Partnering with industry and garnering its best practices play a critical role in advancing modernization of the Army’s infrastructure, senior leaders said during a discussion at the Association of the U.S. Army’s 2025 Annual Meeting and Exposition in Washington, D.C.

Maj. Gen. Gavin Lawrence, Army Materiel Command’s deputy chief of staff for operations, outlined the role of the command. It is responsible for delivering ready combat formations, providing quality services for soldiers and their families, and for optimizing the Army’s organic industrial base, which serves “as the backbone of strategic level sustainment,” he said.

“What I’ll tell you is, as we look at those three lines of effort, Army infrastructure really underpins and supports everything we do at Army Materiel Command in terms of Army readiness,” Lawrence said Oct. 13 during a panel discussion on transforming Army infrastructure through industry partnerships.

Lawrence also pointed to Army Secretary Dan Driscoll’s remarks during the 2025 Annual Meeting’s opening ceremony earlier in the day, in which he said the Army will increase partnerships with the private sector to reduce costs, improve on-post construction and make installations more self-reliant.

“We need to collaborate with industry if we're serious about making our installations communities where our soldiers and family members can thrive, if we're serious about improving our 20th-century industrial processes and bringing that into the 21st century,” Lawrence said. “We’ve got to collaborate with industry, garner their best practices and make us better.”

Maj. Gen. John Reim, joint program executive officer of armaments and ammunition and commanding general of Picatinny Arsenal, New Jersey, the joint center of excellence for guns and ammunition, said that in the three years he’s been in the job, he’s been tasked with achieving higher output in a facility that was built in the 1940s.

Using the war in Ukraine as an example, Reim explained that as the war ramped up, the Army was tasked with increasing the production of 155 mm artillery shells to ship to Ukraine for the war effort.

“When the war first started, we were producing what we consumed annually in training for both the Army and Marine Corps, and very quickly we got the mission to hurry up and go fast,” Reim said. “We needed to shift from 14,000 [shells] a month to 100,000 a month, and I think that really illuminated some of the challenges we have in our industrial base.”

Reim underscored the importance of AUSA’s conferences as “more than just sitting on the panel.”

The meetings, he said, are “about relationships and networking. I've already had multiple engagements with industry, and the rest of my week is booked solid with industry engagements so that they can understand priorities within our portfolio and where we're putting our money, where our needs are where the Army is going.”

Reim said the ability to hold “frank and candid conversations are critically important going forward.”

— Gina Cavallaro