‘AT THE NUCLEAR BRINK’
Perry was exceptionally, even unusually, qualified to be secretary of defense, and not just because of his previous service in the Carter and Clinton administrations or his service on the Packard Commis- sion and other high-level government panels. Perry had served as an enlisted man in the Army, beginning at 18, and then as a reserve officer. He’d worked in the defense industry as a top scientist and as an entrepreneur.
During the Cuban missile crisis, he was director of Sylvania’s Defense Electronic Systems, which he said was a “pioneer in sophisticated electronic surveillance sys- tems.” Perry was called to Washington by the head of the CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence, where he spent eight days with a team analyzing images of nuclear- capable Soviet missiles in Cuba.
After former Secretary of Defense Harold Brown, his boss in the Carter admin- istration, Perry was only the second scientist in the post. “Most of the secre- taries of defense had backgrounds in law or politics,” Perry said. “Of the scientists, there were, besides me, Harold Brown and [now] Ash Carter, of course. It’s an unusual background for secretary of defense.”
Service would seem to be a part of Perry’s DNA. When, as a 14-year-old in 1941,
he got the news from a friend that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor, his biggest concern, he said, was that the war would be over before he got the chance to serve. In 1944, at age 17, the Pennsyl- vania native passed the tests and enlisted in the Army’s Air Cadet program, then went home to wait for an opening. In anticipation, Perry left high school early to get a head start on college at what is now Carnegie Mellon University. In May 1945, just as he was finishing up his first semester, the Army disbanded the program and gave him an honorable dis- charge. He finished two more semesters and, at 18, enlisted in the Army engi- neers, he wrote, although the war was over. It would prove to be a life-changing experience. He was assigned to the Army of Occupation of Japan, and he went to Tokyo.
In a telephone interview with Army AL&T Senior Editor Steve Stark on July 28, Perry said that his experience in Tokyo, and then in Okinawa, forever shaped his worldview.
“Te first month I was over there I was in Tokyo, and I witnessed the complete dev- astation of that city, which was—if you hadn’t seen it, you’d hardly believe it,” he said. Okinawa, he said, was far worse. “I don’t know whether you remember your history of World War II, but Okinawa
was the last great battle of World War II, and we absolutely devastated the island. Tere was hardly a building left standing. I saw firsthand at age 18 the devasta- tion that could be done by conventional bombs, and then I recognized [in light of] the history of Hiroshima and Naga- saki ... [that] what had taken a thousand raids and tens of thousands of bombs in World War II now could be done by a single bomb in an instant.”
Perry completed his service in the Army in 1947 and returned home to marry Lee, his high school sweetheart, and finish school, transferring to Stanford Uni- versity, where he would earn both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in math- ematics on the GI Bill—unwittingly transplanting himself into the heart of Silicon Valley before it was Silicon Valley.
But a couple of years later, he returned to his native Pennsylvania to pursue teach- ing and a doctorate at Penn State. It was there that he got his first taste of apply- ing his knowledge of math to defense problems, working for a local defense company called Haller, Raymond & Brown Inc. Te company, later known as HRB Systems Inc., was acquired by E-Systems Inc., which is now part of Raytheon Intelligence and Information Systems.
One way, obviously, of improving the acquisition system is to make that job more profitable so that the program manager will want to stay in it and that the services will be motivated to keep the program managers in it for longer periods of time.
100 Army AL&T Magazine October-December 2016
According to Perry, it was just after com- pleting his master’s that North Korea invaded South Korea, and, having joined the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps while at Stanford, he fully expected to be called upon to serve. He was not, but he continued to grow increasingly con- cerned about the threat of the “belligerent and aggressive Soviet Union,” which sup- ported North Korea and, in 1953, had detonated its first hydrogen bomb. Tat same year, Perry applied to finish his Ph.D. in absentia and applied for a job
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