A LEGION OF SERVICE
President Barack Obama meets with, from left, Perry, former Sen. Sam Nunn, former Secretary of State George P. Shultz and former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger in the Oval Office in May 2009, to discuss the U.S. nuclear nonproliferation policy. Since leaving their official roles, Shultz, Perry, Kissinger and Nunn have urged the U.S. to take the lead in reducing and eliminating nuclear weapons worldwide. (Official White House photo by Pete Souza)
Army AL&T: How does the program manager make that call: military spec, bespoke system or off-the-shelf commercial?
Perry: Well, certainly we end up doing that for computer sys- tems. Te Defense Department generally doesn’t go out and design their own laptops. Tey end up adopting laptops that were designed for commercial purposes. I think that’s a good principle to follow. You see something that has been designed [and] is doing a good job in industry and you have a need for something comparable to that in the military. I would think you would start off by saying, can we adapt that system that’s already been built rather than starting off with a new one? It may need some modifications to meet special military needs.
In general, I think you’d be better off starting off with an exist- ing system and adapting it rather than starting with a clean sheet of paper. Now in the case of fighter airplanes, there is no comparable industrial model, so that doesn’t apply. In a lot of other things, it does. In aircraft carriers it doesn’t apply. I mean there are lots of cases where it just doesn’t apply. So you need to look at places where it does apply, and there are lots of those, probably more than we actually have taken advantage of.
Army AL&T: I have an 18-year-old son who tells me that the world is by far a safer place than it has been at any time in his- tory, although the headlines certainly don’t make it seem so. Is it your view that the United States today faces more threats, or a wider variety of threats, than it did back in the 1990s?
Perry: No, I don’t think so. I think your son has a lot of data on his side to support his view. I think there’s an important exception to that rule, and it’s a very important exception—and that’s in the case of dangers of the nuclear catastrophe, which, in my opinion, are greater now than they were even during the Cold War.
Just looking at the time since the development of nuclear weap- ons, I’d say that the possibility that they might be used in a catastrophic way is higher today than it has been at any time since they’ve been developed. And that’s something I don’t think we generally appreciate. Tat’s a fundamental point in the book that I’ve written.
Army AL&T: Let’s get to the book. In terms of the way that DOD is going and the way that Congress is going and the way
ASC.ARMY.MIL 105
CRITICAL THINKING
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