Soldiers’ ingenuity and curiosity are informing and driving Army transformation efforts, the commander of Army Futures Command said.

Through the Army’s transforming in contact initiative, “we’ve put kit in the hands of soldiers, and [we’re] getting user feedback,” Gen. James Rainey said.

“The closer you are to getting shot at, the better you are at innovating,” he said. The good news is today’s young soldiers are “phenomenally adept” at innovating. “It’s inherent,” Rainey said.

Speaking March 26 during a Strategic Landpower Dialogue event co-hosted by the Association of the U.S. Army and the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Rainey said today’s soldiers also are adaptable. “If you bring a piece of technology and you give it to a soldier, and it takes them more than eight hours to figure out, you’ve probably got a garbage product,” Rainey said.

Soldiers are innovating “all over the force. It’s happening naturally,” Rainey said.

During the Strategic Landpower Dialogue, which took place in conjunction with AUSA’s Global Force Symposium and Exposition in Huntsville, Alabama, marking the first time the popular dialogue series was held outside of Washington, D.C., Rainey also talked about the challenges facing the Army and joint force.

“We’re at the most disruptive point in time in the history of warfare,” Rainey said. “The speed and scale of it is unprecedented.”

The good news for the U.S. joint force is that war remains a contest of wills between human beings, Rainey said. “It’s a human endeavor, which is good for us, because we have better people.”

As the Army looks for new technology, “the key characteristic we want to build into our forces is adaptability,” Rainey said. The challenge for the U.S. joint force is to look at what’s happening in Gaza and Ukraine and determine which lessons must be learned and applied, he said.

“No Army leader wants to see a U.S. rifle squad helpless against a swarm of drones,” Rainey said.

As technology evolves, Rainey said he’s observing that precision and mass, particularly with unmanned aerial vehicles, are beginning to merge. “Imagine precision mass and the potential of that, where commanders can fly 100 things that will hit a 10-digit grid,” he said.

The merger of offensive and defensive fires and rise in data-centric warfare also are growing challenges, Rainey said.

One of the Army’s advantages is how it trains, Rainey said. “We train to standard until we run out of time, that’s how we were raised,” he said, adding, “I’m very proud of the Army. One thing we have not done is walked away from our ability to maneuver. I don’t know a single leader in the Army that would ever willingly send a soldier into harm’s way that was untrained.”

What the Army needs from industry is the ability to replicate the unmanned aerial system threat during home-station training, Rainey said. When a Bradley platoon is training, for example, “we need to be able to swarm them,” he said.

“We just need to be able to start making sure our lieutenants and sergeants get used to looking up with the same intensity we use to secure 360 [degrees],” Rainey said.

Rainey said he is optimistic that the Army and industry will work together to solve the challenges facing the force today. “We’ve got to be more iterative and more open with industry and let industry do what they’re good at,” he said. “We need to lean into the acquisition authorities we have and look for new approaches. I’m an optimist. You have to be an optimist to be a leader in combat. Nobody likes to follow a pessimist around in a gunfight.”