Future Conflict & Emerging Tech: Brose’s "The Kill Chain" Reviewed
Emerging Technology
I heard about Christian Brose’s book The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare when the book came out four years ago. Given my work in the intelligence community at the time and my past career experiences, I was well familiar with many of the themes that he talks about, but I had not read the book until this year. My mistake. What I missed is the opportunity to see a well-informed insider’s take, in a single volume, on a complex set of interconnected defense, competition with China, and technology issues amidst the evolving character of future conflict.
Brose sounds an alarm that the United States’ military dominance - born out of World War II and honed to victory in the Cold War - is eroding rapidly and is not moving fast enough to adapt to the new realities of emerging conflicts of the twenty-first century. Brose states the U.S. is falling behind its principal competitor, China – noting the PRC is a greater political, economic, and military challenge to our national security than the Soviets were during the Cold War. The scale of today’s threat is one that Americans do not fully understand.
The author has the background and perspective to tell this story. His long experience in government, working for Secretaries of State Colin Powell and later Condoleezza Rice, culminating as the staff director and personal staff officer of the late Senator John McCain, Chairman of the Senate Armed Forces Committee (SASC), led him to write this book with encouragement from a host of senior policy and defense officials.
For those well familiar with the issues that Brose covers, you may find nothing really new here. And to a point, I would agree with you. There may also be a number of people who know the key points but are not steeped in the background and detail he provides. But I suspect this number of people in both of these categories is rather small and largely concentrated in a small circle of folks across the national security and the defense arenas. For both groups and most importantly, for those that are not in these groups across government and our public (are you listening, Dad?), this book offers a comprehensive baseline, which I believe is The Kill Chains’ greatest service.
So, what is the title of the book about? The kill chain is a battlefield concept familiar to most in the military, which Brose elevates and adapts to a strategic model through which to describe and assess whether the output of our defense capability will actually result in an effective military and a winning qualitative military edge.
Brose states that to regain our decisive military edge, the U.S. must win “the kill chain,” which he describes as the integration of three components.
• First, is the need for situational awareness which provides insight to where the adversary is, what they are doing and the ability to persistently surveil the adversary for timely warning.
• Second, Brose says we need to make timely decisions about what to do about it. When the adversary takes an action, we need to have in place the leadership and systems that swiftly transmit, coordinate and oversee our response.
• Third, we need to take action that creates an effect to achieve an objective. That is, have the systems and weapons we fight with resulted in an effect on the adversary of our choosing?
Brose argues that if we can do all three, we would “close the kill chain” and be positioned to prevail in conflict. He notes, that if we fall short in any element we would “fail to close the kill chain’ and would be at risk of losing in a conflict. Similarly, if we can deny the adversary from achieving these three elements in conflict, we would be “breaking their kill chain,” ultimately undermining the adversary’s ability to prevail.
The kill chain is a simple enough concept. For decades, the military has exercised similar concepts in its strategies and is integral to military planning and decision-making. But as Brose applies it, the kill chain is effective and useful as a simple model of complex strategic issues.
Brose provides an effective history of how the U.S. developed its strategy in the Cold War and set about building the key weapon systems, such as ballistic missiles, to build an effective defense. He notes President Eisenhower’s philosophy was that the government needs to get the big things right so that the defense and defense industry could be successful. For example, picking the right leadership for key tasks was an important decision that Eisenhower personally attended to.
The author notes that the nature of war has changed, and our adversaries have adapted their approach to conflict as well. But the U.S. has not changed.
Brose’s view is that a combination of lack of leadership in both the White House, DoD, and Congress to get the big things right (unlike President Eisenhower, who did get the big stuff right) has set us on a path of complacency where a lack of reform of our military to imagine and win the future fights persists. Related, the Pentagon, with support from Congress, should be investing in smaller, more diverse platforms suitable for future conflict rather than continuing to follow historical acquisition processes and political practices that are inflexible, slow, and set on producing major weapon systems that won the last conflict. The character of war has changed – the world has changed - and, as Brose contends, the U.S. was “ambushed by the future.”
Here is where I am not sure I follow Brose’s view. I am not sure that ‘ambushed by the future’ is accurate, but I get his point. In my opinion, I do not believe we were truly unaware and surprised by the change in the operating environment. For years, we have been warned about the rise of the PRC and a resurging Russia (and that Beijing and Moscow shifted their approach to conflict following their study of our success in DESERT STORM) and the rise in revolutionary technology and its disruptive transition of societies into the information age. I expect it is more the case that leadership failed to fully embrace the warnings, make the hard decisions, and act accordingly.
Brose covers many areas, but three stand out and deserve attention: the nature of conflict, technology and technology application, and the relationship between defense and the defense industry.
First, he provides insight into the visionary work by the Pentagon’s leader of the Office of Net Assessment, Andy Marshall (a.k.a “Yoda”), who, in the early 1990s, wrote of the coming changes to conflict. His work foresaw the shift to information-centric warfare coupled with advanced technology weapons. He imagined a future where ubiquitous surveillance technology would be widely available globally (and not just in the purview of the most powerful states). A future where if you could be seen, you could be killed. A future where innovation and resourcefulness in applying and combining the potential of emerging technologies would provide an edge to those who possessed those capabilities. In short, in this future conflict environment, the U.S. would have to change its way of war if it is to compete and maintain its military edge.
Second, Brose delves into a long list of the emergent technologies from generative AI, CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) spurred genetic mapping and splicing, 3d printing, advanced materials, processing advancement, human-machine interaction, etc., and their applications to space, cyber, hypersonics and communications. He cites these advancements as setting the stage for truly autonomous, intelligent machines that can sense, understand, decide, and act. He makes the good point that it is not technology by itself that matters, but the convergence of technologies into new capabilities and the connections of those capabilities in a system of machines that matters most. He describes the system as an internet of military things – a concept that is well known on in the commercial world - where the power is in the connections between the things and not the things themselves. Brose argues that new, effective weapon systems are important, but the real need is for intelligent systems, and not just weapons.
Related, the most impactful point, and one that is too easily glossed over, is the question of ethical, intelligent machines and the imperative that they operate within human-defined parameters reflective of a free society and not authoritarian regimes. In my view, the U.S. is slow to have meaningful discussions on this topic, but it is the key issue facing our society in the information age. I agree with Brose that the U.S. needs to lead in this area; less authoritarian regimes do and bias the machines built from the technology to their ideology proliferated to the global market. As Brose writes, this is a different kind of arms race that is crucial to our way of life.
Last, he traces the evolution of the close and effective defense and defense industry relationship of the Cold War to the rise of Silicon Valley, where today, new technologies and their application are aimed at the burgeoning commercial sector. In short, what was a close relationship between political leadership and our industrial base in the Cold War has drifted apart due to a shift in the defense acquisition landscape over recent decades where now the industrial base has no culture of working with the Pentagon.
Cutting-edge technological advancements are moving at speed while defense struggles to adapt and incorporate new technology under the burden of slow legacy acquisition systems more comfortable in bending metal vice writing code and that is as Brose writes “optimized for risk aversion and cost accounting, not rapid technological development at scale.”
Brose argues that the military and defense workforce have more cutting-edge, relevant technology at their fingertips in their off hours at home than in their day jobs working in defense. How true. It was a common complaint among colleagues that work could be done more effectively at home, vice at the office.
Since The Kill Chain was published, DoD has moved to reform the acquisition process. That shows promise in not just investing in new capabilities for future conflicts but also represents potentially a change in the Pentagon’s acquisition culture. One example is when last year, Deputy Secretary of Defense Hicks announced the Pentagon’s Replicator initiative, a bold and encouraging shift in defense acquisition strategy to smaller, dynamic cutting-edge drones produced at scale. According to the Pentagon, they have invested a billion dollars to deliver “all-domain attritable autonomous systems (ADA2) to warfighters at a scale of multiple thousands, across multiple warfighting domains, within 18-24 months, or by August 2025.” Time will tell if this initiative will take hold and spawn change across the risk-adverse Pentagon and industrial base acquisition culture that Brose writes about, or will the legacy culture eat strategy and Replicator becomes an anomaly. We will see.
Brose does offer solutions and what we can do to change course, arguing that the corrective path is within the government system, but details are lacking. He advocates executive and legislative leadership need to make the tough decisions and get the big things right as we did during the Cold War. The role of Congress is integral to how we govern. However, he does not describe how that side of the equation would break out and generate genuine bipartisan leadership that shifts the status quo, putting us on a corrective path. I am hopeful Brose is right, but for me, the indispensable key ingredient is senior political leadership, with the requisite experience to take on the significant challenge and make the hard decisions. Frankly, that is a huge challenge in our current political climate, where our leadership seems neither experienced nor willing to invest the capital in tackling these strategic issues. I am an optimist at heart, but I do not see an Eisenhower 2.0 anywhere out there.
This book adeptly covers a wide, complex topic, painting a picture of how strategies, technology, and defense evolved to the competitive struggle of today, which is unlike any the U.S. has ever faced before. The Kill Chain is an excellent primer and really delivers a holistic, insightful, and understandable look at the complex challenge to our nation and the challenges facing today's military. I am glad I finally read it, and it is more than worth your time for your next read.
Tags: Book Reviews, Defense Strategy, China, USMC Reading List
That sounds comprehensive!
Does Brose touch on developments out of the Russian invasion of Ukraine?
https://researchingukraine.substack.com/p/ignoring-ukraine-today-dooms-you
Will have to check this one out