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

by Christian Brose

For the goal of a military should not be to buy platforms. The goal is to buy deterrence, the prevention of war. And the only way to deter wars is to be so clearly capable of winning them that no rival power ever seeks to get its way through violence.

We often tried to use unproven technologies to produce better versions of the same kinds of platforms that the US military had relied upon for decades. Many of these programs turned into multi-billion-dollar procurement debacles.

“The main problem,” one military officer put it to me last year, “is that none of my things can talk to each other.”

Put simply, the means by which the US military generates understanding, translates that knowledge into decisions, and then takes actions in war have not been built to adapt.

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.

It 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. Put simply, it should be a military defined less by the strength and quantities of its platforms than by the efficacy, speed, flexibility, adaptability, and overall dynamism of its kill chains.

But he also stressed that new technology on its own did not enable militaries to succeed. They also had to develop new ways to employ that technology operationally and reform old institutions for new strategic purposes.

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.

But most of that money went toward new versions of old things, and that is the real reason why so many truly revolutionary efforts ended up underfunded or discarded: they threatened the big, manned legacy systems that formed the identity of the military services.

The deeper problem that has resulted from our experiences and choices of the past three decades is that the way the United States has built its kill chains is at risk of becoming irrelevant to the future of warfare. The connections between our military systems tend to be highly rigid, excessively manual, rather brittle, and thus slow. We have largely focused on connecting specific military systems together to generate understanding, facilitate decisions, and take actions against specific kinds of targets. But those kill chains do not easily adapt to threats that are different from those they were specifically built to address. They may be highly effective against preplanned objectives that do not change much, such as striking stationary targets in the opening days of a conflict. But our kill chains struggle to confront dynamic threats, such as moving targets, or multiple dilemmas at once.

Assassin’s Mace weapons

The bigger problem is that over time the military-industrial complex has failed at the one job it had: to get the absolute best technology the nation has to offer into the hands of the US military so that America can stay ahead of its strategic competitors.

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.

Another critical point is that military innovation is never about technology alone or even primarily. What is always more important is what militaries use technology to do—how they use it to build new kinds of capabilities, operate in new ways, and organize themselves differently to take full advantage of their new ways of fighting.

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

Put simply, militaries and their civilian leaders must believe there is something worse than change. They must believe that change is the lesser evil, and that a failure to change will realistically produce catastrophic, near-term consequences, such as the loss of a major war. Ultimately, this is the deeper reason why America has been so badly ambushed by the future. For far too long, we have not truly believed there is something worse than change. We simply could not imagine it.

The Cold War is often called a contest between great powers, and that is true enough, but the Soviet Union was never a peer of the United States. At the apex of its power, the Soviet Union’s GDP was only about 40 percent that of the United States.5 It was largely isolated from the broader international economy and lacked its own domestic base of technological innovation. The Soviet Union was powerful, but it was never America’s peer.

The origins of security competitions are always the result of geopolitics. These competitions are caused by the mistrust that exists between great-power competitors that are developing advanced technologies and their concerns over losing military advantage. This is why America and China are now locked in a strategic competition over emerging technologies that will be unlike such contests of the past in some key respects.

the vast majority of instances in history when nations have agreed to restrict their use of the most terrible weapons—from nuclear weapons and incendiary bombs to poison gas and biological weapons, land mines and cluster bombs—agreement has occurred only after those weapons were developed, after they were widely used in combat, or after nations determined the weapons were not as effective or beneficial as assumed.

In some areas, China may even surpass the United States. Realistically, the best-case scenario is not victory in this race but parity. That may not sit well with many Americans, who are used to dominating our military competitors, but the idea is nothing to scoff at.

The point here is not to argue whether to keep the kill chain firmly in human hands or to turn it over, in part or in whole, to machines. Rather, the point is that the current debate over the role of intelligent machines in war—one of the most serious ethical questions raised by emerging technologies—too often focuses on the wrong things. We seem overly concerned with means rather than ends, actors rather than actions, “killer robots” rather than effective kill chains. Ironically, even our ethical debates about military technology seem overly focused on platforms.

Many defense and technology experts, such as Paul Scharre, Heather Roff, and Joe Chapa, have written extensively on the serious ethical and technical challenges involved in the military use of intelligent machines—challenges that the deepening strategic competition between the United States and China is only exacerbating.

Our challenge, then, will be adapting to an era of human command and machine control.2

As intelligent machines become capable of performing these kinds of technical tasks more effectively than humans can, allowing them to do so can liberate more members of the military to do work of greater ethical value. They can spend more of their days solving complex problems with other people, making operational and strategic decisions, contextualizing critical information, distinguishing between right and wrong, and commanding people and machines to perform critical missions. These are the kinds of jobs that Americans actually join the military to do. In this way, intelligent machines could enable more human beings to concentrate on the ethics of warfare than ever before.

Bingo!

One other principle should guide our development of lethal autonomous weapons, and it might make much of America’s defense establishment deeply uncomfortable: radical transparency. This is largely the opposite of how the US government has approached the issue of armed drones over the past two decades. We went to enormous, perhaps even excessive, lengths to ensure human control over every task in the kill chain, but then we refused to talk about it. We treated the entire issue with the utmost secrecy—to our own detriment. We created the perception that we were doing something wrong and illegal, because we largely refused to explain, discuss, and defend our actions. We prevented the operators and overseers of these weapons from demonstrating how thoroughly and carefully they used these systems to limit unnecessary loss of innocent life and ensure that our actions were consistent with our values and our international legal obligations. The result was that America handed this entire ethical question over to our critics, who told lies about our use of military drones and made baseless accusations that we did not sufficiently and convincingly rebut.

Each piece of the battle network is indispensable, but it is the sharing of information that is most important, and most often overlooked. Things that sense and shoot are interesting. Things that share information are not. They are unsexy. They do not star in action movies. Those who regard themselves as “warfighters” rarely like to be bothered with mundane technical issues such as information protocols and pathways. But they are what transform a mess of individual military platforms into one battle network, and in an increasingly automated military they will be far more important. Indeed, without the ability to share information well, there is no battle network, and the result is that it takes more time, more people, and more money to close the kill chain.

The central idea of this digital revolution, which has enabled the Internet of Things, is that individual platforms matter less than the broader network that they are part of.

The US military is more a collection of balkanized battle networks that require large quantities of time and human struggle to cohere. And that is the deeper problem with our current military business model: each sensor or shooter that we add to our battle networks to increase their speed and effectiveness requires corresponding additions of exponentially more money and manpower. And sooner or later, we will run out of both, especially in a long-term competition against China, which has four times as many people and could soon have an economy as big as ours.

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.

right on

The purpose of a Military Internet of Things is not to replace people in the performance of these essential roles. To the contrary, it is to free up people in our military to focus more of their time on performing these core functions better.

However, technology itself is never the goal. It is always the means to achieving the goal. The real goal of sensing, for example, is not to collect exquisite sensors but rather to extend the reach and accuracy of human understanding. Similarly, the real goal of shooting is not to stockpile traditional arms but rather to extend the reach and efficacy of human action.

But the real objective is to have better, faster, more adaptable kill chains—to be able to understand, decide, and act more effectively under highly dynamic conditions than our opponents. The critical source of future military advantage will be the ability to impose so many complex dilemmas on our opponents at once that we shatter their kill chains, disrupt their ability to command and control their own forces, and leave them incapable of understanding what is happening, making sound decisions, and taking relevant actions.

By inverting the ratio of humans to machines in the future battle network, a Military Internet of Things will arrest and reverse the shrinking of the US military that has consistently occurred for the past seventy-five years. The United States prevailed in World War II primarily by superior military mass. We simply outproduced our enemies. But in the early Cold War, the United States recognized that it could not win a numbers game against the Soviet Union, and we correctly made a bet in favor of quality over quantity.

Putting people in machines makes them significantly more complex and expensive.

In fact, many of the machines in a Military Internet of Things could become so inexpensive that they would not need to be maintained at all. They would be expendable, “attritable.” This would enable the US military to acquire technology more as we do in the commercial world, where the emphasis is less on maintaining the same machines for decades at a time than on acquiring the latest technology as it becomes available.

Jan Bloch

The Future of War.

Decentralization of communications networks will accelerate as militaries become capable of their own version of “cutting the cord.”

This is why, for example, Trump’s decision to withdraw from the nuclear agreement with Iran was a mistake—not because the deal was “good,” but rather because it would have enabled America to spend less of its limited military power focused on what is ultimately a secondary priority.

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. In this way, emerging technologies could be tailwinds rather than headwinds. We could achieve the more limited, defensive goal of denying military dominance to China by creating the same kinds of anti-access and area denial predicaments for China that it has been creating for us.

The purpose would be to deter acts of aggression and war by demonstrating to potential aggressors that the US military can destroy any forces they send on the offensive, prevent opponents from projecting military power beyond their own territory, replenish our losses faster and more cheaply than they can, sustain the fight for as long as necessary, and halt their ability to keep attacking. It would be an American version of “winning without fighting.”

We need to buy outcomes, not things.

First, rather than small numbers of larger systems, the future force should be built around larger numbers of smaller systems. This will enable the US military to distribute more forces over broader areas. Our rivals would no longer be able to concentrate their sensors and shooters on a few big targets. Instead, they would have to find and attack many things over larger spaces. In this way, the United States could impose costs on its competitors rather than allowing them to impose costs on us, as is the present case. Every dollar that a competitor has to spend on more sensors and more weapons to target larger masses of US military systems is another dollar that is unavailable for them to spend on new offensive capabilities. This would be a reversal of the same kind of losing game the United States has been forced to play for too long.

This points to another attribute that the future US military should have: rather than large numbers of people operating small numbers of heavily manned machines, the future force should consist of smaller numbers of people operating much larger numbers of highly intelligent unmanned machines. People are expensive. Putting people in machines is even more expensive. And no one ever wants to pay the ultimate price of losing a human life. Manned systems will not fare well on future battlefields, which will be extremely violent with heavy losses on all sides. Lower-cost intelligent machines, however, can operate in large numbers and be lost and replaced in equally large numbers. Putting fewer human beings physically in harm’s way may be more effective militarily and produce better, ethical outcomes.

“unobtainium,”

“You give me $17 million on a credit card, and I’ll call Cabela’s tonight, and I’ll outfit every soldier, sailor, airman, and Marine with a pistol for $17 million. And I’ll get a discount on a bulk buy.”