Why the Army is cutting light tanks and other high-price-tag programs

Can you talk about the development of the four multi-domain commands as were laid out in the execution orders that were issued last month

Why are they being created? What might they look like? How might they be structured

So warfare has hit an inflection point, and I think most of the listeners to this probably feel it, too

When you look at Operation Spider's Web that just happened in Russia, air and land and sea have now all kind of mixed together with space

and it is no longer sufficient to specialize in one. The United States Army cannot function on land if it can't protect the air

And so what we are trying to do fundamentally is start to think about how do we create expertise

and get assets and experience in all of the different domains and how do we learn lessons from those that can impact the rest of the force

And so we were up in JBLM and seeing one of the task force

It was just incredible what they were working on, but it wasn't sufficient

And that is our problem as leaders to try to figure out how do we take those lessons, get them what they need to test it, and then take what's working and get it to the broader force

And how would multi-domain task forces fit into these multi-domain commands that you're creating

I think a lot of this is if you think about the tech startup community and you think of this concept of minimum viable product

The idea is that if you're a company and you're small and medium and you think you have something that works

get it into the hands of your customers as fast as humanly possible and get lessons from them that can impact the broader force

And so essentially the way we're thinking about these is they are our testers at small scale so that those lessons can spread up to the larger force

Okay. And so would these commands sort of take those lessons and be able to organize and disperse them across

Okay. All right. That's helpful. You also canceled and curtailed programs where the Army already spent billions of dollars There a lot of hard burn over this RCV yeah ITEP improved urban engine program M10 Booker What the strategic logic behind walking away from programs the Army previously has fought hard to get

I know this has always been a huge debate ending programs after there's been a great deal of investment

It's happened in the past. But talk a little bit about what you're trying to do here

because so much has been invested in this and so rapidly over the last four or five years

I think it's tough for some folks in the Army to see that come to an end

So the strategic vision. And this is one of the things that General George and I have aspired to do

and we should be held accountable when we've missed the mark on this. But we've told every senator and every congressman that we've annoyed with these cuts

every business that we've tried to get on the phone with them and explain to them our logic

and tell them why we don't think what we had said in the past holds true anymore

and show them where we are hoping to go. This concept of sunk cost fallacy

and it is a thing that human beings generally struggle with, which is if you've invested a lot in the past

and we do this in our personal lives, you get anchored to things that are suboptimal for the future

If you could just start again and detach your brain from the emotions, you would think, well, what's best going forward

And so what we've tried to do is, taking the booker as an example

It was intended to be a light tank that served all of these new purposes

It ended up medium. I don't think the manufacturer liked it all that much. And we, the Army, as a customer kind of helped create this Frankenstein that came to be

No one seemed to be all that excited about it. And I think what would have historically happened is I think we would have continued to acquire it

We would have needed the parts. We would have needed to train soldiers. And we would have just made it work

And so what we did is we went into the leadership Departures Dep SecDef and SecDef and said we the Army got it wrong We don think it the right idea to purchase it anymore the same with robotic combat vehicle it a three million dollar amazing

amazing piece of technology that that is made by people that we want in our ecosystem building for

us but the problem was we put out requirements that were just not uh synced with this idea of

800 drones being able to take out exquisite equipment and we just it's a lesson we learned

And so we are trying to have those hard conversations and try to empower these small and medium businesses to build the small and intratable things that we actually need going forward

Absolutely. Is there anything laid out in the memo or in the execution plans that previously signed by the Army that might change that where you might change your mind or you might shift gears based off of what you think you're going to do versus what you end up doing

How are you working through some of the continued ysis, if you will, on the impact of some of these decisions, such as the effects of some of these decisions may have on the industrial base in the United States

And I know lawmakers last week, they're going to push back on certain things

They expressed concern that the industrial base is brittle and the Army needs to make investment strategies that recognize that and that take into account those second and third order effects of the industrial base

So how are you working through that? And are you already seeing the potential need to maybe walk back on some plans or change some plans that you have

So I am going to bifurcate my reply and I'm going to narrowly focus on what I define as or General George would define as parochial issues first

And then I'll give the second reply. So the first one is to date that I know of

We have not taken a single, call it congressional district or specific state or specific company issue into account to do what we think is right for the soldier

And so what we believe is for the longest time you basically had way too much energy and effort from lobbyists who were kind of empowered I think by the building and kind of the calcified nature of this thing to get what they want against the best interest of soldiers

We have not, that I know of, compromised a single time on that to date

And that is actually helpful in conversations because I can say, hey, to date, we've made zero compromises

That being said, to the other part, if everything we have said we believe to be true six weeks ago holds true, that probably means we're not doing a good enough job learning from soldiers and learning from the community and learning from the defense industrial base about ways to do things better

I would be shocked if there aren't things that we said that turn out to be less true or not true that we believe

And so the process of kind of iteratively getting better should mean definitionally to me

It will be a trailing indicator that I have failed if we are not tweaking these things as we're learning

Yeah. So basically, you know, the memo doesn't snap the chuck. This is a living, breathing effort document, you know, as it goes forward and that you are not, you know, just being rigid about your previous decisions as you have more and more conversations about this

I hope so. And we think that this is very specifically, I think we believe when we do the math, it's $48 billion over five years

and being recycled into the things we believe that we need, that recycling should be occurring constantly

And even new things that we think we should spend on, I hope we are finding out that they're not

And if we're not falling into our own sunk cost fallacies, we're able to recycle those

And so the request of everyone on our team and every senator and congressman we talk to

a good, healthy engine of decision-making and a good democracy has tension to it

And there should be some tugs and pulls. That should land us in a better spot. And so I don't think we are naive enough to believe that we are 100% right on everything