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2025 Kermit Roosevelt Lecture

Gen. James Rainey, U.S. Army

 

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In May 2025, Gen. James Rainey represented the U.S. chief of staff of the Army at the annual Kermit Roosevelt Lecture in the United Kingdom, an annual event held since 1947 to honor the close relationship between the U.S. Army and British Army. The Kermit Roosevelt Lecture series is an exchange of military lecturers who address military officers and national security professionals with the goal of strengthening transatlantic relationships and improving interoperability and mutual understanding between the two nations. The series was initiated by Mrs. Kermit Roosevelt in memory of her husband who served in both the British and American armies.

In a series of three lectures, Rainey provided a candid assessment of the challenges confronting the military profession in a rapidly evolving security environment. Framing his address through ten critical questions, Rainey charged the audience to think deeply and openly debate these pressing issues while cautioning against prematurely drawing conclusions from current conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East. Rather than offering solutions, he emphasized the need to critically engage with these questions as both armies grapple with difficult decisions on where to invest limited resources and accept risk on the future of their armies.

Following this introduction, Military Review has included a consolidated transcript of Rainey’s speech. We encourage military professionals to use these ten questions as the inspiration for future Military Review articles and professional military education monographs and papers.

 

 

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Kermit Roosevelt Lecture by Gen. James Rainey

30 April–2 May 2025

   

Thank you all very much. I stand here very humbly representing the Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army. The Kermit Roosevelt Lecture series is illustrative of the unique relationship between the United States Army and the British Army. Gen. [Randy] George sends his regards.

I want to start by saying thanks for your time. Honestly, every time I get a chance to speak, I remind myself that the kindest thing that people do for each other is to share time. It’s the most precious thing that we have, it’s something you can’t get back, and it is something everyone has in common. Thanks for being here, and I hope we have a great conversation.

The U.S. and UK armies share a commitment to the idea that members of the professional military in democracies are members of a profession. We don’t have jobs. This isn’t an occupation. It’s a calling, it’s a way of life. We don’t go to work at the Army, we are the Army, and that is a very important distinction.

One of the responsibilities of a profession is to guide our forces into the future, and that is a very complex responsibility because of the unknown and high stakes for failure. Nobody hates war more than people who have to fight it. But, we’re primarily in the business of deterring conflict, convincing our enemies to pursue nonmilitary solutions to problems. A big part of being a member of the profession is making sure that your service is ready for the future. What I tell people about thinking about the future is that the goal is not to get it right. The goal is to think deeply about what you may need in the future so we do not get it really wrong. It’s foolish to think we’re going to predict the future.

I’ll give you a couple of interesting examples. U.S. Army Gen. John Kerr was a phenomenally successful strategist and effective Army cavalry officer in World War I who rose to become chief of U.S. Cavalry in the late 1930s. Gen. Kerr looked at the emergence of mechanization and tanks and thought we could put horses on those things, and when we get to the objective, the horses will have fresh legs. And that’s not a stupid thing, Kerr was a smart, thoughtful, educated, and experienced person. But he was obviously wrong. In the interest of the U.S. and UK partnership, the second example is from Field Marshal [Bernard] Montgomery, the very famous World War II army commander, who declared the tank obsolete in 1953. He missed the mark by a bit ... the tank has proven decisive repeatedly since then, and while there are doubters today, I would argue it isn’t obsolete yet.

The general who is a better example is George Marshall, the famous U.S. general and later secretary of state and architect of the Marshall Plan. Marshall served as the chief of infantry at our schoolhouse in the late 1920s and early 1930s, where he trained then–Capt. Dwight D. Eisenhower and 150 students who would go on to be our most successful general officers in World War II. The leaders of the greatest generation were trained by him. Marshall encouraged student officers to think about and get ready to fight the first six months of the next war. First six months of the next war. I think that’s a happy medium on that front sight post and rear sight post. Those first six months will be decisive. Spending a lot of time and energy thinking past that, if you’ve learned one thing from watching Ukraine and Russia, is that the spin cycle is a little bit faster than that, and more than six months is probably unknowable. But you absolutely need to be ready for what’s going to be the next time we go to war and not assume it is going to be quick or cheap.

No matter if you are a general, battalion commander, work national security policy in government or various roles, there are two characteristics I think are absolutely essential for being a leader in today’s environment. We need leaders who are intellectually humble and passionately curious. Spending a couple of hours a week thinking about problems should be a big part of what you do. Passionately curious, what can I learn? What am I not thinking about? What are the second- and third-order effects? What am I missing? Once you find the holes, have the intellectual humility to find people who are younger than you and have different experiences and ask them, Why are you so successful?

Based on that, today’s talk is not about my answers, what I think, but to pose ten questions that we, as military professionals and those in the defense industry, might find value thinking about and debating to make sure we are more right than wrong.

Based on our observation of current conflicts, what is and is not changing in the character of war?

The fundamental question is what we are seeing in Ukraine, Gaza, and elsewhere a revolution, evolution, or anomaly? As military professionals, we have a responsibility to be learning everything there is to possibly learn so that next time, we don’t lose people unnecessarily. But people are making a whole bunch of assumptions based on an observation versus a lesson learned, and there is a difference.

A revolution should be a very high bar, and while we could argue for hours about definitions, I think we could agree that it is a major disruption to the character of conflict that fundamentally changes how we fight like the advent of firearms, the railroad, machine guns, precision weapons, or the telegraph. Big, giant disruptions like that. I will offer one or two of the things we are seeing today that might meet those criteria. Is what we are seeing an evolution, something very complicated? Are we seeing a different way of doing something we do now, and we need to figure out how to capitalize on that evolution. And the third category, an anomaly, when both sides fight in a way we would not do. Something that our armies, as part of the joint force and a coalition, would do fundamentally differently. So, the caution is to ensure we don’t learn the wrong lessons from what we’re watching. Before you put something in the “revolution” pile, consider that you’re uploading a bunch of risk if you’re wrong. That’s number one. Because of that, I’ll talk a little bit later, adaptability, is not about getting the future right, it’s about getting close to right. I think whoever has the ability to see what they got wrong first and adapt faster has a marked advantage.

We should apply the lens of revolution, evolution, or anomaly as we think through the rest of these questions.

How do we leverage technology to move to data-centric warfare?

The second question is data-centric warfare. I am, by trade, an infantry officer and a digital immigrant. That being said, I interact with some of the best data people in the world in my job. There are about ten thousand PhDs and super smart data people in Army Futures Command. And I interact with digital natives both in the Army and the American tech sector. I’m not an expert, but I believe moving to data-centric warfare—defined as software-first, cloud-native, computing at the edge, and end-user device agnostic—describes a fundamental change in how we fight. Imagine commanders with apps on a tablet, rather than tied to big, slow, and essentially immobile mission command systems. I think this falls under the category of having potential to revolutionize the future of warfare. So not just about sensor-to-shooter, but the real opportunity that presents itself of ubiquitous sensing going into one data layer that is connected to any firing/strike system with real time access to sustainment status.

We should put the commander back into command and control. The command-and-control warfighting function became the network run by signalers, but it exists for the commander to make more, better and faster decisions. We have the potential to turn what are today largely hardware problems into software problems—problems we can solve with keystrokes instead of materiel. Data-centric warfare uses data mesh, edge compute, end user device agnostic, multiple transport means, and is cloud native but not dependent. We are still going to need the primary, alternate, contingency, and emergency (PACE) plans, hand and arm signals, tracer rounds, and whistles will still be useful. But this is going to radically change how commanders command and staffs control on the future battlefield.

I don’t know what’s going to happen with AI, large language models, machine learning, but it looks like it is only becoming better. The best AI people in the U.S. believe the “Moore’s Law” of AI is probably about seven months … which means the potential for AI to be twice as effective seven months from now without plateauing for the foreseeable future. So, if you think that’s even remotely close to true, who knows what potential large language models and machine learning are going to unlock?

But I am sure you know your ability to do anything with AI requires you to have access and control of your data. If you don’t have data, you can’t train the models. If we’re able to figure this out, which we should, because the United States and Western allies hold every advantage in compute power, innovative talent, reliable power, and existing data centers.

The reason I feel that this question is important is that I believe what’s happening with machine learning and what’s going to happen with AI in our lifetimes and certainly with quantum sensing, which is a real thing, with quantum computing means we’re going to have to take advantage of that. Data-centric warfare will put the commander back in command and control. It’s about commanding, letting our commanders make faster, better decisions—a huge asymmetric advantage. The ability to confront our enemies with the belief that we can out-decide them, outact them at a scale of 10-to-1 will be enough deterrent value to offset what are their larger, positional, and magazine depth advantages. But that can’t happen unless we think, debate, and adapt as technology changes.

How do we maneuver under constant observation and in constant contact by contesting the adversary’s ability to understand?

We are already seeing battlefields with constant observation, and this is the one change that might be the most frightening. If you think of everything we’ve learned about maneuver and everything you’ve studied in history, it’s about making contact on your own terms, not being surprised, using terrain to hide your movements. That is no longer possible. The amount of ubiquitous sensing that is happening in the world makes it almost impossible to hide. Already the entirety of the earth is being photographed or sensed at least once every three days or so. Many people would say we are a year or two away from any place on earth subject to continuous sensing from space. Add in drones, passive radars, acoustic sensors, infrared and thermal viewers, and—in the not too far future—quantum sensors will make it nearly impossible to hide. All we have learned about how to maneuver using terrain features and the night to hide from the enemy are not going to be a U.S. or UK advantage next time we go to war. The ability to use direct, indirect, and nonkinetic effects are eliminating the idea of sanctuary. Our most likely enemies have the absolute ability to contest us and maintain contact with us in the electromagnetic spectrum, acoustically, visually, from space. So, we’re going to have to figure that out. I think it’s the biggest challenge that land forces will face. This is not a doomsday scenario, but something we have to deal with and think through—better now than when lives are on the line.

Two points of optimism. First, anything the enemy can do to us we can do back to them better. Imagine being the commander of a formation who does not have to find the enemy, always having knowledge of their movements and strength. So much energy is put into figuring out where the enemy is and what they are doing. So, we’ll have the same advantage. A well-trained unit capable of being able to see and hit anything is a pretty strong deterrent value.

And the other thing is it doesn’t mean you give up. If we concede the idea that the enemy may see us, we absolutely do not have to concede that they can understand what they are seeing. We must use camouflage, deception, be unpredictable, attack his sensor capability, attack his decision cycle, disrupt that to make sure that we maintain decision advantage. Countering his sensing capability and countering his ability to command and control his formations is as important as maintaining our ability to do those things. When our commanders are able to make a decision and send orders with clarity, I would put my money on our commanders and noncommissioned officers’ ability over any of our adversaries any day.

How do we capitalize on and counter technology that eliminates the need to choose between precision or massed fire?

It appears that technology is presenting a unique opportunity for the ability to deliver precision fires in mass. This is one of the main observations of the Ukraine-Russia conflict. My whole career in the Army, in combat, we had options when confronted with a tactical situation or an enemy. We had precision solutions that allowed us to hit whatever we wanted, the ability to fly through the window of the building or strike a terrorist driving. But it was very expensive and therefore we did not have a lot of it. At the same time, we’ve always had mass at low cost because our great artillerymen could shoot a lot of artillery—still the number one battlefield killer. Some people say it’s UAVs, but I would offer, only because of the shortage of artillery rounds. Artillery is not as accurate. If you are trying to figure out the impact of the UAV phenomenon, it is that commanders no longer have to choose between mass and precision. They can fly UAVs exactly on target and do a whole bunch of it. The merger of mass and precision could be a major evolution.

I think technology is also changing how we think of fires overall. We have one part of our Army designed to do offensive fires, with radars, weapon systems, command and control for field artillery. We have a whole other branch with another set of command posts, radars, and weapon systems that are designed to shoot down stuff coming at you. I think that’s wholly insufficient for the speed and complexity of the next battlefield. If you are in the air defense and fires business, I think it would be good to explore the potential to merging those two branches and their capabilities. It is about merging the offensive and defensive capabilities, made possible by data centricity. It can now take anything it can sense, knock that thing down, and launch the kind of counterfire that we need. It’s not a matter of if this technology exists. It’s a matter of will and money. The radar that acquires something coming at you, there’s no reason that that same radar couldn’t facilitate your response to that. Same thing for our launchers, especially with missiles.

And the last thing on this one is, and I don’t mean to be morbid with this, we need to evaluate the cost per kill. The military is not a business, it’s a profession, I believe that. But we have to start looking at how much things cost. This is something that I think is very important when we talk with industry. We have got to factor in the ability to manufacture at a price point that is feasible for countries that have a lot of things competing for budgets. We no longer have the luxury of outspending our primary adversaries. So, you might be familiar with Tomahawk missiles, or Patriot missiles, very popular here in the UK, in Ukraine, and the U.S. They are awesome capabilities. Depending on the model, they cost between $3.5 and $7 million for each missile, and we shoot multiple Patriot missiles at each incoming threat to make sure, even though the system has a 97 percent accuracy or something. So that’s good. And if you’re the people that would have died or you prevented an incoming missile from hitting that school building, that is certainly worth $7 million. At the same time, standard artillery rounds cost about $5,000 each. If it’s not precise, not exquisite, then the cost has to be low. But there is a growing case for low-cost mass with precision. It would be a mistake to go 100 percent in that direction and surrender our technological and innovative advantages, so we must continue to pursue exquisite capability. And if something is exquisite, then it’s worth the cost. The challenge is, if you are in the defense acquisition business, how do you move out of the 80 percent middle and get to the 10 percent at the extremes that are cheap and can deliver mass or are expensive but truly exquisite weapons.

What is the appropriate balance between maneuver to fire and fire to maneuver at the tactical level and operational level?

One of the things twenty years of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan taught a generation of leaders is to rely on fires to set the conditions for maneuver. That has not always been the case, as historically the U.S. Army has often maneuvered to emplace fires that would inflict the most damage to our adversaries and protect your most precious asset, your people and equipment. It is always best to not have to send your men and women into harm’s way to do something. So, solving a problem with fires that you don’t have to solve with blood is always better. I think we should really examine this, and there are probably different answers at the tactical and operational levels. What is an appropriate balance between fire and maneuver would be worth some thinking. Do you use your fires warfighting systems to set the conditions for leading maneuver, or given the lethality and the complicated nature of the battlefield, should we focus on maneuvering to emplace our fires? It is probably not a binary solution. How would you proportion training time and energy to those two skills? And if you end up in a joint or higher headquarters, or in the Indo-Pacific versus Europe, there may be different answers.

The U.S. Army’s priority is to build capability to deter China in the South China Sea. I think the main role of infantry and land forces will be to take a piece of land so that our air force can put bombers and fighters down. Or take key terrain to use for long range, land-based fires. Or seize a port so our navies can rearm and refuel. As great as the navies are, they must keep coming back and touching the land. Those battles will also take place in cities, so we need to think about how we will fire and maneuver in urban environments.

How do we account for and close the widening gap between the ability to protect and ability to sense/strike?

There are a lot of articles and books discussing the strength of offense versus defense. I would say that is the wrong question. Defense is and always has been stronger than offense. However, you cannot win without the offensive, as it is only offense that is decisive. So, while technology is making the defense stronger and offensive is getting harder and more costly, you need both.

The ability of an army to sense and strike, to find the enemy and hit them, has always been a bit better than a unit’s ability to protect themselves with camouflage, air defense, and movement. So, there is a gap between sense and strike and protect, and it seems that the gap is widening. The ability of our enemies to find us and strike what they can find, especially the Chinese, is growing exponentially. At the same time, our ability to protect our soldiers, our infrastructure, and our civilian populations is lagging and not progressing at the same speed. Is our ability to sense and strike one thing and how to protect is another? I was recently challenged by a really thoughtful young officer asking if these are three separate problems. To solve this problem, we will need our thinking to be focused on how we can bring leadership, technology, and training to bear to protect our men and women.

I recommend you watch the videos of a Russian soldier being attacked by UAVs. I am horrified by the idea that one of our soldiers would be faced with that sense of helplessness on a future battlefield. I am talking about the next time we go to war, which could be anytime. We do not yet have the ability to protect our sustainment enterprise, airfields for helicopters, or our headquarters. Shame on us if we don’t close that gap and figure out how to give the capability for the inherent right of self-defense. We may be outmanned. We may be outnumbered. We may be outgunned. But we’re never helpless. We take for granted that every one of our soldiers has the ability, ethically and physically, to protect themselves. We, as leaders, cannot send men and women in the harm’s way the next time if we can’t protect them.

What we’re not seeing in Ukraine and Russia is all arms/combined arms maneuver. Neither of those armies have the ability to maneuver. I know that if you took a U.S. division with a brigade from the UK Army, we would use combined or all arms maneuver. Historically and in every one our war games and exercises, when our command-and-control system enables the commander to employ the capabilities of infantry, armor, fires, intelligence, electronic warfare, cyber, space, and sustainment in concert, we overwhelm the ability of the adversary to effectively sense and strike our formations. One challenge is that we and our adversaries have employed AI technology to increase speed of the sense and strike cycle but have yet to apply AI to enable better protection.

The solution is not bubble wrapping our soldiers physically or technically. Because they still must—going back to my earlier question about fire and movement—be able to move. We can take our armored formations as an example. We absolutely need tanks in the future to provide mobile, protected, firepower as part of the combined or all-arms maneuver team, but we cannot have seventy-ton or sixty-ton tanks. We must press industry to explore technological solutions to make them lighter and more protected. We should be looking at open architecture in the turret to keep the crew in the hull. AI has the potential to develop new materials for armor that are lighter, cheaper, and stronger. We’ve got to drive the weight and sustainment tail for mechanized formations down. And at the same time, increase the lethality of our light infantry formations. And then always remember we must have the ability to maneuver. We must ensure we train leaders, making sure we pay the price of leader development so that our soldiers and their units are able to maneuver on the future battlefield and don’t settle into the attritional warfare at the tactical level and accept exhaustion as a strategic level objective. That is when the horror of war is most, most costly and most horrific.

How do we preserve the ability to take and hold ground through close combat on a confusing, casualty-filled, and horrific battlefield?

The biggest mistake any army can make right now is think that any amount of technology, any amount of change, is going to ever eliminate the requirement to close with and destroy the enemy, take ground from them, kill them, hold that ground. So we should aggressively pursue any advantage we can get from technology, but we can’t forget that the horror of war, close combat, the ability to close over physical ground and take land, take things away from our enemies and then hold them, is not only not going away, I would offer, is probably more essential on the future battle than it’s ever been. I can imagine no future fight against anybody where our armies are not going to have to possess the ability to close, fight, and win.

Whatever you see in Gaza and Ukraine, and these other horrific things you’re seeing, there’s absolutely no evidence that technology removes the need to impose our will on other human beings. So therefore, humans remain the central aspect and because they insist on living on land, that is where the decisive actions will occur.

Technology doesn’t work all the time. The Chinese are good. They’re going to take GPS away. They will disrupt our comms and contest our ability to employ our air forces. We will also have to fight in terrible weather. So we must make sure that the pointy end of the spear can dominate in the rain, in the mud, when you’re tired, in the chaos of a city, and when leaders are casualties. We will be the ones on the objective at end of the day.

I think what our enemies are really scared of is our close combat capability, the ability of our junior leaders to close with and destroy. I don’t think China is particularly concerned about us out-innovating them. I know they’re not concerned about our magazine depth versus theirs. I think what they’re concerned about is finding themselves two hundred meters away from a U.S. or UK rifle company, with one of their rifle companies or battalions, because they don’t do that. That’s not what they built their military to do nor do they have recent experience with that type of combat. They don’t have the leaders, quality, or scale that we have in our formations. No one wants to be in front of one of warfighting formations. And also, they don’t want to fight NATO, the joint force, the U.S., or the UK. You do not want to fight us anywhere out in the open.

So I think whoever we fight, they are going to go into the cities to survive because they don’t share our concern for the value of human life, especially civilians. They’re going to go tuck up against critical infrastructure in innocent populations. And you can bring technology to bear, but you cannot tech your way out of that. We are going to have to go in, not to clear and hold entire cities, but we must be able to achieve limited military objectives in urban environments.

How do we reduce risk with autonomous unmanned systems and optimize human capability for the things only people can do?

I use the term unmanned systems broadly. In the air we have high-altitude ballons, low-altitude type one/two/three unmanned aerial vehicles, launched effects, and first-person-view [FPV] drones. But unmanned systems also include unmanned ground, subterranean, maritime, and subsurface. We should be thinking about how we are going to bring all these different capabilities to bear.

I think what we are seeing with UAVs right now, as disruptive and crazy as it is, is just the leading edge of what is a larger disruption of land warfare that is going to be caused by the sum of those unmanned systems. This could be our equivalent of the disruption caused by mechanization with the advent of tanks and tracked artillery. Guys like J. F. C. Fuller, B. H. Liddel Hart, and Heinz Guderian are just a few who thought about that revolution. This is going to be a huge challenge military professionals will have to deal with over the next ten years. UAVs are just the leading edge because maneuvering in the air is easier in terms of physics. Whoever figures this out is going to have such an advantage, and we should believe there’s no reason we shouldn’t win this race.

A couple words of caution. I do not think looking at machines as a way to replace humans is the right approach. It should be how do I optimize my humans and machines. I believe we should have a maxim that we are not going to trade blood for first contact, ever again, as the technology already exists to avoid this. We should figure out how to use systems to do the most dangerous things. We should not find improvised explosive devices or mines with a vehicle driven by humans. We should not find the leading edge of a minefield with a vehicle or a rifle squad. We are going to find that with robots. When we fight in the city next time, we are never going to have the first thing going in the building be something with a heartbeat. If I am an aviator, I am going to fly my helicopter, but the radar is not going to light up on me. It is going to light up on some unmanned system, and that is going to let me smoke the radar. That is all technologically possible. I’m all for transferring the hard, dull, dark, and dirty. Commercial application of robotics is more about doing stuff that people don’t want to do than stuff they can do better than people. So, we should do that too, but it’s really the transfer of risk to unmanned systems so that we can optimize our humans for the things that humans are better at than machines.

The real goal with unmanned systems is, how do we optimize our people? I think about how we aggressively offload risk. I believe it is only a matter of time before people are freaking out about ground robots the way people are freaking out about UAVs now. But, back to my point about war being a contest of wills. Humans are our asymmetric advantage, with a marked advantage over anyone we are going to fight. We recruit, train, and retain better people. Why would we want to take that advantage off the battlefield?

One effort should be to reduce the cognitive load on people. As you inject technology into rifle squads and tank platoons, the limiting factor will be the human brain. We should be studying that and training our people to expand their capacity. We are doing a lot of experimentation and testing on how much technology and how many unmanned systems can one human handle and for what periods of time. How do you move from one-to-one to one-to-many? I’m not talking about swarm, but can that pilot and helicopter handle a fight and four UAVs? Can two soldiers handle four robots and the associated payloads? Good news, if you try to teach me to fly an FPV, we would be training in the field for a month. Fortunately, we have men and women like those in your army that walk in and for them it is just natural.

I don’t want to be an old guy preaching to you, but another big consideration is how we use humans and machines to adhere to the law of armed conflict. As members of the military profession, the ethical management of violence is an expectation of our societies. Our countries, in the right conditions, extend to us the authority to take human life. To kill people. That is a big deal and based on trust. I don’t see a point where computers are going to exercise ethical decision-making at the speed of war.

I think there are also instincts. Instincts are a real thing. It is your brain’s ability to recognize patterns subconsciously. We know that a scout will just do something that nobody told her to do, but she will render that critical report when every screen is telling you something else. When you have trained with her, you are going to go with the sergeant’s report and act on instinct. Western countries are big on free will. I think one of our superpowers is we rely on commander’s intent and trust our people to exercise disciplined initiative. If you read about some of the great battles of history, many victories came when some leader made some decision that made no sense, and yet it turned out to be brilliant. Closely related to my opening comment about curiosity, I see no demonstration of machines being curious, which I think is one of the great strengths of us as human beings.

And so the advantage is likely to go the side that figures out how to use autonomy to help humans, how to enable humans to control them, and who makes the most adaptable systems. The next war is going to be a constant back and forth between innovation and adaptation. I would put the integration of humans and machines in the potential revolution category and therefore would be of some study and questioning. I would say, from my view, that this is a big deal. It’s pre-World War II, airplanes, radios, and combustion engines. It’s a massive disruption and if it’s not a revolution, it’s the top of the evolution stack.

If adaptability is going to be an essential skill for both institutions and leaders, how do we build leaders and units with that skill and characteristic?

I talked about adaptability a lot today. This is a big one. Our profession is fundamentally a thinking endeavor. You have got to be able to outthink people. It is not going to be about who gets it right, the next war is going to be about who gets it the least wrong ahead of time, has the ability to recognize their mistake, and can adapt faster than the person they’re fighting.

In the case of my Army, we are putting deliberate effort into thinking about how do you build an adaptive human being? It’s kind of random. I personally believe that adaptability is a top three characteristic we want going forward, especially in leaders. Those closest to the front lines tend to be the best at adapting, as there is nothing like getting shot at to inspire thinking about how to survive. But we need to make sure that those in supporting roles can apply adaptation to budgeting, acquisition, and requirements to keep pace. It is not just going to happen. Some people appear to be good at it. Some people are not. So how do we build an entire army where one of the core competencies of our leaders at echelon—noncommissioned officers, officers, warrant officers—is adaptability. And it’s even harder when you talk about how you build a unit that’s good at adapting, and it’s even harder if you’re talking about how to create an institution as big as the Army that has a competency in adaptability. So, it takes work, and it’s going to take time.

What’s the difference between innovation and adoption? Those are two different processes. People conflate the terms innovation and adoption quite often in conversations. Innovation is about developing something completely new of value that is worth the cost. Fortunately, our countries are steeped in a culture of innovation and that gives us a major advantage. Adoption on the other hand is about taking something that exists, including something your adversary developed, and figuring out how to best use it in a military context. Adoption is especially valuable because it appears that dual use technology will play a huge role in combat for the foreseeable future.

There is a famous story from World War II right after the D-Day landings in Normandy. Facing the German defenses taking advantage of the hedgerow, one good sergeant and one good specialist who were next up to break through thought maybe they should try something new. They figured out that if they welded the steel beams from the German beach defenses onto the front of the tank, they would create big forks that would jam through the dense brush. So, I would encourage you to make sure that you’re empowering your junior people, the units that are actually training and fighting and deploying to lead your adaptation. Senior folks like us, we don’t have to be the one figuring it out, we need to be the ones fighting through bureaucracy, moving money, and creating opportunities to try new things. And institutional innovation, again, just a foot stomp, that militaries are not famous for being creative, outside the box organizations. So, we have a culture problem, and nothing is harder to change than culture.

Dual-use technologies provide militaries with a huge advantage because companies making something great that we can use do not need the military to be their business case to make a profit. UAVs are a good example, because unlike artillery munitions, we would not want to make thousands and store them in stockpiles. Who would want a UAV bought today if we go to go to war in two years? We have to figure out how to mass produce this stuff at cost and quantity to be useful, so there is an advantage if the company can primarily sell to the public and then ramp up production of the newest and most effective UAVs when needed.

Adaptability therefore has components of the ability to innovate and the ability to rapidly adopt good existing technology. Some of our challenges are because our traditional acquisition model was really designed to invent capabilities that didn’t exist rather than just buy something that is ready to buy off the shelf. It takes five to ten years to make a new tank, but now we can buy the best UAVs without any development required. We just need to create a demand signal and industry will be incentivized to deliver capability, especially in the case of UAVs and ground robotics.

One of the U.S. Chief of Staff of the Army Gen. George’s major initiatives is “Transformation in Contact.” About a year ago, our chief looked at what we were doing, and said, why don’t we just get the best stuff and give it to our units that are out doing things, let them use it. We have found that when we offer the company that makes something new the opportunity to put engineers, coders, or software engineers with the unit, they are more than willing to get prototypes out. We just give it to our soldiers, let them use it, close the feedback loop, and then buy tranches of whatever works. Instead of trying to pick one thing and lock in a single vendor to outfit the entire army. This model has been making the U.S. Army huge gains, and we are looking to expand as quickly as possible, not only because of the immediate improvement in lethality, but it also trains our leaders, soldiers, and formations how to be adaptable.

Accepting all of the above questions requires the skill, experience, and leadership of military professionals, how do we preserve the profession of arms and prevent our Army from becoming an occupation?

I will end where I started with what I said up front that we are members of a profession. I’m a purist. When I say profession, I mean there are three or four in the history of the world. Clergy, lawyers, doctors, and professional militaries. That’s how big a deal a profession is. Despite the name, “Professional Football,” they’re just big and fast—well, our footballers are big and fast, your guys are little and fast—a lot of the rest are honorable trades. Nursing, teaching, etc. These are honorable things, but they’re not professions in the same sense. When people ask me where I work, I don’t say I work at the Army in the same sense as those who say they work at the plant or work down at the factory. I am in the Army. You are in the military. It’s what you do, it’s a way of life. Professions are accountable to their population and citizens and their civilian leaders for application of a skill that is restricted from the rest of the population and are responsible for policing their own ranks. They are therefore accountable to the people.

If you accept that premise, I would offer the most important question we should be asking ourselves, with everything that’s going on in the world, all the challenges, is how do we preserve that profession? How do we preserve the idea that we are members of the profession? Because we cannot have an army that thinks it has a job, people that think this is something that they’re just working at, it’s one of the things they do. I would offer that type of army would not have the intestinal fortitude for the commitment that it would take to answer the above difficult questions.

So how do we do that. Let us debate these questions. Let’s talk about them. Let us do things like this, exchange ideas, challenge each other, push each other. For those of us that are a bit older, set the example for young people. It is okay to fail, if you fail fast and you don’t fail twice at the same thing. It is not for a lieutenant to decide whether acceptance of learning by mistakes is an organizational value, that’s for the guy running the organization. Underwrite honest mistakes. Incentivize healthy risk-taking behavior by young people.

Leaders have a great opportunity to demonstrate that intellectual humility that I talked about. Go down and talk to the youngest soldier in your formation. Don’t ask him, “Hey, how are you doing?” Any time as a general I asked a young person, “How are you doing?” the answer was always “Oh it’s awesome.” “How’s the unit?” “It’s great.” A better question might be, “What do you do for us?” And, “Will you show me how you do it? You teach me.” Or, “What can I do for you to make you more effective?” One of my friends, Gen. Chris Cavoli, he genuinely enters every human interaction as an opportunity to learn something. That’s something I try and model, although I’m not as good as he is at it.

But just being passionately curious and intellectually humble isn’t enough, I think we as military professionals, we need to engage. You can’t sit behind the wall on the base. You can’t complain about how people don’t understand how hard it is. You have got to get out. Have the intestinal fortitude to throw your ideas out in the public for criticism and feedback. I had a wonderful session with a UK colonel earlier today that stretched my brain, inspired me to take pages of notes, and made me a better leader. We did not have a lot in common, and we probably pushed each other a little bit.

But too many in the military are scared to do that. It can be scary to take your ideas out in the open and see if they survive. But that means they are not behaving as a professional. We have to maintain the trust of civilian leadership and serve the citizenry of democracy. Fear of speaking publicly is behaving in a way that makes civilians not trust you. Because when we go to war, if we go to war, they do not get a choice whether they trust you. So why not behave in a way that shows them that they can trust you.

And then the last thing is, you know, if we’re truly professionals, and we have a responsibility to be accountable, we have to police up our own ranks. Do not make someone else come into our organization because we are not holding each other accountable. One of the characteristics of a true profession is it is self-policing. It puts time into developing people, rewards merit-based excellence, and it is equally as aggressive at eliminating people from that profession with empathy and compassion. It’s not for everybody. Not everybody can live up to the high standards of our profession. So I think if we do those things, steward the profession, we will be respected by our citizens and our enemies.

So, while we do all these complicated things, that might be the most important one of all. We’re going to have to maintain the professional idea, because if we let what we do turn into a job, the passion, the commitment, the sacrifice, the selflessness, the discipline that it’s going to take to answer any of the other questions and prepare our nations for the next war won’t be there.

But the one thing I do know is, if we don’t maintain and police our profession, we won’t be able to do this, and we’re going to pay a price for it. And the people that are going to pay that price are eighteen-to-nineteen-year-old men and women, and that’s why, even as we are laser focused on the current wars and things that are going on, our armies need to be thinking deeply and figuring out wicked hard problems.

So I don’t have answers for you. I’ve got some really good questions, and I hope some part of that, one of the questions, fostered creative juices and gave you something to think about. Thank you very much for your time.

 

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