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

by Christian Brose

But little was changing about how, and with what, the United States actually fought. The primary reason was the same as before: it simply did not strike a critical mass of Washington’s decision-makers as necessary.

government. The scale of this divide has become staggering. The top five artificial intelligence companies in the United States—Amazon, Alphabet, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple—spent a total of $70.5 billion on research and development in 2018. That is money they are investing in the future. In contrast, the top five defense companies—Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon Technologies, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman—spent a total of $6.2 billion. Indeed, Apple regularly sits on around $245 billion of “cash on hand,” enough money to buy all five of those top US defense companies outright.

leaders, who come and go every few years, as tantamount to part-time employees who are not around long enough to really matter—or, as a friend in one of those communities once put it to me, “the Christmas help.”

Work assesses that US and allied forces would have to close the kill chain against 350 Chinese ships during the first three days of a conflict.