Gen. Mark Milley, having spent the first year of his tenure as Army chief of staff shoring up the service’s near-term readiness, has set his sights on modernizing the force for future conflicts.
Appearing at his second Association of the U.S. Army annual meeting as chief, Milley on Monday said he and Army Secretary Eric Fanning would focus their attention on the “deep future” of an Army that could fight a near-peer adversary beyond 2025.
“Last year we talked about readiness being the number-one priority and we have made significant progress over the past year,” Milley said. “We’re not there yet, as an Army, to where we need to be to deal with the multiple and varied challenges that we anticipate in the near future. Having said that, this year … what Secretary Fanning and I want to emphasize at this particular AUSA is the future of our Army, the deeper future, modernization and future concepts.”
Milley regularly posits that fundamental changes the way wars are fought akin to the introduction of the stirrup or rifled barrel will occur within the decade. He reiterated Monday that the Army is five to 10 years away from such a fundamental shift that will include the introduction of ground robotics and other disruptive technologies to the battlefield.
The U.S. Army likely will not have the technological monopoly it has enjoyed since World War II and must begin investing in modernization efforts so that technologies that are emerging today will be ready for fielding in 2025, he said.
“We don’t have to get it exactly right, but we have to get it less wrong than any potential adversary if we’re going to prevail in the next war,” Milley said. “The Army will be essential to the conduct of any conflict and our task is to prepare that Army for that potential future conflict. That will be a focus item for the secretary, for myself and for all the senior leaders … and throughout the entire institution.”
To prepare the Army for future warfare, the service will have to find ways to access commercial technology that evolves significantly more rapidly than the Army’s traditional acquisition process, Fanning and Milley agreed. It will have to rapid integrate cutting-edge equipment with legacy platforms like Bradley, Abrams and Apache that will be around at least for another 10-15 years while investing now in technologies that will replace them around 2025, Milley said.
“The system, left to its own devices, is in fact frustrating, slow, complicated, complex and I believe … is not designed for the world we are now entering. The commercial sector produces things at a much more rapid pace and our adversaries are doing the same,” Milley said. “There is still a lot of frustration out there. You’ve just got a very large process that is very bureaucratic and there’s a reason … because of mistakes that were made in the past, so now there’s check upon check upon double checks upon triple checks.”
Fanning has prescribed a workaround for existing technologies that are mature enough to warrant fast-track testing and fielding on a timeline of between one and five years. The Rapid Capabilities Office that will take charge of such short-term technology acquisitions is scheduled to formally open by Nov. 1, Fanning said.
Rapid Capabilities Office fills a gap between the Rapid Equipping Force that identifies, builds and fields technologies that solve a specific problem or perform a needed task within weeks or months and the traditional acquisition process, Fanning said.
“This office isn’t meant to be a workaround for traditional acquisition programs of record,” Fanning said. “It’s meant to link into them. There may be a capability on a helicopter that we need to get out faster and integrate onto existing helicopters … and as we field it that will inform the larger program of record.”
“What we see as we build towards the Army of the future is adversaries are iterating more quickly, technology is iterating more quickly,” Fanning added. “We can’t continue to modernize in the way that we always have in the past. We have to find ways, even as we are building large programs of record, to get technology capability into soldiers’ hands faster than we are right now because the adversary is doing it.”