Gen. Randy George, Chief of Staff of the Army, discusses next generation command and control (C2) system capabilities with a 1st Infantry Division Soldier during a human machine Integration demonstration at Project Convergence – Capstone 4. (US Army/Sgt. Brahim Douglas)
WASHINGTON — An upcoming civilian leadership shakeup across the entire Department of Defense next year could usher Daniel Driscoll in as the 26th Army secretary if Senators give their blessings.
President-elect Donald Trump announced his pick — a former soldier and adviser to Vice President-elect JD Vance — to lead the ground service in early December. The gig brings with it a host of decisions including ways to move weapon development programs into production; revamp ones that have foundered in early development; and carve out efficiencies.
[This article is one of many in a series in which Breaking Defense reporters look back on the most significant (and entertaining) news stories of 2024 and look forward to what 2025 may hold.]
Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George, who still has several years left of his tenure, talked about some of these challenges back in October.
“It should be clear to all of us that the days where we indiscriminately could buy an entire Army’s worth of inventory in a single program of record are gone,” he told an audience during the Association of the US Army annual conference. “We can’t afford to invest in obsolescence.
“There are also some things that we are going to stop buying, old, stand-alone tech that doesn’t connect to our network, equipment that can’t operate in our [transformation in contact] formations, all of the outdated stuff that isn’t survivable on the modern battlefield,” the four-star general later added. “Even if it was a requirement in the past, even if it was a program of record, we may have to stop buying it.”
While he didn’t name names of possible programs on the cutting room floor, the service has been grappling with a flat budget as it pushed forward with modernization priorities categories — long-range precision fires, next-generation combat vehicles, future vertical lift, the network, air and missile defense and soldier lethality — that were inked out during the first Trump administration. By and large, those priorities remained during the Biden administration, with the exception of some systems being killed off, like the Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft (FARA), and others sent back to the drawing board. While service officials haven’t disclosed if 2025 will be the year they need to make sweeping cuts and prioritize funding, they do have some key decision points set for the coming 12 months.
This year, for example, the service officially announced it was halting development on its Extended Range Cannon Artillery (ERCA) platform after spending several years integrating and testing out the addition of a 30-foot, 58-caliber gun tube to BAE Systems’ Paladin M109A7 self-propelled howitzer. It subsequently announced that five companies had been picked — Rheinmetall, BAE Systems, Hanwha, General Dynamics and Elbit Systems — to demo their existing platforms. In early December, Director of the Long-Range Precision Fires Cross Functional Team Brig. Gen. Rory Crooks said those early evaluations indicate that the vendors are “absolutely ready for competitive evaluation,” which means the service may decide not to delve into another lengthy development phase, and a decision is likely coming in 2025.
Depending on when a new Army civilian leader is ultimately sworn in, a couple of other big-ticket items may await including the Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) Next and a single vendor selected for the Robotic Combat Vehicle Phase II.
The Army is also poised to use next year’s Project Convergence capstone event to test out the service’s future command and control (C2) architecture to see if it’s on the right track. If testing there goes well, senior leaders will likely hand the prototyping project over to the Army Futures Command’s (AFC) Network Cross-Functional Team to continue work.
That team is “already getting the requirements developers together. They’re already looking at the budget that it will require, and working [on] the acquisition approach,” explained Col. Michael Kaloostian, the AFC’s networks and security director for Next Generation C2.
Part of that tentative plan ahead revolves around delivering a “minimal viable product” to units later in 2025 for continued testing before the service begins fielding it to soldiers, possibly in 2026.
Another hot topic across the government next year is poised to be the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. An initiative rather than a department, there have been threats of major cuts to the DoD, and for his part, George has said is in favor of finding efficiency inside the Army.
“We’ve talking about process innovation in the Army for the last year,” he told an audience in early December out at the Reagan National Defense Forum. “If it doesn’t make us more lethal or our teams more cohesive, we have to be looking at, you know, should we be doing it? So I think we have to review everything that we’re doing in that light.”
