The Army must continue to build enduring advantage as it prepares the force for the future fight, Deputy Undersecretary of the Army Mario Diaz said on the last day of the Association of the U.S. Army’s 2024 LANPAC Symposium and Exposition in Honolulu.

“Building enduring advantage is about people, it’s about formations, it’s about procedures and it’s about policy,” Diaz said May 16 during his keynote presentation. “It’s about building and composing a future Army, for the Army we need and the Army we can afford.”

Diaz urged the U.S. and allied and partnered military leaders in the audience to continue building relationships and partnerships. He also encouraged continued growth in multilateral training opportunities and experimentation of new and emerging technologies.

These real-time activities complement the Total Army Analysis, a process that considers strategic guidance from DoD and other agencies while integrating Army doctrine and the threat analysis to build the Army of the future, Diaz said. “It’s three-dimensional chess,” Diaz said. “It impacts much of our Army, it has second-order impacts on how our joint force uses our Army, but it also resonates in the halls of Congress, it impacts our workforce for generations. It’s the definition, really, of building enduring advantage.”

The Army has made progress as it undergoes the most sweeping transformation in decades, Diaz said. Faced with a future battlefield that threatens to be more lethal and complex than before, “we want to be good, and we need to be good for a sustained period of time,” he said. “We have to make sure to set those long and enduring conditions for success.”

This includes having the right leaders in the right place at echelon and continuing to build relationships with allies and partners. “If we don’t institutionalize a lot of aspects of what we need to do, we will miss this opportunity to make it stick,” Diaz said.

Keeping an eye on the future, the Army also must adapt for near-term risks and threats, Diaz said. “We must take advantage of what we see on the ground, take advantage of emerging technology … and implement that change as quickly as possible,” he said. “We have to continue to learn, and we have to continue to watch the operational environment.”