Early Life and Career
Born in Vandergrift, Pennsylvania, he graduated from Butler Senior High School in 1945 and served in the United States Army as an enlisted man from 1946 to 1947, including service in the Occupation of Japan. Perry later received a commission in the United States Army Reserve through ROTC, serving from 1950 to 1955.
Perry received his B.S. (1949) and M.A. (1950) degrees from Stanford University, and a Ph.D. in mathematics from Pennsylvania State University in 1957. He was director of the Electronic Defense Laboratories of Sylvania/GTE in California from 1954 to 1964, and from 1964 to 1977 president of ESL, Incorporated, an electronics firm that he helped found. From 1977 to 1981, during the Jimmy Carter administration, Perry served as undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, where he had responsibility for weapon systems procurement and research and development. Among other achievements, he was instrumental in the development of stealth aircraft technology. Not all of the programs he developed were as well-received, however. As journalist Paul Glastris wrote in the Washington Monthly:
As under secretary, Perry effectively controlled which emerging technologies and weapons systems would receive R&D funds and which systems the Pentagon would procure. Among the regrettable high-tech weapons systems he gave the green light to: the MX missile (still no basing system), the TV-guided Maverick missile (fighter pilots become sitting ducks when they launch them), the F-18 fighter (costs more, performs worse than the planes it replaced), the Aquila Remotely Piloted Vehicle drone (worse than the Israeli version, 16 times as expensive), the DIVAD gun (no amount of money could make it work), and the Apache helicopter (the Pentagon recently grounded the entire fleet).
On leaving The Pentagon in 1981 Perry became managing director until 1985 of Hambrecht & Quist, a San Francisco investment banking firm "specializing in high-tech and defense companies." Later in the 1980s and up to 1993, before returning to the Pentagon as deputy secretary of defense, he held positions as chairman of Technology Strategies Alliances, professor in the School of Engineering at Stanford University, and a co-director of the Preventive Defense Project at Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation. He was also a member of the Packard Commission.
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