The Book That Reveals Why America Could Lose World War III
Christian Brose’s The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare offers a compelling assessment of the American military and its acquisition programs.
Christian Brose, The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare (New York, NY: Hachette, 2020). 320 pp. $28.00.
IN A letter to a friend in 1908, Lord Esher, a leading UK Liberal political operator, wrote of Germany, “the danger now is that in Europe we have a competitor the most formidable in numbers, intellect and education with which we have ever been confronted.” One hundred and ten years later, in its National Defense Strategy (NDS), the United States, Britain’s successor as the world’s leading power, voiced almost identical concerns about China. Though the NDS actually spoke of two “peer competitors”—pointing to Vladimir Putin’s Russia as a major near-term threat to American interests, allies, and friends—it was China that it viewed as posing a far more dangerous long-term challenge to American security and leadership.
In his important and highly readable book, The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare, Christian Brose both elaborates upon the NDS and adds urgency to the need to act upon its warnings. Brose knows whereof he speaks. As John McCain’s senior policy advisor and staff director of the highly influential Senate Armed Services Committee—the youngest person ever to hold that position—Brose was privy to the most sensitive intelligence reports concerning Chinese and Russian military progress and prowess. He especially closely followed, and attempted to influence—sometimes successfully, at times less so—the Department of Defense’s strategic, operational, and technical response to the challenges these two states pose to American security. More particularly, his experience on Capitol Hill rendered him especially sensitive to China’s remarkable gains, frequently by illicit means, in the realms of cyber, space, networking, and advanced computing in all its forms.
BROSE’S MESSAGE is not solely about the need to recognize the high-technology threats that China and Russia pose to the United States; it is equally about America’s thirty-year complacency and its inability to maintain the overwhelming technological lead it held at the end of the Cold War. That lead enabled it to dominate what Brose calls “the kill chain,” a term that is widely used in the military but, as he rightly notes,
few outside of the military have ever heard of.” Put simply, the kill chain involves “gaining understanding about what is happening [wherever militaries compete or are in conflict] … making a decision about what to do … and … taking action that creates an effect to achieve and objective.
Moreover, he adds, “though that effect may involve killing, more often the result is all kinds of non-violent and non-lethal actions that are essential to prevailing in war or military contests short of war.”
Brose argues that the so-called American “unilateral moment,” during which time, in the rather unkind words of French foreign minister Hubert Vedrine in 1999, America was a “hyperpower,” administrations of both parties did too little to maintain American mastery of the kill chain. In particular, they failed to exploit the stunning advances that the commercial high-tech sector had achieved in what became known as “the information revolution.” Moreover, the federal government seemed almost indifferent to the growing alienation of that explosive sector, which he terms “Silicon Valley,” from the Department of Defense. As a result, China, and to a somewhat lesser extent Russia, have both forged ahead technologically while in relative terms America has stood still. In so doing, both countries threaten to break the American kill chain in order to realize their strategic objectives.
Russia under Vladimir Putin seeks to restore its place as a major power whose global reach can extend beyond eastern and central Europe and the Middle East. China’s objectives are in the first instance, to evict the United States from East Asia, thereby ensuring its dominance over the entire region. Indeed, it seeks to extend its sphere of military influence well beyond the Western Pacific as far as both its land and maritime “silk roads” can reach.
Brose’s concerns regarding the Pentagon’s tardy exploitation of high-tech solutions to future challenges recall for me such behaviors when I was serving in the Pentagon in the early 2000s. In relating Russia’s 2014 assault on Ukraine, Brose writes that “the Ukrainians tried to dig themselves into bunkers and trenches, but the Little Green Men hit them with thermobaric warheads that sucked all of the oxygen out of those closed spaces, turning it into fuel that ignited everything and everyone inside.” As the Department of Defense (DoD) Comptroller, I was privy to every DoD program. I also had the ability, though limited by Congress, to move funds within and between accounts in order to bolster projects that often for bureaucratic reasons were never brought out. One such project was the selfsame hyperbaric weapon that Brose describes. The weapon had been under development in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency for several years, but, due to bureaucratic indifference, had yet to see the light of day. In November 2001, when America had launched Operation Enduring Freedom against Al Qaeda and the Taliban-led government of Afghanistan, I was approached by Ron Sega, then assistant secretary of defense for Research and Engineering, who requested funds for a weapon he claimed would flush terrorists out of their Afghan caves. He called it a hyperbaric weapon, and said that if I could fund it, it could be fielded within six months. He requested less than $100 million, which even twenty years ago was a rounding error in the Pentagon budget. Recognizing that the weapon was the victim of Pentagon inertia—against which Brose devotes many pages to voice his frustration, I transferred the funds that Sega needed. By the following spring, the military was employing the weapon with great success.
A similar case crossed my desk at roughly the same time frame, with far less successful results. Pete Aldridge, Sega’s boss as undersecretary for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics, touted a hypersonic weapon that could fly at least five times the speed of sound. He requested and received funds that would move the program into the later stages of development. Two decades later, the U.S. military still has yet to field a hypersonic weapon of any kind.
On the other hand, as Brose pointedly notes multiple times in his volume, China already can deploy the DF-17 missile that carries the WU-14 hypersonic glide vehicle and has a range that may be as long as 1,550 miles. The DF-17, which was publicly unveiled in October 2019 and is now operational, poses a new and more dangerous threat to the U.S. Navy’s aircraft carriers.
The WU-14 is not the only hypersonic weapon that China threatens to add to its arsenal. For example, China has been testing the Xingkong-2 “waverider” hypersonic cruise missile. Indeed, as Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Michael Griffin has observed, “in round numbers [China has conducted] 20 times as many hypersonic weapons tests as has the United States over the last decade.”
Moreover, Russia may be further ahead than China in the realm of hypersonics. Russia has deployed the Peresvet laser since December 2019. In the same month it also introduced into service the Avangard hypersonic glide system, which also went into serial production last year. Finally, its Kinzhal hypersonic ballistic missile, which reportedly can reach Mach 10, or 7,672 miles per hour, has undergone successful operational testing.
YET HYPERBARICS and hypersonics represent the least of high-tech challenges that would confront the U.S. military were it to engage in conflict with what the NDS terms “strategic” competitors. Brose’s primary emphasis is on the Pentagon’s inability to capitalize upon the breakthroughs that the commercial sector has accomplished in artificial intelligence, quantum computing, machine learning, space technologies, and the Internet of Things. Employing metaphors that make these technological advances comprehensible to the lay reader, Brose demonstrates that the breakthroughs that have emerged from Silicon Valley and its counterparts elsewhere in the United States will change the very nature of warfare, or, as Brose puts it, “transform the character of military power.”
Space will become a central theater of warfare, as has already been the case with cyber. Large numbers of small satellites will enable constant surveillance of enemy movements. In addition, technological advances will enable information that supports “situational awareness” to be evaluated, coordinated, prioritized, and disseminated to networks of battle systems at hitherto unimagined speeds. Most importantly, not only will machines carry out many of the tasks currently assigned to humans, they will do so far more effectively and efficiently.
Brose demonstrates that these developments are already rendering obsolescent many of what the Pentagon considers to be its most advanced weapons systems. Nevertheless, the DoD has displayed shockingly little interest in capitalizing on the slew of advanced technologies emerging from the commercial sector.
On the other hand, these technologies are central to China’s aggressive intentions in Asia. Beijing seeks not only to deny American and allied military forces the ability to operate freely—termed anti-access/area denial (A2/AD)—in the air and at sea within the first island chain nearest to its coast, employing what it terms “assassin’s mace weapons,” but also to extend its A2/AD capability well into Western Pacific. The key elements of its strategy are not only its land-based missiles and its large and still growing fleet, but also its space-based sensors and the latest advances in information and computer technologies that would network all of its military systems.
Actually, things go wrong even when the Pentagon does attempt to catch up to the advances that are prevalent in the commercial world. A classic case that Brose notes is that of DoD’s effort to bid out a contract for an enterprise cloud that would serve the entire Department as opposed to only some of its component parts. To do so, DoD sought to contract for what it labelled the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI.
Several of the largest hi-tech firms—including Amazon, Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, and Google—expressed interest in bidding for what was to be a major $10 billion award. Significantly, Google dropped out of the bidding after its employees protested that working with DoD violated its “corporate values.” Although the award seemed imminent in the summer of 2019, it became subject to a combination of bureaucratic and political entanglements. First, Oracle protested the impending award to Amazon, for whom the contract appeared to be “wired.” The senior judge of the U.S. Court of Claims responded by putting the award on hold. In August 2019, several weeks before the winner was finally to be announced, President Donald Trump intervened to put the award on hold once more, ostensibly to have Mark Esper, who had been confirmed as secretary of defense a few weeks earlier, review the contract before the Department determined which bidder should win the contract.
As Brose notes,
it was only in October 2019 that the department finally awarded a contract to set up an enterprise cloud, which quickly became embroiled in official procurement protests stemming from Donald Trump’s attacks on one of the competitors, Amazon, and its founder Jeff Bezos.
Bezos owns the Washington Post, a frequent critic of the president, and no one mistook Trump’s intervention as motivated by technological rather than political concerns. On October 25, DoD awarded the contract to Microsoft.
Brose’s account of the JEDI mess ends there. In fact, however, the story is far from over. Amazon turned and protested the award to Microsoft. The following February, 2020, a day before the Microsoft system was meant to go live, a federal judge put a halt to any further activity until the protest was resolved. In response, the DoD promised the judge to quickly reopen bidding on part of the contract. That did not satisfy Amazon, however. Early in May, Amazon filed another protest, challenging the DoD’s handling of its reconsideration process and arguing that the department’s revision was too vague to permit Amazon to price its new bid with any degree of accuracy. Nevertheless, the DoD gave no indication as to whether it would revise its “reconsideration process.” Meanwhile, the Pentagon continues to operate without an enterprise cloud, years after it had first begun to identify the need for one.
The irony of the JEDI fiasco is that, as Brose notes, “the information revolution has moved beyond the cloud to what is called edge computing.” He buttresses his argument with the case of Nvidia, a firm whose graphics processing unit is at the heart of increasingly higher resolution video games and that is building mini-supercomputers for autonomous vehicles. He writes,
when equipped with well-trained machine learning algorithms, Nvidia’s computers enable vehicles to make sense of the myriad events that happen every second on congested roads and perform complex, time-sensitive actions, such as maneuvering through city streets … all of this information is being processed right where the vehicle collects it and needs it.
It is this process that is called edge computing; “a better description,” he notes, “might be machine brains.”
Nvidia’s technology, and others like it, outstrips the most capable computers onboard the DoD’s most advanced and complex weapons systems. Brose points out that Nvidia’s DRIVE AGX Pegasus, which conducts 320 trillion operations per second onboard a car or truck, represents 800 times the computing power of the F-35 fighter, the DoD’s most advanced aircraft. What is even more troubling is that, as Brose observes, “compared to the rest of US military programs, when it comes to being an intelligent system the F-35 is light years ahead.” Most weapons systems cannot themselves process the information they collect. That takes place elsewhere, and is a lengthy and painstaking process that humans, not machines, carry out.
One might have thought that DoD would be eager to exploit Nvidia’s technological breakthroughs. The Pentagon continually assures both the Congress and the public that it is seeking the closest possible relationship with the commercial high-tech sector. Nevertheless, Nvidia does not do any business with the Department of Defense. This isn’t because of Nvidia’s lack of interest or ideological misgivings about working with the military. On the contrary, Nvidia would very much like to partner with DoD. Rather it is because the DoD has yet to develop a consistent formula for interacting with smaller companies and start-ups that are not part of its traditional industrial base.
AS A result, it is China, not the United States, that has devoted massive resources to capitalize upon these technological developments. Even as the Pentagon has been fixated on the “war on terror” for the past two decades, China has begged, borrowed, and stolen many of the American-developed hi-tech capabilities in the process of reinventing its military to compete on equal terms with that of the United States and to break the American “kill chain.”
Brose is at pains to point out that machines will not completely replace humans on the battlefield. Instead, machines will enable humans to focus on strategy and to optimize both operations and tactics. He also posits that it is critical that new technologies be subjected to sufficient operational testing to warrant the trust of troops in the field. Brose concedes that machines will be no better than the algorithms that control them and that they will be subject to error. Nevertheless, with adequate testing, machines will be far less prone to errors than humans who most likely would be overwhelmed by the mass of information they must evaluate in the shortest possible time. Indeed, in the absence of high-speed connective networks, humans generally would have to do so without the ability to fuse their findings with material that other systems might be generating at the same time.
Even as the DoD has yet to exploit commercial high-technology to its fullest, it continues to acquire ever more costly systems at increasingly lower rates. While Brose acknowledges that the U.S. military is more capable than ever, it is also shrinking at a frightening pace. Moreover, whereas in the past three decades the United States has had time to build up its forces, faced only third-rate opposition on the battlefield, and benefitted from unchallenged command of the skies and the seas, that will not be the case when facing Russia and especially China. Quality is important, of course, but numbers matter as well, and Brose demonstrates that America is simply ill-equipped to generate in a timely manner the force levels that would be required to face its peer competitors.
Brose offers a number of reasons for the Pentagon’s inability to exploit the technologies that could be made available to it. To begin with, in the past the DoD was prepared to place big budgetary bets on a relatively small number of systems without hamstringing developers with a myriad of rules and regulations that the bureaucracy, or Congress, or both, might have generated. Brose writes of General Bernard Schriever, who, together with the former Nazi scientist Wernher von Braun (whom Brose does not mention), led the development of long-range ballistic missiles despite numerous test failures and bureaucratic opposition thanks to President Dwight Eisenhower’s unstinting budgetary support. “And,” notes Brose, “they did it all, from start to finish, in just five years.”
Similarly, money was not an issue nor regulations a barrier for Hyman Rickover, father of the nuclear-powered submarine and—not mentioned by Brose—the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. Kelly Johnson, who headed Lockheed’s so-called “Skunkworks,” led the development of several aircraft, including the SR-71 reconnaissance plane, the fastest ever flown. All of these developments took place during the Cold War, when the Soviet Union posed both a military and technological threat to the West; it was the Soviets who launched the first satellite and made Sputnik a name as widely recognized worldwide as Michael Jordan decades later. But then, as Brose archly notes, “this was how America acted when it was serious.” He argues forcefully and convincingly that this is how America should act again.
Why, then, has the Pentagon failed to engender the same spirit of dynamism and experimentation that it once did? Why is its acquisition system so hidebound that, as Brose recounts, the DoD spent two years and $17 million to test a pistol? Brose offers a powerful and cogent series of explanations that alone would make the book a worthwhile read. He points to the flaws in the DoD’s programmatic processes and the prevailing bureaucratic caution that penalizes experimentation and risk taking. And he notes that both are buttressed by Congressional preferences for maintaining job-creating programs whether or not those programs best support the military’s efforts to retain its superiority over all comers.
Brose knows whereof he speaks. He is a veteran of John McCain’s unceasing efforts to reform both the military and the Pentagon while working with like-minded allies such as former House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry. Brose has few kind words for the Pentagon Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution process, better known as PPBE. (The “E” is a rather late add-on, which I initiated in 2002 while I was serving as DoD Comptroller). He rightly notes that the process, built around what is termed the “Program of Record,” that is, those programs initiated and funded that have been incorporated into the Department’s “Future Years Defense Program,” or FYDP (pronounced “fidip”), has enabled the bureaucracy to stifle innovation.
The stultifying effects of the Program of Record have a long pedigree. I recall that when first joining the Pentagon in 1981, I proposed to a meeting of programmers that several older efforts be replaced by newer systems. My suggestion was met with a cynical response by an Army two-star general: “Weinberger may try to change what he wants. But he won’t get anywhere. The program is locked in.”
Decades later, as I was about to take office as Comptroller, Robert McNamara asked me if the DoD still operated on the basis of the ppb system that he had introduced four decades earlier. When I replied in the affirmative, his amazed reply was “they’re still using it?” Equally amazed was Donald Rumsfeld, who, upon resuming the Pentagon’s helm after a twenty-five-year hiatus, expressed his astonishment that nothing had changed. Indeed, when early in 2001 Rumsfeld called a meeting to discuss repurposing 10 percent of the Pentagon budget, he was flatly told by a senior military officer that “you can’t do it.” Rumsfeld got so frustrated that he stormed out of his own meeting.
As if the ossification of the program were not enough, Brose points out that there are no incentives for change. Indeed, there are disincentives, since program managers simply wish to avoid mistakes so that, after two or three years in their current positions, they could move on to other jobs without any record of failure that would blemish their efficiency reports. As he puts it, “the issue is not a lack of authority to go faster or take more risk, but that those who must exercise those authorities, bear those risks, and be accountable for the outcomes rarely use the authorities they have.”
Brose could have added that where an officer was permitted to remain in the same position for more than a few years, and was willing to risk failed experiments, the program ultimately proved to be a major success. That was the case with Hyman Rickover, who directed the naval nuclear program for decades, whose last several promotions were mandated by the Congress in the face of Navy recalcitrance, and whose successors serve for eight-year terms. Similarly, Wayne Meyer, whom Brose does not mention in his book, became manager of the Navy’s Aegis radar air defense program as a captain, and successfully led its upgrades and modifications even as he rose to the rank of two-star admiral.
One way to address Brose’s concern about the lack of risk taking in the Pentagon would be to change the rating system for both officers and civilian managers. The latter generally serve as deputy program managers and provide management continuity when their military bosses are assigned to other positions. Risk taking should be a criterion for promotion, rather than a drawback. Experimentation should be rewarded, and failure tolerated. That was the case when General Schriever and his colleagues launched the ballistic missile program, or when the Marines first sought to adapt the British vertical/short landing and take-off aircraft for their own amphibious missions.
In addition, the DoD should put greater emphasis on ensuring that the leaders of its acquisition programs remain fully abreast of the latest technological developments, and are open to acquiring them regardless of source, whether from the commercial sector or the long-standing defense industrial base. Military officers benefit from ongoing professional military education, though too few of them are exposed to the workings of industry, or the latest breakthroughs in university laboratories. Civilian managers have even less exposure to technological breakthroughs; indeed, the DoD has only begun to take the first halting steps toward providing continuing education for the civilian acquisition corps. Such exposure should be a prerequisite for promotion to general or flag rank, or to the senior executive service. Only acquisition managers who fully appreciate the significance of potential technological breakthroughs can be expected to seek them wherever they might be found, whether in the commercial sector, or even among America’s allies, whose advances over the years have all too often been dismissed as unimportant and/or insignificant because of the bureaucracy’s log-standing, and deleterious “not invented here” syndrome.
In addition to undertaking the training of civilians, the DoD has begun to reach out, albeit very haltingly, to the developers of commercial high-tech. Ash Carter, Barack Obama’s fourth and final secretary of defense, was especially sensitive to the need to exploit commercial breakthroughs for military purposes. Ellen Lord, the undersecretary of defense for Acquisition and Sustainment in the Trump administration, has built upon Carter’s outreach to Silicon Valley. The difficulty is that the career bureaucracy is not nearly as forward looking as many of the Pentagon’s leaders.
In 2015, Carter prompted the establishment of the Defense Innovation Unit (at the time called Experimental, or DIU-X). Possessing an office in Silicon Valley, the unit has a mandate to reach out to the commercial sector in order to help the U.S. military make faster use of emerging commercial technologies. The following year Carter had the unit report directly to him and staffed it with both civilians and reservists with experience in high-tech industry. By the time he departed his office in early 2017, the DIU had additional offices in other high-tech regions of the country—Boston, Austin, as well as the Pentagon.
DIU has a worthy mission, to be sure, and has indeed identified some start-up programs that the military services have incorporated into their own research and development budgets. In particular, during Lord’s tenure, DIU scored an important success when in late May 2020 it awarded Google—evidently no longer suffering from qualms about working with DoD—a contract to detect and protect against cyber threats. DIU will use Anthos, Google’s cloud service, to build, as the company put it, a “multi-cloud solution… allowing DIU to run web services and applications across Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure — while being centrally managed from the Google Cloud Console.” Thus, even as Microsoft and Amazon continue to tangle over JEDI, DIU, with a contract worth a fraction of the JEDI deal, has introduced DoD to another cloud-based approach.
The DIU award does not guarantee that the whole of DoD will actually adopt the Google cloud service, however. Indeed, the number of systems that the military has adapted from DIU’s pilot projects remains quite small. Moreover, the challenge of avoiding having these new systems weighed down by voluminous and bureaucratically-driven military specifications (termed mil-spec) has yet to be overcome.
What DIU really needs it cannot obtain from Congress: a fund that would enable it to move resources from less promising developments to new emerging ones without having to go through the entire PPBE process. As Brose notes, Congress worries about slush funds, and has tended to prefer micromanagement either on its own or on the part of the Office of the Secretary of Defense rather than grant the military, who are the actual consumers of technology, any degree of autonomy or flexibility in program development. This sentiment does not just affect DIU—it is one that constrains all DoD research, development, and procurement.
It is not merely an aversion to so-called “slush funds” that colors Congressional attitudes to defense budgeting. As Brose points out, and as I recall from exceedingly frustrating personal experience, Congress limits the Department’s ability to move funds among its accounts. Brose notes that the ceiling on what is called “re-programming” totals less than of one percent of the budget; the ceilings on individual accounts are considerably lower. These limits make it exceedingly difficult to support innovations as they emerge in the commercial sector.
It does not help that, as Brose notes, Congress’ inability to “correct the failings and oversights of the Department of Defense and the defense industrial base ... [while] too often us[ing] its awesome powers for things that do not matter much to the future effectiveness of our military,” is due in no small part “to the significant reduction in the number of members of Congress with military experience, which is roughly half of what it was thirty years ago.” In addition, he points out “less than 1 percent of members have studied computer science, and few have meaningful experience working in the technology industry.” While he acknowledges that neither form of experience is a prerequisite for prioritizing new technology for the military, he rightly concludes that “more leaders who understand these technically complex subjects can only help” and the same can be said regarding military experience.
BROSE RIGHTLY observes that “the United States needs capable allies and partners to succeed in the world, especially to balance Chinese power.” He adds that Donald Trump is not wrong to push wealthy allies to contribute more to the common defense. Still, as he also writes, “having higher expectations of our allies … should not be confused with deriding the value of having allies at all.”
Brose also is correct when he asserts that “the United States has intentionally contributed to our allies being militarily less capable.” He notes American reluctance to sell the most capable offensive and defensive weapons to allies for fear that such sales would be “destabilizing and provocative.” He also points out that for too long “we have taken a limited view of the operational utility of those allies” and that “Washington leaders pay lip service to the importance of allies.”
Indeed, one could press his argument even further: Until now, American planners saw allies as nothing more than a “nice to have” rather than as a force multiplier. Their attitude echoed that of Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson, who wrote during the war against France, “the allies are a rope of sand.” The Pentagon’s disdain of allied capabilities might have been acceptable during the Cold War, when America’s dominance and force levels were both overwhelming. It is no longer the case today, when military force levels are shrinking even as defense budgets have grown.
One result of this cavalier attitude on the part of American defense planners, that Brose does not sufficiently dwell on, is the unfortunate case that allies not only have spent less on their defense but have done so inefficiently. Instead of combining their resources and research to produce more, and more effective, systems, leading European states have supported their own defense programs by often duplicating those of their putative partners, as well as of the United States. Moreover, as noted above, the American “not invented here” attitude prevents a viable two-way exchange of military hardware and software between the United States and its allies.
Brose correctly sums up the present and long-standing challenge for American defense leaders vis-à-vis their allies and partners: “This must change for America to deny China military dominance … we must require a lot more from both our allies and ourselves.”
Brose acknowledges that many of his recommendations often are not more than visions; indeed, many of the programs he describes are little more than gleams in the developer’s eye. Nevertheless, he is right to conclude on an optimistic note. Washington policymakers do have the power to change the vector of American military capability. As Brose puts it “we have the money, the technological base and the human talent. And … the flexibility and authorities … to carry off the transition from the military we have to the military we need.” One place for them to start would be to read, ponder, and act upon this valuable volume.
Dov S. Zakheim served as the undersecretary of defense (comptroller) and chief financial officer for the U.S. Department of Defense from 2001–2004 and as the deputy undersecretary of defense (planning and resources) from 1985–1987. He also served as the DoD’s civilian coordinator for Afghan reconstruction from 2002–2004. He is vice chairman of the Center for the National Interest.