The Army National Guard and Army Reserve are in high demand as the Army meets national and international challenges, said Gen. Andrew Poppas, commander of U.S. Army Forces Command.

“You represent the best of our Army right here at home, on our border, in our cities” and “in the face of disaster,” Poppas said Oct. 13 in remarks at the Association of the U.S. Army’s 2025 Annual Meeting and Exposition. “We rescued over 500 individuals in Texas during a flash flood” and hundreds “during the hurricane that affected us in North Carolina” last September.

Addressing an audience of soldiers from the Army National Guard and Army Reserve, Poppas noted that reserve component infantry brigade combat teams are becoming increasingly more mobile and making “huge shifts.” Under the Army’s continuous transformation, two National Guard brigades, the 116th Infantry Brigade Combat Team in Virginia and the 76th Infantry Brigade Combat Team in Indiana, are designated to convert to a mobile brigade combat team structure.

“The units are changing,” he said. Infantry brigade combat teams are “converting to mobile” brigade combat teams. “Some of the armor and the Stryker formations are changing over into mobile formations,” he said.

As units transform, reserve components are also leveling up their training at the Army’s combat training centers, Poppas said. Through Minuteman Rotations, National Guard units train alongside active-duty soldiers at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California, and spend time in an immersive combat environment.

“It's a temporary, very mission-specific subordinate Guard formation. And they come in in the middle [of a] rotation … and they execute that task, whatever mission it is, with the formation in the box, then they come back out and redeploy, all while the rotation continues, just as we've done in combat,” Poppas said.

As the reserve components evolve in lock step with the Army, maintaining readiness is paramount, Poppas said.

“Even as we change, we have to stay ready to fight tonight,” he said. “The stakes are so high. You look around the world today” and each area of operation “is a flashpoint on the precipice of war. In every location that we're at, we have to be ready, and the nation's relying on us to make sure that we are ready.”

– Karli Nelson