The Army’s top leaders launched the Association of the U.S. Army’s Leader Solarium with a briefing on the service’s priorities and encouraged participants to provide feedback about theirs.

Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George provided the “view from our foxhole,” along with Sgt. Maj. of the Army Michael Weimer, by addressing recruiting, budgetary constraints and his plan to tackle how the Army processes change.

“We wanted to just start off and kind of give you a view from our foxhole just to kind of set up what we're going to ask you to do while you're here over the next couple of days,” George said Oct. 14 in remarks on the first day of the Association of the U.S. Army’s Annual Meeting and Exposition in Washington, D.C.

In remarks to Solarium participants, George explained that even though the Army made its mission of 55,000 recruits in fiscal year 2024 and added 11,000 more to the delayed entry pool, some “tough choices” about formations will be made as the active Army slowly grows from its current end strength of 447,000 to a goal of 470,000 by 2029 or 2030.

With an annual budget of about $185 billion, which George described as “a lot of money,” he pointed out that the Army has been funded at that level for three years, diminishing the service’s spending capacity.

Participants at the third annual Leader Solarium, hosted by AUSA’s Center for Leadership, included 55 battalion leadership teams from the Regular Army, the Army Reserve and the Army National Guard and one team each from the United Kingdom and Australia.

George emphasized his top priorities of warfighting, ensuring ready formations and the need for continuous transformation. He also discussed the challenges inherent in affecting change in an organization such as the Army, which has a culture of doing things the way they’ve always been done.

“Generally, our processes and systems that we have that everybody is really comfortable with, haven't changed for decades, and if you look at what's happening right now in the world and how fast technology is changing just in the last couple of years, you cannot hide anywhere on this globe,” George said.

With the battlefield “changing in weeks and months, maximum,” the Army is still putting things into the budget cycle that take years to come to fruition, he said. The “Army of 2030 is a term that I really don’t like to use because it’s based on [budget] cycles, and we’re trying to focus on doing things differently.”

George and Weimer, who will meet with Solarium participants again on Oct. 16, asked for feedback on one or two things the Army can stop doing to focus more on priorities, and what help leaders need from Army senior leaders to better command in a social media environment to promote a culture of accountability. They also asked participants to think of something to share with them that they may not be thinking of.

“I'm really looking forward to our time together on Wednesday afternoon,” George said.

— Gina Cavallaro