A winter evening in 2017, in John McCain’s office in the Russell Senate Office Building. Christian Brose — staff director of the Senate Armed Services Committee, McCain’s foreign-policy hand for a decade — walks the senator through how a war with China would actually unfold. Carriers sunk in the opening hours, bases cratered, networks blinded. This was not one aide’s imagination: David Ochmanek of RAND, the Pentagon’s own federally funded research arm, had compressed a decade of classified wargaming into a single line Brose quotes: “When we fight China or Russia, blue gets its ass handed to it.”
Brose turned that evening into The Kill Chain (2020), still the sharpest insider anatomy of why the Pentagon buys platforms instead of outcomes. And by the time it reached print, its author was chief strategy officer at Anduril — the venture-backed defence firm co-founded by Palmer Luckey, which sells precisely the cheap, autonomous, software-defined systems the book says America must now buy. Brose discloses the affiliation; the acknowledgements thank Luckey by name.
None of this makes the diagnosis wrong. The congressionally mandated commission on the National Defense Strategy reached similar verdicts from a disinterested seat. But notice what the reader cannot do: the lost wargames at the book’s core are classified — unverifiable, and therefore unfalsifiable, in either direction.
So the working rule cannot be “trust him” or “dismiss him”. It has to be finer than that: separate the diagnosis, which independent bodies corroborate, from the prescription, which happens to be the author’s product line. Future-war writing has carried this dual character since the genre existed — warning and sales prospectus, bound in one volume.
Read the acknowledgements before the argument.