The U.S. Army’s transformation enterprise is swiftly reshaping the Army National Guard into a lighter, more lethal force and aligning its capabilities to meet the rigors of future warfare.

Sweeping changes soon will be felt across combat formations as legacy platforms, including Stryker armored vehicles and M1 Abrams tanks, are replaced by light formations with autonomous capabilities, light tactical vehicles and next-generation command-and-control technology.

The Army National Guard’s 54th Security Force Assistance Brigade will be eliminated, and force structure changes will see soldiers now assigned to mechanized formations reclassified and retrained as light infantrymen or trained for MOSs in units seeking to expand.

Training will get a big boost from a new program called the Minuteman Rotation, in which National Guard units will drop into active-duty Army rotations at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California, and spend up to nine days of their two-week summer training period immersed in a combat environment.

The changes are generational, said Lt. Gen. Jonathan Stubbs, director of the Army National Guard. “It’s big,” Stubbs said in July. “This is what I would characterize as a once-in-a-generation moment in time and an opportunity. I mean, this is generational evolution at a scope and scale that we really haven’t seen [since] just after 9/11.”

Early in his tenure, Stubbs was afforded a view from the top at the National Guard Bureau when, after swearing in as Army National Guard director on Aug. 5, 2024, he was quickly tapped to be the bureau’s acting chief.

But as of mid-October 2024, he said, he has been “firmly planted” as the 23rd director of the Army National Guard. He has since traveled from Guam to Germany and points in between, taking the pulse of the force and conferring with the adjutants general of the 54 U.S. states, territories and the District of Columbia about the future.

“I’ve been visiting with soldiers and leaders and talking about what we’re doing as a National Guard and this year of transformation,” Stubbs said. He acknowledged that big change comes with uncertainty but cited the need to step boldly forward.

“We’re reorienting to large-scale combat operations against a near-peer adversary, and that reorientation demands this evolution,” Stubbs said. “There is always apprehension, right? Because you think about the last 20 years, we’ve been organized the way we are now, and we’re going to change that.”

Time for Change

The Army National Guard has become part of transformation in contact, an Army initiative that puts new technology in soldiers’ hands for 18 to 24 months to give them a chance to test it in the field, find new ways of using it and provide feedback on what works and what doesn’t.

The initiative, which began in fiscal 2024 and is in its second iteration, or 2.0, informs the Army’s continuous transformation efforts and its vision to move toward more agile acquisition and fielding processes.

Two National Guard brigades, the 116th Infantry Brigade Combat Team in Virginia and the 76th Infantry Brigade Combat Team in Indiana, have been selected to go through transformation in contact 2.0 and will conduct their testing and give their feedback separately from the Regular Army.

Each brigade also is designated to convert to a mobile brigade combat team in the coming year, Stubbs said. “A mobile brigade combat team is smaller than a legacy infantry brigade combat team, so there will be some reorganization,” Stubbs said, explaining that unlike a standard infantry brigade, which has roughly 4,200 personnel, a mobile brigade combat team, to include a support battalion, will be closer to 2,500 to 2,700 personnel.

A mobile brigade combat team is centered around the Infantry Squad Vehicle for mobility. “That’s new for us,” Stubbs said, though he added that it’s not just about the vehicle. “It’s going to come with next-generation command and control … and a greater density of unmanned aerial systems, or drones, that can be used at the lowest echelons of the formation, say, at the squad and platoon level.”

The mobile brigades “will be leaner, lighter, more agile, more survivable, more adaptable. We’re looking forward to learning lessons as we put these two [brigade combat teams] into the new organization and as we begin to field the new kit that comes with it,” he said.

Next summer, Stubbs said, the new mobile brigade combat teams will go through a rotation at the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk, Louisiana, where their capacity for incorporating new technology and operating on a transparent battlefield will be tested by a seasoned, resident opposing force known as Geronimo.

“They will immerse themselves into that decisive training environment, and they will fight Geronimo. They will learn lessons, and they will apply lessons just like the active-component units that have gone through [transformation in contact 1.0 and 2.0] up until this point in time,” Stubbs said.

He pointed out that what’s been learned at the Joint Readiness Training Center about maneuverability is that “there’s an increase in lethality based off the inherent mobility that exists … within the new mobile brigade combat team.”

Modified Brigades

Another transformational evolution for the Army National Guard will begin in 2027 as part of the Army Transformation Initiative announced May 1 by Army Secretary Dan Driscoll and Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George that seeks sweeping changes across all three Army components.

For the Army National Guard, this will start with the modification of the National Guard’s Stryker and armored brigades, Stubbs said. The 81st Stryker Brigade Combat Team in Washington and the 56th Stryker Brigade Combat Team in Pennsylvania—the National Guard’s only Stryker formations—will become mobile brigade combat teams.

Transforming the two units into mobile brigades is “a very similar proposition” to the infantry brigades as far as equipment, and because Stryker brigades are principally manned by infantry soldiers, there won’t be a lot of reclassification and retraining, he said. “Mostly it’s going to be a reorganization,” Stubbs said.

But in 2028, he said, when the Army National Guard begins to transform three of its five armored brigade combat teams into mobile brigades, it will be “a more significant endeavor because we’re talking about large armor formations … so we’ll have a good amount of reclassification, retraining and transition.”

Armored brigades slated for transformation to mobile formations are North Carolina’s 30th Armored Brigade Combat Team, the 116th Armored Brigade Combat Team in Idaho and the 278th Armored Brigade Combat Team in Tennessee, Stubbs said. Soldiers in those units with MOSs such as armor crew member or cavalry scout will have to reclassify into an infantry MOS and go through infantry training, Stubbs said. He acknowledged that it could be challenging, much as it is when changes are made in the active component.

“It always starts with a mindset,” he said. “Coming off an M1 tank, for a young soldier, that’s significant. But by and large, the reflections I’ve had from the adjutants general that are impacted with our Stryker brigades and our armor formations is our soldiers are generally excited about the opportunity because they realize … you’re on the cutting edge of technological developments and new warfighting organizations.”

Stubbs said most soldiers will be willing to become infantrymen, but he pointed out that because the mobile brigades are smaller formations, there may be opportunities for soldiers to join other National Guard units that are “looking to expand in other areas that are needed” in large-scale combat operations.

Some of those units include cyber, electromagnetic warfare, unmanned aerial systems and counter-unmanned aerial systems, and air and missile defense, he said, adding that the Army National Guard will maintain two armored formations.

“When it’s all said and done, the Army National Guard’s close-combat formations will consist of two armored brigades and 25 mobile brigade combat teams for a total of 27 brigades,” Stubbs said. Each brigade is aligned with one of the Guard’s eight divisions, he said.

Realistic Training

Further tying the reorganization to increased lethality are Minuteman Rotations, a new program designed to get National Guard soldiers into more frequent realistic combat scenarios than the current twice-yearly rotations they get at the National Training Center or the Joint Readiness Training Center. Those are “not enough for us,” Stubbs said.

With only 39 training days a year—24 weekend days and 15 consecutive days of annual training—Stubbs and his planners sought to get leaders more time at the Army’s combat training centers. Through Minuteman Rotations, different size units will drop into active-duty units going through combat training center rotations and integrate with their operations.

The initial training units will vary from infantry to transportation to field artillery to logistics, Stubbs said, adding that while there is value in combat training, the rotations also will engender inter-operability, relationships and overall rapport with the active Army. The rotations are slated to begin in 2026 with company-sized elements, and in 2027 will expand to include one maneuver battalion.

“Our [combat training centers], that’s the Super Bowl of collective training,” Stubbs said. “You’re not going to find a better environment in which to immerse yourself and learn the hard lessons.”

Quoting retired Gen. Eric Shinseki, Army chief of staff from 1999 to 2003, who said, “If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less,” Stubbs said, “We certainly don’t want to be irrelevant.”

“We in the Army National Guard, we’ve got to change with the Army because we need to be interoperable, and we need to be relevant,” Stubbs said. “We need to be combat credible, and the way we do that is through transformation.”