If there’s one word to describe Army Secretary Christine Wormuth’s tenure so far, it’s “transformation.”
“We know we have to change,” she said. “We need to go from an Army focused on counterinsurgency and counterterrorism to an Army focused on and ready for large-scale combat operations against near-peer, nation state-level threats.”
To get there, the Army is making “a lot of changes,” Wormuth said, while contending with the most dangerous security environment she has seen in her professional lifetime and relatively flat Army budgets.
“I think we’re going in the right direction, but we have to be realistic,” Wormuth said. “It’s not the autobahn. We’re hiking up the Alps in a rainstorm. But the important thing is, we’re going in the right direction [and] we have to stay the course.”
Changing Battlefield
Since being sworn in as the 25th secretary of the Army in May 2021, Wormuth has led a busy Army that’s in demand at home and around the world. Simultaneously, the Army is investing in an ambitious transformation that aims to prepare the force for 2030 and beyond, where leaders anticipate a complex, transparent and deadly battlefield that could pit the U.S. Army against a near-peer adversary.
From how it recruits new soldiers, to how the force is structured, to fielding leap-ahead technologies, the Army is pushing quickly and urgently to reach its goals.
The Army is very busy, Wormuth said, and as she travels across the force and talks to soldiers and families, that’s something she’s hearing from them as well. “But I also think the soldiers understand their missions and see how relevant they are,” she said.
Tens of thousands of soldiers are still deployed in Europe to reassure America’s NATO allies and support Ukraine. Wormuth also highlighted the soldiers who were returning from the joint logistics over-the-shore mission in Gaza. “As much as there were challenges with weather and security on the ground, the mariners doing that work understood how important it was, understood that they were feeding people in desperate need,” she said.
Give and Take
Soldiers and families are seeing the good parts of the Army’s transformation, from new equipment being fielded to investments in barracks, Wormuth said. But they also are seeing the challenges of transformation, she said.
As an example, as part of the Army’s force structure transformation, the service is downsizing some units to make way for new formations. “The folks who are in those particular formations are sometimes nervous about those changes, but I think they see the vision that’s animating all of that work,” Wormuth said.
The force structure transformation, announced in February, is well underway and will continue for the next few years, Wormuth said. The goal is to shrink “hollow” formations and make room for the capabilities the Army needs to fight technologically advanced adversaries.
“Obviously, all those changes aren’t happening all at once, but it’s very important that we continue and finish building the additional multidomain task forces, for example, … the four [Maneuver-Short Range Air Defense] battalions, the four [Indirect Fire Protection Capability] battalions,” Wormuth said.
The Army also is reducing “overstructure,” she said. “We don’t want to have hollow units, so a lot of the transformation, it’s not just creating space for the new formations, it’s getting rid of stuff that we don’t need anymore.”
Recruiting Revisions
Another “really big” transformation effort involves the Army’s recruiting enterprise, Wormuth said. “That is going very well, and I think it’s extremely important,” she said.
After struggling to meet its recruiting goals, Wormuth and Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George announced a series of sweeping changes to how the Army recruits, including expanding into new markets and demographics, and how it selects and trains its recruiters.
“It’s going to be a much more rigorous, much more in-depth selection, really looking at capabilities and attributes,” Wormuth said about the Army’s recruiters. “Then, those people are going to be trained differently.”
Part of the transformation includes creating the 420T warrant officer MOS, or talent acquisition technician. The first class of 25 graduated this summer, and its members were slated to start reporting to recruiting units across the Army in September, Wormuth said.
A second cohort of 420Ts is in training, and the soldiers are scheduled to report to their units in January, Wormuth said. A third cohort will be selected soon, she said.
The Army also is creating the 42T MOS for enlisted soldiers who specialize in recruiting. The first cohort of 24 soldiers, most of whom were from the Army’s existing 79R recruiting MOS, has been selected. In August, they began training with industry for four months, working with and learning from companies such as Amazon, Deloitte, Wells Fargo, Boot Camp Digital and the University of Louisville, Kentucky.
When they complete their stints with industry, they will report to Fort Jackson, South Carolina, in March and help build the new MOS, Wormuth said.
“This is really a new way of approaching how we recruit and figuring out how we’re going to train and develop specialized, permanent recruiters,” Wormuth said. “Because we’re going to be learning as we go, I think we need to do a crawl, walk, run approach, rather they trying to sprint out of the gate right away and screw up.”
Expanding Efforts
Another initiative that has quickly yielded results is the Future Soldier Preparatory Course at Fort Jackson and Fort Moore, Georgia, which helps recruits meet the Army’s academic or physical fitness standards. The Army also is expanding and improving its marketing and advertising efforts, including commercials that target slightly older potential recruits and those who may be interested in the U.S. Army Reserve.
U.S. Army Recruiting Command, while hard at work on the recruiting mission, also is in the middle of its own transformation and reorganization. The Army plans to create a Recruiting Command East and West, “to make sure that we’re really geographically covering the entire country effectively,” Wormuth said.
The two new subordinate commands will be in addition to the headquarters at Fort Knox, Kentucky, she said, adding that more details will be announced in the coming months.
As the pieces fall into place, the Army has created an innovation directorate within Recruiting Command to experiment with technologies that can further help its recruiters. It also is looking to sustain its momentum.
“A big part of [Recruiting Command] is going to be focused every day on the close fight of just getting contracts signed,” Wormuth said. “We have to have another part of [Recruiting Command] that’s looking ahead, and that’s really going to be where the innovation directorate is key.”
Vetting Gear
Transformation also is underway in units across the Army, particularly in three brigade combat teams selected to be part of the Army’s “transforming in contact” initiative, which puts new equipment and emerging technology into soldiers’ hands so they can experiment, learn and provide their feedback. “I think we’re going to really try to look for opportunities to do that as much as we can,” Wormuth said.
At the same time, leaders have their eye on how busy the force is. “[Operational tempo] has been a long-standing concern for the Army,” Wormuth said. Today, one of the most in-demand communities is the air defense community, she said.
“The demand for Patriots, for [Terminal High Altitude Area Defense], is not getting any less robust. If anything, to the contrary,” Wormuth said. “Frankly, we’re seeing it manifest in challenges retaining our soldiers in that community. We’re seeing it in challenges recruiting people into that set of MOSs.”
Wormuth said she recently read a paper that indicated that only 50% of air defense artillery officers were opting into the Battalion Command Assessment Program, which assesses and selects officers to lead the Army’s battalions. “A lot of that is driven by optempo and strain on families for those young or mid-level leaders,” she said.
To tackle that challenge, Wormuth said the Army is working, broadly, to relieve requirements for soldiers “to the greatest degree possible.”
“We recognize that every single additional requirement, regulation takes time for our leaders and our troopers,” she said.
Out With the Old
One example is the Rapid Removal of Excess program, an effort led by U.S. Army Materiel Command to identify excess and obsolete equipment and remove it from Army property books. This fiscal year, the first year of the program, 333,000 pieces of equipment have been turned in, according to data from Wormuth’s office. “Just getting rid of excess equipment and not having soldiers have to go through and keep track of all of it saves them a little time,” Wormuth said. “And every place where we can save time is key.”
“But the key part, really, of some of the optempo strains is recruiting, recruiting, recruiting,” she said. “Part of what’s driving optempo is a smaller Army that’s still doing the same or more in terms of mission. That’s just another reason why it’s critical that we continue to turn our recruiting around.”
The Army is on track to meet its active-duty end strength goal of 445,000 in fiscal 2024, as directed in the National Defense Authorization Act, but the service is working to get to 470,000 around 2029.
“I do think an Army of 450,000 is too small, so we do have to focus on growing, and if we keep improving our recruiting the way we have this year, I think we will continue to grow the Army back,” she said.
Retention is another key to growing the Army. “Our retention is historically high right now,” Wormuth said. “But we can’t take that for granted.”
The Army continues to invest in quality-of-life programs for soldiers and families, including better barracks, access to quality child care, improved dining facilities and more, Wormuth said. “We can’t take our eye off those kinds of balls because if we do, I think we’ll see retention fall back,” she said.
Family Changes
In the future, the Army must do some “deeper thinking” about how it operates, Wormuth said. “Much of how we operate today is the same as it was in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, when families looked a lot different,” she said. “Now we’re in a completely different universe where … there are lots of different kinds of families. There are dual-career families, there are single parents, many spouses, man or woman, want to have careers along with their uniformed member, and our Army model makes that pretty challenging,” Wormuth said.
“We’re never going to be an Army that teleworks—you can’t win a war from your basement—but can we make further adjustments? I really think that’s something we need to look at,” she said.
As the Army pushes ahead on its transformation, Wormuth said she is concerned about operating under a continuing resolution, stopgap funding that keeps the government running at the previous year’s levels and prevents new program starts.
“The chief and I have talked a lot about the importance of being able to be more agile because technology is moving so quickly,” Wormuth said. “We’ve talked about the need to have more agile funding mechanisms with Congress. I think that is starting to resonate [but] a [continuing resolution] just makes it a lot harder to be agile.”
Wormuth said the Army likely is looking at a continuing resolution for “several months”—the new fiscal year starts Oct. 1—“but what we need to be doing is moving toward being allowed to have that more agile approach,” she said.
For its part, the Army is moving faster, “but we need to move faster still,” Wormuth said.