NCOs Have Key Role in Preparing Force for Future Fight

NCOs Have Key Role in Preparing Force for Future Fight

Senior enlisted leaders speak at AUSA 2024
Photo by: Jonathan Newton for AUSA

Setting the stage for a fight the Army must win, five of the Army’s most senior enlisted leaders provided in-depth briefings on the future battlefields NCOs need to prepare their soldiers for.

In remarks during a professional development forum hosted by Sgt. Maj. of the Army Michael Weimer, the command sergeants major of U.S. Army Pacific, Army Special Operations Command, Army Europe and Africa Command, the Army National Guard and the Army Reserve discussed transformation in contact, technology, mission command, interoperability, data management and how their organizations were tailoring formations for the future.

The discussion was aimed at highlighting how senior NCOs are “supporting the theater Army to make sure that [combatant commands] are ready to do what we pray we never have to do,” Weimer said Oct. 16 during the forum at the Association of the U.S. Army’s Annual Meeting and Exposition in Washington, D.C. The goal is to be “so lethal that it actually deters an adversary from wanting to go from competition to crisis to conflict,” he said. “It is that important.”

Among the questions fielded by the panel were queries about the Army’s ongoing force restructuring. Command Sgt. Maj. John Raines, senior enlisted adviser for the Army National Guard, noted that while in the Guard “we pride ourselves on looking just like the Army,” the component is asking itself, “Does the whole Army need to look the same?”

“Maybe we need different capabilities in different places to counter different threats,” said Raines, who is slated to become senior enlisted adviser of the National Guard Bureau. “Some of that is guesswork because we don't have the intelligence that we need. There is a lot of it that is known by us being able to observe things that are going on around the world and seeing what our enemies’ capabilities are, and we just have to rely on our Army senior leaders to make those type decisions for us.”

When asked if data and artificial intelligence should be used for command and control and to better posture a theater Army, Command Sgt. Maj. JoAnn Naumann, senior enlisted adviser for Army Special Operations Command, said, “I think we have to integrate it into everything we’re doing.”

“It is everything from understanding our manpower and how we're utilizing our manpower and the readiness of our manpower, just taking some of those tasks off of leaders so that leaders can focus on the things that only leaders can make decisions about is critical,” she said.

Weimer pointed out that while the senior NCOs who packed the audience at the forum are privy to transformation details at the highest levels, they must “overcommunicate” to their troops how the Army is transforming for large-scale combat operations.

“There are still some folks that don’t even know what that means,” Weimer said, noting that almost all those present had served before 9/11 and fought in counterinsurgency-focused operations. “We’re talking to ourselves a bit. We have to go on a campaign and talk to the soldiers that this room would be filled with if they were in your formations that don’t even know what I’m talking about right now.”

— Gina Cavallaro