"kill chain" meaning in English

See kill chain in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Forms: kill chains [plural]
Head templates: {{en-noun}} kill chain (plural kill chains)
  1. (military) The process of making an attack, from identifying the target to dispatching forces and destroying it.
    Sense id: en-kill_chain-en-noun-HeVImVrE Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header, Pages with 1 entry, Pages with entries, Military Topics: government, military, politics, war

Inflected forms

{
  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "kill chains",
      "tags": [
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    }
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  "lang_code": "en",
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  "senses": [
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      "categories": [
        {
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "English entries with incorrect language header",
          "parents": [],
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        },
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          "source": "w"
        },
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          "kind": "other",
          "langcode": "en",
          "name": "Military",
          "orig": "en:Military",
          "parents": [],
          "source": "w"
        }
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      "examples": [
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          "bold_text_offsets": [
            [
              74,
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            ]
          ],
          "ref": "2025 October 30, Ross Douthat, “What Palantir Sees”, in The New York Times, New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 30 Oct 2025:",
          "text": "[To Palantir CTO S. Sankar] And so Palantir treats the military as both a kill chain problem and a corporate supply chain problem? You’re working on both effectively?",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "bold_text_offsets": [
            [
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            ]
          ],
          "ref": "2026 March 3, Robert Booth, Dan Milmo, “Iran war heralds era of AI-powered bombing quicker than ‘speed of thought’”, in The Guardian, →ISSN:",
          "text": "Anthropic’s AI model, Claude, was reportedly used by the US military in the barrage of strikes as the technology “shortens the kill chain” – meaning the process of target identification through to legal approval and strike launch.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "The process of making an attack, from identifying the target to dispatching forces and destroying it."
      ],
      "id": "en-kill_chain-en-noun-HeVImVrE",
      "links": [
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          "military",
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        [
          "process",
          "process"
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        [
          "attack",
          "attack"
        ],
        [
          "identify",
          "identify"
        ],
        [
          "target",
          "target"
        ],
        [
          "dispatch",
          "dispatch"
        ],
        [
          "force",
          "force"
        ],
        [
          "destroy",
          "destroy"
        ]
      ],
      "raw_glosses": [
        "(military) The process of making an attack, from identifying the target to dispatching forces and destroying it."
      ],
      "topics": [
        "government",
        "military",
        "politics",
        "war"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "word": "kill chain"
}
{
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      "form": "kill chains",
      "tags": [
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      ]
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  ],
  "head_templates": [
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          "text": "[To Palantir CTO S. Sankar] And so Palantir treats the military as both a kill chain problem and a corporate supply chain problem? You’re working on both effectively?",
          "type": "quotation"
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          "ref": "2026 March 3, Robert Booth, Dan Milmo, “Iran war heralds era of AI-powered bombing quicker than ‘speed of thought’”, in The Guardian, →ISSN:",
          "text": "Anthropic’s AI model, Claude, was reportedly used by the US military in the barrage of strikes as the technology “shortens the kill chain” – meaning the process of target identification through to legal approval and strike launch.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "The process of making an attack, from identifying the target to dispatching forces and destroying it."
      ],
      "links": [
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        [
          "process",
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        ],
        [
          "target",
          "target"
        ],
        [
          "dispatch",
          "dispatch"
        ],
        [
          "force",
          "force"
        ],
        [
          "destroy",
          "destroy"
        ]
      ],
      "raw_glosses": [
        "(military) The process of making an attack, from identifying the target to dispatching forces and destroying it."
      ],
      "topics": [
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        "military",
        "politics",
        "war"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "word": "kill chain"
}

Download raw JSONL data for kill chain meaning in English (1.9kB)


This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2026-03-11 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2026-03-03 using wiktextract (602557e and 59dc20b). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.