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

by Christian Brose

From 1990 to 2017, the Chinese military budget increased by 900 percent.

China has rapidly developed arsenals of advanced weapons intended to break apart US battle networks, destroy the US military’s traditional platforms, and shatter its ability to close the kill chain.

The question is not how new technologies can improve the US military’s ability to do the same things it has done for decades but rather how these technologies can enable us to do entirely different things—to build new kinds of military forces and operate them in new ways.

Perhaps most importantly, Moffett fought his own leadership and peers within the Navy to promote aviators into jobs that had never been open to them, thereby seeding the bureaucracy with insurgents who would use their newfound power to drive internal change to the benefit of the kind of warfare he envisioned would become central to any victory—naval aviation.

The reason to build weapons is not because we want to but because we believe we have to, because we do not want to live disarmed and defenseless in a world full of predators. We should not build weapons because we are eager to use them but because we intend to make it so we never have to.

good idea rarely wins on its merits alone. Its success too often comes down, instead, to the trading of favors and the political dark arts.