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Introduction
Last week’s book, Atomic Habits, shook up our worldview in a positive way. It’s fitting that this week’s book, The Kill Chain, overturned innate assumptions in a less pleasant, but equally necessary way. This wake-up call comes courtesy of Christian Brose, the former Staff Director of the US Senate Committee on Armed Services. Brose’s government career spans 15+ years across the U.S. Department of State and the Senate Armed Services Committee - the latter of which Brose served as a key advisor to former Senator & presidential candidate, John McCain. Brose left the public sector in 2018 (shortly before McCain’s passing) to join Anduril Industries as the military defense company’s Chief Strategy Officer. Anduril builds cutting-edge hardware and software products that solve complex national security challenges for the US and its allies. Since launching in 2018, Anduril has quickly become a force in the defense industry. The company recently raised $450M at a $4.5B valuation from several major venture capital groups including Andreesen Horowitz, Founders Fund and 8VC. In The Kill Chain, Christian Brose presents an iconoclastic view of American national security matters that may surprise lay observers like ourselves.
The Shortcomings of the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex
Brose analyzes the current challenges faced by what his former boss John McCain called the “military-industrial-congressional” complex. This term refers to the “iron triangle” that addresses US national security concerns: the Department of Defense (DoD) executes defense policy and requests funding from Congress, much of which is ultimately funneled to large, legacy defense contractors for technology and services that the DoD wants. According to Brose, systemic failure now characterizes this Military-Industrial-Congressional complex.
Brose describes this as a failure to understand what’s really happening in the construction and exercise of military power, which leads to misjudgment and mismanagement of the American defense enterprise. One key manifestation of this phenomenon is thinking about defense in terms of platforms - individual vehicles and specific advanced equipment systems like aircraft carriers, battle tanks, or fighter jets.
Well-intentioned, honorable and competent DoD leaders go before Congress and argue for funding based on the need to maintain a 355 ship Navy or a 386 squadron Air Force. These platforms are powerful, tangible and satisfying to look at; they also employ manufacturing workers across many congressional districts and often come to define the identities of military institutions. Brose argues that this approach mistakes inputs for outcomes and means for ends; the DoD needs to ultimately buy deterrence, whether it comes from platforms or something else. Making conflict too costly for adversaries is what achieves the maintenance of peace, and this end must be kept in clear focus.
The deterrence offered by legacy platforms erodes as the era of great power politics returns. Russia and China observed US global dominance after the end of the Cold War in 1991 with fear and resentment. In response, their militaries have developed weapons that target these large and traditional military platforms. With hypersonic missiles that can take out aircraft carriers at sea within range, these adversaries feel less pressure to compete on power projection of naval fleets themselves. Brose outlines other key examples where Russia and China have focused on weapons that negate the American advantage without competing on the same playing field. The Kill Chain describes frightening accounts of Russians using these evolving tools and tactics in Ukraine since 2014, as well as how the US could easily lose a war to China in the Pacific with massive losses in troops and equipment. This vivid example has led us to contemplate China’s recent aggression towards Taiwan, a key American ally and strategically critical trading partner. With the once-overwhelming power gap between the U.S. and China having narrowed dramatically, would the United States be able to defend Taiwan in a conflict with China halfway across the world? We are not the first to think about this issue by any means, but we believe that it’s an issue that should be discussed more than it is - especially given Taiwan’s strong democratic example and critical role in high-tech supply chains.
Solutions & The Path Forward
Despite these concerns, solutions exist for the vulnerabilities, inefficiencies and lack of interoperability inherent in the current platform-based approach. Brose recommends refocusing on the military’s concept of the kill chain. The kill chain is a three-step process: gain understanding of what is happening, decide what to do about it and take action (which can be violent or non-violent). Greater focus on closing the kill chain lies at the heart of Brose’s approach. He believes the Department of Defense should focus less on the quantity and strength of its platforms and more on the efficacy, speed, flexibility, adaptability and overall dynamism of its kill chains. Military planners should leverage more of the data they produce to optimize operations, and they can no longer underemphasize defense vs. offense in a world that once again has more than one great power.
One of the primary examples Brose proposes for achieving this is a military internet of things – a series of battle networks where human military personnel oversee networks of intelligent machines that share pertinent data and can act autonomously. In this new battle network, the United States would employ larger numbers of highly autonomous machines that are smaller, cheaper and mass producible rather than smaller numbers of large, traditional, expensive, exquisite, heavily-manned and hard-to-replace platforms. For example, Brose’s approach would favor producing legions of cheap, autonomous and lethal aerial drones over smaller quantities of expensive manned F-35 fighter jets. The F-35 is an incredible weapon system, but it also exemplifies many of the problems inherent in the platform-based approach. Its rollout was delayed for years past schedule. Designers had to fix many bugs as they tried to patch together technical requests from around the Pentagon. The system is extremely expensive and has not been produced in large quantities yet. Many other platforms face these issues in addition to the problem of being obsolete by the time they’re rolled out, contributing to expensive upgrade and maintenance cycles for decades after purchase.
Conclusion & Interesting Recent News
While we’re not experts in US defense policy, we find the analysis and recommendations in The Kill Chain to be compelling. We’ve also been inspired to dig in and learn more. Key topics we intend to focus on include just how much the US military advantage over Russia and China is eroding, the state of autonomous intelligent machine development, and what other military thinkers are saying about these matters. We’re not optimistic about what we’ll find on the last point. Brose’s observation that many pay lip service to buzzwords like digital transformation, internet of things, AI and machine learning while focusing on platform counts and composition aligns with what we’ve seen as outsiders.
We saw a very conspicuous example play out last month, when the Pentagon’s first ever Chief Software Officer (CSO), tasked with driving digital transformation and IT modernization across the DoD, resigned rather cantankerously. After three years, Nicolas Chaillan was fed up with bureaucrats’ inability or unwillingness to change or to fund needed change. As Chaillan stated in his resignation that went viral on LinkedIn:
“I realize more clearly than ever before that, in 20 years from now, our children, both in the United States’ and our Allies’, will have no chance competing in a world where China has the drastic advantage of population over the US. If the US can’t match the booming, hardworking population in China, then we have to win by being smarter, more efficient, and forward-leaning through agility, rapid prototyping and innovation. We have to be ahead and lead. We can’t afford to be behind.”
“I, as have many of us, have been trying for 3 years now to convince various teams to partner and merge work across the Department. We don’t need different stacks just for the sake of egos. There are 100,000 software developers in the DoD. We are the largest software organization on the planet, and we have almost no shared repositories and little to no collaboration across DoD Services. We need diversity of options if there are tangible benefits to duplicating work. Not because of silos created purposefully to allow senior officials to satisfy their thirst for power.”
Another key point of interest for us is the gulf between the American technologically innovative class and the military-industrial-congressional complex. Leaving domestic partisan politics aside, we struggle to be patient with American tech companies that hesitate to do business with the DoD over moral concerns without controlling their appetite for doing business with the Chinese Communist Party. We do, however, sympathize with the hesitance to deal with bureaucratic sclerosis. We’d celebrate the DoD implementing Brose’s recommendations to bridge this gap and create a more entrepreneurial, fast-moving process for cooperation between new entrants / tech companies and the DoD. A helpful framework could borrow elements from the model of Eisenhower’s policy in the 1950’s: a sense of urgency, rapid funding, accountability to results and deadlines.
As Americans, we hope there will be more public discussion and awareness about the issues raised in the book, and that they’ll be addressed with the urgency they demand.
All the best,
The Citizen Scholar Team
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Discussion #10: The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare, by Christian Brose