WASHINGTON — As part of the Army Transformation Initiative, the Army will re-invest up to $48 billion into the modernization of its next generation command and control within the next five to six years at a rate not done since the 1980s, said Gen. James Mingus, vice chief of staff of the Army, during a Landpower Dialogue at the Center for Strategic and International Studies earlier this month.
The Army has moved at a flat rate for the last 10 years, but the rate of technology changes and increasing threats moves more rapidly, said Mingus said.
This money comes from streamlining command structures to make the Army more fit to fight, he said.
“Our buying power continues to get less and less every year,” he said. “Meanwhile, technology and the threat are evolving at a rate that is unprecedented. And so, we saw that we needed to do some big things to change without going after our combat formations or our maneuver formations.”
Command Change
We looked at every single Army headquarters from top to bottom, Mingus said.
“Our staffs were oversized. There were some programs that were no longer necessary to survive the next fight,” he said.
Mingus said the Army has been working with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on the next generation command and control and how the Army will rapidly transform. On the tactical level, the Army had about 17 to 18 disparate battle command systems built over decades that weren’t interoperable.
“None of them were built to seamlessly work together,” he said. “They were built in stovepipes. The next-generation command and control is going to realize a singular architecture. We have physically prototyped this twice now at Project Convergence.”
In March, Soldiers, technology, equipment and defense industry partners came together at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California, to execute Project Convergence. The first part of the project focused on enabling operations at the corps and below level along with joint and multinational allies and partners.
As the project continues to evolve, planners will build upon successes and lessons learned from earlier experiments to develop a concept-driven design focused on data-driven decision making, expanded maneuver, and forging seamless and joint and multinational interoperability.
Mingus said 4th Infantry Division, Fort Carson, Colorado, will experiment with it beginning this summer.
The Army will start with how that data is stored, how it’s used, how it’s computed, and then how it moves that data. It will spend the majority of its intellectual property on the data layer and the transport layer.
Landpower
Mingus said the Army is going to begin to rapidly field the M1E3 Abrams tank. He emphasized that the tanks do not operate alone in battle but while in unified land operations, the Army executes offense, defense and stability operations simultaneously using all land operations resources.
“Combined arms and maneuver is the combination of all the warfighting functions put together in a meaningful way, synchronized over time,” he said. “The power of engineers, infantry, armor and artillery, combined, is the future of warfare for the land force and multidomain.”
Mingus said China has 3,000 tanks, Russia has 5,000 tanks, and the Army has 1,700.
He said tanks aren’t going anywhere and neither is combined arms.
“You can’t predict who you fight or where you fight,” he said. “The two things we do control is how you fight and what you fight with.”
He said the center of the way the Army fights is the movement and maneuver function.
“Where is the enemy weak? Where is he strong? Where do I flank?” Mingus said. “We develop a scheme of maneuver to figure that out. We develop a scheme of fires, protection and sustainment, and all that goes into that to support the scheme of fires.”
Mingus said the Army is using lessons learned from the Ukraine, Israel and other places around the world to put together offensive and defensive fires into a single function. The Army now has direct fire systems that will reach out and touch eight, 10, 12 kilometers. It has long-range precision fires that will reach out as close as 2,000 kilometers.
“The majority of the things that are going to kill our troopers in the future are going to come from the air,” he said. “Instead of defending points on the ground, we have to go on the offense when it comes to air defense and bring those together in a much more comprehensive fires function.”
This includes long-range direct fires, indirect fires, long-range precision fires, and air defense into a singular function.
“This is changing the character of war in terms of how we will fight,” Mingus said.
Simulations
Mingus said the 25th Infantry Division Artillery, Schofield Barracks, Hawaii, is conducting simulations where maneuver formations will have platoon leaders, company commanders and squadron leaders employing fires from their formation, using smaller first-person drones and one-way attack drones.
“We’re imagining in a future where we’re going to give them a battalion of [High Mobility Artillery Rocket System] and a battalion of M-777s [Howitzers],” Mingus said.
He said the third battalion will be a combination of mortars, M101A1 Howitzers, launched effects, loitering munitions, and first-person drones. During the simulations, Soldiers use a combination of these battalions across multiple divisions and corps.
“After every simulation, we tweak those combinations of rockets, artillery, drones and mortars to see what is the right combination,” Mingus said.
Joint forces
Since each service branch, along with NATO and allied forces bring integrated components to the land power and long-range fires fight, Mingus said it’s important for all of the systems to work together to disrupt and deny the enemy’s network.
“We’ve got to win the counter-recon fight,” he said. “We’ve got to win the counter-fires fight.”
Because of technological advances and the need for air defense, the Army is increasing its Patriot battalions and reintroducing a combination of Indirect Fire Protection Capability battalions and Patriot battalions to rebuild its air defense community.
The Army currently has 14 available Patriot battalions, three in the Indo-Pacific, one at European Command, one in Central Command for close to 500 days, and the rest are service retained.
“It’s a very stressed force element, but they’re very proud of defending Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar,” Mingus said. “It’s a very proud organization. We have plans to grow more, including one in Guam for its defense system.”
There will be more IFPC battalions coming online to help offset the air defense side of the Patriot mission. The Patriots will also get an updated radar with 360-degree coverage. It expands the range and altitude and doubles the Patriot’s capability, Mingus said.
Part of the air defense will be countering drones. He said the Army has new 30-mm proximity rounds that have a small emitting radar that if it comes within proximity of a drone, it explodes and takes the drone out.
TiC 2.0
The Army’s second phase of the Transformation in Contact will begin this year, expanding beyond light formations to varied formations, Mingus said. The 3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division; 2nd Brigade, 101st Airborne Division; and 2nd Brigade, 25th Infantry Division, began TiC 1.0 efforts in 2023.
These divisions used real-world applications in Ukraine and next-generation technology to improve the Army’s mobility, firepower, unmanned system, counter-UAS, electronic warfare and next generation command and control requirements.
With the team’s help, the Army went from experimentation to an approved design for the new Mobile Brigade Combat Team, Mingus said.
Army recruiting
Mingus said the Army’s goal for 2025 was 61,000 in the door, and 10,000 in the delayed entry program.
“We hit that at the end of May, so four months ahead of time,” he said. “In fact, we’re just over 64,000 on contract.”
He said the Army’s goal between now and October will be to fill critical military operational specialties it’s still short to make the Army more lethal in the future fight.
“We missed the mark two years in a row and realized we had a big problem,” Mingus said. “The Army was coming down at a rate that was unsustainable. Both accessions and recruiting were headed in the wrong direction. The propensity to serve, the eligibility to serve, lines and trajectories for those were headed in the wrong direction. We needed to fundamentally shift and alter how we were doing recruiting.”
Army changed Recruiting Command headquarters to directly report to the Pentagon and elevated the command structure to a three-star general. They expanded the amount of recruiters they put into the force. The Army made sure the screening criteria for the recruiters was of the highest caliber. They improved data analytics to better understand the demographics of the country, using live data to better understand the recruits that are out there, including college students, said Mingus.
Based on the Army Transformation Initiative, Mingus said the Army hopes to get both the structure and end strength close to 458,000. The current end strength is 450,000.
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