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

by Christian Brose

Overview

From a former senior advisor to Senator John McCain comes an urgent wake-up call about how new technologies are threatening America's military might.

For generations of Americans, our country has been the world's dominant military power. How the US military fights, and the systems and weapons that it fights with, have been uncontested. That old reality, however, is rapidly deteriorating. America's traditional sources of power are eroding amid the emergence of new technologies and the growing military threat posed by rivals such as China. America is at grave risk of losing a future war.

As Christian Brose reveals in this urgent wake-up call, the future will be defined by artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, and other emerging technologies that are revolutionizing global industries and are now poised to overturn the model of American defense. This fascinating, if disturbing, book confronts the existential risks on the horizon, charting a way for America's military to adapt and succeed with new thinking as well as new technology. America must build a battle network of systems that enables people to rapidly understand threats, make decisions, and take military actions, the process known as "the kill chain." Examining threats from China, Russia, and elsewhere, The Kill Chain offers hope and, ultimately, insights on how America can apply advanced technologies to prevent war, deter aggression, and maintain peace

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316533676
Publisher:	Hachette Books
Publication date:	03/15/2022
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	108,153
Product dimensions:	8.20(w) x 5.30(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Christian Brose is currently Chief Strategy Officer of Anduril Industries, a technology start-up that develops national defense capabilities, and Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He served as Staff Director of the Senate Armed Services Committee (2015-2018), where he was the youngest person to hold the position in the committee's history. Before that, he served as Senator John McCain's senior policy advisor (2009-2015). Brose was previously a speechwriter to two secretaries of state, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, and a member of the State Department Policy Planning Staff.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Playing a Losing Game ix

1 What Happened to Yoda's Revolution 1

2 Little Green Men and Assassin's Mace 21

3 A Tale of Two Cities 41

4 Information Revolution 2.0 55

5 Something Worse Than Change 76

6 A Different Kind of Arms Race 97

7 Human Command, Machine Control 118

8 A Military Internet of Things 141

9 Move, Shoot, Communicate 162

10 Defense Without Dominance 184

11 Bureaucracy Does Its Thing 206

12 How the Future Can Win 225

Conclusion: A Failure of Imagination 247

Afterword: After the Storm 253

Acknowledgments 263

Notes 267

Bibliography 279

Index 287

Editorial Reviews

"The Kill Chain is a tour-de-force. Few people are as knowledgeable and experienced as Christian Brose in thinking about the intersection of emerging technology and national defense. He pulls it all together in this compelling, unsettling, and outstanding book."—Eric Schmidt, former Chairman of Alphabet and CEO and Chairman of Google

"Provocative, jolting, superb, and on target! The Kill Chain is all of those things and more. If you read only one book to better understand the challenges facing the US military and the promise of emerging technologies, this should be it."—Admiral James Stavridis, former Supreme Allied Commander at NATO and author of Sailing True North: Ten Admirals and the Voyage of Character

"Christian Brose has done the country a great service by writing this important and timely book. The Kill Chain is a powerful and thoughtful challenge to much of the conventional wisdom about national defense. It also offers a compelling vision for how the US military can get beyond business as usual to compete and win in this new era of great power competition. Brose's book should be read by every American."—Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR), author of Sacred Duty: A Soldier's Tour at Arlington National Cemetery

"The Kill Chain is an exceptional—and an exceptionally stimulating—guide to thinking about the military and technological revolutions that will produce a fundamental change to the character of war."—General David Petraeus (US Army, Ret.), former Commander of the Surge in Iraq, US Central Command, and Coalition Forces in Afghanistan, as well as former Director of the CIA

"Christian Brose understands like few others the serious challenges the U.S. military faces, especially in relation to China. He delivers a powerful wake-up call to the American people and our leadership—warning aptly that America's military superiority is at grave risk unless we reimagine defense. Thankfully, Brose issues a thoughtful and compelling plan for America to adapt effectively in this gripping, must-read book."—Susan E. Rice, former US National Security Advisor and Ambassador to the United Nations

From the Publisher

2020-02-18
A warning on the geopolitical front: Forget about the Islamic State group. It’s the rising superpower of China, and probably Russia, that the U.S. will be fighting in the future.

Brose, former policy adviser to John McCain and staff director for the Senate Armed Services Committee, doesn’t mince words: War drives military adaptation, and “many of the ways in which the US military has innovated and changed in recent years have only happened because it has been at war.” Yet the enemy, by his account, has been misidentified. Our military has been developing expensive platforms, with hardware favored over software (and software rapidly rendered obsolete in the bargain), that are directed at nonstate targets such as IS and the Taliban when the real enemies are various people’s republics. The People’s Liberation Army of China, Brose writes, has a highly evolved understanding of the “kill chain,” military parlance for the process of intelligence gathering and decision-making that can end—but doesn’t have to—in actual fighting. “We have been building our military to project power and fight offensively for decades,” he argues, “while China has invested considerably in precision kill chains to counter the ability of the United States to project military power.” Send a fleet to the South China Sea, in other words, and China will await with highly developed aircraft carrier–killing missiles; meanwhile, Chinese hackers are targeting American infrastructure and satellite systems. It will come as no surprise, given Brose’s ties to McCain, that Donald Trump comes in for a drubbing for not understanding any of this. His spending priorities are all wrong, writes the author, while his war with Jeff Bezos compromises the military’s development of cloud-based AI, and the many vacancies in the chain of command mean that nothing is getting done in the Pentagon, “which really means falling behind.” The likely outcome? A world dominated by our one-time Cold War enemies.

Alarmist at points, but an alarm all policymakers, military planners, and students of international affairs should heed.

Kirkus Reviews