Christian Brose’s The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare is a book about death. It is a book about Senator John McCain’s legacy after pursuing defense reform as Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. It is a book that makes a case for the death of the current tradition of American power projection. Correspondingly it is a book about the desired death of a defense acquisitions ecosystem that has, according to Brose, contributed to building a military ill-equipped for the 21st century.
Information, Interdependence, and Friction in Strategy
Information has a critical place in warfare. It is at once the source of both intelligence and the fog of war. Information is a nebulous infinite set from which we draw our frameworks, biases, and facts. The growing surfeit of data has led to proclamations that “data is the new oil” and even the idea that the information extracted from this data constitutes a kind of currency. At the tactical level, the intelligence born out of information preparation certainly constitutes a means of transacting operations. Yet beyond the battlefield, and into the realm of grand strategy, the utility of information can be uncertain.
Diary of an Orphan: Information-Based Effects in the U.S. Military
Tales of the demise of non-kinetic, information effects are greatly exaggerated, but that doesn't stop information operations from being controversial at best, and ineffective at worst. The reason is a matter of preference: deliver the emotional impact of a kinetic strike against a threat, or endure the statistical drudgery of sorting non-kinetic signal from noise. The US spends more on kinetic hardware than many militaries combined, so the Pentagon’s preferences are obvious. Yet information flows, their data generating processes, their interpretation and their implications for battlefield and non-battlefield environments are set to increase exponentially. The challenge in a national security context is not only to think all the way through the information effects of the structure behind the transmission of signal but also through how the signal is received, processed and acted upon by behavioral agents. The national security context has largely focused on the former, to the detriment of the latter.