Back From Futures Command

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are mine alone and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government who probably should have my views. This is not official communication which seems pretty obvious...

The Army has officially retired TRADOC and Army Futures Command, merging them into the new Transformation and Training Command (T2COM). Leaders describe the move as more than a bureaucratic shuffle — Gen. David Hodne, now at the helm, calls it a “reset” designed to bring training, doctrine, and modernization into one framework. His predecessor, Gen. James Rainey, emphasized continuity: “names will change, patches will change, but we’re not going. The Army is not leaving Austin, and we’re doubling down on transforming.”

The AFC ecosystem alone is already contributing an estimated $1.8 billion annually to the Texas economy from AFC’s 970 personnel pre-merge which is a definite economic success. https://comptroller.texas.gov/economy/economic-data/military/2023/army-futures.php

While Austin offers a vibrant backdrop, innovation is not a contagion caught by mere geographic osmosis. The critical challenge for T2COM isn't leveraging Austin's dynamism; it's fundamentally rewiring how the Army itself innovates. There is some risk in perpetuating a centralized, top-down model that historical precedent and recent experience suggest struggles with the blistering speed of adaptation demanded by modern warfare. Further, Army may get priced out of the market for staff working in Austin. Even before Musk started taking over the greater Austin area, Army had to spend $8.5M to buy three homes for the top brass. https://www.stripes.com/theaters/us/army-says-8-5-million-purchase-of-austin-real-estate-for-top-leaders-housing-was-the-right-decision-1.647219

If AFC illustrated the pitfalls of overpromising and overcentralizing, the Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office (RCCTO) has been its quiet counterexample. With a fraction of the staff and none of the Austin fanfare, RCCTO has managed to field the Typhon long-range missile system, push forward directed-energy and high-power microwave prototypes, and experiment with autonomous launchers — all while bigger, general-officer-laden efforts stalled. By contrast, marquee AFC programs like the M10 Booker “light tank” collapsed under their own weight (literally too heavy for many bridges), the Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle was canceled before relaunch as the XM30, and the Extended Range Cannon Artillery is now on life support. Taken together, the lesson is less about technology than about process: small, empowered teams focused on rapid prototyping have delivered more than headquarters saturated with generals chasing multi-role platforms that end up doing nothing especially well.

Bottom-Up instead of Top-Down Innovation

Past military adaptations offer great lessons on innovation that could frame T2COM's very existence. Consider Sergeant Curtis Cullin in the hedgerows of Normandy. Facing an immediate, life-threatening tactical impasse, he didn’t await a directive from a distant general staff; he welded scrap metal to a Sherman tank and engineered a solution born of visceral necessity. General Omar Bradley’s genius was recognizing this brilliant edge-driven ingenuity and possessing the vision and authority to rapidly scale it across the force. This Cullin/Bradley dynamic – edge discovery amplified by leadership – is the gold standard for practical, timely adaptation. Contrast this with the Maginot Line, a marvel of top-down, prescriptive engineering, meticulously designed by France’s most esteemed generals to fight the last war, only to be rendered irrelevant by German maneuver. These examples crystallize the central question for T2COM: Will it cultivate a thousand Cullins?

True transformation hinges not on new organizational titles or chasing "shiny object" technologies, but on building a better "factory that builds the factory," to borrow Elon Musk’s insightful metaphor – meaning a relentless focus on improving the Army's process of innovation itself. This requires the Army to finally and fully operationalize design thinking as a core institutional competency and to genuinely empower distributed, bottom-up innovation by embedding technically proficient engineers directly with Soldiers at the tactical edge where problems are most keenly felt and solutions most urgently needed. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a prototype is worth a thousand pictures (which is worth a thousand JCIDS documents).

Sometimes visionary leaps, like aircraft carriers, do demand sustained, top-down championship from figures like Admiral Moffett, battling institutional inertia to realize game-changing platforms. This is an indispensable role for senior leadership in driving strategic, capital-intensive transformations. Arguably the Army should be more bottoms-up driven since it's focus is on people. The Air Force and Navy are more about high-tech "things" which enable them to be in the air and sea. People live on land. Ukraine has taught us the agile integration of the entire spectrum (low-med-high) will win.

AFC's creation, born from understandable senior leader frustration ("damn scientists and program offices weren't getting them toys"). Senior leaders must set strategic direction and be stewards of a bottoms-up Soldier/scientist ideated and experimentation driven process -- and if it's done right it will not be efficient and fail forward often. General officers should not consider themselves a proxy Soldier touchpoint otherwise you will build the Army for 1989 (Back from Futures?). Generals haven't touched a sandbag in decades and certainly they haven't printed drones, written code, or flown FPV drone races. "God grant me the serenity to accept that I don’t know how this gadget works, courage to let the young lieutenants try anyway, and wisdom to stay out of the server room."

The 1855 New York & Erie Railroad diagram—the world’s first org chart—wasn’t a military-style command overlay or chain-of-command map. It was a living, organic depiction of authority radiating outward to operational nodes. Authority lived where the information lived. That diagram stands in stark contrast to today’s Army S&T structure, where command is often held by operational leaders with no technical background, and DEVCOM’s subordinate labs behave like siloed fiefdoms—each protecting turf rather than integrating effort. The result isn’t structure; it’s stasis. Org charts become demoralizing when they merely show who you report to, not who you rely on to get the mission done. As Lindred Greer of Stanford GSB observes, people are most frustrated when they’re boxed beneath someone they don’t believe should lead. She advocates visualizing teams more like Venn diagrams—where even junior members own and protect distinct slices of mission authority. That kind of controlled chaos—where competence is distributed, not rank-bound—is precisely what T2COM should encourage.

General Stanley McChrystal confronted this same problem in combat. Leading Joint Special Operations Command against a decentralized insurgency, he realized that his technically capable subunits were paralyzed by the very command structure meant to guide them. His solution wasn’t to erase structure—it was to flatten information and rewire trust. He built a “team of teams,” not by decree, but by flooding the network with shared awareness and giving frontline teams full agency to act. Operations, intel, logistics, and analysis fused into hybrid, co-evolving clusters. The relevance to T2COM is immediate: S&T success won’t come from command compliance or syncing slides across DEVCOM. It will come from persistent, digital, cross-functional teams solving problems in real time—many of whom may never meet in person, yet operate with full context, mutual trust, and no need to ask permission before fixing what’s broken.

Maximizing Adaption - Surprise Factory

To achieve dissuasion, the U.S. military must deliberately embrace a portfolio of the elements of military power as encapsulated in the equation below. Keep in mind that the equation applies to all domains of warfare (sea, air, land, information, space) and time horizons.

Effectiveness = Technical Overmatch × Mass × Tactics × Surprise

Prototype Warfare is the mindset Army should finally embrace—not as a niche strategy, but as the default mode of modernization. Instead of chasing exquisite, decade-long Programs of Record that deliver one-shot capabilities easily studied, spoofed, or stolen, the Army must field a stream of purpose-built prototypes—limited-run systems tailored to emerging threats, iterated quickly, and deployed with minimal ceremony.

This continuous, distributed prototyping approach generates not just tactical solutions, but strategic confusion. Each new system—be it loitering drone, electronic decoy, AI-enabled ISR node, or autonomous mule—compels adversaries to account for it, to probe its signature, and to divert resources toward countering it. The result is a portfolio of technical dilemmas, each one fragmenting the adversary’s planning bandwidth and targeting calculus. This isn’t just acquisition reform—it’s how you win the competition phase. Surprise becomes procedural. Complexity becomes a weapon. And forward prototyping becomes the Army’s most credible signal of its will to prepare.

Creating multiple technology dilemmas for the enemy means they can't simply focus on achieving a small amount of overmatch. It means, again, the country that can best combine multiple dilemmas and create entropy will succeed in an affordable way. The US has not historically adopted this methodology and pursued deterrence by raw technology overmatch alone, as evidenced by military expenditures. Consider 2017, before the invasion of Ukraine: Moscow spent $66.3 billion compared to the $900 billion spent by 29 NATO countries.

The overmatch "time window" for fielding new technology versus the threat's response time is crucial. ROI considerations include the overmatch "time window" for fielding technology versus the threat's response time and the cost versus the cost imposed on the threat to counter it. To maintain a competitive edge, the U.S. must invest in technologies that outpace the adoption clockspeed of adversaries.

T2COM - A Distributed Design Thinking Brain?

T2COM has the opportunity to champion the operationalization of design thinking and build a better machine that builds machines. Design thinking requires treating everything like a hunting expedition where you don't entirely know where the animal is you're tracking and exactly what animal it may be. You keep trying to close on it read the tracks and signs. Design thinking is rooted in empathy, iterative prototyping, and a 360-degree understanding of user needs, latent pain points, and ecosystem constraints. It begins with empathizing: observing users, not just asking them what they want. It acknowledges that people often don’t know what they need until they see/touch/try it. If you only ask users what they desire, you might end up with "faster horses," as the adage suggests, missing opportunities for paradigm shifts like the automobile (or, as the IDEO design firm might point out, we'd all still be using computer joysticks instead of the mouse).

The operational heart of this revitalized adaptation surprise factory must be a vibrant edge ecosystem. T2COM must champion forward-deployed innovation nodes. DEVCOM should increase its global Science Advisor program and establish maximum "innovation hubs," pushing its engineers out from historic labs in Aberdeen, Detroit, or Natick (locations with virtually no large troop concentrations) to co-locate with soldiers in key areas like Hawaii (the pacing theater, whose unique environment cannot be replicated on the mainland) and Europe. These hubs, embedded in units like the 101st, 82nd, and across USARPAC, need formal resourcing, manning, and critically, dedicated, embedded engineers. This leverages lessons on distributed work platforms honed during COVID. Catalyst Pathfinder, a program linking soldier problems to solvers, needs more funding, as does the Science Advisor program. For integrating commodity tech with high-end systems (like drones with HIMARS), DevOps is non-negotiable. This iterative collaboration between developers and operators must occur in the field. It cannot be effectively replicated from Austin or Arberdeen. Further this is how we will inevitably fight -- and we should practice in peacetime. Engineers can't sit back and be the institutional Army -- S&T must be part of the operational fight!

Furthermore, this ecosystem needs robust digital connective tissue: secure chat platforms like Mattermost, a flexible, open-source collaboration environment modeled after Slack. Within Mattermost, distributed innovation cells can create dedicated channels (e.g., #drone-autonomy, #3dprint-issues, #sensors-pacific) where soldiers, engineers, and researchers share field observations, troubleshooting tips, and rapid iteration feedback in real time. The DoD application would be to add CAD model software version control for 3d designs and toolpaths. But it's more than chat—Mattermost supports embedded images, version control, annotated screenshots, explainer videos, allowing a sergeant in Schofield Barracks to upload a smartphone video of a failed 3d print in jungle humidity and get troubleshooting advice from a Natick materials engineer within hours. These channels become living archives of lessons learned and tacit knowledge, often far more actionable than PowerPoint briefings or doctrinal PDFs. Paired with GitHub-style repositories for version-controlled designs and a wiki of evolving “how-to” guides, this digital collaboratorium turns the Army’s global footprint into a shared, searchable brain—where insights are captured, prototypes iterated, and institutional memory sharpened by every deployment. This is how a modern military learns at the speed of relevance.

The T2COM's Austin headquarters is a geographic decision. The real transformation, however, is procedural, cultural, and intellectual. The Army's ability to out-adapt its adversaries hinges on operationalizing design thinking, empowering soldier-engineer teams in the spirit of Cullin, providing visionary leadership to scale successes like Bradley, and relentlessly increasing the clockspeed of its entire innovation ecosystem. The true epicenter of Army transformation is not in Texas; it's wherever soldiers confront the evolving challenges of modern war. That's where T2COM must enable and accelerate the fight.

This is a compressed version of a much much longer document.