Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks spoke of the challenges the Defense Department is working to overcome during a talk that marked the 10th anniversary of the Smart Women, Smart Power program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, yesterday.

Hicks, who has spent her entire life in or around the Defense Department, said she was not surprised by the challenges that faced her when she became the deputy in 2021. “The top challenge I expected and the top challenge I faced are the same — which was the relentless modernization and expansion of the People’s Liberation Army and the capabilities of the People’s Republic of China,” she told Beverly Kirk, director of Washington Programs at Syracuse University, who moderated the talk.  

Hicks has an integral role in shepherding President Joe Biden and Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III’s vision for the Defense Department to reality. In the private industry setting, the deputy secretary would be the chief operating officer, and Hicks had to connect the strategic vision “through the budget, through the capabilities development process … into the capabilities we would need,” she said. “And that has absolutely been my focus, and consistent with what I expected.” 

This has been a learning and growing process, and she was surprised at the reluctance of the institution to undertake the effort at the beginning. Part of this grew out of a decade of budgetary sequestration, she said. It is also a result of budgetary uncertainty — she noted that DOD is currently under the 12th continuing resolution just during the Biden Administration.  

The budgetary uncertainty also affects innovation, which is key to maintaining DOD’s warfighting edge. Yet even with the problems, “we’ve been able to deliver real outcomes,” Hicks said. “There is no silver bullet at a level that we’re talking about, [which is] the scale of the Defense Department.”

DOD is a mammoth-sized organization with more than 3 million people, a global footprint, tens of thousands of properties and more. Compare DOD with the largest corporations in the United States and they are still dwarfed by the military establishment. “It’s kind of an unfathomable scale, and so change at that level is really about tailoring to what are the major problems that are getting in the way of delivery to the warfighter, and making sure you have solutions targeted toward that,” Hicks said. “There is no one thing that is going to fix the challenges and barriers that we’re after. So, what I have been all about, is trying to make sure I understand the problems and then focus on the problems to get to distinct solutions.” 

Scaling solutions up to the department level will need more fundamental reforms, she said, but the department cannot wait. DOD would be “demonstrating malpractice if we didn’t attempt to execute the system that we have today to deliver outcomes,” she said. “So, that’s where we’re tailoring all these solutions to try to overcome those barriers — whether they are barriers of continuing resolutions, the way in which our budget is structured, or cultural barriers in the department itself.” 

The constant continuing resolutions has meant DOD has lost more than five years in the past decade. The department cannot make new starts under a continuing resolution, and this is a burden to innovation. “You can’t make that time up,” Hicks said.  

There have been successes and Hicks specifically cited the use of joint all-domain command and control. “In the age we live in where you can pull up your phone and pick up a rideshare, … how do you take that kind of compute capability and bring it to create decision advantage for that warfighter? So, whether it’s the commander in chief trying to understand where all the trade-offs are globally, and how that creates decision advantage, all the way down to the tactical level, where a commander on a battlefield, or at sea or in the air, or better yet, looking across all those domains to synchronize their capabilities,” she said. “That’s what we’re trying to do in joint all-domain command and control. From 2021 to today, [there has been] unbelievable progress.”

Kirk asked the deputy secretary about dealing with the seeming “polycrisis” atmosphere in national security today. The term refers to the many global crises that the United States and its allies and partners confront. “In a 30-year career, national security ‘polycrisis’ is the norm,” Hicks said. “There’s never been a time where we’ve had the luxury to … have just one crisis or urgent national security need to focus on. Today is no different.” 

What is important at this time is “having a North Star” to steer by. The National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy provide this guidance. These documents provide officials a manual to understand “what those most pressing, most dangerous, most likely contingencies are for which you need to be prepared,” she said.  

The strategies allow the U.S. government to be flexible and understand how to adjust to reality. “If you have too rigid an approach, you’ll be brittle, and you will break,” she said.

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