Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. James Mingus will speak April 29 as part of the Strategic Landpower Dialogue co-hosted by the Association of the U.S. Army and the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The event will take place from 1:30–2:45 p.m. Eastern April 29 at CSIS headquarters, 1616 Rhode Island Avenue NW, Washington, D.C. It also will be livestreamed on the CSIS YouTube channel.

To attend in-person or online, you must register here.

Launched in September 2023, the Strategic Landpower Dialogue is a quarterly on-the-record speaker series on land power security issues. It serves as a unique source of insight into the current thinking of and future challenges facing the U.S. Army and land-based forces.

A former commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, Mingus became the 39th Army vice chief of staff on Jan. 4, 2024, after serving as director of the Joint Staff at the Pentagon.

Since becoming Army vice chief of staff, Mingus has focused on the service’s transformation initiatives, testifying March 12 before the Senate Armed Services subcommittee on readiness that because “our adversaries are moving faster than we are, … we are reorganizing our formations, refining how we fight and modernizing faster than ever, pushing new capabilities into the force in months, not years.”

Under the transformation in contact initiative, he said, “we are enhancing our tactical networks, rapidly fielding unmanned aerial systems, counter-unmanned aerial systems, electronic warfare systems and increasing mobility across our formations.”

As the Army moves to quickly adopt new technology, it must make sure its formations know how to fight on an ever-changing battlefield, Mingus said last fall. “It’s not just about the kit,” he said. “It’s about how you take it, put it together and how you fight that’s just as important as the stuff that’s out there.”

Transformation in contact, which puts new and emerging capabilities in soldiers’ hands, emphasizes the importance of continuous change, Mingus said. “It never stops,” he said. “Every day, the Army should get up and be a little bit better than what it was yesterday.”

Technology is changing so rapidly, and threats around the world are evolving so quickly, that the Army can’t do things in a normal way, Mingus said. “We have to constantly and continuously transform,” he said, “and kind of break the paradigm of how we normally modernize.”