Kill Chain

In the Anduril page, the “kill chain” is the organizing metaphor for the company’s whole thesis — and is the networked-lattice idea drawn from the book The Kill Chain (distinct from this concept page). The argument: “the exquisite-platform paradigm (carriers, bombers, the F-35) is the wrong shape for the next conflict; the right shape is many cheaper, more autonomous nodes networked into a ‘kill chain’ lattice.” The future of military power, on this view, “belongs to autonomous, networked, attritable systems built at startup speed, not to a handful of exquisite legacy platforms” — and Anduril’s Lattice software is the connective tissue that wires those nodes into a coherent chain.

The concept sits at the center of Kyle’s defense-reading cluster: book sources framing the thesis include The Kill Chain, Chip War, Skunk Works, Flying Blind, and The Man From The Future, and it connects to the Dependencies and American Dynamism threads on the Anduril page.

Context: In military doctrine, the “kill chain” is the sequence of steps to engage a target — find, fix, track, target, engage, assess (often abbreviated F2T2EA). The strategic argument Kyle tracks holds that whoever can complete that chain faster and more resiliently — by distributing it across many cheap, software-networked sensors and shooters — wins, displacing reliance on a few high-cost “exquisite” platforms.

Where this appears

• Anduril — the central metaphor for Anduril’s thesis: replacing exquisite platforms with many autonomous, networked nodes wired into a “kill chain” lattice via Lattice software.