Shaping the leadership pool requires a combination of carefully selecting senior leaders with a high technical acumen. Most senior and mid-level Army sustainment leaders can ask the right probing questions to fast-track their assessment of a subordinate’s plan. These questions serve as a shorthand heuristic gained through many iterations. However, only by actively engaging in planning and executing data operations will today’s junior officers gain the proper experiences and skill sets to lead tomorrow’s sustainment commands.
The Army has moved in the right direction by creating new technology-focused specialties to enhance traditional functional areas like operations research and systems analysis (ORSA). However, we propose a talent-development framework that categorizes all users across three tiers, while creating cross-functional teams of technology and sustainment experts. The FA49 ORSA Army occupation code and 280A Software Operations Technician for warrant officers are critical for sustainment commands. These experts serve as the focal point for planning the strategy and operationalization of data across all time horizons, bridging the gap between current operations and future operations.
The ORSA is responsible for building the core data that will support future analysis such as designing and curating ontology. The ORSA also chairs the governance board, guiding the commodity experts within the support operations (SPO) staff through developing data standards. Once the ontology is designed and standards are set, the data analyst, data engineers, and software developers must work to operationalize the data plan.
The FA280A operating model oversees the full development process, leveraging the Agile methodology, coaching junior developers, and directly engaging in the most sophisticated development. The team of engineers and analysts drawn from the SPO staff, assistant chief of staff, operations staff, and G-3, and overseen by the FA280A, builds ontologies, automates governance policies, and develops the user experience and workflows. This team is curating data for current decision making and future analysis. The Sustainment Automation Support Management Office, in coordination with the assistant chief of staff, signal staff G-6, maintains the information systems and interfaces with the broader enterprise to resolve issues with connectors, permissions, and the timing of enterprise reconciliation.
Traditionally the Army relied on standardization for organizational training. However, many young people gain tremendous competency through non-traditional paths before they arrive in their Army roles. These competencies should be leveraged to accelerate modernization.
- Tier 1 Soldiers are comfortable communicating on MAVEN and building basic presentations and updating the products in GAIA.
- Tier 2 Soldiers are comfortable building dashboards in and managing pipelines.
- Tier 3 Soldiers develop workflows and analytics products end to end, providing both strategic product management and technical know-how.
This tiered approach ensures engineering talent is not wasted hammering in nails, while building a talent ladder that Soldiers can aspire to ascend. It is also resilient to chance, ensuring that while the technical spaces or the faces in the formation change, there is still a continuity of effort organic to the organizational whole.
Within sustainment commands, modernization budgets must support accelerated talented growth based on operational milestones and compressed timeframes. This allows a full cycle of integration with external partners, such as a corps, and a deliberate execution of these skills into a single annual exercise life cycle. Reducing turnover is a smart way to reinvest gains where talent has consolidated and gained traction. The Army can mitigate turnover risk and reward technical throughput by allowing winning teams to consolidate and build on these gains. Cultural change will become enshrined within the institution when the leaders of these teams rise to senior staff and command roles and can exert formal influence at scale. The outcomes demand new mechanisms to recognize the value of non-traditional career paths and incentivize the bright and ambitious to engage in these spaces, without fear of being pigeon-holed into technical roles with limited career upside. Within the three-tier framework, the goal must be for officers to achieve Tier 2 status by battalion command, with all sergeants major being highly proficient Tier 1 users. Achieving this level of expertise ensures that commanders and their staff can actively engage in the oversight and leadership of data operations as they would with any other staff function.
The tiered system is a risk management and change management tool and is consistent with traditional training models. Membership in a tier is achieved by demonstrating proficiency in the skills, regardless of rank. Commercially available software firms offer high-quality, self-directed training. These opportunities can empower Soldiers to train and achieve certifiable skills outside traditional training models and serve as a self-selecting process that generates highly motivated self-starters. When hard skills are rewarded with more influence, leaders pursue these skills as vigorously as they pursue a high Army Career Tracker score. Eventually, Tier 2 skills become table stakes for the most desirable roles.
A high density of these skills in data and software operations will mitigate turnover risk. A new member of a team can quickly join a new effort and possess the shared skills to pick up where the predecessor left off. This requires teams to operate on a common Agile framework, employing DevOps at echelon, and maintaining robust in-platform documentation. The operating model led by the 49A and 280A will ensure continuity without loss of tacit knowledge. In time, this model will replace legacy knowledge management.
Army Reserve sustainment commands are uniquely positioned by personnel to experiment with the concepts put forth here. However, these commands often lack access to technology to effectively leverage its personnel advantage. Recently, several sustainment commands have participated in a full exercise cycle with an active-duty corps. These exercises have provided sustainment commands with access to technology not otherwise available and have proven to be an excellent context for experimentation. The Army can leverage exercises and formalize some level of experimentation for tactical and operational data and software operations. True experimentation requires altering the legacy staff models and planning processes to implement experimental frameworks for data operations in the six to nine months before an exercise like Warfighter. Experimentation across exercises and commands will help refine the model and shape evolving doctrine and force structure questions.
Experimentation comes at a cost when commanders look to train their staff for a near-term conflict. It is understandable that commanders may be reticent to experiment at the expense of refining familiar processes. If this is the case, the Army may consider smaller scale-controlled experiments that do not place expensive high-profile exercises at risk. These proofs of concepts can reduce risk inherent in the new methodology and introduce it to commands for more robust experimentation with a well-developed implementation package and training suite. This glide path provides the opportunity to compare the new model to the legacy model on quantitative and qualitative measures.
Conclusion
We have proposed novel talent management principles for modernizing sustainment commands. This includes a new force structure and leaders who possess competency in technology and analytics leading cross-functional teams in planning and managing data operations.
Critics might argue that building deep technology competency across a large segment of the workforce will either detract from developing expertise in sustainment skills or place a barrier to advancement for those otherwise strong leaders who lack the acumen to learn these new skills. These arguments are not wrong, especially in the time-constrained training environment of the Army. These arguments are rooted in the reality of budgets, time, and thinly stretched staff. Additionally, the recent focus on austere training and large-scale combat operations (LSCO) shifts the characteristics of training events, even for senior sustainment staffs.
We concede that the pace and nature of the changes proposed here are unlikely to gain traction under these conditions. However, our recent observations have likewise demonstrated that LSCO will stress senior Army Reserve sustainment commands to the edge of what can be managed in a dynamic and fast-paced corps-level operation. While transformational change is unlikely to occur in these commands, leaders can focus on accumulating marginal gains along a deliberate staff modernization trajectory. This trajectory is as dynamic as the technology market. The trajectory and training will continuously recalibrate to keep pace with technological developments, and managing this capability will require both technical hands-on proficiency and strategic foresight.
U.S. Army Combined Arms Support Command has an opportunity to help implement rapid transformation to bring the transitioning ESCs on par to the evolving battlefield. Codifying these concepts and systems into a cohesive doctrine can help streamline the development of organizational workloads with the new technologies available. This requires a significant change in culture and how leaders view the potential of Soldiers across the force. The structural component can adjust as the implementation of these new concepts creates new requirements, tested in training and in the realities of new areas of operation.
--------------------
LTC Domenico C. Amodeo currently serves as the operations officer for the 55th Sustainment Brigade. Previously he commanded the 1185th Deployment and Distribution Support Battalion in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. His professional credentials include designation as an APICS Certified Supply Chain Professional, alongside technical certifications in Azure, artificial intelligence, and NVIDIA. His education includes a Ph.D. in systems engineering from George Washington University.
MAJ Rich Galila currently serves as the force development officer for the 310th Expeditionary Sustainment Command. He previously served as the S-4 of the 63rd Mission Command Support Group. His education includes a Master of Business Administration with a supply chain focus from Syracuse University.
--------------------
This article was published in the fall 2026 edition of Army Sustainment Professional Bulletin.
RELATED LINKS
Army Sustainment on Line of Departure
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Social Sharing