What ‘Transformation in Contact’ means for the enlisted soldier

Over the past year, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George and his top generals have merged two constant Army initiatives: readiness and modernization.

Keeping soldiers ready to fight when called and delivering them new gear, updated doctrine and time to train on their equipment and tactics is a balancing act.

Although the Transformation in Contact initiative is part of an Army-wide effort, three brigades have been selected to test out many of the on-the-ground changes, including 2nd Brigade, 101st Airborne Division out of Fort Campbell, Kentucky; 2nd Brigade, 25th Infantry Division out of Hawaii; and 3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division out of Fort Drum, New York.

The brigades are buying commercial equipment and reconfiguring their unit structures to find out what they’ll need for a future fight.

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But the Army has had its waves of modernization and restructuring over the years. Often, those moves have been the focus of colonels, generals and planners, without much input from the junior soldier.

Army Times spoke with Command Sgt. Maj. T.J. Holland, who serves as the senior enlisted leader for Forces Command, which handles mobilization, deployment, sustainment and transformation, about what this transformation means for junior soldiers and enlisted leaders.

The following Q&A has been edited for length and style.

Army Times: From an enlisted perspective, how is Transformation in Contact different from past modernization and readiness efforts?

Command Sgt. Maj. T.J. Holland: When I first heard about it, as an enlisted soldier with almost 30 years in the Army I thought, “Oh boy, I’ve got a new buzzword. We’ve always had those, right? But what does this mean to me, the enlisted soldier?” Well, a few years ago we started looking at what it would mean to make purpose-built brigades. We’ve always task-organized for the mission. For instance, when soldiers deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, you’d show up to a 20-foot container of equipment provided in theater. And the first question was, “What is this and why do I need this?” Some of it was outdated. We didn’t have a vote as an enlisted soldier — we just got what was handed to us. Now you go into a squad or platoon on one of these experiments you’re going to find a scientist, a concept developer, a program officer; you’re going to find an expert that’s in the dirt with the soldier improving a solution with tactical feedback.

What have been some of the biggest challenges so far in conducting TIC with the selected brigades?

The biggest challenge is resources. Whether its time or the actual technology, it all revolves around that one word: resources. The bottom line is ensuring we get the equipment into that unit’s hands ahead of their training cycle so they can play with it, train on it and employ it at home station. Then they can leverage that capability at a combat training center. But there must be a red line. We established that with 2nd Brigade, 101st Airborne. We establish a red line where we cannot bring any more kit, new kit beyond this point or we’ll fail to get the right feedback.

What have been some of the early success, surprises, rewards of using the TIC approach with these brigades?

A big success has been command and control fix and command and control next. The streamlining of communications equipment has been fundamental. When I deployed to Afghanistan, I had four or more radios just to communicate. That comes with a lot of gear and batteries. And it takes soldiers. I want a soldier with a rifle to be a rifleman; I don’t want that soldier just sitting in a swivel chair working between two radio systems. What we were able to achieve with 2nd Brigade, 101st Airborne at the Joint Readiness Training Center in August was giving every leader with an end-user device the ability to transport voice and digital data on one device. That’s fantastic. I wish I had that as a squad leader all the way through brigade sergeant major.

What should soldiers in non-TIC designated brigades understand about this and how it will affect them in the future?

It’s not Christmas morning. You’re not going to wake up and see presents under the tree suddenly one day. Transforming is hard. You must understand the blocking and tackling of implementing new methods and gear. You must think what a unit must look like for the mission and what my roles and responsibilities are. But it does empower soldiers and leaders to take the initiative. And it’s not some far-off goal. We’re building for the Army of 2030, but units are using this equipment and tactics right now in European Command and Central Command.

What can non-TIC brigade soldiers do now to apply some of what’s being learned from this initiative?

Just look at the multifunctional reconnaissance company in 2nd Brigade, 101st Airborne. Brigades have everything in their hands and their formations right now to build that unit. They have a reconnaissance platoon, a heavy weapons platoon, a mortar platoon. Then they add a robotics and autonomous systems platoon. And now we’re funded for brigades to buy commercial equipment in these areas for their own experimentation. And they can work on the art and science of mission command by experimenting with their networks and command and control for better command posts. They’ll need to learn that if my unit is too big for the mission, it will cause problems. And if it’s too light or too small then I can’t do my job and I’m burdening the command’s support.

Given your decades-long Army career, what has been your past experience with modernization efforts and how is it different for the Pvt. Holland in today’s formation?

I started my career as a paratrooper in the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne Division. That was a brigade with just three infantry battalions. We only received extra enablers, other supporting units and capabilities, when we went to the field or to a combat training center rotation. When I came up in the Army, I didn’t have a conversation with my platoon sergeant unless he made eye contact. Nobody cared what my idea was even if it was a good idea. But, for example, the IED-defeating Rhino counter-IED system was developed by soldiers in Iraq. It saved lives. But those examples are too few and far between. Now we have soldiers computing on the edge, using 3D printers to make parts and solve problems.

Leonardo debuts drone-mounted jammer to bamboozle air threats

ROME — Aircraft and missiles heading into hostile territory will soon be relying on drone-mounted jammers flying ahead of them to bamboozle and block air defenses if a new British-built jammer takes off.

In sharp contrast to stand-off jammers, which are placed on large aircraft out of harm’s way and take out enemy radars from long distance, Leonardo is launching a new “stand-in” jammer it claims will be small enough to fit on a drone and cheap enough to be expendable.

The BriteStorm, which the firm is showing off at the AUSA convention in Washington, will weigh about 2.5kg and occupy the space of six Coke cans, including transmit and receive modules and antenna, Leonardo managers have said.

“It can be at the leading edge of any forces going into an enemy area,” said Michael Lea, VP Sales Electronic Warfare, Leonardo UK.

Designed to be sufficiently affordable to be expendable, the package will fit on large quad-copters or winged UAVs heading into the battlespace, Lea said.

“It is priced in a way it can be treated as an attritable asset so it wont break the bank or cause a major strategic issue if shot down,” he said.

After receiving an enemy radar signal, the system uses Leonardo’s Digital Radio Frequency Memory (DRFM) technology to digitally capture the signal, process it and respond by jamming the radar with electronic noise or spoofing it, which could involve creating dozens of “ghost” fighter jet signatures.

It is the same DRFM technology Leonardo has used on its BriteCloud – an expendable countermeasure designed to be released from aircraft to disrupt incoming missiles’ radar guidance systems.

The BriteStorm uses up to three transmit-receive modules, which cover low, mid, and high wavebands.

After development at Leonardo’s Luton facility in the UK, the system has been test flown by the Royal Air Force’s Rapid Capabilities Office.

Leonardo believes the BriteStorm is a step beyond the Raytheon MALD, or Miniature Air-Launched Decoy, an air launched, expendable jamming missile which has reportedly been used in Ukraine.

It also beats a stand-off jammer, said Lea. “A stand off jammer’s position in the sky is predictable whereas a stand-in jammer operates closer to threats, has more maneuverability and more axes on which it can confuse and suppress the threat,” he said.

Army wants all troops on new fitness program by 2032. How’s it going?

The Army recently announced that its all-around health and fitness program will now expand beyond a select 111 brigades to the entire Army.

Since its inception in 2018 with a pilot program, the Holistic Health and Fitness program, or H2F, has sought to educate and improve soldier performance in physical, mental, nutrition, spiritual and sleep domains.

To that end, the force has built brigade-level civilian teams of nearly two dozen contracted staff members, which include an H2F program director; nutrition, injury control and mental health directors; registered dietitians; physical therapists; athletic trainers; strength coaches; cognitive performance specialists and occupational therapists.

Army to speed up fielding of holistic health and fitness program

The brigades also receive fitness gear such as kettlebells, stationary bikes and various other equipment.

The Army’s original goal was to resource its 110 close combat brigades by 2030. With H2F rolling out across the entire service, Army Times spoke with officials at Training and Doctrine Command’s Center for Initial Military Training, which oversees the program, about where the service is now.

Here’s a look at the numbers.

Fifty active duty brigades now have H2F Performance Teams. This includes a mix of combat units, such as infantry, armor and Stryker brigades, and support units, such as military police, medical, engineer, training and sustainment brigades.

The service expects to have performance teams fully fielded to the original 111 selected brigades, or 47% of the Army’s total brigades, by fiscal 2027.

The remaining 53% of the Army’s brigades will begin seeing performance teams starting in fiscal 2028. The goal is to complete all team fielding by fiscal 2032, officials said.

“The general model will have an H2F Area Support Team that would be responsible for several units on an installation that do not already have an H2F Performance Team,” said Dr. Kevin Bigelman, H2F deputy director.

The Army Reserve will begin seeing performance teams at their units in fiscal 2026. All 28 Army Reserve commands and divisions will have the teams by fiscal 2030.

At the same time, the Army is developing an H2F Soldier Performance Management System, or H2FMS, to help soldiers and leaders measure, assess and improve their individual and unit fitness, performance and health, Bigelman said.

Funding for the team fielding to the first 111 brigades has already been factored into the fiscal 2026 to 2030 budget plans, officials said.

An H2F Performance Team costs an estimated $3 million to field and $2.5 million to maintain annually, officials said. A team for an Army National Guard or Reserve unit costs about $1.3 million to field and $1 million to maintain.

“The initial return on investment shows H2F will pay for itself as it decreases musculoskeletal injuries, reduces nondeployables, and helps soldiers who do get injured return to duty faster,” Bigelman said.

Initial data comparing H2F-resourced brigades to nonresourced brigades shows:

Though musculoskeletal injuries (MKSI) have increased across the Army, brigades with H2F Performance Teams have a 14% lower increase in MSKI and 30% lower increase in MSKI longer than 90 days.23% greater Army Combat Fitness Test pass rate.27% more soldiers qualifying as expert in rifle marksmanship.22% lower increase in behavioral health reports.502% lower increase in substance abuse profiles.

Source: Center for Initial Military Training

The Army isn’t relying solely on civilian experts to advise its teams. Senior leaders want soldiers at the head of physical training but also to have a working knowledge of the other H2F domains.

In October 2023, the Army changed its Master Fitness Trainer Course to the H2F Integrator Course and renamed its Physical Fitness School the H2F Academy.

The program of instruction for students includes:

Develop training programs to optimize performance potential and mitigate injury risk.Coach and improve movement patterns.Fuel for performance in daily life and for physically demanding tasks.Practice stress management techniques.Learn to search for, and connect with, a greater purpose.Apply rest, recovery and sleep foundations to compliment training programs.

Source: Center for Initial Military Training

The Academy has graduated 754 H2F integrators in the past year, officials said.

But to expand the reach, the Army has also conducted satellite training in H2F for Guard and Reserve participants. That’s resulted in another 611 H2F integrators, for a total of 1,365 integrators now in the Army.

US to send missile defense system and troops to Israel

The United States will send a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense battery to Israel, along with the troops needed to operate it, the Pentagon said Sunday, even as Iran warned Washington to keep American military forces out of Israel.

Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder, Pentagon spokesman, said in a statement that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin authorized the deployment of the THAAD battery at the direction of President Joe Biden. He said the system will help bolster Israel’s air defenses following Iran’s ballistic missile attacks on Israel in April and October.

The delivery of the sophisticated missile defense system risks further inflaming the conflict in the Middle East despite widespread diplomatic efforts to avoid an all-out war. The Iranian warning came in a post on the social platform X long associated with Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, who noted the earlier reports that the U.S. was considering the deployment.

Israeli forces and Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon have been clashing since Oct. 8, 2023, when the Lebanese militant group began firing rockets over the border in support of its ally Hamas in Gaza. Late last month, Israel launched a ground invasion into Lebanon.

Israel is widely believed to be preparing a military response to Iran’s Oct. 1 attack when it fired roughly 180 missiles into Israel.

In a brief exchange with reporters before leaving Florida on Sunday, Biden said he agreed to deploy the THAAD battery “to defend Israel.” Biden spoke at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa after making a quick visit to see the damage caused by Hurricane Milton and meet with first responders, residents and local leaders.

Ryder, in his statement, said the deployment “underscores the United States’ ironclad commitment to the defense of Israel, and to defend Americans in Israel, from any further ballistic missile attacks by Iran.”

It was not immediately clear where the THAAD battery was coming from or when it will arrive. Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, an Israeli army spokesman, declined to provide any timeline for its arrival, but thanked the U.S. for its support.

The U.S. deployed one of the batteries to the Middle East along with additional Patriot battalions to bolster protections for U.S. forces in the region late last year after the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas militants. Ryder also said that the U.S. sent a THAAD battery to Israel in 2019 for training.

It is also not unusual for the U.S. to have a limited number of troops in Israel, which the U.S. considers a key regional ally. There have generally been a small number of forces there consistently as well as routine rotational deployments for training and exercises.

The THAAD will add another layer to Israel’s already significant air defenses, which include separate systems designed to intercept long-range, medium-range and short-range threats. Israel recently retired its U.S.-made Patriot systems after decades of use.

According to an April report by the Congressional Research Service, the Army has seven THAAD batteries. Generally, each consists of six truck-mounted launchers, 48 interceptors, radio and radar equipment and requires 95 soldiers to operate.

The THAAD is considered a complementary system to the Patriot, but it can defend a wider area. It can hit targets at ranges of 150 to 200 kilometers (93 to 124 miles), and is used to destroy short-range, medium-range and limited intermediate-range ballistic missile threats that are either inside or outside the atmosphere.

The U.S. Missile Defense Agency is responsible for developing the system, but it is operated by the Army. An eighth system has been funded and ordered and is expected to be in the field sometime next year.

Associated Press writers Jon Gambrell in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, Aamer Madhani in Tampa, Florida, and Josef Federman in Jerusalem contributed to this report.

Army races to widen the bottlenecks of artillery shell production

The U.S. Army has started diversifying its supplier base for 155mm artillery shells, moving away from the bottleneck of a single source that has endangered the flow of fresh ammo, according to a top service official.

The service is racing toward a goal of shoring up all major single sources that provide parts or materials for 155mm munitions by the end of 2025.

“There’s going to be a lot of ribbon cuttings between now and the end of the year,” Doug Bush, the Army’s acquisition chief, told Defense News in an interview ahead of the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference.

The Pentagon is investing billions of dollars to increase the capacity of 155mm munition production as it races to replenish stock sent to support Ukraine’s fight against the Russian invasion, which began in early 2022, and to ensure the U.S. has what it might need should conflict erupt across multiple theaters at once. The Army planned to spend $3.1 billion in FY24 supplemental funding alone to ramp up production.

Prior to the war in Ukraine, the U.S. could build about 14,400 of the artillery shells per month. But as Ukrainian forces burn through the ammunition for howitzers sent to the country, the U.S. recognized quickly that replenishment could not be done with the current infrastructure.

The service has set a target of producing 100,000 artillery shells per month, but Army officials have shared it has fallen slightly behind schedule. Even so, the Army is now producing 40,000 shells a month, Army Secretary Christine Wormuth said at the Defense News Conference last month, adding that the plan is to reach 55,000 shells a month by the end of the year.

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“Part of what’s enabling that are things like the brand-new plant that we opened up in Mesquite, Texas, a couple of months ago. We’ve got a new load, assembly, pack plant in Camden, Arkansas, that’s going to be opening up pretty soon. So those are examples of where you see the payoff in that investment in the organic industrial base,” she said.

The Army had been making 155mm shells at a single plant in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and a privately operated facility nearby. All of the shells were transported to one place – Iowa Army Ammunition Plant – where they are packed with explosives.

The service quickly went under contract with General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems to build a new, mostly automated facility in Mesquite to build more shells using production systems from Turkey. And it also contracted more shell production with a company in Ontario, Canada – IMT Defense.

Shell production will go from basically one facility to four by early next year, Bush said.

The load, assemble and pack process will, by early next year, be conducted at two other facilities outside of Iowa — General Dynamics in Camden, Arkansas, and Day & Zimmerman in Parsons, Kansas, Bush said.

The Army awarded $1.5 billion in contracts to companies globally to procure bulk energetics like TNT and IMX-104 explosive as well primers and fuses in 2023.

Even so, the Army is also setting up two locations to produce propellant. “This is the propellant that goes inside the modular artillery charges right now, it’s only done in one place. It’s Valleyfield in Canada,” Bush said. Another propellant production facility will be set up at Radford Army Ammunition Plant in Virginia and the facility in Canada will have a capacity increase, he added.

US Army awards $1.5B to boost global production of artillery rounds

The Army is planning to design and construct a domestic TNT production facility, which will likely be at Radford, Bush has said in the past. Once a contract is awarded, the plan is to build it in 48 months. Currently, the U.S. relies entirely on TNT from allies.

The only place that made combustible cartridge cases – Armtec Defense Technologies – was in Coachella, California, well-known for its music festival, but also for being located along the San Andreas Fault with a high risk of large earthquakes. Day & Zimmerman will produce the cases at another location in Texarkana, Texas.

The Army is also setting up two locations producing propellant charges – American Ordnance in Middletown, Iowa, and General Dynamics in Camden, Arkansas.

“There [is] still the occasional single point, if you go down far enough, I’m not sure we can ever eliminate them entirely,” Bush said. “But we can build in more redundancy than we had before, which was, frankly, a very fragile setup where I could give you grid coordinates for like, four buildings in America, and if one of those, something happened tomorrow, we weren’t making anything … it definitely isn’t acceptable now, and we’re trying to get away from it.”

How the Army’s upgrading ammo to destroy targets large and small

From pistol rounds to artillery shells, the Army is developing a host of new ways to destroy targets large and small.

The service is working on one-way tracer rounds for current standard rifle ammunition and reduced-range training rounds for some of the same cartridges. Additionally, the service is testing proximity fuses for grenade launcher rounds that would help defeat enemies behind barriers and blast drones out of the sky.

Meanwhile, on the larger end of the caliber spectrum, Army scientists are building new rounds for the 120mm tank rounds they expect will be needed to defeat enemy armor.

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Col. Steven Power, project manager of maneuver ammunition systems for the Army’s Joint Program Executive Office Armaments and Ammunition, said his office is developing airburst options and proximity sensing in a selection of rounds between the 20mm and 40mm range.

“It won’t be long before our soldiers are facing swarms of drones,” Power said at the National Defense Industrial Association’s annual Future Force Capabilities conference in September.

The round development gives soldiers in both air defense units and other types of units ways to knock out aerial drones with the tools they have on hand. For instance, the airburst option for 30mm rounds is key to the Maneuver-Short Range Air Defense system the Army is deploying to protect various units.

The 40mm round is used both in the M320A1 individual grenade launcher and the mounted MK19 belt-fed grenade launcher.

The Army is also developing a day and night 40mm training round to help with better accuracy in the dark, Power said.

The service is finding ways to jam and disrupt signals — even looking at lasers to melt a drone’s guts to drop it out of the sky. But there’s nothing quite like steel or lead striking a target.

“In my opinion, the best way to service a single, small (drone) and certainly a swarm of them, is with a proximity medium-caliber munition,” Power said.

Developers are also working on improved airburst rounds for the Apache attack helicopter, Power said. This isn’t necessarily for drone defense but is sometimes more effective for destroying incoming targets of any type.

For the frontline foot soldier, tracers have long carried the adage that they “work both ways,” meaning shooters can see their rounds out, but the enemy can see where they’re originating.

The one-way luminescent tracer, or OWL, round is still in development, with the Army focusing on 5.56mm and 7.62mm, its most widely used small arms rounds.

But, Power said, efforts are underway to add the service’s newest caliber to the mix: the Next Generation Squad Weapon’s 6.8mm round.

While the performance of the one-way luminescence has been going well, Power said they’re still working to ensure the ballistics of the OWL rounds match what soldiers shoot with standard rounds.

That matters because with new optics, soldiers need to know how to put rounds on target and adjust rounds. If there are ballistic mismatches, it will affect accuracy.

The Army is also pushing for more at-home station training, which means more rounds fired on the service’s many ranges. However, many of those ranges were built only to accommodate the 5.56mm round, which requires 500 meters or less.

But the 7.62mm, .50 caliber and 6.8mm all shoot much farther and with much more energy.

The reduced range rounds for these calibers allows soldiers to train at their home station ranges with their full complement of squad, platoon and even some company-level weapons.

US Army sets ambitious new recruiting goal following years of struggle

The U.S. Army is aiming to recruit 61,000 new soldiers in the coming year, an ambitious goal that is building off of the service surpassing its goal with 55,000 new recruits in fiscal 2024 after several dismal recruiting years, Army Secretary Christine Wormuth announced Monday at the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference.

The Army recruited 55,000 new soldiers in FY24.

The service’s Delayed Entry Program goal for FY25 is 10,000, which is twice the number as FY24, Wormuth said. The delayed entry program allows enlistees to sign up but leave for initial training later, often so that they can complete high school or college.

“This goal is ambitious but we believe it is achievable,” she said.

The Army hitting its target represents a reversal of recent years, where the Army and other services struggled to overcome restrictions on in-person recruiting mandated by the COVID-19 pandemic, a low unemployment rate and stiff competition from private companies able to pay higher salaries and provide similar or better benefits.

Even so, Wormuth warned in September as the numbers became finalized that “the headwinds that we’ve been facing are not going to stop blowing.”

An expected drop of about 10% in the number of college-age young people nationwide in 2026 is a significant concern, Wormuth said. The dip comes 18 years after the financial recession in 2008, which triggered a decrease in the number of children born.

The Army conducted a major overhaul of its recruiting efforts last year, adding dedicated enlisted and warrant officer job positions, extending recruiter training by two weeks and using artificial intelligence to help comb through prospective recruit data. The AI tool is being provided by Deloitte, a professional services provider, in five U.S. cities to better target individuals who might be interested in service.

The service is also restructuring how it manages a variety of commands, adding a digital dashboard of key recruiting metrics and moving as many as 40 physical locations to better areas to attract recruit attention.

The Future Soldier Prep Course, a pre-basic training program that helps get prospective recruits up to physical and academic standards within 90 days, has seen more than 28,000 individuals complete the prep and basic training since its inception in 2022. That has resulted in a 90% graduation rate for prep course attendees.

Last fiscal year, the Army also saw more than 13,000 prep course graduates move on to basic training from all components total – active, reserve and Guard, according to Brig. Gen. Jennifer Walkawicz, deputy chief of staff for the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command.

That provided 25% of the total new recruits this year, which helped fill the shortfall that the Army might have otherwise faced if it had not been able to rely on the prep course.

How the Army plans to remove soldiers from the deadly breach

If a collection of soldiers and scientists are successful, troops may never again have to run, on foot, into a breach, swinging a grappling hook in a scene resembling medieval foot soldiers breaking through enemy fortifications.

Instead, soldiers of the future may pilot explosives-laden drones and robotic bulldozers into the tangle of concertina wire, steel barricades and landmines.

Over the past nine months, the 264th Engineer Clearance Company, with the 20th Engineer Brigade at Fort Liberty, North Carolina, began its third phase of human-machine teaming experiments.

Army engineers use 1950s breaching tech when robots might solve the problem

The Sandhills Project began more than a year ago, when the XVIII Airborne Corps commander tasked the brigade with finding a way to keep soldiers out of the breach, one of the deadliest spots in a combat zone.

While several Army efforts are advancing new technology to carry out this deadly task in the coming years, the brigade is working on how to breach such obstacles now, using the tools and manpower the Army has on hand.

Col. Sean Shields, 20th Engineer Brigade commander, recently laid out modern examples that military experts are witnessing in Ukraine and what it could mean for future U.S. military operations.

In early 2023, when the Ukraine military mounted a counteroffensive against the Russian invasion, Ukrainian troops faced some of the most extensive obstacle networks seen since World War II, Shields said.

Russian troops had constructed multiple barrier lines, one of the largest being the 500-mile-long line of fortifications that stalled any large-scale maneuver against Russian forces.

After kicking off in June, the counteroffensive ultimately failed by the end of the year, with some experts citing Ukraine’s lack of minefield breachers that could overcome Russian obstacles as a reason.

While the U.S. Army does have more tools and trained personnel at its fingertips, leaders don’t want to sacrifice waves of soldiers to advance forces.

“We’ve got to figure out a different way to conduct breaching operations,” Shields said.

Current methods rely on 1950s-era technology, such as the Mine Clearing Line Charge, or MICLIC, a trailer-borne line charge launcher that must be towed to the breach by an armored vehicle.

The device then launches an explosives-filled line overhead and into the obstacles. The line is then detonated and triggers any explosives in its path while destroying other non-explosive obstacles.

That move creates a path for vehicles and units to flow through barriers.

At times, foot soldiers must also hand-carry a grappling hook and line, hurl it over concertina wire barriers and pull the wire out of the path. But these antiquated methods are prone to yielding heavy casualties.

Shields and his team are looking toward defense industry tech to solve that problem.

“One-way attack [drone] launch effects are likely really critical to this,” Shields said.

Command Sgt. Maj. Corey Wilkens, with the 20th Engineer Brigade, oversees the Sandhills Project with Shields. He shared some of the daunting figures on current breaching methods that operational research has shown leaders.

Units must “start” five breaching lanes to ensure they’ll have one successful breach, he said.

That means a division will need to run 15 lanes into barriers to clear at least three lanes, so that three brigade combat teams can maneuver through obstacles, Wilkens said.

That strategy keeps the enemy off balance, so they must cover all five lanes, rather than mass firepower on one lane.

“This makes it very hard for the enemy to pick a lane. And when they target that area, we just switch,” Wilkens said. “The idea is that it’s so overwhelming that they can’t stop it all.”

Over this past year, soldiers have experimented with robotic vehicles, such as the Squad Multipurpose Equipment Transport, which is akin to a robotic mule built to carry food, water and other supplies for soldiers on foot.

Troops have also started working with synchronized aerial drones capable of flying and landing in a pattern aligned with explosives line charges to detonate and clear obstacles.

Some of the key steps, though, happen before the breaching lanes are even initiated.

Wilkens noted that drones with aided target recognition can help identify surface-level obstacles and mines.

They’re also using mines themselves to counter mines.

A system under development can spread 700 mines across more than 3,200 feet in a matter of minutes. Soldiers are still working out the kinks on that system when it comes to avoiding trees and other obstacles, Wilkens added.

Still, there are advantages to using classic bulldozers outfitted with remote-control or even autonomous controlling, Shields said. A hardened bulldozer gives leaders the hope that it will survive the hailstorm of enemy firepower as it approaches the increasingly dangerous breach.

Leonardo, BlueHalo demo counter-drone system on Army Stryker

After an eight-month sprint to develop and install a laser-equipped counter uncrewed aircraft system on an Army Stryker vehicle, Leonardo DRS and BlueHalo announced today they conducted a successful live-fire test of the system last month in New Mexico.

The Stryker-based directed energy Counter-UAS prototype, dubbed a C-UAS DE Stryker, can detect, identify and track multiple drone threats and use both kinetic and non-kinetic means to neutralize them. During the demonstration, the system destroyed multiple uncrewed systems, proving it could near-simultaneously track and engage targets with either a laser or a kinetic effector like a cannon or gun.

“Over two days of live fire activity, right after our initial testing, the system was 14 of 14 against small UAS within the constraints of the range,” Ed House, Leonardo’s senior director of business development for land systems, told Defense News. “Those were all defeated by the 26-kilowatt Locust laser weapon system that’s fully integrated on a modified Stryker.”

With BlueHalo’s Locust laser weapon as the centerpiece of the project, Leonardo DRS served as the prime integrator, also providing cameras and the system’s computer. Six other companies also provided subsystem support, including BAE Systems, EOS Defense, Arnold Defense, Northrop Grumman, Digital Systems Engineering and Ampex.

The integration effort and demonstration were funded by the “coalition” of industry partners, House said, noting that the Army provided a Stryker for the project.

The flexibility to use multiple effectors and integrate a slew of payloads from several providers is one key feature of the effort, House noted. Also significant is the laser’s power source. Rather than operate from a battery like most directed energy systems, Leonardo and BlueHalo were able to integrated the Locust’s power system with the vehicle, eliminating the need for a battery recharge between cycles.

“The only limiting factor we have on this Stryker is thermal management, and that means that as long as we keep the laser cool, we can continue to engage over and over and over again,” House said. “When you add laser technology — directed energy — without a power limitation, you extend the magazine.”

The demonstration has drawn some interest from the Army, House added. In the coming weeks, the team will wrap up some final integration efforts on the vehicle and then in December it will participate in a two-week concept verification effort at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico run by the Army’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office.

Data from that verification event as well as the September demonstration will inform next steps for the DE Stryker.

Mary Clum, BlueHalo’s corporate executive vice president, said that following the demonstrations, the team will shift its focus toward production and scaling the technology. The company is currently building up its manufacturing capacity for Locust so the system is available when needed to be integrated with a range of systems.

“As we’re scaling up our manufacturing, we’re making it multi-purpose,” she said, noting that it has already been installed on an infantry squad vehicle and the Army’s Joint Light Tactical Vehicle. “We want to show that you can utilize those with what’s in the inventory today.”

Trial by fire: How the Army banks on frontline units to test new gear

When learning recently that a prototype of the Army’s new air and missile defense radar was performing significantly better in tests than the old Patriot radar, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George had an idea.

Why not send the Raytheon-made Lower Tier Air and Missile Defense Sensor, or LTAMDS, to units stationed in the Pacific, the Middle East or Europe to get a sense of how the new equipment works in field, he suggested.

The process would essentially outsource service test and evaluation procedures currently confined to controlled environments in the United States to what the Army calls the “tactical edge,” one step in a wider transformation initiative that prizes change driven by the deployed.

“We bought several prototypes. We know what that capability is – whether it’s three times better or five times better, it’s better than what we have and it may not be exactly where we [want to be] at, but how can we take the same approach to putting it inside of our formation,” George said in a recent interview with Defense News.

He is now waiting for a briefing coming soon on how the Army could move more quickly with LTAMDS.

“It’s not how we normally do business,” he said, but the approach is gaining traction, propelled by a shared understanding that the pace of fielding new capabilities is the key benchmark for winning wars. “We can’t use old hardware processes when we can do things differently nowadays.”

After a series of devastating program failures, the Army has made major moves over the last decade to try to modernize its force faster, from the creation of a four-star command focused on pushing modernization efforts to the finish line, to the establishment of an office in charge of rapidly developing tech in some of the most challenging areas like hypersonic flight.

Over the years, Army officials have called for dramatic cultural changes within its modernization and acquisition communities in order to get things done, but even with nearly a decade of trying reform measures, lack of funding and red tape can still serve as roadblocks.

George became Army chief in the fall of 2023, entering the job with a reputation of bucking the status quo.

As a brigade commander in Afghanistan, George was known as the guy who outfitted his entire brigade with lighter equipment including non-standard, high-quality hiking boots because they were better than the standard-issue footwear.

At the Pentagon, George continued on that path.

He canceled two major development programs — the Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft and the Extended Range Cannon Artillery system — in favor of other avenues. And he did it before the programs entered the costlier phases of development and production.

George has scrapped legacy programs like the Shadow Unmanned Aircraft System in favor of a wide variety of commercial-off-the-shelf options while still pursuing a tactical UAS competition to replace the older system.

He has also worked to inject nascent capabilities into operational environments at a larger scale, compared to small soldier touchpoint events of the past, in order to understand if novel equipment can work as intended and to gauge the second-order effects on the organizations tasked with absorbing it.

He calls this effort “Transforming in Contact.”

“When the chief is talking about transforming in contact, if you take a step back, he’s talking about changing culture in the United States Army. He’s changing culture at the tactical edge. He’s changing culture with the acquisition process. He’s changing culture with the requirements process,” Lt. Gen. Karl Gingrich, whose job is pairing funding with programs as chief of the G-8 staff, told Defense News.

“We’re seeing that. We’re seeing [the Army] implement it, look at themselves on the battlefield,” he said. “They are learning, they are changing their tactics, techniques and procedures.”

Flexible Funding

Earlier this year, George began discussing the possibility of the Army asking for more flexible funding in its budget for certain capabilities. Such requests are usually touchy subjects with lawmakers, who fear losing oversight outside of the yearly appropriations cadence, a perception the chief has sought to counteract.

“I think everybody recognizes that we have to change,” he said in the recent interview ahead of the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference. “What we’re doing is we are now going to fund a capability rather than a specific program.”

The three target capabilities the Army is pursuing for flexible funding in the fiscal 2026 budget request will be unmanned aircraft systems, counter-UAS and electronic warfare. In future years, the Army is considering a more flexible budgeting approach with network capability as well, George noted.

“The chief and I feel very strongly that we need to invest more in … unmanned aerial systems, counter-unmanned aerial systems and electronic warfare,” Army Secretary Christine Wormuth said at the Defense News Conference in September. “When you look at what’s happening in Ukraine, we look at the lessons learned from Ukraine, clearly the role of drones, the role of capabilities to take down drones, that is going to be hugely important.”

In essence, the Army is asking to buy capability, “not things,” Alex Miller, the Army chief’s technology officer, told Defense News.

“What that allows is, generally, everyone races to be the number one provider of a thing, but the flexibility lets multiple contenders in the market and gives the Army some flexibility if a performer is not performing, if they’re not being a good teammate, we cut them loose,” he said. “And if other people come into the market, because we want to encourage that, we can bring them in as teammates.”

The Army is also looking at gaining more flexibility in research-and-development funding accounts in future years, George said.

While flexible funding means moving money around to buy specific capabilities, “we don’t want anybody to think that we’re doing things willy-nilly, and we don’t,” George said.

But Congress also needs to allow the Army to make adjustments that, for example, might cost more. “If you can imagine, [if] industry out there had to go and ask permission to make a software adjustment and it took 90, 120, 180 days, things would stop working,” George said.

The Army is working with Congress on the proper notification system that will allow lawmakers and congressional staff to see what the Army is doing and have a forum to ask questions or flag specific activity, Gingrich said.

In one way, flexible funding is just “consolidation and streamlining” line items in the base budget associated with drones, counter-drone capabilities and electronic warfare, Army Under Secretary Gabe Camarillo said in a recent interview. That consolidation “would give us much more flexibility within certain program line items to do more competitions, to be able to insert technology and to be able to procure from multiple vendors after a competition, to be able to pivot and react to emerging threats and shifting technologies at the pace that we need to.”

Generating requirements

The Army has struggled in the past to lock in requirements but maintain enough flexibility as it progresses through technology development for new weapons systems. Requirements were too numerous, rigid or specific, and when they could not be met programs were canceled.

Through Army Futures Command, or AFC, the process for establishing requirements has changed. Rather than setting rigid requirements, the service has begun to adopt characteristics it is looking for in a capability and is using prototyping to understand what is possible.

Command officials now start the process with a statement outlining needs and desired characteristics, a few pages of prose, articulating the problem the Army wants to solve and what it is looking for, according to Gen. James Rainey, who heads Army Futures Command.

Even so, more refinement is coming to how the service writes requirements, Gingrich, Army G-8, told Defense News. “I think it will require a relook of threshold and objective capabilities. I think threshold is kind of your minimum viable product. I think we’re learning, perhaps, we set objectives maybe a little farther … extend the bar a little bit higher,” Gingrich said.

In the Army G-8, which is responsible for conducting the Army Requirements Oversight Council, or AROC, where requirements are approved, Gingrich said he’s beating back the misconception that he’s there just to execute that process on a rigid, calendar-based timeline.

“Our job as staff officers is to ensure that soldiers are getting appropriate output and outcome, not that I manage the AROC process,” Gingrich said.

Gone are the days where the requirements approval process takes a certain amount of time in staffing or requires program managers to fill out 100-page long slides for AROC presentations, he said.

“I am not averse to change. Neither is the chief. We’ve changed what we present to him at the AROC,” Gingrich said. “The calendar is dynamic. We look at it every week, and we shuffle.”

Better buying

Taking a page from how Ukraine continues to adapt against evolving Russian tactics, the U.S. Army knows it needs to be iterating technology in real time, according to the AFC commander. The war-torn country is on its fourth or fifth major revolution in terms of how it fights with unmanned systems, Rainey said recently.

“The more technology-based something is, the more you need to be able to adapt fast,” he said. That includes the Army’s three rush priorities of drones, countering drones and electronic warfare.

The Army, as part of transforming in contact, has already bought things like commercial-off-the-shelf UAVs for companies within 15 months. The service bought loitering munitions in about 18 months, Rainey said, and set up a directed requirement and put proliferated low-earth orbit capability in its Arctic Brigade in 60 days.

“I don’t want to overstate it, we haven’t totally solved the problem. But we’ve demonstrated the ability to see something happen rapidly, get a requirement written, acquisition process, and turn that into something in a real formation,” Rainey said.

The Army already has the tools in its acquisition playbook to get units what they believe they need, rotating brigades through the deployment cycle with the transforming-in-contact principle in mind, according to Doug Bush, the service’s acquisition chief.

The service designated three brigades to take new capabilities and try them in operational environments at scale. The third and latest brigade is in the midst of its turn at the Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center.

“For example, on these first two rounds, it’s largely been taking things we were already doing and kind of focusing them in,” Bush told Defense News. “It’s buy-try-decide,” a method already in practice with the Army’s acquisition shop, “but at a larger scale,” he noted. “Now it’s an entire brigade, not like one platoon trying something.”

The focus on commercial technologies, like drones, that the service can get more quickly using different authorities outside of the regular defense acquisition process is “one of the things that I hope makes transforming in contact more successful,” Stacie Pettyjohn, director of the Center for a New American Security’s defense program, told Defense News. “The big question is, how they go from these few units that have been chosen as sort of the experimenters to actually fielding at scale.”

One idea coming from the initiative is that the Army doesn’t necessarily have to field standard sets of capabilities across all Army brigades over a set number of years, Camarillo, the Army under secretary, noted.

“I think there has been a revolution in our thinking about that over the last few years, in recognizing that it’s okay for different brigades to have some equipment that’s different from what’s fielded in the past, and also different equipment from other brigades,” Camarillo said.

The other shift in thinking, he added, is recognizing that some capabilities can be treated almost like consumables. “We don’t need to worry about buying and procuring over multiple years and sustaining it because we know that it’s going to be replaced very quickly over time. UAVs and tactical UAVs are a good example of that,” he said.

George certainly isn’t the first Army chief to try and bend the service acquisition bureaucracy into shape for modern conflicts, so only time will tell what ends up sticking. For Pettyjohn, one of the questions to watch is whether the experiment of having the faraway tactical edge dictate improvements can cement itself in the processes at home. “I don’t know if they’ve totally closed those loops,” she said.