Mr. Chairman and members of the Committee: I am pleased to be here today. I will not provide an assessment of the draft Export Administration Act of 2001 that is under consideration by this committee. I will, however, speak about the realities of globalization and their implications for national security and, more specifically, for export controls as a function of national security.

My remarks will be based primarily on the deliberations and findings of a Defense Science Board Task Force on Globalization and Security that I chaired, and which completed its work in December 1999; I have provided each member of this committee a copy of the Task Force’s final report. The Task Force was chartered by the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Technology to: (1) examine the impact of globalization on DoD, and (2) advise the Department on innovative policies, procedures and/or technologies that may allow DoD to maximize the benefits of trends associated with globalization while concurrently mitigating any associated risk. Not long into deliberations, the Task Force refined its overarching objective into advising the Department of Defense on how to enhance US military dominance in the face of globalization. This course change stemmed from members’ strong belief that the US can achieve a net military capability gain over its potential competitors if it vigorously exploits the globalization trends. Conversely, members believe as strongly that an overly cautious approach to dealing with globalization will result in a net erosion of U.S. military dominance, due primarily to relative or asymmetrical capability gains made by potential adversaries who are, in fact, seizing the opportunity to exploit the global availability of militarily-useful technology, products and services.

Before discussing the Task Force’s key findings and recommendations, it is important to establish a working definition of the now-ubiquitous term "globalization"—which means different things to different people—and to offer the Task Force’s broad sense of globalization’s impact on DoD. From the Task Force’s perspective, globalization—defined as the integration of the political, economic and cultural activities of geographically and/or nationally separated peoples—it is not new, but rather is a continuously evolving process. What is new is the dramatic acceleration of global integration and the resulting political, economic, and technological change the world has seen over the last decade. Goods and services, materials, capital, technology (know-how and equipment), information, customs, people, and energy all flow across national borders, not always freely but most often successfully. Most important, the phenomenon of accelerated global integration is largely irresistible. Thus, globalization is not a policy option, but a fact to which policymakers must adapt.

Globalization has accelerated as a result of many positive factors, the most notable of which include the collapse of communism and the end of the Cold War; the spread of capitalism and free trade; more rapid and global capital flows and more liberal financial markets; the liberalization of communications; international academic and scientific collaboration; and more rapid and efficient forms of transportation. At the core of accelerated global integration—indeed, its principal cause and consequence—is the information revolution. Driven by quantum leaps in telecommunications and computing efficiency and effectiveness, the information revolution is knocking down barriers of physical distance, blurring national boundaries and creating cross-border communities of all types.

Globalization affects DoD in two distinct, if overlapping, ways:

First, globalization is altering fundamentally the composition of DoD's supporting industrial base. DoD once depended upon, and could afford to sustain, a dedicated domestic industrial base for the development, production and provision of its equipment and services. Today, the "U.S. defense industrial base" no longer exists in its Cold War form. Instead, DoD now is supported by a broader, less defense-intensive industrial base that is becoming increasingly international in character. This transformation is due largely to the confluence of three factors: (1) deep cuts in U.S. defense investment in the Cold War's wake (procurement and R&D are down 70 percent and 25 percent in real terms, respectively, since the late-1980s), (2) an explosion in commercial sector high-tech R&D investment and technological advancement, and (3) a shift in procurement emphasis from weapons and platforms, per se, to the sophisticated information technologies so amplifying their capabilities.

Indeed, yesterday's U.S. defense industry is, with few exceptions, reconstituting itself into a global, more commercially-oriented industry. The traditional core of the U.S. defense industrial sector—those firms still focusing nearly exclusively on the defense market—comprises firms that will focus increasingly on the integration of commercially developed advanced technology to produce military capabilities. That which remains of this sector:

• has undergone an intense period of consolidation;
• has already begun—although mainly in the lower industrial tiers—the process of integration across national borders, via mergers, acquisitions, joint ventures and strategic partnerships with European counterparts, who are themselves in a period of rationalization and consolidation; and
• is now supplied to a significant degree by the commercial sector and is increasingly dependent on commercial business and defense product exports for growth and good health.

It is now the commercial sector, which pays scant attention to national boundaries, which is driving the development of much of the advanced technology integrated into modern information-intensive military systems. This is especially true of the software and consumer microelectronics sectors. The National Science Foundation reports that over 80 percent of high-technology exports (some of them dual-use) originate from outside the United States. Moreover, high-technology commercial exports dwarf arms exports in magnitude. Accordingly, future U.S. military-technological advantage will derive less from advanced component and subsystem technology developed by the U.S. defense sector than from the military functionality generated by superior, though not necessarily U.S.-based, defense sector systems integration skills.

Second, and perhaps most significantly, globalization is reshaping the military-technological environment in which DoD must compete. During most of the Cold War, the United States enjoyed a near-monopoly on the development of and access to advanced military technology, and could, to a large degree, deny other nations access to such technology in order to maintain a wide military capability gap between itself and its potential adversaries. No longer. It is now likely that a majority of militarily-useful technology will eventually be available commercially and/or outside the United States as a result of many factors, all of which are direct manifestations of the globalization phenomena. The United States remains the world’s premier military technology integrator and developer of military systems; this is not likely to change. However, over time, all states—not just the U.S. and its allies—will share access to the majority of the technology underpinning the modern military.

In developing its findings and recommendations, the Task Force focused its energies on four specific areas: maintaining US military dominance amidst global technological leveling; globalization of the US defense industry; DoD acquisition of commercial technology, products and services; and personnel security. All four areas are important; however, I will concentrate the remainder of my remarks on the first one, as I believe it has the most direct relevance to the work of this committee.

From a strategic standpoint, globalization's most significant manifestation is the leveling effect it is having on the military-technological environment in which DoD must compete. Access to commercial technology is virtually universal, and its exploitation for both civil and military ends is largely unconstrained. Many of the most important enabling technologies for information-intensive U.S. concepts of warfare (e.g., access to space, surveillance, sensors and signal processing, high fidelity simulation, and telecommunications) are equally available to the United States, our friends and allies, and potential U.S. adversaries. In other words, much of the technology the U.S. is most anticipating leveraging to maintain military dominance—information-related technology developed largely in the commercial sector—is that which DoD is least capable of denying its potential competitors. The so-called "Revolution in Military Affairs" is, at least from a technology availability standpoint, a truly global affair.

Compounding this narrowing of the U.S. technological advantage are continuing declines in DoD research, development, test and evaluation (RDT&E) and defense industry internal or independent research and development (IR&D) investment. In addition, government and private defense R&D investments are skewed toward near-term priorities (e.g., upgrades to fielded systems and the development of legacy system replacements) and away from fundamentally new capabilities.

Traditionally, defense industry IR&D has funded the development of many of the United States' most advanced military technologies and innovative integrated defense systems. Stealth technology is but one example. Industry has historically put about three percent of the DoD procurement budget back into IR&D. However, with a 70 percent decline in procurement budgets in the past decade, contractors not only have less to spend on IR&D, they appear to be using many of these funds to secure increasingly scarce line-item business and/or maintain profit levels. The result is severely depressed U.S. military-technological innovation when the premium on innovation has never been higher, and a defense industry devoted primarily to the development of what the military says it wants—legacy system replacements—and not necessarily what it needs to meet emerging strategic challenges. Accordingly, this trend must reversed if the U.S. is going to maintain the capability gap between it and its potential adversaries.

As the technological playing field levels, the United States' potential competitors will be able to modernize their forces and augment their overall capability relative to ours at a much faster rate than was previously possible. One reason is that they will be able to take multiple, concurrent paths to military modernization.

A common path will be through an increasingly permissive and technologically advanced global conventional arms market. The arms market has undergone a striking transformation in the last five or so years, the root cause of which is the contraction in worldwide defense spending that has increased significantly the pressure on firms to export—and on governments to encourage them to do so. When combined with increasing level of cross-border collaboration, the black and gray market availability of most types of defense products, and the pressure on already export-minded firms to offer their most sophisticated equipment, these trends will progressively erode the effectiveness of conventional arms and defense technology export controls worldwide. With a few exceptions, advanced conventional weapons will be available to anyone who can afford them.

Beyond the global arms market, the general diffusion of technological know-how and commercial availability of so-called "strategic" or "enabling" dual-use technologies (e.g., advanced machine tools, high-performance computing, manufacturing of biotechnology products) will likely yield rapid advances in competitor industrial infrastructure development and, in turn, indigenous weapons production capability. Moreover, the commercial sector will offer an increasingly wide array of both advanced components and subsystems (particularly software and microelectronics) to aid indigenous defense system production and system upgrades, and of full-up systems (particularly information- and communications related) offering direct capability enhancement.

Furthermore, with virtually the full range of military technologies and capabilities available, competitors will also be able to tailor more effectively their investments to their particular geo-strategic circumstances to achieve scenario-specific advantages over potential foes. As previous DSB studies have pointed out, those states preparing for potential conflict with the United States will seek to capitalize on the great distances U.S. forces must travel to engage them, and U.S. forces' near-absolute reliance on unimpeded access to and use of ports, airfields, bases, and littoral waters in the theater of conflict.

To exploit these vulnerabilities, potential competitors are not trying to match DoD ship-for-ship, tank-for-tank, or fighter-for-fighter. Rather, they are investing asymmetrically, channeling their more limited resources into now widely-available (and increasingly affordable) capabilities, conventional and unconventional, that could allow them to deny U.S. forces both rapid access to their region and/or and sanctuary once in-theater. These include conventional anti-naval forces (e.g., ultra-quiet diesel submarines, advanced anti-ship cruise missiles and sophisticated sea mines); theater-range ballistic and land-attack cruise missiles (with the latter expected to be available in the thousands, and, increasingly, with low-observable characteristics); and nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.

In addition, future U.S. competitors will leverage the commercial space sector to achieve so-called "step function" gains in anti-access capability. Capabilities such as space-based communications, surveillance, navigation services and equipment will become increasingly available through a variety of multinational consortia. Such unobstructed access to space for C3ISR support will allow even the most resource-constrained adversaries to monitor the location of, target and precisely attack U.S. forces in the field, at theater bases, ports and airfields, and moving through critical naval chokepoints. Viewed in this manner, technological leveling—globalization's most strategically unsettling manifestation from a U.S. perspective—is clearly the engine of the emerging "anti-access" threat.

Consequently, there is growing—if uncelebrated—risk inherent in U.S. power projection and force modernization strategy. Strategic risk is defined here as a discernible decrease in U.S. forces' capability to protect vital U.S. interests relative to adversaries' capability to threaten them: a potentially serious erosion of military dominance. At the root of the problem are the inherent limitations—namely, sluggish deployment times and heavy dependence on theater access—of the legacy, primarily short-range general-purpose force elements to which the vast majority of the Services' modernization funding is currently dedicated and the correspondingly inadequate investment planned in long-range force projection capabilities (e.g., long-range stealthy bombers, standoff missiles, and long-range reconnaissance/surveillance). Viewed in this light, the continued budgetary, strategic and force structuring primacy of legacy systems in DoD budgets has a clear and high opportunity cost: the investment agility necessary to transform U.S. strategy and forces to meet the emerging strategic challenges posed by global military-technological leveling.

One might, at first glance, reason that the U.S. could mitigate the undesirable effects of global military-technological leveling by unilaterally tightening restrictions on dual-use and defense technology exports, and by coordinating with its allies enhanced multilateral restrictions dual-use and conventional military technology exports. This approach worked reasonably well during the Cold War, e.g., through the Coordinating Committee on Export Controls (CoCom). However, unilateral and multilateral controls today are no longer a significant factor affecting potential adversaries’ access to highly sophisticated dual-use technology and they have been only marginally more successful in the conventional weapons arena.

CoCom's success, for example, derived from its members facing a common threat—the Warsaw Pact and, to a lesser extent, China—and sharing a common objective: retarding Warsaw Pact and Chinese technological advancement. CoCom also benefited from the disproportionate leverage the United States, its leading advocate, held over the other members as the guarantor of Western security. The Cold War's end undermined this cooperative impetus, and the U.S. can no longer count on its allies, its closest competitors in the high-tech sector, to follow America's lead. The lukewarm success of CoCom's successor, the Wassenaar Arrangement, is a testament to the declining utility of multilateral technology controls in the post-Cold War era. It also points to the utter futility of the U.S. attempting to control unilaterally technologies, products and services that even its closest allies are releasing onto the world market.

China is perhaps the best and certainly the timeliest example of the difficulty of coordinating multilateral technology controls in the new environment. Under CoCom, the West had a well-coordinated position on dual-use trade with China. In the wake of CoCom's dissolution, a chasm has developed between the U.S. and many of its Western allies, who no longer view China as a threat and have relaxed or lifted dual-use export restrictions to China accordingly. This, in turn, has rendered many U.S. controls on exports to China essentially unilateral, thus neutralizing their utility as constraints on Chinese acquisition of dual-use technology.

Also limiting the utility of dual-use export controls is the ubiquity of critical technologies and the ease of their transfer. Consider the case of high-performance computing. Microprocessors, which are the essential ingredient for high-performance computers (HPCs), have long been a commodity product widely available on the world market from a vast range of sources. Personal computers are similarly difficult to control. Each year, U.S. and foreign companies manufacture millions of PCs and sell them the world over, often via mail order and the Internet. The technology to "cluster" these computers (i.e., link them together to multiply their computing power) is also available online. Through clustering, it is possible to create computer systems ranging in computing power from 4,000-100,000 MTOPS (millions of theoretical operations per second)—equivalent to the supercomputers currently under strict export controls. In other words, while the most advanced U.S. stand-alone high-performance computers may be controllable, high-performance computing is not.

High-performance computers are a good example of limited controllability, but the same is true for other sectors where the state-of-the-art is advancing rapidly, such as telecommunications, and controlled software. It is somewhat easier for the United States to control the transfer of large capital items, mainly because the customer base is smaller and the products cannot be easily and inexpensively cloned and/or scaled-up in capability (e.g., as PCs are clustered into HPC-level systems). However, as is the case with HPCs, this does not mean the technology will not be available outside the United States. In some of these sectors, such as machine tool and semiconductor manufacturing equipment, the U.S. has a minority global market share and the technology is widely available abroad. In others (e.g., satellites) the U.S. currently has a strong global position but is under growing pressure from formidable competitors.

Some argue that the obstacles to effective multilateral controls suggest that the United States should become even more restrictive unilaterally. In some cases, this may be necessary, but doing so broadly in the face of globalization is likely, in the end, to do the United States more harm than good. DoD is relying increasingly on the U.S. commercial advanced technology sector to push the technological envelope and enable the Department to "run faster" than its competitors. DoD is not a large enough customer, however, to keep the U.S. high-tech sector vibrant. Exports are now the key to growth and good health. In the computer and communications satellite industries, for example, between 50% and 60% of all revenues come from foreign sales. Any significant restriction on exports would likely slow corporate growth and limit the extent to which profits can be put back into research and development on next-generation technology. This is particularly true for internal or independent R&D (IR&D) designed to address particular DoD concerns, which, because it is less likely to yield products with near-term commercial demand, would likely receive even lower priority during any IR&D decline. If U.S. high-tech exports are restricted in any significant manner, it could well have a stifling effect on the U.S. military's rate of technological advancement.

If the United States responds to what some parochially and inaccurately view as a preventable hemorrhaging of U.S. advanced technology (vs. the irresistible leveling of the global technological playing field) by unilaterally tightening controls on high-tech exports to states such as China, new competitors in Taiwan, Korea, Japan, and Europe can be expected to move quickly to fill the market void. The U.S. lead in most dual-use sectors is based not on the United States being the sole possessor of the technology, but rather on the comparatively high quality of U.S. products and the efficiency with which they are produced (which enables competitive pricing). Shutting U.S. industry out of major markets such as China will necessarily create viable competition where little currently exists. As has been demonstrated in other sectors, the increased competition will not be limited to the Chinese market. New competitors will use their market share in China and all its benefits (e.g., accelerated IR&D funding) as a springboard to challenge U.S. dominance elsewhere. In other words, if the U.S. were to unilaterally tighten dual-use controls to China, the loser is not likely to be the Chinese. Rather, the losers will be U.S. industry, whose technological and market leadership will face new challenges, and DoD, whose access to the world's most advanced technologies will be at the very least complicated, and perhaps compromised, by virtue of their being developed and produced by non-U.S. firms.

Furthermore, because the dual-use sector is fully globalized, export control tightening meant to deny single states such as China access to certain technology can do unintended damage to vitally important U.S. business relationships elsewhere. Congress' 1999 decision to return commercial communications satellites to the State Department's U.S. Munitions List from the Commerce Department's dual-use list—and the U.S. Government's interpretation of Congress' direction—may already be having such an effect. Consider the case of Europe. The U.S. and European space sectors are deeply interconnected. In the wake of the controversy leading up to the decision to move satellites back to State—intended by Congress as a means of tightening controls over satellite exports to China—the U.S. Government has become much stricter in its interpretation of the ITAR, which govern the export of items on the munitions list. This is particularly true of the DoD and its interpretation of ITAR Part 124.15(a), which states specifically that: "The export of any satellite or related item . . . or any defense service controlled by this subchapter associated with the launch in, or by nationals of, a country that is not a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or a major non-NATO ally of the United States always requires special export controls, in addition to other export controls required by this subchapter. . ." DoD has insisted on applying these "special export controls" on our NATO and major non-NATO allies (as is allowed for under Part 124.15(c)); it is this approach that may be proving the most damaging.

Most European satellites—and most European military systems, for that matter—contain U.S. components that are also subject to the stricter controls. The U.S. Government's stricter interpretation of the ITAR may also be having a negative ripple effect on the behavior of the U.S. space industry, which has, in turn, ratcheted up its own security procedures. According to some in Europe, this is making it increasingly difficult to do business with the U.S. space industry. Said one European space industry official in a recent media report: "To have a simple telephone conversation with a U.S. customer or supplier, I have to inform him of my wishes 30 days in advance, then fax him an outline of what I want to talk about. The fax gets passed on for clearance by the U.S. State Department: What is the purpose here—national security or protectionism?" The long-term effects could be damaging. European defense/aerospace firms, which currently depend on U.S. companies to assure their supply chain, will logically look elsewhere for suppliers if the of doing business with the U.S. remains unacceptably high.

A tightening of dual-use controls could also spawn—or hasten—the development of indigenous R&D and production capabilities where they might not otherwise flourish. For example, China has the capacity to produce high-performance computers indigenously. While China cannot currently compete with U.S. companies on the global market, they can produce machines with performance sufficient to provide many of the military capabilities they seek, though perhaps at greater time, effort and cost than would be the case with the highest performance computers. Denying countries such as China U.S. products could very well encourage their own development and production.

Finally, increased technology protection amidst global technological leveling could well limit the special influence the United States might otherwise accrue as a global provider and supporter of military equipment and services. This includes intimate knowledge of, and access to, military systems that only the supplier would have, and that could prove militarily instrumental in crisis and conflict and is particularly true regarding communications and information systems.

The strategic significance of the ongoing leveling of the global military-technological playing field cannot be overstated. It presents a direct challenge to the fundamental assumption underlying the modern concept of U.S. global military leadership: that the United States enjoys disproportionately greater access to advanced technology than its potential adversaries. This assumption also underpins the increasingly strained logic holding that technology controls are the sine qua non of U.S. military dominance.

However, such a parochial assumption is simply not consistent with the emerging reality of all nations' militaries sharing essentially the same global commercial-defense industrial base. The resulting erosion of long-standing technical and economic barriers to acquiring advanced militarily-useful technology will increasingly negate enduring U.S. advantages in technology development, namely, superior infrastructure, education and resources. By virtue of its comparatively large defense R&D investment—past and present—the United States will likely maintain over the long-term a developmental advantage over its competitors in a limited number of cutting-edge, defense-specific technologies; directed-energy weaponry is one example. However, such niche technological advantages will not sustain a meaningful, long-term military capability gap between the United States and its potential adversaries.

Rather, with the whole world working from essentially the same military-technological "cookbook", the United States will need to rely on its unique strengths as a "chef", that is, as the world's most innovative integrator of militarily useful—though not always U.S.-developed—technology. The U.S. will need to redouble its efforts at out-innovating, out-integrating and out-investing its competitors. This involves exploiting our currently superior systems integration skills, training, leadership, education and overall economic/industrial wherewithal to translate globally available technology into dominant military capability. To remain dominant, DoD will need to not only "run faster", but also to "pick alternate routes"—that is, respond asymmetrically to its competitors' asymmetrical strategies by intelligently altering its own warfighting strategy and investment plans. Indeed, sustaining military dominance in the face of technological leveling will ultimately come down to the age-old questions of how—and with what—DoD chooses to fight.

1) The Department needs a new approach to maintaining military dominance. Globalization is irresistibly eroding the military advantage the U.S. has long sought to derive through technology controls. Accordingly, the more the United States depends on technology controls for maintaining the capability gap between its military forces and those of its competitors, the greater the likelihood that gap will narrow. To hedge against this risk, DoD's strategy for achieving and maintaining military dominance must be based on the recognition that technology controls ultimately fail to deny U.S. competitors access to militarily useful technology.

DoD must shift its overall approach to military dominance from "protecting" militarily-relevant technologies—the building blocks of military capability—to "preserving" in the face of globalization those military capabilities essential to meeting national military objectives. Protection would play a role in an overall strategy for preserving essential capabilities, but its primacy would be supplanted by three other strategy elements: direct capability enhancement, institutionalized vulnerability analysis and assessment, and risk mitigation efforts designed to ensure system integrity.

To shift its approach from technology protection to essential capability preservation, the Task Force recommended that DoD: 1) establish a permanent process for determining a continuously-evolving "short list" of essential military capabilities, and 2) develop strategies for preserving each essential capability. Both the list of essential military capabilities and the strategies for their preservation are needed to inform the development of: U.S. warfighting strategy and the forces to underpin that strategy (by identifying how and with what the U.S. will need to fight to remain dominant), DoD positions on technology and personnel security (by helping to identify those capabilities and/or constituent technologies which DoD should attempt to protect and how vigorously they should be protected); and DoD acquisition risk mitigation measures (by identifying those systems that should be the focus of intense efforts to ensure system integrity).

2) DoD needs to change substantially its approach to technology security. The Task Force did not challenge the propriety of the Department of State's statutory obligation to evaluate proposed defense technology transfers against U.S. foreign policy objectives. That said, the leveling of the global military-technological playing field necessitates a substantial shift in DoD's approach to technology security, the principal objective of which is to help maintain the U.S. military-technical advantage. DoD should attempt to protect for the purposes of maintaining military advantage only those capabilities and technologies of which the U.S. is the sole possessor and whose protection is deemed necessary to preserve an essential military capability. Protection of capabilities and technologies readily available on the world market is, at best, unhelpful to the maintenance of military dominance and, at worst, counterproductive (e.g., by undermining the industry upon which U.S. military-technological supremacy depends). Where there is foreign availability of technologies, a decision to transfer need only be made on foreign policy grounds by the Department of State. If foreign availability has been established, DoD should not review export license applications. This change will allow the DoD licensing review to concentrate on cases where the availability of technology is exclusive to the United States.

Moreover, military capability is created when widely available and/or defense-unique technologies are integrated into a defense system. Accordingly, DoD should give highest priority in its technology security efforts to technology integration capabilities and the resulting military capabilities themselves, and accordingly lower priority to the individual technologies of which they are comprised. For those items and/or information that DoD can and should protect, DoD security measures need improvement. The means for such an improvement might come from a redistribution of the current level of security resources/effort, whereby DoD relaxes security in less important areas and tightens up in those most critical. In short, DoD must put up higher walls around a much smaller group of capabilities and technologies.

3) DoD should take the lead in establishing and maintaining a real-time, interagency database of globally available, militarily relevant technologies and capabilities. Such a database, which would facilitate rapid and authoritative determination of the foreign availability of a particular technology or military capability, would serve two principal functions. First, it would allow those involved in the export licensing and arms transfer decisionmaking process to determine what is available abroad and, thus, no longer U.S.-controllable. Second, it would enhance U.S. access to the global technological marketplace by illuminating potential foreign sources and/or collaborators.

Prior to founding Hicks & Associates, Inc., Dr. Hicks served as the Under Secretary of Defense for Research & Engineering (USDRE). As USDRE, Dr. Hicks was the Principal Staff Assistant and Advisor to the Secretary of Defense for scientific and technical matters, basic and applied research, environmental sciences, and the development of weapon systems.

Prior to his appointment as USDRE, Dr. Hicks was Senior Vice President, Marketing & Technology, for Northrop Corporation. He joined Northrop in 1961 as Vice President-Technical for the Company’s Ventura Division. Four years later, he formed the Applied Research Department of the Nortronics Division of Northrop. In 1967, this department became a major part of the newly formed Northrop Research & Technology Center, with Dr. Hicks serving as Vice President & Manager. In 1970, Dr. Hicks was promoted to Corporate Vice President of Research & Technology, a position he held until his appointment as Senior Vice President-Technology in November 1974. This position was expanded in 1979 to include corporate marketing.

Before joining Northrop, Dr. Hicks headed the Applied Physics Section of Boeing Company’s Aerospace Group. From 1950 to 1956, he was a physicist with Lawrence Radiation Laboratory where he conducted basic research related to various aspects of fission physics.

During World War II, he served three and a half years in the U.S. Army, reaching the rank of 1st Lieutenant.

Dr. Hicks holds AB, MA and Ph.D. degrees in Physics from the University of California, Berkeley. In 1985, he received the University of Southern California’s Award for Outstanding Achievement in Engineering Management.

Dr. Hicks has been a member of the Defense Science Board, serving on a number of DSB task forces for the past 30 years, and chairing those of Nuclear Warhead Production, Remotely Piloted Vehicles, Urban Warfare, and Globalization & Security. He is a member of the National Security Advisory Committee of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory & the National Security Advisory Panel of the Sandia National Laboratories.

For his service as Under Secretary of Defense, Dr. Hicks received the Secretary of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service, the U.S. Air Force Decoration for Exceptional Civilian Service, the Distinguished Public Service Award of the U.S. Navy, and the U.S. Army Decoration for Distinguished Civilian Service.