- US Army leadership has made preventing and preparing for conflict with China a top priority.
- Its focuses are uncrewed systems, autonomy, and next-generations weapons and platforms.
- Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll also highlighted the need to fix back-end problems.
The US Army is pushing radical transformation, preparing for a war that it hopes never happens, and striving to send China the message that it won't win should a fight come.
China is a rising military power and a chief concern for the Department of Defense. The Pentagon has characterized China as a "pacing challenge," and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has warned that "the threat China poses is real," stressing that Beijing is "credibly preparing to potentially use military force to alter the balance of power in the Indo-Pacific."
US Army leadership told Business Insider how it intends to meet this challenge.
The Army is pursuing future warfighting technologies and new weapons. But the service is also working on improving areas within its decision-making that it says are inefficient and ineffective.
Though there have long been efforts to pivot the military's focus to China and the Indo-Pacific, fights in the Middle East and Russia's war against Ukraine have often pulled the US in other directions.
In an interview with Business Insider, US Secretary of the Army Daniel Driscoll and Gen. James Rainey, the commanding general of Army Futures Command, spoke to what the Army's doing to not just counter China, but as Rainey said, convincing its adversary that "they're not gonna win a fight."
Readying for a future fight
The Army is working on implementing future warfare technologies and weapons, such as uncrewed systems, autonomy, and artificial intelligence, across the force, especially in the priority Indo-Pacific theater where these emerging capabilities could be critical.
There are questions around which weapons the Army needs to purchase to sufficiently prepare for potential future wars. Both Driscoll and Rainey shared that there are certain systems that are no longer necessary and that with the speed of technological advancements in modern wars, the Army has to rethink its acquisition process.
"What we've learned is you can't write a requirement for something you want five years from now," Rainey said, adding that there needs to be a change in behavior "so we can iterate faster."
Driscoll said that inefficient decision-making models have led to equipment "often not being where it should be" and that there is a need for better information from soldiers on the ground for improving weapons and systems quickly.
"That feedback loop has just been broken for a long time," he explained.
Soldiers are testing new tech out in the field with allies and partners, and the service intends to increase and streamline feedback between the Army and industry partners.
The value of some of these systems, Rainey said, "can't be overstated." And learning how weapons and tech work in specific environments in the Indo-Pacific is essential.
During a recent training, troops from the 25th Infantry Brigade saw decreases in the flight distances and endurance of drones and uncrewed systems in the Philippines due to hot and humid weather, as well as rain and winds affecting vertical takeoff and landing capabilities. And in a deployment of the new Mid-Range Capability, an Army missile system, soldiers reworked it in the field in the Philippines to improve effectiveness.
Beyond field experiments, the Army is also preparing to field a next-generation command and control system, Rainey said, that takes advantage of data-centric warfare and "lets our commanders make more, better, faster decisions."
In recent years, the Army and the larger US military have acknowledged a need to present commanders with options and responses quickly. Cross-domain fires, too, meaning capabilities from ground, maritime, air, cyber, and space, have been a priority to increase lethality.
US President Donald Trump's Pentagon has spoken at length about increasing lethality, a buzzword that refers to how effectively a military can fight. In line with efforts to boost individual soldier lethality, longstanding efforts, Army leadership told BI it's working to get rifle squads better weapons, night-vision devices, and command and control capabilities.
One of the Pentagon's current lines of effort is cutting the programs, legacy systems, and force structures that Trump, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and other military leaders deem nonessential for warfighter readiness.
That call has led to sweeping directives on transformation initiatives in the Army, especially in how it buys and uses new weapons and systems. Driscoll said that pursuing these radical transformations is "the number one thing we are doing to get the Army ready for a threat like China."
The planned overhaul, which could cost an estimated $36 billion as the service figures out what it needs for potential high-intensity future fights, stands to be one of the largest since the end of the Cold War.
