The Army knows it must address child care shortages, construct better barracks and improve the quality of food at dining facilities. But it is tackling these issues for reasons its leadership says are more than quality of life measures: these problems must be solved so soldiers can focus on their jobs as warfighters.

During a panel Oct. 14 on “The Soldier and Family Experience,” Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George and Sgt. Maj. of the Army Michael Weimer said installations should be places where troops and families can practice wellness, get medical care, rest and recharge.

But installations also must be locations where personnel train for the fight and increase performance. “Our installations, posts, camps and stations exist so we can fight and win. They don’t exist so that we have a great place to live, awesome [child development centers], discounts including commissaries. We need all that stuff so we can train and be really good at our jobs, and I think for a long time, we had the conversation reversed,” Weimer told an in-person and online audience during the Association of the U.S. Army’s 2025 Annual Meeting and Exposition in Washington, D.C.

According to leaders, the service has formed a working group to examine whether soldiers in some MOSs at large installations can homestead for longer than three years, transferring within the post, without hurting their careers.  

It is looking to increase home-station training, going to the field to maintain the skills needed to go to war.

And for the more mundane tasks of garrison life, the Army is exploring the use of artificial intelligence so troops have more free time for rest or to spend with families, Driscoll said.

“AI, very soon—in a matter of months—should start to make a huge difference on the tasks that leaders have to do to care for soldiers,” Driscoll said. “We should be ‘best in class’ at partnering with the Googles and the Metas and the Microsofts to give you the tools to free up your time. … You deserve it, and the tools are there. So, if you don't start to see it showing up in your lives soon, it's because we're failing.”

In the coming year, the service will start testing campus-style dining at five installations, building “food court-type environments” where soldiers and family members can select from different serving stations—traditional meals, ethnic foods, made-to-order omelets—and swipe for their meals using their Common Access Cards.

Driscoll said healthy, delicious food options for troops have been a priority since he and his family ate their first on-post meal at Fort Myer, Virginia. “I was so excited because we were going to be able to take the kids … and we got there, and it was awful,” he said.

The service also will work in close concert with the Department of War to build new barracks for soldiers, Driscoll said. Earlier this month, War Secretary Pete Hegseth created a Barracks Task Force to craft a barracks needs and construction plan, identify partners and set quality standards.

Regarding child care, the service is closely following a pilot underway by the nonprofit Armed Services YMCA, which is building child care centers off-post for use exclusively by military personnel and DoW civilians.

The biggest challenge facing the Army regarding child care is hiring quality workers. The Army has been offering incentives, such as commissary privileges and deep discounts at the centers for employees with children, to entice caregivers.

Regarding those considerations, the service also is looking to make it easier for family members who are employed on post to transfer to a job when they move to their next duty station.

Driscoll said he was hoping to “quickly is set up a structure for our spouses when they want to work on our bases, that you get approved one time, and that is good. It's a fast pass for jobs within the United States Army,” Driscoll said.

The three leaders urged Army families to stay informed, become engaged and utilize tools at their disposal, like the MyArmyPost app and the Harding Project, the service’s new professional military education initiative.

“I'm always wondering when people don't know something, I think, ‘Are you looking on our apps? Are you on our websites? Are you on the Harding Project? Are you reading? We're trying to make all of this accessible. So, I think information is also a two-way street,” George said. “If there’s anything, we need to maybe advertise those a little bit better, because I think the information is out there.”

— Patricia Kime for AUSA