Word.ws English Dictionary

kill chain

kill chain noun: the process of making an attack, from identifying the target to dispatching forces and destroying it.

Noun

kill chain (plural kill chains)

  1. The process of making an attack, from identifying the target to dispatching forces and destroying it.
    • [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?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
    • 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.2026 March 3, Robert Booth, Dan Milmo, “Iran war heralds era of AI-powered bombing quicker than ‘speed of thought’”, in The Guardian, →ISSN

Forms of kill chain

pluralkill chains

Questions about kill chain

What does kill chain mean?
Kill chain means the process of making an attack, from identifying the target to dispatching forces and destroying it.
What part of speech is kill chain?
Kill chain is a noun.
What is the plural of kill chain?
The plural of kill chain is kill chains.

Words near kill chain in the dictionary

  1. kill
  2. kill bit
  3. kill bits
  4. kill box
  5. kill boxes
  6. kill chain
  7. kill chains
  8. kill cord
  9. kill cords
  10. kill devil
  11. Kill Devil Hills

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: kill chain (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “kill chain.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/kill_chain. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.