In her final address in the Pentagon’s No. 2 job, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen H. Hicks touted her team’s work to quickly disperse U.S. military’s capabilities to better challenge China, while cautioning against miscalculation in the competition between the two great powers.
In a Jan. 10 speech at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, Hicks emphasized the bipartisan consensus that the People’s Republic of China and and its ambitions in the Indo-Pacific region are the top strategic concerns for the U.S. Under the Biden administration, she said, the Pentagon focused on “driving changes needed to outpace the PRC and ensure our enduring military advantage.”
Many of those changes came down to spreading out and scaling up capabilities, given how China “carefully crafted its elaborate military modernization” to focus on an anti-access/area denial strategy, Hicks said. Watching how the U.S. projected power with large deployments and central hubs in the 1990s and 2000s, China’s leaders geared their approach, she said, to “keep us out of the western Pacific in a crisis.”
In response, “we’re changing the game, and even changing ourselves where necessary,” Hicks said, focusing on becoming more distributed, mobile, and resilient.
For the Air Force, the development of Agile Combat Employment, in which combat forces disperse to numerous expeditionary airfields as opposed to large bases, is one part of that change. But Hicks also noted that the service is “hardening Pacific bases,” one of Secretary Frank Kendall’s operational imperatives for modernization.
Hicks highlighted the Air Force’s investment in Collaborative Combat Aircraft—semi-autonomous drones that will fly alongside manned platforms, carrying weapons or sensors to potentially distribute a formation’s capabilities.
Hicks’ own signature effort, known as Replicator, is likewise focused on drone development. Replicator seeks to field thousands of cheap autonomous drones across all domains, including loitering munitions, and other systems including undersea vehicles, quadcopters, and the Air Force’s Enterprise Test Vehicle program.
“Make no mistake, our novel concepts are imposing dilemmas that sow doubt in our competitors,” she said. “Sometimes with new capabilities like attritable autonomous systems, and sometimes by using existing capabilities in new ways.”
Hicks and other Pentagon officials say Replicator is set to hit its goals this coming summer.
“We knew execution was key with Replicator; that was part of our thinking from the beginning. It’s where other innovation visions had stumbled in the past,” Hicks said. “By driving both technology change and culture change, Replicator is showing that DOD can move fast to shape the battlespace and equip our warfighters with what they need to win.
That focus on scale and distribution extends to space, where Hicks noted efforts by the Space Force and others to move to “proliferated architectures” with large numbers of small satellites.
“We’re ensuring that the web of satellites DOD can draw upon is so great, that attacking or disrupting them would be a wasted and escalatory effort,” Hicks said.
On top of that, the Space Force has also shown it can launch satellites on accelerated timelines, improving resiliency.
The U.S. military must continue to pursue these programs to “deny the territory-conquering goals of a military that wants to someday exceed our own,” said Hicks, who will transition out of the Pentagon when the Trump administration takes over Jan. 20.
But Hicks emphasized that U.S. investment in new capabilities does not signal coming conflict with China; rather, Hicks said, “victory” in this strategic competition means assuring U.S. security and interests while at the same time avoiding war.
“We don’t believe conflict is inevitable,” she said. “But it’s our job to prevent war by always being ready for war if it comes. So where Beijing might see DOD anticipating a potential conflict, that’s because we’re concerned Beijing will instigate one. Both sides must try hard to avoid misunderstandings in this dynamic.”