The Kill Chain

March 15, 2020
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.

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