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The Kill Chain cover

The Kill Chain

Christian Brose•2020

  1. Chappy's Book Notes•332 books

The Kill Chain

Christian Brose•2020

Length
9h 44m•~161 pages
Read
Oct 22nd - 28th '24
Emerging TechnologyPolitics
•

The summary and key takeaways below are auto-generated. I ran an AI pass based strictly on my handwritten notes for this book. I haven't done my own pass over them yet.

I read a book once and take handwritten notes as I go, then leave them alone. Weeks or months later I come back and write the key points and summary from those notes.

The delay is on purpose. Having to rebuild a book out of my own notes does far more for my recall than a second read-through would.

This one has only gotten as far as the AI pass. I'll come back and redo the takeaways and summary myself soon!

Summary

Key Quotes

National defense is the ultimate closed system

America's military dominance is eroding because the kill chain—understand, decide, act—has been disaggregated by information technology, but the defense establishment still buys platforms instead of networks. China has leapfrogged in autonomous swarms, hypersonic weapons, and biotechnology while the Pentagon remains trapped in bureaucratic inertia: too many stakeholders, too-long procurement cycles, and a culture that protects legacy manned systems over revolutionary capability. The fix requires a shift from offense to defense, from hardware to software and information, from few exquisite platforms to large numbers of smaller, cheaper systems, and from a closed defense-industrial base to one that can actually absorb Silicon Valley's pace of innovation.

Key Takeaways

  • Three steps: gain understanding, make a decision, take action to achieve an objective
  • Goal is to strengthen your own chain while breaking the opponent's
  • 1980s infotech enabled disaggregation—but the military never fully adopted it
  • Revolutionary tech gets discarded because it threatens legacy manned systems that define military identity
  • Defense contractor consolidation (107 → 5 by 1990s) created a closed loop of self-interest
  • Red tape, risk aversion, and too many stakeholders make the procurement process glacially slow
  • Autonomous swarms, hypersonic weapon superiority, and aggressive biotech and space programs
  • Garasimov doctrine targets political and social fault lines—misinformation, cyber attacks, subversion
  • 2014 marked the 're-emergence of great power competition'
  • Shift from few exquisite platforms to larger numbers of smaller, cheaper, networked systems
  • Information and software must matter more than hardware
  • Military IoT could reverse the decades-long trend of shrinkage (quality over quantity)
  • Commercial tech spending now dwarfs military R&D
  • Only SpaceX and Palantir have succeeded at scale—each required billionaire founders and lawsuits
  • The tech world sees profit and global good; the military sees last line of defense—bridging this gap is existential

Notes

Introduction

  • We are not in a state to win anymore
  • Not about platforms, but deterrence
  • The Kill Chain: 3 steps
    • Gaining understanding about what is happening
    • Making a decision about what to do
    • Taking action to create an effect that achieves an objective
  • Objective is to strengthen ↑ and break opponents’ ↑
  • 1980s infotech → disaggregated kill chain
  • “National defense is the ultimate closed system”

1: What happened to Yoda’s revolution

  • “Military operations other than war”
  • Tone of cancelled programs
  • Big demonstrations of power > consistent presence
  • Revolutionary tech discarded, underfunded because it “threatened the big manned legacy systems that formed the identity of the military”
  • Focus on means > ends
  • Rational pursuit of self-interest → incompatible, closed loop systems
  • Revolution became a dirty word

2: Little green men and assassin’s mace

  • Better to target the political and social fault lines of a country, eg. Misinformation political subversion assassination. Cyber attack.
  • Garrasimov doctrine: ↑
  • China strategic military moves*
  • 2014 ambushes “re-emergence of great power competition”

3: A tale of two cities

  • The military industrial complex
  • Cold War “founders”
  • Silicon Valley was a startup incubated by the DoD
  • Bureaucracy slowed down innovation
  • Post-Cold War defense contractor consolidation: 107 → 5 by 1990s
  • Red tape, risk aversion
  • Commercial tech market came to dwarf public military R&D spending

4: Information revolution 2.0

  • Late adoption of Cloud, Edge computing
  • Worried about being left behind
  • Hardware fab / manufacturing tech
  • CRISPR, BCIs, quantum
  • Tech’s belief in global good vs military’s belief in last line of defense of aggression
  • SpaceX, Palantir: required billionaire, founders, lawsuits to succeed
  • ↑ only two that have succeeded at scale
  • View of Silicon Valley, as “ morally unserious”, profit > nationalism

5: Something worse than change

  • Hard to solve because:
    1. bureaucracy is inherently resistant to change
    1. hard to evaluate readiness without actual conflict
  • China’s return to power
  • Have to accept inevitability of power parity

6: A different kind of arms race

  • China’s autonomous swarms
  • China’s hypersonic weapon superiority
  • Biotechnology, space race
  • First impact of AI will be to improve human understanding in warfare
  • Arms control agreements often come posthumously

7: Human command, machine control

  • Intelligent machines: AI weaponry
  • “Human command, machine control”
  • Autonomy vs autonomous
  • Process of training, testing, and trust
  • Frees people to “do work of more ethical value”
  • Legality of weapons:
    • Not indiscriminate by nature
    • Cannot cause unnecessary suffering or superfluous injury
    • Cannot cause harmful effects incapable of control (bioweapons)
  • Arms race is inevitable
  • Unethical to not equip our military with the best equipment possible
  • Rules of war helps
  • Have to negotiate from a position of power

8: A military internet of things

  • Battle network:
  • Weapons development as a deterrent, moral good that saves human lives
  • Machines to facilitate human understanding, decisions, and actions
  • Military IoT could reverse process of shrinkage (quality > quantity)

9: Move, shoot, communicate

  • Weapons are getting more powerful
  • Logistics > tactics
  • Predictions on the future of warfare*
  • Goal is ubiquity

10: Defense without dominance

  • New goal: prevent China from achieving a position of military dominance in Asia
  • “Overall, the military will have to do less”
  • Switch from offense to defense
  • Larger #s of smaller systems
  • Info + software > hardware
  • We need allies

11: Bureaucracy does its thingBureaucracy does its thing

  • Needs of today > needs of tomorrow
  • Too many stakeholders / communities of interest
  • Too long a process
  • Too many present concerns to strategize about the future

12: How the future can winHow the future can win

  • Proposed solutions*
  • Mainly about creating proper incentives
  • Companies need to purchase lobbyists