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

by Christian Brose

Many of these programs turned into multi-billion-dollar procurement debacles. Some produced highly capable platforms, but these platforms rarely cohere into one battle network that can share information effectively. “The main problem,” one military officer put it to me last year, “is that none of my things can talk to each other.”

The result is that the US military is far slower and less effective at closing the kill chain than it can and must be.

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.

Winning had less to do with any decisive transformation in how the United States built battle networks and closed kill chains, and far more to do with the fact that our opponent was just not that capable.

But our kill chains struggle to confront dynamic threats, such as moving targets, or multiple dilemmas at once.

Although some traditional defense companies were developing some of these technologies, such as advanced missiles and directed energy weapons, many of the most consequential technologies were being developed by commercial enterprises that were not interested in providing them to the US military. How the Department of Defense ended up in this predicament is an even bigger part of this story.

The reason was simple: year after year, Washington introduced new laws, policies, and regulations that made it harder and costlier for numerous companies to remain viable in the defense industry.

As fewer companies were willing and able to do business with the military, and as the defense industry became more consolidated and less competitive, the Department of Defense turned to the same few companies for more of its needs. A narrowing group of voices was bound to create blind spots, and that was a main reason why Washington got the information revolution wrong. The defense establishment primarily thought (and still thinks) in terms of things—of building and buying platforms.

Human commanders would certainly be free to dismiss this computer-generated advice, but having it could give them access to better information and more considered options than they have now.

Though 5G networks will be critical for broader economic and geopolitical purposes, communications networks are really just pipes for information. Wider pipes allow more information to flow through them faster, and 5G pipes will be the widest yet. But faster information flows might not necessarily change the way militaries operate. Intelligent machines will.

The US military often refers to the relationship between human beings and intelligent machines as “human-machine teaming.” I dislike this term because teaming suggests a relationship of equals. The better way to think about this relationship is with the military concept of command and control, which refers to the hierarchical relationships between people in military organizations.

After all, fighter pilots are no more eager to lose their jobs to machines than factory workers are.

define problems correctly and clearly, compete over the best solutions, pick winners, and spend real money on what is most important and can make our military most effective.