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Restructuring by Reassembly

Patterns of Organizational Reform in the U.S. Army

 

Lt. Col. Brad Hardy, PhD, U.S. Army

 

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The U.S. Army’s current Army Transformation Initiative (ATI) represents one of the most significant internal reorganizations in decades, reshaping the institutional Army to meet perceived future challenges. Under ATI, the Army consolidates Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) and Army Futures Command (AFC) into Transformation and Training Command (T2COM). It also integrates Forces Command (FORSCOM), U.S. Army North, and U.S. Army South into Western Hemisphere Command (WHC). And it seeks service-wide efficiencies in materiel development (see the figure).¹

Despite the preceding acronym soup, the new command names leave little doubt over their purposes. As one article claims, the TRADOC-AFC merger aims to reunify “force design, force development and force generation” into the Austin-based headquarters.² Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George stated, “I think the initial concept [of merging TRADOC into AFC] … was … having this all in one roof and driving change, and that’s what we want. There’s a lot of … absolute goodness in both.”³ Likewise, WHC seeks efficiencies in homeland defense and hemispheric engagement through combination.

The intent of these reforms invites historical comparison, particularly to support the claim of the “most significant internal reorganization in decades,” but direct analogies are limited. While the Goldwater–Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986 may have been the most significant reform of the modern era, it primarily addressed the relationships among the secretary of defense, the services, and the combatant commands rather than the Army’s internal institutional structure.⁴ Goldwater–Nichols clarified operational authority across the armed services, whereas ATI seeks to modernize the Army’s own command architecture to meet contemporary training, readiness, and force-generation requirements. One could also consider that the modularity reforms during the Global War on Terrorism bear some resemblance to ATI in terms of unit reconfiguration. However, they focused on tactical force structure to suit deployment timelines and wartime command relationships rather than what ATI promises.⁵

A more appropriate historical lineage lies within the Army’s own institutional reform movements, particularly Project 80 in the early 1960s and Operation Steadfast in the early 1970s. Both were comprehensive internal reorganizations at the three- and four-star levels driven by shifting global, technological, and bureaucratic conditions that closely mirror today’s circumstances. Both reforms created or affected the institutional ancestors to T2COM and WHC—Combat Developments Command, Continental Army Command (CONARC), FORSCOM, and TRADOC.

This article seeks to demonstrate historical continuities between the Cold War and today’s Army and to provide some insight into present change.⁶ The argument is that when the Army encounters organizational inefficiencies due to changes in strategic context and the expectations of modern warfare, the service often responds by patching together new organizations from the prized pieces of their superannuated predecessors. The result is an accordion effect: periods of institutional compression in which functions and authorities are consolidated into large, multifunctional headquarters followed by phases of expansion and diffusion into more specialized and differentiated commands. Whether triggered by political change, new leadership, emerging adversaries, or shifting conceptions of the next war, each contraction and release of this organizational rhythm follows moments of strategic reassessment when the Army again judges itself as unprepared for the future and seeks renewal through structural reform.

Project 80: Modernizing the Army for the Early Cold War

Strategic context. By 1961, the Army faced the dual pressures of a rapidly evolving global security environment and largely fruitless internal organizational changes at the division level.⁷ The election of John F. Kennedy ushered in a new administration intent on modernizing the Department of Defense, which it viewed as antiquated and inefficient, or at least argued so on the campaign trail.⁸ In his assessment, the new president found a military establishment absent “basic assumptions about our national requirements” but rife with “faulty estimates and duplication arising from inter-service rivalries [that] have all made it difficult to assess accurately how adequate—or inadequate—our defenses really are.”⁹ Cold War contingencies, ranging from nuclear deterrence in Europe to a nascent conflict in Southeast Asia, required an Army capable of operating with both flexibility and rigor. Kennedy believed he inherited a deficient Army, so he would be the one to fix it, stating at his first State of the Union address in January 1961,

I have, therefore, instructed the Secretary of Defense to reappraise our entire defense strategy—our ability to fulfill our commitments-the effectiveness, vulnerability, and dispersal of our strategic bases, forces and warning systems—the efficiency and economy of our operation and organization—the elimination of obsolete bases and installations-and the adequacy, modernization and mobility of our present conventional and nuclear forces and weapons systems in the light of present and future dangers.¹⁰

Kennedy tapped Robert S. McNamara as his secretary of defense to lead the reform. At the age of forty-four, McNamara was the youngest man to hold the post since its creation in 1947. A former president of the Ford Motor Company, he brought a reputation for statistical precision and managerial efficiency of large organizations rather than extensive military experience to the Pentagon. His brief World War II service as an Army Air Forces analyst introduced him to the military, but his actual expertise lay in corporate management and quantitative analysis. Kennedy selected him precisely for that reason, believing that McNamara’s business discipline and data-driven approach could modernize what he saw as an outdated and inefficient defense establishment.¹¹

The new secretary offered his diagnosis following the State of the Union address, observing that “many of our limited war forces are inadequately trained for non-nuclear war. We need more large scale deployment exercises for all Services, but especially joint Army-Air Force training in limited war operations.”¹² To McNamara, such shortcomings reflected deeper institutional dysfunction within the military establishment, particularly within the Army’s fragmented planning and budgeting systems. His remedy was rooted in consolidation and rational management.¹³ Firm civilian control over strategy and resources became the cornerstone of his reform philosophy, which he later summarized as a process to “define a clear objective for whatever organization I was associated with, develop a plan to achieve that objective, and systematically monitor progress against the plan. Then, if progress was deficient, one could either adjust the plan or introduce corrective action to accelerate progress.”¹⁴ In essence, McNamara sought to impose corporate-style systems analysis on the Armed Forces, transforming a diffuse military bureaucracy into a more centralized, measurable, and ostensibly efficient enterprise.

The early 1960s Army recognized that its structures, mainly inherited from World War II and minimally adjusted since then, were increasingly misaligned with the demands of technology, doctrine, and global posture. Although through fits and starts, the service was increasing its focus on atomic warfighting doctrine through its educational institutions at the basic courses, the Command and General Staff College, and the Army War College. Atomic-capability weaponry such as the MGR-1 Honest John Rocket, the M28 Davy Crocket recoilless rifle, and the M65 280 mm atomic cannon (“Atomic Annie”) found their way into the Army’s inventory for a potential conflict with the Soviet Union. As a result, individual and collective training demands widened for this scenario, while Vietnam was barely on the radar for most soldiers in the first years of the 1960s.

The 1961 Report on the Reorganization of the Department of the Army, the resultant proposal for service restructuring through the Army’s Project 80, observed that “deficiencies … are natural consequences of the explosion in technology, new management concepts, and the unprecedented size, deployment, and missions of the peacetime military establishment”¹⁵ Project 80 director Leonard Hoelscher, whose expertise in management and organizational analysis matched McNamara’s philosophy, reinforced these concerns.¹⁶ Between McNamara and Hoelscher, this period reflected an intellectual turn toward management science and systems analysis, which legitimized administrative reform as a strategic imperative. As historian James Hewes Jr. found,

The Department of the Army was growing larger and its operations more complex and diverse. Reformers sought a means of establishing more effective executive control over these expanding activities along lines similar to those developed by DuPont and General Motors in the 1920s. …. Project 80 … [was] part of this evolutionary process which, judging on the basis of past performance, was likely to continue indefinitely into the future.¹⁷

Functional drivers of reform and the new organizational architecture. The 1961 Project 80 report identified a series of functional problems that constrained Army efficiency and effectiveness.¹⁸ Materiel development, for example, suffered from ambiguous authority. Overlapping responsibilities between the deputy chief of staff for logistics and the chief of research and development produced

difficulty in the integration of effort in the materiel area. It may also affect the relationships of these two staff agencies with other general staff elements and with subordinate commands. Both staff agencies are placed in the somewhat anomalous position of being responsible for formulating policy, plans, and programs; implementing their directives; and finally reviewing and evaluating their own actions.¹⁹

As a result, projects drawing on multiple technical services such as the Signal Corps or Chemical Corps often struggled to coordinate resources effectively, and industry partners sometimes found it “difficult to adapt itself to the Army’s organizational arrangements, policies, and practices,” according to the report.²⁰ Personnel management similarly suffered from fragmentation. While the deputy chief of staff for personnel held general responsibility for manpower, over twenty other agencies played significant roles in personnel decisions.²¹ Officer assignments were often restricted within their own branch, subordinating broader Army needs to internal branch interests. In contrast, branch chiefs and the adjutant general split enlisted career development and assignment duties.²²

Combat development, defined in the report as “the research, development, and early integration … of new doctrine, new organization, and new materiel to obtain the greatest combat effectiveness,” was divided among relatively autonomous agencies.²³ CONARC, the successor to the Office of the Chief of Army Field Forces in 1955 and higher headquarters for operational Army units in the United States, lacked full authority, limiting its ability to coordinate exercise- and operations-informed innovation across the Army.²⁴

Training and doctrinal development responsibilities were dispersed among the various technical services. Although specialization allowed expert supervision, the report concluded that the arrangement “unduly complicates the determination of requirements for and the distribution of … personnel and units to Army component commanders in unified commands.”²⁵ The technical branches filled assignments based more on what was best for the branch and less so for what was best for a ground force commander.

Project 80 responded to the Army’s growing organizational inefficiencies by reassembling and consolidating existing institutions rather than building wholly new ones. In keeping with a broader historical pattern, the reformers of 1961–1962 sought coherence not through revolution but through careful recombination of the service’s functional fragments. The proposed Army Materiel Command merged overlapping responsibilities from the deputy chief of staff for logistics and the chief of research and development, placing them under a single authority. This new command centralized the Army’s wholesale materiel operations, laboratories, depots, and supply functions but did so mainly by reorganizing assets already in existence.²⁶ The change represented a shift toward unity of control and managerial clarity rather than a fundamental break with the past.

Similarly, the creation of the U.S. Army Combat Developments Command sought to overcome the diffusion of doctrinal and developmental authority that had long hindered innovation. By integrating, as the report noted, the “relatively autonomous combat developments agencies of the technical services, administrative services, and elements of the Army General Staff” under one command, Project 80 did not so much invent a new capability as it restructured and rationalized the Army’s existing developmental machinery.²⁷ The logic was functional rather than structural: to align planning, experimentation, and doctrine development under a system capable of responding to rapid technological and strategic changes without multiplying bureaucratic layers.²⁸

Finally, the results of Project 80 tasked CONARC (itself a product of earlier postwar consolidations) with unifying individual and unit training across combat arms and services. By drawing together the training responsibilities that had become scattered among multiple commands, Project 80’s reforms promised “substantial opportunities to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the over-all Army training establishment.”²⁹ The outcome, however, was less an innovation than a rationalized reassembly of existing functions, producing greater coherence within enduring institutional forms.

Taken together, Project 80 exemplified how the Army adapted to strategic and technological pressures by recombining familiar organizational components into new frameworks of authority. Its architects applied the emerging principles of management science and systems analysis, hallmarks of mid-century defense reform under McNamara, not to dismantle the existing Army but to reorder its parts. The result was an evolutionary reform: a new architecture built from inherited structures, reflecting the Army’s enduring instinct to modernize by reconstructing itself from the material of its past.

Operation Steadfast: Reassembling the Institutional Army after Vietnam

Strategic context. When President Richard Nixon and Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird entered office in 1969, they encountered a military establishment burdened by what Laird described as a “growing mood of self-doubt.”³⁰ Years of protracted conflict in Vietnam coupled with social unrest and deepening civilian skepticism had left the Department of Defense mired in what Laird termed “frustration and disillusionment.”³¹ In his 1970 testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, he explained that “blame for mediocre results of some past policies and programs fell largely on the shoulders of the military.”³² The credibility of the Armed Forces had been shaken not only by the stalemate in Southeast Asia but also by scandals and institutional mismanagement closer to home: the mishandling of military prisons, the misuse of nonappropriated funds, and the fallout from the Pueblo incident involving North Korea, which raised uncomfortable questions about the Code of Conduct for captured servicemembers. Together, these controversies compounded the sense that the military’s moral authority and administrative competence were in decline.

Laird also found that structural dysfunction within the Pentagon mirrored the malaise of the broader force. He testified that he had “inherited a system designed for highly centralized decisionmaking,” one so rigid that “many decisions are not made at all, or, if they are made, lack full coordination and commitment by those who must implement them.”³³ This “paralysis,” as Laird termed it, reflected a bureaucratic apparatus that had grown unresponsive and self-contained, detached from both interagency partners and the practical realities of available resources. Long-range plans existed, but, as he noted, they “did not always reflect realistic planning within foreseeable resources.”³⁴ For Laird and Nixon, the task of repairing this fractured institution required more than operational or budgetary reform. It demanded a fundamental rethinking of how the Army and the broader defense establishment were organized, managed, and held accountable. The Army’s subsequent internal reorganization through Operation Steadfast unfolded within and in response to this broader atmosphere of institutional doubt and administrative fatigue.

By the end of 1971, the senior leadership of the Army concluded that another major reform was necessary, and as Jean Moenk, the author of the official account of Operation Steadfast, notes, “A thorough reorganization of the entire Army structure in the continental United States was practically inevitable.”³⁵ The reforms born from Project 80 in the early 1960s were designed for a global war with a peer adversary under conditions of mobilization, not for a prolonged counterinsurgency fought within the constraints of limited war. Within only a few years of implementation, the Project 80 structure had been distorted by the demands of Southeast Asia, as Moenk highlights, with “the result that its adequacy and effectiveness were never really proven in actual operations.”³⁶ This assumes that the Army viewed “actual operations” as a World War III scenario in Europe, aligning its institutional structure to face such an anticipated scenario. Project 80 crumbled in the nearly decade-long slog in Vietnam, where that war’s character placed unique demands on the service.

The end of U.S. involvement in Vietnam forced the Army to reconsider its purpose and organization. The wartime, conscription-infused peak of 1.5 million soldiers in 1968 dropped to eight hundred thousand by June 1973, six months after the end of the draft.³⁷ A smaller active force, increasingly reliant on volunteers instead of conscripts, meant that a greater proportion of its strength would now reside in the continental United States, while reliance on the Reserve Component would grow. Simultaneously, shrinking defense budgets and political skepticism toward large-scale military commitments placed new pressures on readiness and modernization. As one historian characterized this period, “the post-Vietnam era was arguably one of the most difficult the Army had ever faced. Forces around the world, active as well as reserves, had been drawn down, stripped of equipment, under-financed and under-resourced, all drawn into the voracious maw of the war in Southeast Asia.”³⁸ In response, the Army staff identified three functional priorities that would dominate the post-Vietnam period: maintaining combat-ready forces, ensuring practical individual training, and developing new force structures and materiel systems.³⁹

These institutional challenges coincided with a distinct return to a prioritization of the Soviet Union as the Army’s pacing threat. As historian Charles Shrader observes, a “relative stability and a high degree of certainty regarding the global security environment” characterized the period beginning in 1973 and defined a renewed focus on the Soviet threat in Europe.⁴⁰ In testimony to the Senate Armed Service Committee, Laird asserted that while the United States decreased both its presence in Vietnam and military spending, “the Soviet Union is not making similar reductions in its defense budget. In fact, the Soviet Union is pulling abreast of us in many major areas of military strength and ahead of us in others.”⁴¹

Laird and his military planners believed that while the Vietnam War consumed the United States, “the Soviets are continuing the rapid deployment of major strategic offensive weapons systems at a rate that could, by the mid-1970s, place us in a second-rate strategic position with regard to the future security of the Free World.”⁴² This included a growing Soviet stockpile of 275 SS-9 intercontinental ballistic missiles and an opposing Warsaw Pact ground force that could swell to 1.3 million troops during a conflict.⁴³ Such figures fueled a growing sense of strategic vulnerability and reinforced perceptions within the Army that the United States was falling behind in both technology and readiness. As Laird stated in congressional testimony, “The USSR has now reached a position where … there could be new surprises and new ‘sputniks,’” referring to the October 1957 launch of Sputnik 1 and the subsequent fears of U.S. military unpreparedness.⁴⁴ In this climate of unease, Army leaders began to frame post-Vietnam institutional reforms as essential not merely for efficiency but for survival in an era of accelerating Soviet modernization.

Although many cite the Yom Kippur (Arab-Israeli) War of 1973 as the catalyst for the U.S. Army’s post-Vietnam doctrinal and organizational reform, institutional change was already underway prior to the conflict. The Army had begun reassessing its structure, training, and doctrine in response to the challenges of Vietnam and emerging technological developments. The Yom Kippur War, however, provided dramatic empirical evidence that reinforced and accelerated these efforts. The conflict’s unprecedented levels of lethality and mobility appeared to validate many of the assumptions that reformers had been articulating about the nature of future warfare.⁴⁵ As Donn Starry, then a major general and commander of the Armor Center and School at Fort Knox, remarked, “The Yom Kippur War was real armies, real bullets, and real soldiers. And everything that happened out there validated, almost without exception, what we thought about the future battlefield was going to look like.”⁴⁶

Nevertheless, as historian Saul Bronfeld observes, reformers such as Gen. William DePuy also employed the war “as a means to gain leverage in negotiating Army budgets and to convince the infantry generals … of the need to change training methods and increase the role of armor.”⁴⁷ Thus, while the Yom Kippur War confirmed the intellectual trajectory of ongoing reform, particularly with the delivery of the Active Defense and its successor, AirLand Battle, operational concepts, its true significance lay in the political and bureaucratic capital it provided reformers to accelerate modernization, institutional restructuring, and doctrinal innovation.⁴⁸

Functional drivers of reform and the new organizational architecture. At the organizational level, the most pressing structural problem lay with CONARC. Conceived under Project 80 as the Army’s institutional anchor, by the early 1970s, CONARC had become unwieldy and overburdened. Under Gen. Ralph E. Haines Jr., the headquarters controlled fifty-six subordinate elements. It was projected to be responsible for more than half of the active Army’s strength and nearly three-quarters of its total active and reserve force by the end of fiscal year 1973.⁴⁹ As one assessment concluded, CONARC’s dual mission of maintaining ready forces and conducting all individual and unit training would soon exceed “the span of attention and control of a single major commander.”⁵⁰

Operation Steadfast reflected a characteristic approach to Army reform: rather than generating entirely new institutions, the service reorganized existing structures by redistributing and reconfiguring established functions. CONARC, whose broad responsibilities had long encompassed both force readiness and doctrinal development, served as the primary source of this restructuring. On 1 March 1973, the U.S. Army Combat Developments Command moved under CONARC to facilitate the transition.⁵¹ Between 1 July and 1 October 1973, CONARC’s dual responsibilities were divided between two newly designated major commands, FORSCOM and TRADOC. With CONARC’s disestablishment on 31 December 1973, the Army effectively replaced a single, overburdened headquarters with two specialized commands, setting a clear division of labor.⁵²

Each new command represented a deliberate narrowing of focus. FORSCOM became responsible for the readiness and generation of deployable combat forces. TRADOC took command of the Army’s schools, training centers, and combat developments functions, reuniting doctrinal and educational responsibilities that Project 80 separated a decade earlier.⁵³ TRADOC commanded 180,000 soldiers, amounting to 22 percent of the active force, and 49,000 civilians.⁵⁴ Alongside these two commands, AMC remained as a largely independent entity, continuing to oversee logistics, procurement, and materiel development.⁵⁵

The resulting triad of FORSCOM, TRADOC, and AMC gave the Army a clearer division of institutional labor—readiness, learning, and materiel—each under unified command authority. However, as with Project 80, this arrangement was not so much revolutionary as recombinant. Steadfast reorganized and rationalized existing elements to meet new strategic and managerial demands, linking readiness, doctrine, and materiel development more coherently under a systems-oriented framework. It reflected the Army’s post-Vietnam determination to restore professional focus and to reassert institutional coherence after a decade of strategic and bureaucratic strain.

In this sense, Operation Steadfast illustrated the broader pattern at the heart of this study: when faced with inefficiency and external change, the Army tends to respond not by discarding its organizational past but by reassembling it. Just as Project 80 had built new commands from staff fragments, Steadfast recombined existing institutions such as training centers, laboratories, and doctrinal agencies into a structure suited to the technological and strategic environment of the 1970s. This adaptive continuity, rather than rupture, has been the enduring mode of Army reform from the Cold War to the present.

Assessment

Boards and committees. Throughout much of the twentieth century, the U.S. Army relied on named boards and committees as its preferred instruments for institutional reform. From the Gerow, Eddy, Williams, Haines, and Norris Boards that reviewed officer education to the Howze Board that reimagined air mobility, such efforts reflected a consistent tradition of reform through focused, semi-independent study. Even Project 80, which Leonard Hoelscher intentionally structured through working groups rather than a formal board, came to be remembered as the “Hoelscher Committee,” underscoring how strongly this model was associated with Army change.⁵⁶

These boards and ad hoc groups were valued precisely because they stood somewhat apart from the daily machinery of the Army. As historian Martin Blumenson observed, such temporary organizations could concentrate wholly on their assigned task without the distraction of routine staff work, and they could bring a degree of objectivity that was often missing within the normal command hierarchy. Although they sometimes created friction, especially among those who felt their authority threatened by outsiders, they also allowed senior leaders to direct reform more rapidly and flexibly than traditional bureaucratic channels would permit.⁵⁷

Operation Steadfast reflected this trend. It employed a general officer-led steering group, along with a network of subordinate implementation offices, to manage its complex transition.⁵⁸ Supporting efforts included the Myron Board on Army installations and drew on insights from earlier efforts such as the Williamson and Parker Boards.⁵⁹ Together, these mechanisms demonstrated how reform remained, at that time, an iterative and collaborative process, blending new ideas with institutional memory through the structure of named committees.

By contrast, the contemporary ATI emerged, at least from an outside observer, without any such formal board, steering group, or named review body. This shift suggests a broader change in how the Army now approaches internal reform. Rather than relying on semiautonomous committees, modern leaders appear to favor staff-driven, internally managed processes that can be executed quickly within existing bureaucratic structures. However, this efficiency may come at the cost of the perspective and institutional self-examination once afforded by those independent, task-oriented boards that stood deliberately apart from the system they sought to reform.

Fixing the broken Army. Each of these past reform efforts and ATI emerged in moments when the Army appeared, to insiders and observers alike, in a state of disrepair, whether in fact or perception. Project 80 arose from the early 1960s critique that the Army’s staff structure was fragmented, technologically stagnant, and administratively inefficient in meeting Cold War demands. A decade later, Operation Steadfast followed the turmoil of Vietnam, when declining morale, the transition to the all-volunteer force through reduced conscription, overextension, the fear of Soviet outpacing, and an unwieldy command structure convinced senior leaders that the Army required institutional renewal to restore coherence and credibility.

Likewise, ATI reflects similar anxieties, this time after decades of counterinsurgency and irregular warfare, rapid technological change that strains modern capability development, and an increasingly complex operational environment. Contemporary Army leaders have characterized the service as “calcified,” citing redundant programs, outdated processes, and bureaucratic inertia that impede lethality.⁶⁰ In response, ATI seeks to eliminate programs that do not directly contribute to combat effectiveness, consolidate headquarters and command structures, adopt modular open-system designs, and streamline acquisition and business processes. In each case, reformers diagnosed institutional dysfunction and pursued reorganization as the principal remedy, rebuilding the Army’s structure and processes to regain effectiveness, legitimacy, and internal confidence.

Conclusion

Across six decades of postwar reform, the U.S. Army has tended to diagnose its institutional problems in structural terms and treat them with organizational redesign. Project 80 and Operation Steadfast both emerged from moments when the Army appeared fragmented, inefficient, or ill-prepared for future war, and in each case, reformers responded by rearranging existing institutions rather than discarding them. The result was a recurring pattern—a kind of organizational “accordion effect”—in which the Army alternately compressed and expanded its headquarters, commands, and functions in search of greater coherence and responsiveness. Each cycle reflected a conviction that the Army’s structure, rather than its culture or strategy, was the principal barrier to readiness.

ATI follows this familiar rhythm but also departs from it in telling ways. Unlike the deliberative efforts of the 1960s and 1970s, ATI arrived without a formal board or committee process to analyze institutional problems or test solutions. Its introduction through top-down directive rather than extended study reflects a contemporary Army less inclined toward collective reflection and more driven by the pace of bureaucratic and technological change. In this sense, ATI represents both continuity and rupture: continuity in its belief that the Army can reorganize its way to health, and rupture in how it conceives and executes that reform. Whether this latest transformation will finally break the Army’s historical cycle or merely signal the next squeeze of the accordion remains the open question.

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Notes

1. Dan Driscoll and Randy A. George, “Letter to the Force: Army Transformation Initiative,” U.S. Army, 1 May 2025, https://www.army.mil/article/285100/letter_to_the_force_army_transformation_initiative; Mark S. Bennet, “Army Fiscal Year Budget Overview 2026,” U.S. Army, accessed 31 December 2025, https://www.asafm.army.mil/Portals/72/Documents/BudgetMaterial/2026/pbr/Army%20FY%202026%20Budget%20Overview.pdf.
2. “Army Stands Up Transformation and Training Command,” Association of the United States Army, 3 October 2025, https://www.ausa.org/news/army-stands-transformation-and-training-command.
3. Ryan Evans, host, War on the Rocks, podcast, “The Army’s Upcoming Transformation, with Secretary Driscoll and Gen. George,” 27:18, 2025, https://warontherocks.com/2025/05/the-armys-upcoming-transformation-with-secretary-driscoll-and-gen-george/.
4. James R. Locher III, “Has It Worked?—The Goldwater-Nichols Reorganization Act,” Naval War College Review 54, no. 4 (Autumn 2001): 105–6, https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/nwc-review/vol54/iss4/7.
5. Michael Moran, “U.S. Army Force Restructuring, ‘Modularity,’ and Iraq,” Council on Foreign Relations, updated 26 October 2007, https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/us-army-force-restructuring-modularity-and-iraq.
6. For a sample of prior work that leveraged Project 80 or Operation Steadfast to explain institutional change, see John A. Bonin and James D. Scudieri, “Change and Innovation in the Institutional Army from 1860-2020,” Parameters 53, no. 2 (2023): 95–120, https://www.doi.org/10.55540/0031-1723.3225; David C. Hilling, Organizational Change: An Examination of the Past to Prepare for the Future (monograph, School of Advanced Military Studies, 2020), https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/AD1159106; Robert T. Kelly, A State of Permanent Evolution: From 1970s Training and Doctrine Command to 2018 Army Futures Command (monograph, School of Advanced Military Studies, 2020), https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/html/trecms/AD1167586/index.html; Andrew J. Lippert, McNamara as a Transformative Leader (strategy research project, U.S. Army War College, 2010); Charles T. Lombardo, Managing Transitions: Examining the Institutional Army’s Transformation Following the Vietnam War and Operation Iraqi Freedom (monograph, School of Advanced Military Studies, 2015), https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/AD1007901; Paul D. Romagnoli, Increasing Effectiveness in Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) (monograph, School of Advanced Military Studies, 2006), https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/ADA450914.
7. The roughly two-year experiment with the Pentomic Division chased service relevancy and survivability on the anticipated atomic battlefields of Europe. Partly due to a failure in producing the material solutions required to make the concept work, the Pentomic Division gave way to the more durable Reorganization Objective Army Division.
8. Martin Blumenson, Reorganization of the Army, 1962 (monograph, Office of the Chief of Military History, 1965), 1; Lawrence S. Kaplan et al., History of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, vol. V, The McNamara Ascendancy, 1961-1965 (Historical Office of the Secretary of Defense, 2006), 2–3, https://history.defense.gov/Portals/70/Documents/secretaryofdefense/OSDSeries_Vol5.pdf; Paul Dickson, Sputnik: The Shock of the Century (University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 5.
9. John F. Kennedy, “John F. Kennedy’s State of the Union Address, 1961,” Ballotpedia, accessed 31 December 2025, https://ballotpedia.org/John_F._Kennedy%27s_State_of_the_Union_Address,_1961.
10. Kennedy, “John F. Kennedy’s State of the Union Address.”
11. Kaplan et al., The McNamara Ascendancy, 4–5; H. R. McMaster, Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam (Harper Perennial, 1998), 18.
12. Office of the Historian, “17. Letter from Secretary of Defense McNamara to President Kennedy, February 20, 1961,” in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963, vol. VIII, National Security Policy (U.S. Department of State, n.d.), document 17, accessed 31 December 2025, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961-63v08/d17.
13. Bonin and Scudieri, “Change and Innovation in the Institutional Army,” 107.
14. Robert S. McNamara, “My Journey to Washington: June 9, 1916–January 20, 1961,” chap. 1 in In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (Knopf Doubleday, 2017), 24.
15. Headquarters, Department of the Army, Report on the Reorganization of the Department of the Army (Department of the Army, 1961), 2, https://api.army.mil/e2/c/downloads/2024/07/31/fbf052ae/report-on-the-reorganization-of-the-army-1961.pdf. This final report, called the “Green Book,” underwent several refinements through the end of 1961. The Hoelscher Committee issued the first draft, titled “Study of the Functions, Organization, and Procedures of the Department of the Army, OSD Project 80 (Army),” while the Traub Committee, under Lt. Gen. David Traub, provided refinement. Hoelscher Committee member Col. Edward McGregor rendered the final draft into the Green Book cited here and throughout this article. See also Blumenson, Reorganization of the Army, 73–74; Bonin and Scudieri, “Change and Innovation in the Institutional Army from 1860-2020,” 108.
16. Blumenson, Reorganization of the Army, 10; James E. Hewes Jr., From Root to McNamara: Army Organization and Administration, 1900-1963, Special Studies CMH Pub 40-1 (U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1975), 316, https://history.army.mil/Publications/Publications-Catalog/From-Root-to-Mcnamara/.
17. Hewes, From Root to McNamara, 365.
18. Project 80 received its number as part of a series of McNamara-directed studies, dubbed his “96 trombones,” which grew to over one hundred separate research projects. See Kaplan et al., The McNamara Ascendancy, 453; Blumenson, Reorganization of the Army, 19–20.
19. Department of the Army, Report on the Reorganization, 18.
20. Department of the Army, Report on the Reorganization, 19.
21. Department of the Army, Report on the Reorganization, 20.
22. Department of the Army, Report on the Reorganization, 20.
23. Department of the Army, Report on the Reorganization, 21.
24. Department of the Army, Report on the Reorganization, 21.
25. Department of the Army, Report on the Reorganization, 21–22.
26. Department of the Army, Report on the Reorganization, 24–25.
27. Department of the Army, Report on the Reorganization, 21.
28. Department of the Army, Report on the Reorganization, 28.
29. Department of the Army, Report on the Reorganization, 29.
30. Melvin R.Laird, Statement of Secretary of Defense Melvin R. Laird before a Joint Session of the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Senate Subcommittee on Department of Defense Appropriations on the Fiscal Year 1971 Defense Program and Budget (U.S. Government Printing Office, 20 February 1970),7, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015078412155&seq=7.
31. Laird, Statement of Secretary of Defense Melvin R. Laird, 7.
32. Laird, Statement of Secretary of Defense Melvin R. Laird, 7.
33. Laird, Statement of Secretary of Defense Melvin R. Laird, 8.
34. Laird, Statement of Secretary of Defense Melvin R. Laird, 8.
35. Jean R. Moenk, Operation STEADFAST Historical Summary: A History of the Reorganization of the U.S. Continental Army Command (1972-1973) (U.S. Army Forces Command and U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, 1974), 29, https://cgsc.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p4013coll11/id/1957/.
36. Moenk, Operation STEADFAST Historical Summary, 31.
37. William Gardner Bell and Karl E. Cocke, eds., Department of the Army Historical Summary: Fiscal Year 1973 (U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1977), 5; Bernard D. Rostker, “50 Years Without the Draft: Behind the Bold Move That Ended Conscription, and What’s Next for the All-Volunteer Force,” RAND, 31 January 2023, https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2023/01/50-years-without-the-draft-behind-the-bold-move-that.html.
38. Lewis Sorley, Thunderbolt: General Creighton Abrams and the Army of His Times (Simon & Schuster, 1992), 347.
39. Moenk, Operation STEADFAST Historical Summary, 31.
40. Charles R. Shrader, History of Operations Research in the United States Army, vol. III, 1973–1995 (Office of the Deputy Under Secretary of the Army for Operations Research, United States Army, 2009), 4, https://history.army.mil/Publications/Publications-Catalog/History-of-Operations-Research-in-the-United-States-Army/.
41. Laird, Statement of Secretary of Defense Melvin R. Laird, 1.
42. Laird, Statement of Secretary of Defense Melvin R. Laird, 1.
43. Laird, Statement of Secretary of Defense Melvin R. Laird, 4–5.
44. Melvin R. Laird, Statement of Secretary of Defense Melvin R. Laird Before the House Armed Services Committee on the FY 1973 Defense Budget and FY 1973-1977 Program (U.S. Government Printing Office, 17 February 1972), 8.
45. Shrader, History of Operations Research in the United States Army, 6.
46. Lewis Sorley, ed., Press On! Selected Works of General Donn A. Starry, vol. II (Combat Studies Institute Press, 2009), 1109–10.
47. Saul Bronfeld, “Fighting Outnumbered: The Impact of the Yom Kippur War on the U.S. Army,” Journal of Military History 71, no. 2 (April 2007): 468.
48. TRADOC Military History and Heritage Office, “Active Defense Gives Way to AirLand Battle: TRADOC 50th Anniversary Series,” U.S. Army, 16 May 2023, https://www.army.mil/article/266746/active_defense_gives_way_to_airland_battle_tradoc_50th_anniversary_series.
49. Moenk, Operation STEADFAST Historical Summary, 31–32.
50. Moenk, Operation STEADFAST Historical Summary, 33.
51. Shrader, History of Operations Research in the United States Army, 28.
52. Shrader, History of Operations Research in the United States Army, 28.
53. Moenk, Operation STEADFAST Historical Summary, 35, 37.
54. Shrader, History of Operations Research in the United States Army, 29.
55. Shrader, History of Operations Research in the United States Army, 30.
56. Blumenson, Reorganization of the Army, 13.
57. Blumenson, Reorganization of the Army, 121.
58. Moenk, Operation STEADFAST Historical Summary, 293–94.
59. Moenk, Operation STEADFAST Historical Summary, 41–42, 53, 57.
60. David Vergun, “Army Plans to Eliminate Programs Not Contributing to Lethality,” U.S. Department of War, 18 June 2025, https://www.war.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/4220986/army-plans-to-eliminate-programs-not-contributing-to-lethality/.

 

 

 

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March-April 2026