The Kill Chain Quotes

“It is as if America defeated the Soviet Union and then went about adopting the Soviets’ military procurement system.”
― Christian Brose, The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare

“Do we now believe, viscerally and actually, that there is something worse than change?”
― Christian Brose, The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare

“the real problem is a lack of imagination.”
― Christian Brose, The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare

“Do not present problems without also having answers to recommend.”
― Christian Brose, The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare

“New technologies are important, but not as important as new thinking.”
― Christian Brose, The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare

“This was how America acted when it was serious. 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. Did this approach occasionally result in waste, fraud, and abuse? Yes. But that was deemed the price of moving fast, getting things done, and staying ahead of the Soviet Union.”
― Christian Brose, The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare

“Eisenhower believed in empowering these founders by giving them broad authority to solve clearly defined problems, providing them all of the resources and support they needed to be successful, and then holding them strictly accountable for delivering results. In short, it was a strategy of concentration—of priorities, money, effort, and, most importantly, people.”
― Christian Brose, The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare

“Defense companies spent less money on research and development and more on armies of lawyers, lobbyists, accountants, and consultants to help them comply with the Pentagon's growing acquisition bureaucracy and win more of the shrinking number of contracts.”
― Christian Brose, The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare

“These were the very same systems that Marshall wrote in 1992 would be "progressively less central to military operations" because they would become large, vulnerable targets as US adversaries developed their own reconnaissance-strike complexes. And yet it was into these legacy systems that Washington poured billions of dollars, year after year. And because Washington focused on means more than ends, pieces more than networks, platforms more than kill chains, the US military has ended up with an array of sensors and weapons that often struggle to communicate with another and function together--like a box of mismatching puzzle pieces...”
― Christian Brose, The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare

“I get to attend a lot of meetings, dinners, and working groups in which people are trying to bridge the divide between Washington and Silicon Valley, the defense and technology worlds, and I have come to believe that we are radically overthinking this problem. Much of the answer hinges on basic supply and demand. Again, it is a question of incentives. On any given day, billions of dollars of private capital sit on the sidelines in America, looking for promising new ventures that could yield big returns. More of that money does not flow into the defense sector because most venture capitalists have come to believe that defense is a lousy investment, and plenty of empirical evidence supports that assumption. For decades, too many defense technologies have failed to transition from promising research and development efforts to successful military programs fielded at scale. Too many small companies doing defense work have become casualties in the “valley of death” rather than billion-dollar “unicorns.” The reason there are not more success stories is not a mystery: the US government did not create the necessary incentives. It did not buy what worked best in large quantities.”
― Christian Brose, The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare

“It is not possible for the US military to know exactly what it needs for the future. But it is possible to create better incentives that stimulate the development of new capabilities and produce novel solutions to our most pressing military problems.”
― Christian Brose, The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare

“We convinced ourselves that the period of peace and prosperity we were enjoying was uniquely the result of our virtues, our values, and our power, and that all of it would last forever.”
― Christian Brose, The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare

“The entire basis by which the US military understands events, makes decisions, and takes actions—how it closes the kill chain—will not withstand the future of warfare. It is too linear and inflexible, too manual and slow, too brittle and unresponsive to dynamic threats, and too incapable of scaling to confront multiple dilemmas at once.”
― Christian Brose, The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare

“But as McCain was fond of saying, hope is not a strategy. The responsibility for defending America lies with us, and time is running out.”
― Christian Brose, The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare

“In Congress, less than 1 percent of members have studied computer science, and few have meaningful experience working in the technology industry.”
― Christian Brose, The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare

“There is no such thing as an “autonomous” machine, technically speaking, because autonomy describes a relationship, not a thing.”
― Christian Brose, The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare

“US military systems, where hardware has always been king and software largely an afterthought. For most military systems, the schedule for hardware updates determines the schedule for software updates. After all, most of the companies building these systems are hardware companies, not software companies. This has created multiyear software development cycles that are doomed to failure. Think of how well your mobile device would work if its software and apps were updated only every several years. That’s how it is for military systems.”
― Christian Brose, The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare

“In reality, true military innovation is less about technology than about operational and organizational transformation.”
― Christian Brose, The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare