FORT GREGG-ADAMS, Va. – Over 300 sustainment professionals from across the Army gathered at the Michael K. Williams Multipurpose Room on the Army Sustainment University campus May 5-9 for the 2025 Sustainment Warfighting Forum. The annual event, hosted by U.S. Army Combined Support Command/Sustainment Center of Excellence (CASCOM/SCOE), focused on synchronizing initiatives to transform and modernize sustainment forces.
CASCOM/SCOE provided updates on the sustainment profession and the future of sustainment, and recognized transportation and ordnance professionals during a regimental day on May 5.
“Our goal every year for the Sustainment Warfighting Forum is to synchronize and integrate the Army’s sustainment transformation efforts,” said Maj. Gen. Michelle Donahue, CASCOM/SCOE Commanding General. “We hosted key leaders from across the Total Force to solicit feedback and enable rapid dissemination of changes to our doctrine, organizational designs, training activities, and materiel integration in support of Transformation in Contact and the Army Transformation Initiative.”
This year’s theme, “Transforming the Future of Army Sustainment,” centered on how logistics must evolve to meet the challenges of Large-Scale Combat Operations and all-domain competition.
“Theater and tactical sustainment will contend with a full range of multi-domain challenges, impacting command and control, situational awareness, movement, and survivability,” explained Ian Sullivan, Deputy Chief of Staff, G-2 (Intelligence), U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command. “The volume of materiel necessary to achieve mass creates significant handling, storage, and transportation challenges.”
A significant portion of the forum addressed how logistics will adapt to future conflicts. TiC, the Army’s approach to rapidly integrating new technologies and organizational adaptations, allows Soldiers to experiment, innovate, and prepare for modern battlefields.
According to Maj. Gen. Donahue, the next few months will be critical as the Sustainment Force implements rapid changes, including a Light Support Battalion design for mobile brigade combat teams, a Division Sustainment Brigade design for light divisions, improvements to command and control (C2) systems – including Next Generation C2 efforts – food service modernization, and the Multidomain Maintenance Operational concept.
Col. Gregory Gibbons, director of CASCOM/SCOE Fielded Forces Integration Directorate, elaborated on the Division Sustainment Brigade Force Design Update. “The DSB FDU is a direct response to evolving demands, specifically the requirements of Large-Scale Combat Operations within a multi-domain operational environment,” he said. “Recent shifts in focus, detailed in FM 3-0, prioritize division-level headquarters as the tactical unit of action, driving significant changes to maneuver units. Consequently, many sustainment functions are consolidating at the division level, requiring a realignment of capabilities.”
He continued, “The DSB, and its subordinate units, must adapt to provide enhanced logistics support to maneuver brigades, as well as increasingly vital Division Artillery and engineer formations. Transforming the Brigade Support Battalion to the Light Support Battalion – and aligning it under the DSB – is crucial, providing the resources needed to support new maneuver forces and granting division commanders greater flexibility in allocating logistics resources.”
A panel comprised of Operational Force sustainment formation leaders shared TiC 1.0 lessons learned and discussed the refinement of TiC 2.0 learning demands
“With sustainment brigades now part of the Army’s TiC initiative, experimentation with new technology is playing an important part in modernizing logistics and integrating new capabilities with combat formations,” said Lt. Gen. Heidi Hoyle, Deputy Army Chief of Staff for Logistics, G-4, during remarks at a recent Association of the U.S. Army event. She also attended Sustainment Week.
Attendees explored the future of sustainment through discussions and demonstrations of new equipment and applications.
An experimentation panel discussed the Army Future Command-led Project Convergence, a campaign of Army, Joint, and multinational experiments designed to assess future concepts and prototype capabilities in a live field environment over 12-18 months. These experiments facilitate risk reduction, technology refinement, and provide valuable feedback to sustainment capability developers.
“I was very impressed with user-driven innovations like the ‘Paraline’ app, which allows Soldiers to conduct inventories using their smartphones with a user-friendly interface integrated with the Global Combat Support System – Army (GCSS-Army),” said Brig. Gen. Carlos Gorbea, Commanding General, 1st Mission Support Command, Puerto Rico, U.S. Army Reserve. “Innovations like this at the user level will improve data system fidelity and reduce human error.”
CASCOM/SCOE also presented the rollout of the Sustainment Enterprise Analytics (SEA) suite, which launched May 2 as a Power BI replacement for the Commanders Actionable Readiness Dashboard (C@RD). SEA provides commanders and staff with near-real-time GCSS-A data in a user-friendly interface, simplifying maintenance reporting and improving Army readiness.
“I can envision innovations like this expanding to other areas, such as preventive maintenance checks and services, directly through smartphones and integrated with GCSS-A,” Gorbea added.
The forum included force management program briefs from the six sustainment schools, CASCOM/SCOE G3 Operations Training and Doctrine Division, U.S. Army Reserve, and Army National Guard. It concluded May 8 with breakout sessions for brigade commanders, warrant officers, and sergeants major, as well as a Human Resources transformation discussion.
“One of our key goals for the week was to synchronize our sustainment transformation efforts to drive war-winning Army readiness,” Donahue concluded. “I believe we achieved that with our attendees, both in person and via MS Teams. Our hope now is that they will take this information back and integrate these rapid changes into their organizations.”
CASCOM/SCOE trains, educates, and develops adaptive sustainment professionals for the total force, while generating, synchronizing, and integrating innovative Army and Joint capabilities, concepts, and doctrine to sustain Large-Scale Combat Operations in a Multi-Domain Operational environment.
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