The Kill Chain

Brose spent years as staff director of the Senate Armed Services Committee under John McCain, and he wrote this as an argument about how the United States buys and organises military power. His unit of analysis is the kill chain: the sequence of understanding a situation, deciding what to do, and taking action. He argues that American defense planning has fixated on platforms, meaning aircraft carriers, manned fighters and large bases, while China has built forces designed to break American kill chains through long-range missiles, sensors, jamming and cyber attack.

The consequence, he says, is that the US buys small numbers of extremely expensive systems that are precisely the targets an opponent has optimised against. He describes classified and unclassified wargames in which American forces lose quickly, and he traces the acquisition process, requirements writing, congressional politics and service culture that keep producing the same answers. His recommendation is a shift to large numbers of cheap, expendable, autonomous systems, to software and machine intelligence as the core capability, and to buying outcomes rather than platforms.

The evidence is insider testimony about Pentagon process plus open-source analysis of Chinese doctrine. There is little quantitative modelling.

Brose became an executive at Anduril Industries, which sells the kind of autonomous systems he advocates, and readers should weigh that. The book was also written before the Ukraine war, which supplied real evidence about cheap drones, attrition and the vulnerability of expensive platforms, largely supporting his direction while complicating his confidence that software alone decides outcomes.