Keynote Address by Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen H. Hicks 'Outpacing the PRC: Lessons Learned for Strategic Competition' (As Delivered)On-Camera Press BriefingSecretary[...]

Good morning - and good evening to those at SAIS campuses in Bologna and Nanjing, who are joining via livestream. Thank you to Professor Mahnken, Tom, for hosting, and to Dean Steinberg for the invitation. It is always great to be here at SAIS.

When Paul Nitze co-founded the School of Advanced International Studies - some 25 years before he became Deputy Secretary of Defense - he sought to create what he later described as "a center in Washington of independent thought."

Like Nitze himself, SAIS was a vital intellectual engine throughout the Cold War - and I know that history imbues the institution. There's even a piece of the Berlin Wall displayed downstairs.

Over the decades, SAIS always stayed true to its roots, shaping generations of national security scholars, practitioners, and policymakers - military and civilian; Democrats and Republicans alike. They don't call it the "SAIS mafia" for nothing.

Today, as I prepare to depart the same Pentagon office that Nitze held during America's last era of strategic competition, this seemed the perfect place to share how, over the last four years, we've been strengthening America's national defense for this modern era of strategic competition with the People's Republic of China.

***

Now, today's PRC is not the Soviet bloc of the Cold War, and our approach to strategic competition cannot succeed if it's merely some warmed over tactics from 40 years ago.

But there's no doubt we are in a strategic competition. The PRC is the only nation with the will and increasingly the wherewithal to remake the international order, by combining its economic, diplomatic, technological, and military capabilities to challenge the stable, open international system that's done so much for so many for so long.

That's why ensuring the United States provides our servicemembers with everything they need to defend the nation, our allies, and our interests has been my highest priority since taking office nearly four years ago. I did so in direct support of Secretary Austin, who shares my concern over this most consequential competition.

Of course, competition does not mean conflict, because no one should desire the global devastation such a war would bring.

Instead, we want the PRC leadership to wake up each day, consider the risks of aggression, and think to themselves, "today is not the day" - and for them to think that today, and every day, between now and 2027, in 2035, 2049, and beyond.

Nitze would've called that deterrence, which is of course how we seek to prevent conflict: by deterring PRC aggression against us, and our allies and partners. And key to deterrence is being able and willing to win if called to fight.

But "deterrence" is often translated to a Mandarin word, wēishè, that implies coercion. So I want to be clear: we are not trying to coerce or compel the PRC. That is not our goal, nor our approach. And that's not the only example of words DoD uses that we've learned the PRC can misinterpret.

Perhaps a better way to describe our goal and approach is "peace through strength," an ancient phrase first widely introduced into the American lexicon in the 1950s by Bernard Baruch, a close advisor to President Franklin Roosevelt. It's been a consistent, bipartisan theme of U.S. foreign policy for decades, and one the PRC should understand.

Maintaining peace in a decades-long competition means never being complacent.

Long-term strategic competition means that everywhere we currently lead either is or will be strongly contested. Moves will lead to counter-moves, counter-counter-moves, and so on. That's a fact of life in any competition. And so we've strengthened our institutional ability to regularly assess how we're doing and adjust accordingly.

With that in mind, here are four lessons that I think are critical for prevailing in our current strategic competition, which I offer for those who will carry the work forward.

***

First: Stay focused on your highest priority. The world will always try to distract you, but whether you get distracted is entirely up to you.

Remember, DoD has never had the luxury of being able to focus on only one thing at a time. We're a global force with global responsibilities. That was true throughout Paul Nitze's decades of service, throughout the post-Cold War era, the post-9/11 era, and it remains true in this era.

The China challenge isn't new - not for the Pentagon, and not for me. When I worked on DoD's 1997 Quadrennial Defense Review, we were explicit even then that "in the period beyond 2015, there is the possibility that a regional great power or a global peer competitor may emerge." And we named Russia and China as "having the potential to be such competitors."

Since then, the PRC worked with focus and determination to build a modern military, looking to blunt longstanding U.S. operational advantages. And Beijing's behavior has been a slow creep of incremental belligerency, fueling unease across the region.

It's no wonder, then, that the PLA's growing capabilities and aggressive actions were increasingly a concern for defense policymakers across the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations. And with bipartisan support and continuity, our nation started putting in place the building blocks for change. But the actualization often fell short of ambition.

So we came into office determined to build on the progress of our predecessors - from both parties - and to unlock necessary changes. We did so with a sober-minded approach that neither overinflates nor underestimates the nature of the competition.

That's why, since 2021, we've proceeded with equal measure of confidence and urgency: With urgency to sustain deterrence and our military edge, even as the PLA modernizes. And with confidence - but never blind confidence - that America has the capacity to do what's required to meet the moment: today, tomorrow, and for the foreseeable future.

Even as a global power, tradeoffs are inevitable. For example, in Europe, the Middle East, and the Indo-Pacific, everyone wants more Patriot batteries, which don't grow on trees or get built overnight.

You have to stick to your strategy and use that as your guide. Competition for finite resources will always be fierce, and should be - unlimited budgets don't help the taxpayer and don't automatically translate into military strength. So senior decision-makers must rigorously align ends, ways, and means, to ensure the strategy itself remains right and DoD can deliver on it. And if it isn't delivering, those same leaders must drive change from the top.

***

This bring me to my second lesson: Execution is paramount. And that execution must occur across the entire delivery chain that turns vision into capabilities, at scale. It's easy to talk a big game, but you have to be ready to deliver.

Reorienting one of the world's largest bureaucracies toward strategic competition isn't for the faint of heart. It requires significant personal investment, culture change, deliberate disruption and discomfort, and rejecting "business-as-usual" practices - constantly.

So from day one, we've focused relentlessly on driving changes needed to outpace the PRC and ensure our enduring military advantage. The result has been a more modernized, lethal, agile force, across our capabilities, operational concepts, posture, and much more.

We've needed that focus, because the PLA's modernization has been rapid, ambitious, and laser-focused on us - even as their leadership has openly criticized the PLA's "fake combat capabilities," perhaps a reference to their challenges with rampant graft.

For our part, we've always been committed to delivering real U.S. military capabilities that are combat-credible, and cutting-edge, from the oceans to outer space.

Indeed, today the United States maintains significant overmatch in many areas compared to the PRC, and Russia. Undersea warfare is a key example. We're going to keep it that way, even as their navies keep modernizing.

Our AUKUS partnership with the U.K. and Australia will only strengthen our combined power beneath the waves. And we're reinvigorating America's submarine industrial base, to produce at the scale and pace we need. Over four years, we've sought to invest about $10 billion in the workforce and industrial bedrock that anchors the lethality of America's silent service.

We've made even bigger investments on orbit, overseeing DoD's largest space budgets ever.

In 2024, American space launches lofted more satellites than China has throughout its history. And that's happened every year since 2021.

America's dynamic commercial space industry enables this. And it will continue to benefit DoD even more, through our new Commercial Augmentation Space Reserve - almost like our Civil Reserve Air Fleet for airlift, but for space services delivered by satellites.

Not only will it leverage our many advantages in commercial space; it's also critical to keeping space a domain of stability and tranquility, not chaos and destruction. Because it's one of multiple ways 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.

We're also outpacing China's military in the rapid, responsible use of data and AI, making our decision advantage even better than it already is.

Our approach reflects our ethics and democratic principles - we don't use data and AI to censor, repress, or disempower people.

Instead, building upon our predecessors, we draw upon our many U.S. advantages: better chips, better tech, better talent, and better values that guide how we use data and AI.

Our investments and sustained leadership turned Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control from a pipe dream into a real capability now in use at multiple combatant commands, including INDOPACOM. Our speed shows the beauty of what software can do for hard power: delivering for the warfighter in days and weeks, instead of waiting for years.

The quality data powering our applications comes from decades of real-world, modern military operations, and years in active war zones. It leverages abundant, resilient sensors and connectivity across domains - strengthened by real-time data-sharing with allies and partners.

The PLA not only lacks such data; their approach to AI is different, with autonomy superseding human control over an expanding array of missions. We do the opposite - because it's more effective and safer, as we're mindful of AI's potential risks.

When we can see ourselves and any adversaries clearly - when we make the battlespace more transparent than ever, for us - we can sense, make sense, and act faster, while still maintaining human judgment and responsibility over the use of force: the best of both worlds.

Our decision advantage is a vital part of our kill chains, which we've been strengthening since 2021. At the same time, we know how to counter adversary kill chains.

Through our investments in key weapons, platforms, and enablers across domains - air, land, sea, and beyond - we've continually improved how we sense, see, and shoot in contested environments, and we've gotten better at how we complicate our adversaries' ability to do so.

Look at what we've done on missile defense and defeat, with examples just from 2024 including the successful demonstration of ballistic missile defense of Guam, and successful tests by multiple services using Hypervelocity Gun Weapons System projectiles, to intercept missiles and drones at much lower cost-per-shot ratios.

For our munitions, we've embraced a diverse portfolio of long-range fires, encompassing subsonic, supersonic, hypersonic, and newer, lower-cost long-range munitions.

We don't treat munitions as a bill-payer. In fact, when you compare the last four annual defense budgets to the four years prior, aggregate munitions investments grew by over 30 percent.

And with bipartisan Congressional support for multi-year procurement of munitions, we've been buying to the limits of the industrial base even as we expand those limits, including maximizing procurement of munitions most relevant for the Indo-Pacific: Maritime Strike Tomahawks, SM-6s, long-range anti-ship and joint air-to-surface missiles, and much more.

Additionally, we continued our long-term investments in modernizing America's nuclear triad. That's important. Strategic deterrence is a no-fail mission.

We've also focused on complementing our exquisite, world-class systems with things that are small, smart, cheap, and can be acquired and fielded fast, en masse.

That's what our Replicator initiative is doing, first by fielding all-domain attritable autonomous systems in the multiple thousands, in multiple domains, by this August. It's a pathfinder that's on track to meet our stated goal, and is speeding broader scaling of responsible autonomy.

We knew execution was key with Replicator; that was part of our thinking from the beginning. It's where other innovation visions have stumbled in the past.

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.

In all, when we look across four annual defense budgets and multiple supplemental funding bills - adding up all our capability investments, for R&D-plus-procurement - the real-dollar total is over $1.2 trillion. Even after adjusting for inflation, that's more than DoD invested in those areas, R&D-plus-procurement, across any four-year period throughout the entirety of the Cold War.

In addition to the capabilities themselves, we've also focused on developing and fielding innovative operational concepts and force designs for how we use our capabilities, showing that we can continually shape and master the changing character of warfare. And Beijing cares about that.

You see, from the 1990s on, the PRC carefully crafted its elaborate military modernization to counter two longstanding U.S. approaches to power projection.

One was aircraft carriers, as deployed during the 1996 Third Taiwan Strait Crisis. The other was our multi-month, time-phased force deployments that moved America's military might from the continental United States into theater before an operation - like Desert Shield before Desert Storm, and subsequent regional build-ups preceding later wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And since then, we've seen Beijing work hard to focus their military concepts and capabilities toward an anti-access, area-denial approach, to keep us out of the western Pacific in a crisis.

So we're changing the game, which includes changing ourselves where necessary. We're considering, for example, what it takes:
• To be in place earlier, with more distributed, mobile, lethal, and resilient force posture in the first island chain;
• To maneuver, communicate, sense, strike, and resupply into and around a battlespace that's highly contested across many if not all warfighting domains, and the electromagnetic spectrum;
• To be able to hold at risk a peer adversary's operational centers of gravity - not just on demand, but on unexpected timelines, from unforeseen places, and with unanticipated methods and capabilities;
• All to deny the territory-conquering goals of a military that wants to someday exceed our own.

While there is much more work to do, it's already manifesting in aspects that are quite different from the military that the PLA built itself to beat.

And we're seeing in classified wargames that these approaches are paying off.

Make no mistake, our novel concepts are imposing dilemmas that sow doubt in our competitors: sometimes with new capabilities like attritable autonomous systems, and sometimes by using existing capabilities in new ways - ways that are more flexible, mobile, and rapidly-deployable.

For example, this summer the Navy showed that our versatile SM-6 missile has a long-range air-to-air capability that's operationally deployed today. The Marine Corps is accelerating its Force Design initiative, fielding nimble Marine Littoral Regiments that can operate throughout the first island chain, and showing they can fire Naval Strike Missiles from Joint Light Tactical Vehicles.

Meanwhile the Army's standing up Multi-Domain Task Forces, and showing how Typhon missile batteries can be shipped 8,000 miles away in only 15 hours. The Air Force is hardening Pacific bases, and developing collaborative combat aircraft. And the Space Force is showing how we can rapidly launch space systems with barely a day's notice.

I'll stop my examples right there. The PRC's strengths in intellectual property theft and sheer industrial capacity make them talented fast-followers. So we must be careful about what we say and what we show, because a long-term investment can only be revealed once. And we must constantly push to grow our lead.

***

The third lesson for strategic competition is that the United States has strong, enduring competitive advantages that it must leverage: from our vibrant network of allies and partners, to our unparalleled ability to generate innovation through and with our private sector, to the finest fighters in the world.

Strategic competition is a team sport, and more is more at home and abroad.

Internationally, our allies and partners are a force-multiplier that makes us stronger. Where we have partners of choice, our competitors only have bedfellows of last resort.

Since 2021, we've made historic, transformational improvements and upgrades to U.S. posture across the Indo-Pacific, fortifying our position from Northeast Asia down to Australia and the Pacific Islands. That's been a major, personal priority for Secretary Austin, and an enduring legacy he will leave behind.

We're also deepening our interoperability with key allies and partners, and increasing cooperation on both cutting-edge concepts and capabilities. We're expanding co-development, co-production, and co-sustainment, and strengthening our industries and supply chains through a 15-nation Partnership for Indo-Pacific Industrial Resilience.

And around the world, America's friends and allies have been substantially contributing to the common defense. They're investing more on their own and in our collective self-defense, operating more deeply with each other and with us, and fielding more advanced capabilities.

When Beijing sees us training and exercising with capable allies like Australia, Japan, and Korea - whose 14 total Aegis destroyers have over 1,200 VLS cells - it shows how much combined combat power others can bring to bear, alongside our own, if we must ever fight against territorial aggression.

And when Beijing sees, as they did last year, navy ships from Canada, Germany, and others peacefully sailing through the Taiwan Strait, they're reminded that America is hardly the only democracy that wants to see stability and prosperity prevail over chaos and conflict. Since that vital waterway is practically the jugular vein of the global economy.

Domestically, more is also more when we work across government, industry, academia, and non-profits. The same goes for DoD partnering with other government agencies and Congress.

Strategic competition is rarely confined to the military sphere, and as powerful as military tools are, they have limits. When competitors like China act coercively using gray zone tactics, the most effective counters may be intelligence sharing, economic measures, diplomatic actions, or other activities. Sometimes DoD should contribute, but not always.

We must use all levers of national power, and more. That's why this administration has taken steps to ensure that U.S. wealth and innovation aren't exploited for PLA military modernization.

Our private sector is also a key asymmetric advantage, and we must continually collaborate to achieve our competition aims. That's why we've made significant, sustained investments every year to strengthen the health, productivity, workforce, facilities, and supply chains of our defense industrial base, both traditional and non-traditional - from critical minerals to microelectronics, and much, much more.

Our ability to innovate is something that Beijing can never blunt, steal, or copy, because it's embedded in our system of free minds, free markets, and free people. We don't seek to control innovation, or make it toe the party line. Instead we aim to foster and unleash innovation.

That's why, over the last four years, we took chainsaws to the thicket of innovation obstacles that inhibit DoD from adopting America's best commercial technologies.

We built more bridges and express lanes over the valleys of death between warfighter needs, research and development, and production and fielding at scale.

We opened more doors to newcomers, from defense tech startups and scale-ups to commercial companies - and from fiscal years 2021 through 2024, at least $375 billion DoD dollars went to non-traditional defense companies.

Perhaps the most intangible advantage we have over the PLA, is the people who comprise America's all-volunteer force. They're our greatest strength. Retention is strong, and with sustained post-COVID focus, last year we also met our recruit contracting goals, across the breadth of the joint force. That all reflects our attention on taking care of our people.

Now, PRC leaders have in recent years bemoaned their so-called "five incapables" - that is, how some PLA officers and commanders can't judge situations, understand higher authorities' intentions, make operational decisions, deploy forces, or manage unexpected situations.

The U.S. military doesn't have these issues. Our officers and senior enlisted leaders not only are capable of all that; they're exceptional. And because we use principles of mission command, we don't need to centralize decision-making or micromanage operations like the PLA does.

We can trust that even if our forces get cut-off from higher headquarters, they'll use their knowledge of commander's intent, the rules of engagement, and the law of armed conflict, and they'll innovate on the fly to achieve their mission objectives. It's not blind trust - we know they can because they've proven they can, for decades, in the heat of battle.

***

Last but not least is my fourth insight: Attend to your actions and your words. They matter more than you think.

Many of you here at SAIS know the concept of a security dilemma: where the security-seeking actions of two states compel each other to do more, raising the possibility of misunderstandings, miscalculations, or inadvertent escalation that could lead to conflict.

Some think this may already be a factor in today's strategic competition between America and the PRC. Whether or not you agree, the possibility of a security dilemma should inform PRC and U.S. policy. After all, we want our operations, activities, investments, and messages to maintain deterrence, not needlessly provoke Beijing into starting a war.

Even if deterrence is what we intend, it behooves us to consider how our actions might be perceived behind closed doors on the other side. And it behooves China to do the same.

For instance, it's been publicly reported that some in Beijing may genuinely think we're trying to bait or trick them into war. We're not, and consider what we're not doing as part of our evidence: We're not rationing, not stockpiling hard currency reserves, not restarting conscription.

We aren't condoning or encouraging separatism or aggression - rather, the United States strongly discourages both.

At the same time, we do see the PRC's exercises, we hear its leader's words about a willingness to use force against Taiwan - and we take that seriously.

We don't believe conflict is inevitable. 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.

To be clear, we are not - and we have no cause to be - in an ideological struggle for global dominance with the PRC. They don't have to succumb to the fate that befell the USSR in 1991 in order for us to thrive and win the competition for the 21st century. The PRC isn't going anywhere. And that's okay. Neither are we.

As we define the terms of what "victory" we seek in the long-term strategic competition with China, we should be crystal-clear with everyone, that:

Victory means assuring the continued safety, security, and prosperity of our nation and our citizens, our allies and partners, and our interests.

Victory means ensuring the international system is not adversely tilted against us.

And victory should also mean averting the global economic and human devastation that would be wrought by a full-blown war between the nuclear-capable nations of the United States and China.

***

Winston Churchill once rallied Britons by saying: "It would be foolish to disguise the gravity of the hour. It would be still more foolish to lose heart and courage."

Churchill's sentiment has resonated with me throughout my time as Deputy Secretary of Defense. As I said before, we must treat the daunting challenge that the PRC poses to American interests with urgency, but we also must be confident.

We must be forthright about how advanced the PRC's military has become, then do our utmost to out-think, out-maneuver, and out-strategize them: to prevent war if we can, by being able to prevail in war if we must.

Remember whose side we're on: we are the United States of America, and together with our allies and partners, we have so many asymmetric advantages that the PRC lacks - all of which are represented here today:

We have an open society, a vibrant innovation ecosystem that's second to none, and a dynamic free-market economy that Beijing cannot replicate.

We have dependable and increasingly capable friends and allies throughout the region and the world, who stand with us because they share our values.

And we have the most proven, proficient, professional military in the world, enabled by the world's best intelligence agencies.

Because of them, we know the gravity of the hour. And because of them - and you - I have no cause to lose heart or courage.

Whether you're a student or a servicemember; an entrepreneur, an educator, or an engineer; whether you already do or someday will contribute to the cause of America's national security - each of you will shape the future, and our nation's fate, in this multi-decade era of strategic competition. You are the problem-solvers, and it's all hands on deck.

I'm deeply proud of all the Defense Department has done to advance that cause over the last four years. Of course work remains - the needs always evolve. It's the cause of at least a generation, and likely more generations to come. The last several years are but the dawn.

So as I leave this, my third, tour in government, like Paul Nitze and my other predecessors before me, I will be watching for my successors to build on our progress with their own.

I will be rooting for those who continue to stand the watch for our nation: our warfighters, civilians, military families, and all who support them.

And they will remain in my prayers, as they help defend us all.

Thank you.

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