The Army’s top officer on Wednesday said the service’s senior officers aren’t obsessing over the changing political landscape that returned President Donald Trump to the White House and brought former Fox News host Pete Hegseth to the Pentagon as secretary of defense.
Gen. Randy George, the Army chief of staff, told a breakfast meeting of the Association of the U.S. Army that he wasn’t particularly concerned about the recent torrent of executive orders from Mr. Trump over topics like what to do about transgender personnel in the ranks and reinstating service members forced out for refusing orders to get the COVID-19 vaccine.
“There’s going to be some policy decisions, … but we’re working through all of that stuff just like we normally do,” Gen. George said. “We’re focusing on what we need to do to transform the Army.”
He also stayed away from the topic of retired Army Gen. Mark A. Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs who had a difficult relationship with President Trump in his first term. Mr. Hegseth revoked the former chairman’s security clearance and protective detail late Tuesday in what was widely seen as a reprisal for his criticisms of Mr. Trump.
Gen. George instead concentrated on what the Army needed to do to prevail on the battlefield against near-equal adversaries such as China and Russia, after decades spent mostly fighting tenacious but outmatched terror groups in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“We have to be leaner in our formations [and] we’re going to have to be more mobile in our formations,” he said. “We are going to be ruthless about how we get to that point and do it as fast as possible. Our big focus this year is moving at speed.”
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Gen. George said he became a firm believer in “bottom-up” innovation after observing what technologically adept troops could come up with in a pinch when they were faced with a confounding obstacle.
“In Iraq and Afghanistan, when we needed innovation, we had soldiers on the ground going ‘Here’s what will help us,’” he said. “That was working really, really well. Our challenges were really the processes we had back here.”
Drones are becoming increasingly commonplace in Army units of all sizes and now the latest versions are quickly outpacing those that were fielded earlier, Gen. George said.
“They have longer endurance and they’re more hardened. There are a lot of them that are better and chapter,” he said. “There are areas where commercial technology is outpacing military technology and that’s really in drones.”
Because drones have become widely deployed in conflicts such as Russia’s invasion of neighboring Ukraine, the Army also is developing techniques to counter unmanned aerial systems on the battlefield using systems such as signal jammers and high-energy lasers, he said.
Gen. George said some belt-tightening is in the cards for the Army as it balances requirements for new technological innovations while maintaining sufficient traditional firepower. Army leaders will need to make tough choices on upcoming budgets, he said, and nothing is off the table.
“We’re looking at everything that we do for return on our investment, in terms of lethality and readiness and then taking care of our soldiers,” Gen. George said. “We’re going to have to be ruthless about that.”
• Mike Glenn can be reached at mglenn@washingtontimes.com.