The highest-ranking woman in Pentagon history is on a mission to take the armed forces electric

Dylan went on to release Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde, two electrified albums that changed the trajectory of American culture. Whether Hicks is able to achieve her goal—moving all of the Pentagon’s 170,000 non-tactical vehicles from combustion engines to electric motors—remains to be seen. 

But if you ask Hicks, a Biden appointee who has spent the majority of her career in and around the Pentagon, it’s do or die. 

Hicks, who received her Ph.D. in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, joined the Department of Defense in 1993. She was confirmed by the Senate in 2012 as principal deputy undersecretary of defense for policy, where she was responsible for advising the secretary of defense on global and regional defense policy and strategy. She most recently held the position of senior vice president, Henry A. Kissinger Chair, and director of the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. 

“Some people in the Pentagon believe that going green is still a choice,” she told Fortune. “It’s not.” The auto industry is going electric, and if the Department of Defense doesn’t adapt soon, it won’t be able to service its aging vehicles. The U.S. armed forces need to retrain their staff, and they need to make sure they’re resilient to extreme weather events and supply chain kinks, says Hicks. One of her key strategies for achieving that resiliency includes replacing the batteries that electric vehicles run on. Right now, those batteries rely largely on cobalt, which represents the highest material supply chain risk for electric vehicles. Hicks wants them to be powered by lithium, a more readily available resource.

Fortune accompanied the new deputy secretary—who oversees the DOD’s $700 billion budget, its 1.3 million active-duty military force, and 732,000 civilian employees, as well as the high-level capabilities needed to achieve President Biden’s national security objectives for the country—on a whirlwind two-day trip focused on green-ifying the armed forces’ arsenal of vehicles, aircraft, and watercraft. Through a series of flights and motorcades, the deputy secretary and her team, fueled by copious amounts of coffee, visited plants and bases around Michigan, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. 

Throughout the stops on the trip, Hicks’ message remained firm: The military needs to move faster into the future. It’s a difficult objective for an organization known for moving at a glacial pace, and that still holds weapons introduced over a century ago in its active arsenal. 

At the United States Army Tank-automotive and Armaments Command in Warren, Mich., Hicks was introduced to a battery that was described as “state-of-the-art 2010 technology.” 

“Can you say that with a straight face?” she asked. “‘State-of-the-art 2010 technology’?” 

Hicks, a woman leading a male-dominated stalwart organization, did not mince words or soften her march toward carbon-neutral armed forces. 

“I think the challenge we have is that the timeline the Department [of Defense] has been used to on innovation is just plain too slow, and far slower than the commercial sector. The more we can latch up to the commercial sector the more we can help speed up our timelines. And then we have to be working with Congress and inside our own culture to make sure we can move faster,” she told Fortune over morning coffee in Newport.  

“I’m not trying to hold people to unrealistic expectations,” Hicks said. “But we want to make sure folks, from the leadership levels inside the military departments on down, are thinking about this when they think about their investment strategies.” As climate-related weather events begin to cost the Pentagon more (Tyndall Air Force Base sustained billions of dollars in damages during Hurricane Sally; at Naval Air Station Pensacola, the storm cost about $450 million), support for her mission grows. 

There’s a widespread understanding of the need, she said, but “as you rack and stack the requirements and the budgets, these things can naturally fall out, particularly where you’re trying to look at new technology and new investment, which is always challenged against the programs of today…I do worry that there’s some some extra work we have to do to force the system along.”

The military has an extensive inventory of systems that will be with it for years to come, and the lifeblood of a lot of those tactical systems is diesel fuel. In order to convince reluctant DOD officials and Congress that it’s worth it to retrofit those systems, Hicks says she has to prove that there will be a good return on investments in green technology. 

Tactical vehicles that convert to electric not only prevent further climate destruction and circumvent supply chain issues, she said, they’re also advantageous in warfare. They’re silent, and don’t show up on thermal imaging sensors. 

That extra work will make its way into the 2023 Pentagon budget, where Hicks plans to include public accounting for green technology. “We’re going to show Congress and the American public where we’re putting our investments,” she said. “That’s also a market signal, because then the market can see where DOD believes green technology or operational energy or installation resiliency funding needs to be.”

The Pentagon first declared climate change a national security threat in 2008, but remained largely complacent in its attempts to mitigate that threat. For a long time, said Hicks, the United States assumed its defense was in a strong position, especially around its industrial base. By the 1990s, the DOD had stopped requiring an in-depth understanding of its supply chain. 

COVID-19 and the pandemic’s associated supply chain problems changed all that. “We’re very worried that there’s not enough competition. We have not seeded the competition [to domestically produce the technology the military needs],” she said. In particular, the DOD is concerned about China, which has invested heavily in and is dominating lithium-ion battery production. 

The DOD is now partnering with commercial enterprises like GM in an attempt to get back on track on battery production. But there’s a lot of catching up to do: GM Defense is currently producing the first iteration of battery-powered vehicles while simultaneously working on the second and third iterations. There are currently 93 “gigafactories” that manufacture lithium-ion battery cells, and only four of them are in the United States. 

The armed forces will also need to recruit a bevy of electrical and software engineers to keep up with the changes, a task that leaders on each of the bases Hicks visited called challenging.

Increasing diversity also remains a problem. Hicks was consistently the only woman (press aside) at the stops on her trip, surrounded by groups of aging men. President Biden has created one of the most diverse cabinets in U.S. history, but whether that will trickle down into the rank and file of the Department of Defense remains to be seen. In 2020, female active-duty members made up 17.2% of the more than 1.3 million who serve in the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force, up only 0.4% from the year prior. 

Sitting at a long boardroom table at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport, flanked by Democratic Rhode Island Senators Sheldon Whitehouse and Jack Reed, Hicks questioned Navy leaders on their commitment to increasing diversity Tuesday morning. 

“What is it growing by? One to two percent?” she asked. The leaders readily agreed. 

“That was supposed to be a joke,” she replied curtly. 

They’d need to do better.

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