How the Army Prepares for Tomorrow's Wars with the Hon. Christine E. Wormuth, President and CEO of the Nuclear Threat Initiative

So there's a lot that I want to discuss.

I'll start off with getting the listeners to see through a strategic lens and your worldview and then transition to your time as the Secretary of the Army and in your current role.

So first, ma'am, I want to define the future battlefield or maybe what the battlefield looks now.

And so, ma'am, first question I want to throw your way is what assumptions about future warfare have changed the most over the last decade? five ten years you know what what's been showing to be true on the battlefield

well at the most strategic level i think what's really changed in the last 10 15 years is the the focus that we had for the last 20 years on counterinsurgency and counterterrorism you know we have clearly turned the page to a different era and i think you know looking ahead it's all about great power competition and it's about much more high-tech adversaries um i think sort of at the operational level what that means is you're going to see a much greater emphasis on autonomy on robotics on artificial intelligence on unmanned vehicles of all kinds ground vehicles undersea vehicles you know obviously drones It's been really interesting to see how rapidly all of those technologies are evolving and how quickly they are already being seen in conflicts around the world, most obviously Ukraine, but other places as well.

Yeah.

Yes, ma'am.

And you know, next question, you know, and just to segue into it, talk about robotics and AI and autonomous systems, um, and then tying it into, uh, you know, your time as secretary of the army, um, should these technologies like fundamentally change how like the army fights should, you know, we should be incorporating them in, in, uh, adjusting our, our doctrine based off of, off of these capabilities, if that makes sense.

I think the Army does need to do, there's a lot of work to be done to integrate these new technologies into our doctrine, into our operations.

And that work has already started.

During the time that I was Secretary and General Randy George was the Chief of Staff of the Army, we kicked off the transformation and contact initiative and expanded that initiative over time to involve more brigades.

And the idea there was let's get some of this new technology in particular drones, but not exclusively into the hands of our soldiers out in the field.

Let's let them see what works, what doesn't work and bring those lessons back and bring those lessons back to the schoolhouse.

I think on the doctrine side, it always takes longer.

And frankly, shortly after I became army secretary in 2021, I think it was, we put out the whole multi-domain doctrine.

So we had just come out with a big new army doctrine.

that had taken a few years to develop.

And in the intervening time, there's been a lot that has changed that I think is gonna have to be injected into the next round of our doctrine.

One thing that I think we need to remember is the Army fights with formations.

It doesn't fight with specific systems.

And I think we can lose track of that sometimes.

You know, there's so much talk about drones and EW and, you know, unmanned vehicles.

But we have to think about, you know, formations and how do we fight those formations.

Those formations are going to integrate these new technologies, but we need to be thinking from a doctrinal perspective about how do we change our doctrine around how our formations fight and work together.

Yeah.