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

by Christian Brose

China has devised strategies not to beat America at its own game but to play a different game—to win by denying the US military the opportunity to project power, fight in its traditional ways, and achieve its goals.

The problem is not that America is spending too little on defense. The problem is that America is playing a losing game. Over many decades we have built our military around small numbers of large, expensive, exquisite, heavily manned, and hard-to-replace platforms that struggle to close the kill chain as one battle network.

Whereas emerging technologies have recently disrupted and remade major global industries, from entertainment to commerce to transportation, national defense has remained largely unaffected.

requires a sweeping redesign of the American military: from a military built around small numbers of large, expensive, exquisite, heavily manned, and hard-to-replace platforms to a military built around large numbers of smaller, lower-cost, expendable, and highly autonomous machines.

The problem is not lack of money, lack of technology, and certainly not lack of capable and committed people in the US government, military, and private industry. No, the real problem is a lack of imagination.

Admiral William Owens, who became vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff the following year, later concluded that “we conducted the campaign in Iraq essentially as Napoleon, Ulysses S. Grant, and Dwight D. Eisenhower had conducted their earlier campaigns.”4 In other words, massed brute force.

Many of these systems, which Rumsfeld and others billed as “transformational,” were not actually transformational in the way that Marshall and like-minded thinkers intended. These systems did not represent better, faster ways to close the kill chain. They were simply new versions of old things. For example, one allegedly revolutionary component of the new aircraft carriers was electromagnetic catapults to launch aircraft rather than the steam systems of the past.

For example, the F-22 and F-35A fighter jets cannot directly share basic airborne positioning and targeting data despite the fact that they are both Air Force programs and built by the same company.

These and other promising technologies were not neglected or abandoned for lack of funding but rather because they threatened traditional ideas and interests, such as manned military aviation.

Rather than making hard choices about what not to do or buy at present in order to be more ready for the future, the administration and Congress kept handing the US military more missions, but no more resources.

What each president was slow to learn was that Russia was more interested in restoring the great-power status it lost in 1991 than in becoming the partner the United States hoped it would be.

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.

Indeed, while Washington was talking about a revolution in military affairs and often falling short of its own goals before giving up on the idea altogether, China transformed its military in the historical blink of an eye to target the very military systems that Washington kept plowing money into year after year.

“to move the most useful information rapidly to those who needed it most.” In other words, it was still all about closing the kill chain.

The paramount concern was picking winners: the priorities that were more important than anything else, the people who could succeed where others could not, and the industrialists who could quickly build amazing technology that worked. Other concerns, such as fairness and efficiency, were of secondary importance.

When the Cold War ended, there were 107 major defense firms. By the end of the 1990s, there were five.

National defense had become a nearly closed system that was increasingly unattractive to new companies, and the barrier to entry was seemingly insurmountable.

As the answer suggests, most US military systems are many years behind the state-of-the-art technology that commercial companies such as Nvidia are developing. The most capable computer onboard a US military system is the core processor in the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which has earned it the nickname “the flying supercomputer.” The processor can perform 400 billion operations per second.1 By comparison, the Nvidia DRIVE AGX Pegasus can conduct 320 trillion operations per second right onboard a commercial car or truck.2 That is eight hundred times more processing power.

it is the job of humans, not machines, to comb through most of that data and find the relevant bits of information. In 2020, that is the full-time job of literally tens of thousands of members of the US military. When they are off-duty, they may use Nvidia’s technology to play video games or even assist them on their drive home. But in uniform, they are essentially doing the same jobs that their grandparents did in World War II.

military networks are like a medieval world of unpaved roads, handmade bridges, and checkpoints that inhibit more than facilitate the flow of information.

time and time again, is that members of the US military are handed equipment whose functionality is inferior to what they use in their everyday lives.

It is as if America defeated the Soviet Union and then went about adopting the Soviets’ military procurement system.

Our military is overly invested in large bases and expensive platforms that our rivals have spent decades building advanced weapons to attack.

What remains is a smaller, older force that has been so strained by years of operations overseas that it is still many years away from fully recovering.

Militaries are unlike civilian institutions in many ways, but a primary difference is that they lack routine sources of real-world feedback on their performance.

That is also why Assault Breaker succeeded but a program such as the Army’s Future Combat System did not: It became a theory of everything for everyone and eventually collapsed under the weight of the many divergent requirements it was directed to meet.

It is only when civilian leaders and military mavericks are aligned in favor of disrupting the status quo that real innovation becomes possible in the absence of war.

In reality, true military innovation is less about technology than about operational and organizational transformation.

This has been one of the biggest failings of the US defense establishment over the past few decades: we stopped doing meaningful experimentation, the kind that Moffett or Schriever would recognize.

Owens went on to say, is that “the side that is the most smug, the most convinced that its interpretation of the past is the best guide for the future, often turns out to be the loser in the next war.”

It can also be difficult for Americans to appreciate fully the extent to which the leaders of China’s ruling Communist Party are, in fact, ideologically motivated communists.

Indeed, biotechnology could be one area, more than others, where values differences between America and China have the greatest military ramifications.

The US military is drowning in data. It uses powerful and exquisite sensors, all machines, to suck up oceans of information about the world, but then it leaves the job of making sense of it to humans.

From President Xi Jinping down, China’s senior leaders are fully mobilized and moving with awe-inspiring speed to become the world leader in emerging technologies.

The ethical value of human decision making is wasted when people do jobs that require them to use little of their ethical faculties.

It is not difficult to imagine that greater use of these intelligent machines today could lead to more ethical outcomes in war right now, such as reducing the number of civilian casualties or the risk to US troops.

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.

The US military is more a collection of balkanized battle networks that require large quantities of time and human struggle to cohere.

The problem is not that the US military is on the verge of taking humans “out of the loop” of the kill chain but that the US military today has way too many loops and way too many humans in the middle of all of them.

The US military today is simply much slower and less effective than it could or should be at doing the one thing that will determine its success or failure—closing the kill chain.

The United States prevailed in World War II primarily by superior military mass. We simply outproduced our enemies.

the US Air Force that fought in Iraq in 1991 had more than twice as many attack aircraft for operational missions as does the Air Force of today.

the larger concern in regard to the men and women of America’s military is not that they will become too dependent upon intelligent machines in the future but rather that their ability to succeed in the future is at risk now because of a lack of this technology.

Technology was not the only reason why the carnage of World War I was so horrific. It was also because militaries had radically changed what they fought with but not how they fought. Much of the war was waged with modern technology but antiquated doctrine.

Logistics has been the greatest limiting factor in the history of warfare. Hence the old saying: “Amateurs talk tactics; professionals talk logistics.”

Safe areas and sanctuaries will disappear. Everywhere will be contested and within range of enemy fires—even the US homeland.

In recent decades, US leaders have given our military too many missions and have prioritized US military “presence” in too many places across the world that deliver too little benefit to our national defense.

The problem is that this process has become so bureaucratic, so risk averse, so filled with people who can say no, so inclined to develop, test, and buy different things in the same ways, that too often we just make simple things hard, like buying a new handgun.

And once those programs get started, it is incredibly difficult to stop them, because of how many stakeholders in and out of our government benefit from continuing them at all costs.

The real problem is that so few defense companies are left in America after decades of defense industry consolidation, that so few of the remaining companies are leaders in emerging technologies, and that those which are doing this futuristic work for the US military have little to no voice in the budget process.