How the Army is cutting costs and rethinking policy to move faster on new tech

CNBC

4 days ago

In western Louisiana, a Black Hawk helicopter ride away from the Fort Johnson military base, sits a vast complex of wilderness that the U.S. Army uses to train soldiers for combat.
The expanse, what the Joint Readiness Training Center's calls the "Box," stretches 242,000 acres. It was there that the 1st Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division recently completed a two-week rotation and that the service's top military official, U.S. Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George, paid servicemembers a visit.
"We immerse our units in the training that's here. We have a professional opposing force that also has the latest technology, and this is where we learn, adapt and transform," George told CNBC. "This is our fourth brigade that we have basically brought through here and we are completely changing the technology that they're using, how they're organized, and then how they operate."
The 1st Brigade is a new type of military unit: a "transformation in contact" (TIC) brigade. The Army stood up the concept a year ago, and this one represents the most modern to date, equipped with artificial intelligence-enabled platforms, SpaceX Starlink internet connectivity, retrofitted autonomous vehicles and nearly 400 drones.
"What makes this one unique is the scale," said Trevor Voelkel, commander of the 101st Airborne Division's 1st Brigade Combat Team. "The technology has improved, and we're trying to maintain pace with that."
George, whose military career spans four decades, said the Army is on the cusp of a "paradigm shift," ushered in by TIC brigades.
Last month, America's oldest military branch unveiled the Army Transformation Initiative in what is expected to be its biggest restructuring in at least a generation.
Greenlit by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and spearheaded by both George and his civilian counterpart, Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll, the initiative enables the Army to trim some jobs and reposition others. It also calls for shifting more defense dollars to products that can be made quickly and cheaply as battlefields become more autonomous and as "exquisite weapons systems" like tanks and aircraft that cost millions to make have proven to be vulnerable to drone strikes.
Part of the reimaging is an effort to expand beyond the rigid, years-long acquisition process that has defined defense procurement and helped perpetuate legacy programs — whether services like the Army want to continue investing in them or not.
"We know our formations want to move faster, and we are trying to get the whole system to move much more rapidly," said George. "A big part of that is stop buying the things that we know are not going to be as effective on the battlefield so that we can infuse our formations with the things that really will be."
Army leadership has talked about improvements to bureaucratic processes for years, but it's been slow going. What makes this initiative potentially different is an extended continuing resolution coupled with a flurry of presidential executive orders — and the existence of the Department of Government Efficiency that could help a deeper cultural shift take root.
"There's just so much change happening inside the Army, inside the [Defense] Department that wouldn't have been possible a couple years ago," said Katherine Boyle, a general partner at investment firm Andreessen Horowitz, who cofounded the firm's American Dynamism practice and has invested in startups like Anduril.
"To see that culture of change, and that culture of DOGE-ing oneself, of cuts, of making sure that you're spending money in the right way, of innovation really hitting different agencies, I think, it's in some ways very hopeful for people who are building new technologies who want to work with the government," Boyle said in a recent interview with CNBC.
In the Box, the TIC brigade soldiers were supplied with 40 new technologies from 10 different companies — many of them not traditional defense contractors. Engineers and executives from the companies were embedded alongside the soldiers to troubleshoot issues and ensure changes could be communicated back to production lines in real time.
Take Skydio, the largest commercial drone maker outside of China, which sells products to the Army. Its drone wasn't flying the full range advertised during testing in the Box.
"We were able to discover that it wasn't some crazy electromagnetic issue. It was actually an issue in the settings where the drone was set on low power," said Mark Valentine, president of Skydio's global government business. "So instead of going through weeks of trying to understand how that happened, within 24 hours, we were able to identify the default setting was low power, set it on high power, and that solved the problem."
Then there's the example of autonomous vehicles.
The Army has a fleet of 100,000 Humvees acquired and sustained over decades. The service needs new capabilities, and General Motors is manufacturing new infantry squad vehicles (ISV) based off a modified Chevy Colorado.
Driscoll asked why commercial self-driving tech couldn't be adapted for military vehicles, and in 10 days startup Applied Intuition had retrofitted a GM ISV to be autonomous and to the Box it went, according to Applied Intuition cofounder and CEO Qasar Younis.
"I think we can move faster than we are," George said. "Our troops can handle the move. They can go fast and so what we've got to do is break down all the bureaucracy … to make sure that we're moving at the speed that we need to for them."
"Nobody's still using the VCR. We don't need to continue to buy a VCR just because somebody sells it," he said. "We need to have the latest technology that's on the battlefield."