Can the US Keep Its Edge on the Battlefield?

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Leslie Vinjamuri: The world of defense innovation is changing fast, and competition between the United States and China—not only to innovate but to produce and manufacture key innovations—couldn't be more intense. Artificial intelligence, autonomous weapons, and cyber threats are all hitting the battlefield as countries race to build the next game-changing capabilities. Now, the US has led that race for decades, but with China catching up, the big question is: Can America stay ahead? And with the Pentagon rethinking how it buys, builds, and prioritizes new technologies, we wanted to take a step back and look at the bigger picture with the highest woman ever to serve in the Pentagon. 

Kath Hicks: Our goal should be to protect our interests and deter conflict. We don't want to fight, but making sure that we have the capabilities to win if a fight comes to us, I think, is the goal for the defense side of the house. 

LV: Kath Hicks, former deputy secretary of defense and now the Chicago Council's distinguished fellow on defense and security, has seen up close what drives innovation, how to advance and cultivate change makers, the relationship between government and the private sector, and what it means to be in a competition with China. 

I'm Leslie Vinjamuri, president and CEO of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, and welcome to Deep Dish.

Kath Hicks, the highest-ranking woman ever in the US Department of Defense as the deputy secretary of defense. You were the number two, with an extraordinary amount of responsibility. If you were going to take the long view of looking at the question of defense innovation, what have been historically some of the greatest advances in defense innovation in the United States? 

KH: First, the United States has had a series of periods of pretty substantial defense innovation. Folks, of course, will be very familiar with the nuclear age coming at the end of World War II and defining military competition, or the framework within which the United States operated in the Cold War and in later periods, after that, the creation of a long-range advanced warfighting capability. You can think of things like advanced aircraft, long-range missiles, improvements—in particular post-Vietnam—that are not so much about the equipment, but about the people, which we have really refined over several decades to have the best, highest-quality professional military. It has a tradition and is trained to innovate at the lowest level, the lowest echelon, and has a lot of individual ingenuity brought to bear. So it's frequent that we get in these conversations, and I'm sure we're going to talk a lot about stuff today. But the people really are the heart of what makes the US military so innovative, because they know how to bring together how to operate the excellence with which they operate and the stuff as it's advancing. 

LV: I think it's perhaps unusual when you're talking about defense innovation to get so quickly to the question of people, culture, looking after families. But I like that you've put that at the heart of the conversation and the broader question. Has the United States had an advantage when it comes to people as innovators, or the role of the people that you're referring to? 

KH: Very much so. I would again point to, in particular, the professional military era post-Vietnam, where the United States reflected on the experience in Vietnam and the military looked at issues of discipline, issues of the qualities we want in the military, pay and compensation, and how to attract families to the military. We say, "You recruit a soldier, sailor, airman, marine, guardsman, but you retain a family." So a lot of reflection on what it takes to have this professional military that can innovate. I think that's been something we've worked very hard on. We have a legal framework that helps to instill that kind of discipline. We have a compensation framework that's constantly being updated. And the trickiest area in the last 10-plus years is that the technology in the commercial sector is moving so quickly. There's this issue of how to bring all of that into both the uniform military, then the government, and then the defense industrial commercial sector that supports it. How do you make sure what's happening outside of the defense-specific community is really making its way in, and part of that is about that disciplined military force and part of it is about the whole ecosystem around it. 

LV: So, maybe, if we come to this question of a source shift in defense innovation, let's start with the time when you were the number two in the Pentagon. How did the sources of defense innovation, or defense innovation itself, really change? What were the major things that came your way or that you were trying to drive during that period?

KH: Well, let me give a little maybe perspective going back a couple of decades. I started at the Pentagon right at the end of the Cold War. I started in '93. Coming out of a Carter-Reagan buildup and focus on defense, we were in a position of some dominance. We had, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, sort of uncontested military strength. We were thinking about how to reframe that capability for the future. But we understood ourselves to have, in the providence of the defense department of the United States, the ability to tap into the best there was out there. But even by the late '90s, we were seeing the potential, in particular, for China to be worried about Russia, but in particular for China to take its natural advantages: population smarts, lots of different natural resources, and bring all that together in a way that would be concerning for defense.

As we watch that Chinese growth from the '90s forward, which we're now living in a period many years later where that has come to pass, it wasn't inevitable, but it came to pass, where the Chinese really did decide to invest in themselves significantly and develop capability. That was happening at the exact same time that technology itself was diffusing around the world. Certainly, the age of information and everything that's followed it. You can think of things like drone warfare now, which the United States is not engaged in. We're watching it evolve in Ukraine and Russia as the big innovators at the edge right now. So that's just one example of how much of what used to be ours to control, to drive, to lead is not in the government's control—it's outside of the government's control. And it's all about how we tap into that. That's been the big shift that when I walked in in 2021, that was already the world we were in. In the last five years, I think we've seen that prove out, and now we have this great dependence on the commercial sector, and we have advantages in the US. We have a very vibrant allied community that also has great innovation occurring. Our private sector here in the US is a source of incredible innovation. In the Biden administration, over my four years, we made sure we were putting investment behind that. We had the highest overall: $1.2 trillion in procurement and in research and development. So, it was recognition that a lot was happening on the outside that needed to be pulled in effectively. But the watch words have been, and actually continue today under the Trump administration, to be "speed" and "scale." We need to get faster, and we need to do more. 

LV: You mentioned the threats. You know, you're watching China long before you know many other people were watching China. If you're going back to the 1990s, what in your experience was a link between setting the national defense strategy and capabilities and innovation? Did you start with what you have? What can we do with what we have? Or did you look out at the world and say, "This is the threat, these are the capabilities that they have, and this is what we need to ensure that we're prepared to do."?

KH: Well, it is complicated. So the answer to your question is "yes." You look across timeframes, and you're constantly evaluating risk. There is no such thing as having everything in the world, the money, the people, the know-how to feel that you're at zero risk. When you come from the defense community, the national security community, you have to recognize that your goal is not to get to zero risk because you're also going to be wrong, but you're not going to be a perfect predictor. So, it is about how you balance risk today, risk for the future, etc. Often, what you're trying to do is trade off the risk across those two timeframes just as you described. Some people are thinking about today's risk, and some people are thinking about the long-term risk. The big strategy question is how much we worry about today and how much we should worry about the future. 

What we did in the Biden administration for the defense department is said, "We're asking the wrong question." What we should be weighing is this pacing challenge threat, the Chinese challenge. And then in some discreet areas where the Russians are the big pacing challenge, like nuclear submarines, what do we have to be able to do to achieve our goals now and in the future against these most challenging competitors? Then that is what we will prioritize. And that's what we did. We de-emphasized areas that weren't so much about those stressing capabilities, and to your point on strategy, it was all through the lens of what we need to do to secure our interests. Don't get distracted into arms races about who has how much of what unless that's really relevant to how we will be able to deter and, if necessary, fight and win a conflict. 

LV: So you're in the Pentagon during the time of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. You see these innovations on the ground, and in your leadership role, take forward some of the critical innovations in moving the US forward on the development of capabilities in the autonomous weapons realm. Tell us a little bit about that. How did that develop? What exactly did you do? Or the Replicator program is the one that people talk about. What was that? 

KH: Sure. I knew coming in that it was a goal of the administration. It was in my confirmation hearing statement that innovation is going to be at the heart of how the United States advances and continues its ability to defend its interests. And so what I did when I came in was ask, "What do we have to fix to get there?" The number one issue that confronts anyone in the executive branch is how to advance your agenda while working with Congress and other stakeholders, including industry. A lot of it was about where we can go together. Where is their shared vision? Where do we have to convince? How do you get where you need to go? 

I started Replicator in August of '23, so two years into my term. Before that, we kind of built a lot of the foundations that could make that effective. And then, as you pointed out, in that summer of '23 is when the expert community could start to see where the Ukraine-Russia conflict was bringing unproven systems, unmanned systems, and drones onto the battlefield and starting to build up this mass approach. As we looked at how to manage risk now and how to manage risk in the future, we had some "now applications," I think is how I will put it. We had, in the case of deterring Chinese aggression, particularly as it relates to treaty allies, or even helping Taiwan in its self-defense, some specific applications we knew we could bring this to bear on. We also had this need to build out the industrial capacity of the US on drone manufacturing, which, by the way, need not be kinetic. It's very helpful for things like logistics and seeing and sensing the environment. But to build out that industry that China cornered the market on, we had to send a demand signal, and it's all about the investment. That's where Replicator came into effect. It was trying to achieve multiple things at once, and has been at the vanguard of what you continue to see now as momentum for change. It was changing our culture to be about delivering capability on time, on budget, on schedule, etc. It was about actually advancing the US knowledge and industry for unmanned systems. It was showing that we could do that to Congress within the confines of what Congress had frankly demanded from us, which is, "We have given you authorities, we have given you money, show us you can execute on it." So those were the big three goals we were going after with Replicator. 

LV: How much resistance did you face? Did you feel like you were working together with Congress, and it's all very smooth internally within the bureaucracy? People are on your side, and the private sector is like, "Yes, great, money is being invested in something we want to do." We tend to think with technology and innovation, just grab it and run with it...If only it were that easy. What was it really like? 

KH: Extraordinarily hard. I think it was successful, and it demonstrated all the things we knew it would take. You had to have leadership from the top. It had to be the secretary and/or the deputy secretary. They're the only two positions in the department that have the breadth of reach and statutory, in law, ability to do what you need to do. It showed that you had to have resources that you were going to fight against in entrenched resource interests. I think you had an industry that was not involved in unmanned systems. You had intense resistance because they worried that it was going to come after dollars that they might want for other things. I really want to stress: you had a vanguard of change agents everywhere in Congress, in the private sector, in industry, and in the Department of Defense who wanted to see this embrace of any kind of change. In this case, it happened to be uncrewed systems. In Replicator 2, we did a follow-on. It was countering unmanned systems, which continues to be a high priority for the US. Those were people who wanted to see change. 

LV: Why was that? Were those people you already knew, whom you identified? Were those people whose interests were just invested in change? I was reading one of your speeches, and you talked about unlocking the people who could innovate, disrupt, and make change. How did you find these people? 

KH: Both have been around, of course, a long time, but also have been in the deputy secretary job for a few years. We had a strong sense of who was already moving in that direction. The United States Central Command, the folks who oversee Middle East operations, had been doing a decent amount of experimentation and showing some willingness to move ahead. Special Operations Command, and as I said, the [Indo-Pacific Command] team out in Hawaii, had demonstrated to us some really good use-case applications. 

We also had some great champions that we had brought into the defense department. I'll point to Mike Horowitz, now Professor Mike Horowitz, at the University of Pennsylvania, who worked for me before in the Obama administration, and we had folks on the civilian side who were ready for change. We brought in Doug Beck at the Defense Innovation Unit from Apple, who was there to help us on Replicator and other such initiatives. Then the industry, with folks who wanted to build out this piece. They were newer, they were startup, and they were vocal. They really helped us along. Again, fast forward to today, and you see a tremendous wave of support for making sure the US doesn't get left behind in this area. 

The last thing I want to say is that it is incredibly important to me, and to people like Mike Horowitz, that we do it responsibly. We, the United States, are the leader in the world, certainly among militaries, in the appropriate use of unmanned systems. We have a law and instruction inside our military. We have good policy processes, and Replicator lets us use all of that, demonstrating we were using that to make sure we were in compliance with—and really advancing responsible use of—uncrewed systems. 

LV: As you look at the current situation, do you feel like the process is happening in the same way? I know you're not inside it, but you're certainly watching it closely from the outside. The kind of setting strategy, working with the path breakers, the innovators—you call them the changemakers, working with industry, making those cultural changes, and then making sure that there is a legal framework. Is that the system that we're looking at today on the US front, or where are your concerns? 

KH: I don't have a really strong pulse on exactly what's happening, and I think none of us do. The press isn't there. The congressional oversight isn't working the way that it has been. 

LV: Important point there. Because I think sometimes we read the papers, we think we know everything, but the press isn't there. Congress doesn't have the same oversight. 

KH: Yeah. What I would say, though, is that no matter who went into the defense department following my tenure, because of my long experience there, the number one thing I'm always thinking about is execution and the gap possibilities between rhetoric and reality. They're significant when it's easy to say you're going to have this kind of revolution or expansion, and that you're going to do it the right way, but you have to actually be able to execute that, and it's too early to say that. I'm very pleased that there's been so much momentum, and it's moving in the right direction. We really do need change, so that's a very good thing. But it also has to be done well. And that's the piece I think we're just going to have to wait a little bit, either to get some further oversight to get a sense of, or just time passing, so we can see how effectively it's being done.

LV: Many of us who are more amateur than expert on the questions of defense innovation assume that the US has been at the cutting edge, in no insignificant part because of our very dynamic private sector. The relationship between the private sector and the Pentagon, in this case, is not uncomplicated, but seemed to be a source of dynamism and power. Now we're at a moment where I think some of us are wondering whether the US is keeping up and whether that relationship is enough. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the story I've been hearing from you is one where innovation, strategy, and the recognition of what capabilities need to be developed from the government work with the private sector. Presumably, sometimes it goes the other way, but one way or the other, it feels like it's been healthy and productive on balance. Where is it now, though? Is the concern now, actually, China's ability to think ahead and plan strategically to draw on its natural capabilities puts it at a natural advantage in the decades ahead?

KH: I don't think it puts them at a natural advantage. I think the US has the greater potential, and it's ours to lose in terms of our ability to protect our own interests. But the Chinese have been improving greatly on their own. I used to say they would steal their way up the value chain, with intellectual property theft. They would create rule sets for how companies had to work in China, in particular, that would allow them to have an advantage. There are lots of other ways in which they fix the system to their advantage. But they didn't have that innovation potential that the US has. I still think that's true, that they don't have our potential, but they have gotten much better at creating a system of innovation—not just copying. And they've married it to production. Production, as we all have agreed across Democratic and Republican administrations, is a major challenge. We are not a country that is known for building. We learned through COVID, in particular. There's this very searing memory for me of the baby formula crisis. The headline in the national news was that we couldn't produce enough baby formula. In the defense department, this was happening at the same time that we were running to help Ukraine, and we faced many appropriate questions. It was an interesting contrast, trying to go through that education about what it would have taken—for many years—to have that kind of line moving. We put a massive investment in the submarine industrial base with ship-building, an area of bipartisan concern. The  CHIPS Act was a great example of trying to get behind the need to manufacture more to create more, but the Chinese are just way ahead. They're way ahead, and we're going to have to decide how much we're going to invest in advanced manufacturing, robotics, and other approaches that could bring us into the same sphere of production. 

LV: This is the moment when everybody listening gets very, very nervous listening to somebody so deeply experienced and having had such a prominent leadership role, say, "The Chinese are way ahead." Maybe we should break that down just a little bit more. The Chinese are way ahead, and what happens from here? How high are the stakes right now in this competition, from a sort of capabilities and defense innovation standpoint? Concretely, what are your clearest concerns, and what does the US need to do?

KH: Yes, I want to be really clear here that the Chinese are not way ahead on military capabilities; they're way ahead on production and production technology, particularly in their civilian sector. That's where there's a lot of room for the United States to advance its own game. What the Chinese don't have—and I'm just going to go back to the beginning of this conversation—at the heart of their military, they don't have that professional, trained, ready, and operationally experienced military that we have. They have to constantly worry that they haven't tested their force, that there are massive corruption challenges inside their military, that the quality of what they're producing and what their individual service members are able to do actually can perform. This is where we have a significant advantage. 

But if we're talking about the production of mass quantities of things, that's where the Chinese have an advantage. We don't have to match that. We just have to do what we need to do to protect our interests. We have to get better at being on time, on budget, and getting out the capability that the taxpayers have paid for. 

LV: You pointed to things that I think strike at the heart of where Americans have been confident and where some people are less confident now. The other thing we haven't talked about, you referred to at one point, is America's allies and its partners. Where did they sit for you when you were thinking about Replicator, or when you think about defense innovation? How much of this happens not only within the US but in partnership with America's allies? 

KH: I think it's a huge point. First of all, allies in general are a massive strategic advantage. There hasn't been any period of human warfare or peacebuilding that hasn't depended, in part, on strong alliances and networks of relationships. If there's one thing the Chinese fear, it's not military capability; it's the power of America's alliances. 

When it comes specifically to defense innovation, we're seeing tremendous capability across certainly our allies in Europe and Asia. You also see, in partnerships, vibrant commercial sectors in places like Israel or elsewhere in the Middle East, where there's an ability to take things that are happening in the commercial sector and apply them to defense. You see a tremendous amount of assistance in Ukrainian developments that show some innovation. The Europeans have been at the heart of that; they've worked closely with Ukrainians, for instance, and the United Kingdom and other allies to develop that capability. Tapping into all of that gives the US a great advantage, certainly over a Russia or a China, that isn't working with their own relationships among themselves and with Iran. We can do better, and we just have to be able to connect closely with those allies and make sure they're willing to work with us. 

LV: There's always even, presumably amongst allies, a little bit of a "who's innovating more? Who's got the capability in a specific area?" I guess trust built up over decades, certainly in the post-war period, has really helped to ameliorate some of that competition that exists even between allies. 

KH: That's absolutely right. I won't get into how, but the laws on the books also allow us to build on defense innovation across allied relationships in unique ways. You could think of the AUKUS agreement—which is the US, UK, Australia—as largely submarine-focused undersea warfare capability development. We had laws passed specifically to advance innovation across those three countries with lower barriers to sharing. Those are the kinds of things that we can do together to give us an advantage. 

LV: Taking us now, as we close, to projecting ahead in an intense competition between the United States and China. China doesn't seem to be trying to build the sort of alliances that the US has. The US is perhaps in a moment of wobble with its allies. Where do you see this? If you're thinking 10 or maybe even 15 years out, what is your expectation, and what does it depend on? 

KH: My expectation is that the US defies the naysayers and lives up to its potential. The alliance network survives this moment and is strengthened by its common approach around issues like Ukraine, and we are able to better tap into the private sector. We overcome our production challenges, and also that there are areas of common cause with the Chinese and others that help to stabilize the world environment. Our goal should be to protect our interests and deter conflict. We don't want to fight, but making sure that we have the capabilities to win if a fight comes to us is the goal for the defense side of the house. 

LV: So, focusing on capabilities, eyes on the prize. Any other advice you would give to those who actually have the ability, in the next few years, to make decisions that could be pathaltering for the United States going forward? Any words of wisdom or words of advice? 

KH: My biggest concern is around the execution of some pretty clear goals that everyone can get behind. We need a strong alliance system. We need to make sure we can tap into our innovation ecosystem. To do that, we need to absolutely make sure that we are delivering capability and that we are together with our allies and partners when it comes time to deter conflict and fighting. If we need to. 

LV: Kath Hicks, it's tremendous to have you as a distinguished fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Thank you so much. 

KH: Great. Thank you so much, Leslie.

LV: And thank you for listening to this episode of Deep Dish on Global Affairs. I'm your host, Leslie Vinjamuri. Talk to you next week. 

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