She’s at the moment taking a break earlier than leaping into her (nonetheless unannounced) subsequent act. “It’s been refreshing,” she says—however disconnecting isn’t simple. She continues to watch protection developments carefully and expresses concern over potential setbacks: “New administrations have new priorities, and that’s fully anticipated, however I do fear about simply stalling out on progress that we have constructed over numerous administrations.”
Over the previous three many years, Hicks has watched the Pentagon rework—politically, strategically, and technologically. She entered authorities within the Nineties on the tail finish of the Chilly Battle, when optimism and a perception in world cooperation nonetheless dominated US overseas coverage. However that optimism dimmed. After 9/11, the main target shifted to counterterrorism and nonstate actors. Then got here Russia’s resurgence and China’s rising assertiveness. Hicks took two earlier breaks from authorities work—the primary to finish a PhD at MIT and the second to affix the suppose tank Heart for Strategic and Worldwide Research (CSIS), the place she targeted on protection technique. “By the point I returned in 2021,” she says, “there was one actor—the PRC (Individuals’s Republic of China)—that had the aptitude and the need to essentially contest the worldwide system because it’s arrange.”
On this dialog with MIT Expertise Assessment, Hicks displays on how the Pentagon is adapting—or failing to adapt—to a brand new period of geopolitical competitors. She discusses China’s technological rise, the way forward for AI in warfare, and her signature initiative, Replicator, a Pentagon initiative to quickly discipline hundreds of low-cost autonomous programs equivalent to drones.
You’ve described China as a “proficient quick follower.” Do you continue to imagine that, particularly given latest developments in AI and different applied sciences?
Sure, I do. China is the most important pacing problem we face, which suggests it units the tempo for many functionality areas for what we’d like to have the ability to defeat to discourage them. For instance, floor maritime functionality, missile functionality, stealth fighter functionality. They set their minds to attaining a sure functionality, they have a tendency to get there, and so they are inclined to get there even quicker.
That mentioned, they’ve a considerable quantity of corruption, and so they haven’t been engaged in an actual battle or fight operation in the way in which that Western militaries have skilled for or been concerned in, and that could be a large X think about how efficient they’d be.
China has made main technological strides, and the outdated narrative of its being a follower is breaking down—not simply in industrial tech, however extra broadly. Do you suppose the US nonetheless holds a strategic benefit?
I’d by no means wish to underestimate their means—or any nation’s means—to innovate organically after they put their minds to it. However I nonetheless suppose it’s a useful comparability to take a look at the US mannequin. As a result of we’re a system of free minds, free individuals, and free markets, we’ve the potential to generate rather more innovation culturally and organically than a statist mannequin does. That’s our benefit—if we will notice it.
