How the new administration is transforming the U.S. Army

All right, Mr. Secretary, thank you for joining us here at the Pentagon

You have been busy in your first months here and visiting troops all around the world

and you're gearing up to execute a great deal of change laid out in a memo you published last month

as directed by the Secretary of Defense, and you're calling this the Army Transformation Initiative

which has a familiar ring to it. The Army Chief of Staff, General Randy George, was already implementing an effort to transform Army

in contact with units and operational exercises and training events. But this effort directs change

across the board from command consolidations to restructuring formations to canceling or altering

the path of a variety of weapons acquisition programs. So can you talk about how some of

these changes came about? How are they directed? And walk me through the rationale to consolidate

certain commands, such as Army Futures Command with Army Training and Doctrine

the consolidation of U.S. Army North and U.S. Army South with Army Forces Command

Those are just two of the major consolidation efforts. But if you could walk through some of

that rationale. Absolutely. So I think we're pretty close to day 10510 right now. And one

of the things that General George and I try to do really early on is get out and go see what are

our troops doing? What are they learning? Where are they stuck? Where are we succeeding? Where are

we failing? So we did a trip to the West Coast. We went up to JBLM and then Seattle to see Microsoft

And we tried to balance everything out. See troops, go see the best of the commercial sector

Went to Silicon Valley. We were with Meta and Google and OpenAI. Then we went out to Project

Convergence, which is like our big tech demo. And then down to the border, see 10th Mountain

So we had this trip over seven days where we get to spend a ton of time with soldiers

We got to see what was our transformation and contact looking like practically what was kind of on the future edge of what we were thinking of acquiring and then what were our soldiers actually doing when they were taking over the border And I think my big takeaway and from connecting with General George on it

what we've realized is that the calcified bureaucracy that a lot of people complain about

and have complained about for decades was going to fundamentally get in the way of us being able

to empower our soldiers to be as lethal as possible and to do the mission set that I was given from the

president from the Secretary of Defense to go give those soldiers what they want and need to go

be the most effective killing machine on behalf of our nation. May we never need them, but to have

them standing by and standing ready to provide peace through strength. And so what we did is we

collected those lessons. We tried to figure out what are the four sets of blockers that we think

exist. We put it into this memo. We talked with the Secretary of Defense about it. He was completely

bought in. And when he signed the memo, we have basically started executing against it

Diving a little bit more into detail on those command consolidations, talk about why it makes

sense to put Army Futures Command with Training and Doctrine Command, for instance. That was

I think, Army Futures Command was sort of born out of Training and Doctrine Command

and you're sort of combining them again. So what is that going to look like? I know that it's still

very early and you're working through a lot of the details. But why does it make sense to put

those back together? So I'll go high level and then bring it back down. So from a high level

perspective, the fourth bucket of things we wanted to do was just cut soldiers from the bureaucracy

and push them back out to the units to do what they signed up to do. So just for far too long

and we like to blame the Pentagon and we like to blame Congress, but we had to look in the mirror

and say, we are doing the same thing. We have too many four stars and three stars and two stars

just smushed together, pushing paper back and forth. And more than just the sin against their time was the inefficiencies that were created from all of these leadership structures All of this siloing had this kind of incredibly negative effect on our ability to move quickly

One of the things that we've reflected on most is, and this is a cultural thing

we the Pentagon and we the Army have become so risk-averse in everything we do

in all of our purchases, that we are not even just like a little bit slower than the commercial sector

We who should be willing to take on more risk are oftentimes five and ten times slower

And so when you think about merging together these commands, the specific purpose and intent is get rid of some of the headquarters, put people working together

The things that we're buying necessarily need to be informed from what our soldiers are learning in combat

And then it is completely useless to buy a tool for our soldiers and then not have the training kind of immediately changing to take advantage of that

So one of the things I'm most proud of is just to take that very concretely, like drones are now part of our basic training course where five weeks in, soldiers are getting to look and in their after action reviews, see from the drones lens, what do they actually look like on the field

And that matters. And so we think it all needed to be as streamlined as humanly possible

OK, that's that's very interesting in terms of, you know, I think with Army Futures Command, there was the concern

They wanted to create it because the requirements process was getting a bit buried in training and doctrine command

So how are you thinking about ensuring that you are, in fact, I mean, the requirements process needs its own revamp, of course

but ensuring that it continues to get the attention that it needs, that it wasn't getting, you know

really that triggered the creation of Army Futures Command in the first place. I think if you look, we've done things like RICTO

So we've created all of these workarounds to just try to avoid

The fundamental problem is that we as a United States Army have a broken procurement process

We have noble people trying their best but we are not going head on to actually fix the problem And we keep trying to create these workarounds And the workarounds I think on paper look good

I think in their first quarterly briefing, they're fine. It's creating a new bureaucracy

It's just a new. And so what I'm incredibly optimistic for under the leadership of Secretary Hegseth

and Deputy Secretary of Defense Feinberg is we just met about it this morning

we are creating lists of regulations to just cut in places where we, the Army, can take on more risk in testing

and where we, the Army, can purchase things faster. It is just not sufficient in the world of drones

and how quickly technology is moving forward to come up with these massive requirement lists

shop them to industry, wait for them to build a prototype, wait for them to bring it back, test it, and then try to scale it

That's many years compared to the two weeks that we're going to have to be able to adapt and innovate

at best with some of these things. And so what we are trying to do is, in all instances

as an Army, create the list of the things that we don't think are adding to soldiers' lives and

making them safer and more lethal, and cut it out of the process. Okay. All right. In terms of the timeline for some of these consolidations

what are you looking at? What are your goals? When would you like to say, all right

consolidation completes? General George and I testified on this last week. And so I want to disclaim

This is not intended to be intentionally vague. It is intended to say these things are processes

and we believe that we will start to push out the first orders toward this in the coming weeks

and start to give clarity on how we believe, after communicating with leadership in all of these different areas

how we believe it should function and roll out. And so all of that is to say I think in the coming weeks it will be announced

and then we're hoping to have everything completed within kind of 12 to 18 months

Okay. Well, it's going to be fast. Which is fast. And I want you to know the first pitch of the timeline was much longer. And what

we are trying to say is just wherever we can create speed, you've got to go fast. It's the right thing

for soldiers