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

by Christian Brose

Trump’s worldview, which he summed up in June 2019: “Almost all countries in this world take tremendous advantage of the United States,” he said.5 Trump sees America’s allies solely as freeloaders and free-riders, and unfortunately, he has done more to damage America’s relationships with our closest allies and to drive wedges between us than our adversaries ever could hope to achieve on their own.

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.

That structure overwhelmingly favors the present at the expense of the future.

If the future is going to win, it will have to win inside our current system.

Yogi Berra summed up so well when he said, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”

Too many small companies doing defense work have become casualties in the “valley of death” rather than billion-dollar “unicorns.”