technology alone will save us.
Under his tenure, in the spirit of improving efficiency, new layers of oversight, analysis, and management were added, and these grew and began choking off the ability to develop breakthrough technologies quickly.
The “timely fielding of qualitatively superior weapons is not being achieved,” Schriever said, because now it took more than twice as long and “enormously” more money to develop them.
If the United States develops a new, defensive way of war that is focused less on projecting military power than on countering the ability of others to do so, we could create the same dilemmas for our competitors that we are facing.
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.
The future force should also be built around highly decentralized networks that move limited amounts of data rather than the highly centralized networks of today that must move tons of data.
The process can become divorced from a realistic outlook on what is operationally necessary at present and what is technologically possible in the future.
Milley could have decided to go faster or buy the weapon differently, which the bureaucracy would have found risky, but he could have used his authority as a senior leader to do so because he was ultimately accountable for getting soldiers the weapons they need when they need them. Milley
The result, however, is all manner of misplaced priorities and misguided decisions for the US military overall. The Army, for example, is set up to think about closing the kill chain primarily on land with its own ground forces, whereas the Navy is set up to think about doing so primarily at sea with its own maritime forces. But if the fastest and most effective way to close the kill chain against enemy ships is with land-based capabilities—or, better yet, a mixture of different services’ capabilities—those kinds of solutions do not arise easily or naturally in the Pentagon because the
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America’s main problem lies in Washington. It rests in the choices and decisions we have made. It encompasses our increasingly dysfunctional political system
They will have to see it with their own eyes. They will have to see that it works and that it performs better than the systems they are buying and using today. They will have to be made to feel in a visceral way that by continuing to invest in what is familiar, they are putting their self-interest above the needs of the nation, and they will own the consequences if these legacy systems fail America’s servicemembers in a future war. In short, the future will win only when
