The U.S. Army will consolidate its Futures Command with its Training and Doctrine Command under a new command called the Army’s Transformation and Training Command, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George said during a House Appropriations defense subcommittee posture hearing Wednesday.
The naming comes a week after the service announced sweeping changes to its command structure and formations, with the intention to transform the force while scrapping programs that don’t meet current threats or its vision of overmatching those threats in the future.
The new command’s headquarters will be in Austin, Texas, George said, which is where Army Futures Command is headquartered now.
AFC, a four-star command, was established during President Donald Trump’s first administration under then-Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, whom Trump has sought to disgrace since returning to office, including by having Milley’s joint chiefs chairman portrait removed from the Pentagon hallway where it originally hung.
Milley proposed the four-star command he dubbed Army Futures Command as a new way forward, breaking free of the bureaucracy and silos that had hampered the Army’s previous major modernization efforts.
Working with other top service officials, Milley shifted billions of dollars into modernization programs, including the top priority — long-range precision fires — and based the new command in Austin, an area known for its innovative, technology-focused workforce.
AFC was formed to help wrangle a neglected requirements development process. Prior to its formation, the requirements development process lived within TRADOC, where it competed for attention alongside training, recruitment and professional military education. The more focused organization was built to enable the Army to move faster.
The consolidation of the two commands, in a way, nests the requirements development process back together with TRADOC. But this time, “TRADOC is going to merge into AFC,” George said during a press briefing last week.
“That way we have one headquarters that can oversee the design, build, doctrine and training. We know we have to advance in how we’re going to train individual soldiers right now on the tactical change, how we’re doing things.”
While AFC was intended to solve a broken requirements process and help provide a more rapid and efficient bridge over the valley of death between development and actual procurement, it evolved over the last four years from a command with control over investment decisions and a focus on near-term programs to an advisory body focused more on emerging technology and what the force would look like several decades down the road.
Even so, AFC’s contributions include seeing some successful programs in development through to fielding from missile defense capabilities to new aircraft and long-range precision fires. And its leaders helped to develop a more flexible requirements process, choosing to forego lengthy and rigid requirements documents with simple one-page statements outlining a specific capability need the service wants industry to help fill.
Yet Army leadership now views that the two commands should come together again, arguing that separately, there is too much bureaucracy.
“The advantage is we’re going to put majors, sergeant first class, you know, different NCOs and officers back into our formation, which is what we need to do and green up some other areas,” George said of the consolidation last week.
Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll noted during Wednesday’s posture hearing that there are 35,000 people in its acquisitions.
“We don’t know what the right number is; that is too many,” Driscoll said. “What ends up occurring is you just have so many human beings involved that everything gets slowed down.”
Currently, AFC employs 17,000 people, while TRADOC consists of 35,000 personnel worldwide. The Army has not yet detailed the size of a newly consolidated command.
Other details that have yet to come to light is what happens with the Combined Arms Center at Leavenworth, Kansas, once a part of TRADOC but moved under AFC after its formation, or the Centers of Excellence, like the Fires COE at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and Maneuver COE at Fort Benning, Georgia.
Army leadership is also stressing their belief that combining the commands will help build connective tissue between soldiers and what they actually want and need and the things the Army procures.
“These venture capital models for how they back companies to test, innovate, learn, grown and repeat again and again and again until they hit scale, we, the Army, need to do it, and we’re hopeful that we’re taking the first steps,” he added.
Jen Judson is an award-winning journalist covering land warfare for Defense News. She has also worked for Politico and Inside Defense. She holds a Master of Science degree in journalism from Boston University and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Kenyon College.
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