The character of war is rapidly evolving, and soldiers need to keep pace, Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. James Mingus said.

“Between fully autonomous robots, artificial intelligence [and] machine learning, … all this stuff is coming in … beyond anything that we've ever imagined, and it just keeps getting bigger and bigger every day,” he said. As technology evolves, he said, “China has it, Russia has it [and] Iran has it. Most of the modern militaries around the world have that stuff right now, and we've got to figure it out much quicker than our adversary does.”

Speaking at the 2024 Maneuver Warfighter Conference at Fort Moore, Georgia, Mingus cautioned against soldiers getting “so enamored with the tech and the kit that we forget” to focus on “how we fight.”

Winning the next fight will take mastering the basics, Mingus said. If called to fight tonight, soldiers will fight with “the kit that you have right now, and if you've not mastered how to do that with the things that you have right now, … then we're going to be … behind.”

Soldiers will need to dominate the close fight through effective maneuver techniques, he said. “We’ve got to win with this,” Mingus said. “We fought an adversary, the Taliban and ISIS in Iraq and Afghanistan, that our squads were far superior to. … That’s not going to be the case with Russia and China. Their squads are pretty freaking good.”

As command posts become increasingly disaggregated and mobile, forming developed plans will be essential to sustaining the fight, Mingus said. “Our command posts are really good at operations, but not very good at plans,” he said. “You have to be able to do both. If you execute and win tonight, if you're not shaping for tomorrow night and you're not planning for next week, then we're never going to be able to sustain a long-duration campaign.”

As the character of war changes, the Army will need to reevaluate how it fights wars, Mingus said.

“In terms of the character of war, where we fight, who we fight, what we fight with, and how we fight … [must be] put together in a meaningful way,” he said. “When you start adding [the Army’s warfighting functions together], is that still the way we’re going to fight in the future? I don’t know yet, but we need to figure it out really quick.”