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

by Christian Brose

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.