Washington has spent decades asking the wrong question about the Army. Every few years a new strategy arrives and the debate resets. Should the Army be larger or smaller? Heavy or light? Optimized for Europe, the Indo-Pacific or homeland defense? Built for counterinsurgency, large-scale combat or multidomain operations?
These are reasonable questions, but they share an assumption history keeps disproving: that someone will tell the Army in advance what it needs to become. That is not how the world works.
Presidents rarely choose the crises they inherit. Pearl Harbor, September 11th, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, COVID-19, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the October 7 attacks in Israel and the rapid emergence of inexpensive drones as strategic weapons all arrived with little warning. They demanded immediate action, and no president had the luxury of asking the Army to reorganize first before responding.
Here is the part the debate usually misses. The Army has always answered those calls, but it has almost always done so by improvising. When Iraq demanded more infantry than the force was built to supply, the Army converted field artillery and armor units into infantry units and sent them out the door. It worked, but it was ad hoc, done under fire and cost valuable time.
The ability to adapt brilliantly, but from scratch every time, is the real subject of any honest force-structure debate. But that improvisation is growing more dangerous for two reasons.
First, America’s geography no longer buys the time it once did. For generations, oceans gave the United States room to mobilize. Today, cyberattacks ignore borders. Commercial satellites provide global surveillance. Artificial intelligence accelerates decision-making. Small drones built from commercial components can strike critical infrastructure thousands of miles from any traditional battlefield. Distance has lost much of its military value. The homeland itself has become part of the battlefield, and at some point in the near future the Army will be called to defend it at scale.
Second, technology now changes faster than the Army can reorganize around it. Through most of the Cold War, force structure evolved slowly because technology did. Today software, autonomy, robotics, artificial intelligence, commercial space and inexpensive unmanned systems reshape warfare on timelines measured in months, while acquisition programs still measure success in decades. By the time a force is perfectly optimized, the assumptions behind its design may already be obsolete. The question is no longer how new technology will fit into existing formations, it is how fast existing formations can change to absorb new technology.
Put those together and the lesson is clear: trying to predict the next war more accurately is a fool’s errand. The Army should stop optimizing for prediction and start optimizing for uncertainty. Its force structure should be designed around one question: how quickly can it change when the president’s problem changes?
For most of the Army’s history, adaptation has been the exception, a scramble mounted when a crisis outran the plan. The next Army should make adaptation the rule. The difference between improvising flexibility and designing for it is the difference between converting artillerymen into infantry in the middle of a war and being organized, in advance, to reconfigure without the scramble.
Consider the missions a president could assign over the next decade. Reinforce NATO after Russian aggression. Support maritime operations in the Pacific. Defend American cities from coordinated drone attacks. Secure the land borders. Respond to a catastrophic hurricane. None requires the same force, yet each will demand Army capabilities on short notice. No president should have to specify years in advance which comes first, and the Army should not expect one to.
The useful image is a Transformer more than a Swiss Army knife. A Swiss Army knife carries a fixed set of tools and hopes one of them fits. A Transformer changes shape to meet the problem in front of it. The future Army should be judged not by how many tools it carries but by how fast it can rearrange the ones it has.
Army organizations should be built to change as missions change. Headquarters should stay stable while capabilities become modular. Air defense, engineers, logistics, cyber, aviation, autonomous systems, long-range fires, electronic warfare and sustainment should be assembled and reassembled as demands dictate, not converted improvisationally after the shooting starts. The Army calls this task organization. Made deliberate and routine, it becomes far more.
Routinizing task organization requires standardized interfaces. Common mission-command systems and data standards would enable the linkage of any capability to headquarters. Streamlined certification standards would ensure commanders know what they’re getting and training rotations would force commanders to learn how to use packages they don’t typically own.
The same logic applies to modernization. The Army has long treated modernization as swapping old equipment for new. The future demands something else: organizations able to absorb new software, new autonomous systems, new sensors and new communications architectures continuously, without breaking readiness. Success is not how often the Army fields a new platform. It is how fast operational units fold innovation into everyday operations.
Critics may warn that an adaptable Army becomes a jack of all trades and master of none, but the history says otherwise. This is not an argument for doing everything. It is an argument for being prepared to do anything.
America’s Army has never been allowed the luxury of specialization, focused only on land wars. Designing for adaptability does not make the Army a dilettante. It puts a stop to a chronic cycle in which we make assumptions about the future of war, rebuild the Army in the image of those assumptions and then start over when we discover those assumptions were faulty.
Too often force structure debates are hyper-fixated on numbers. How many brigades? How many divisions? Heavy or light? Active or Reserve? Those matter, but they are no longer first order questions. Instead, we must start with questions such as: Can the Army reorganize faster than the next crisis develops? Can it integrate emerging technology without waiting for a decade-long doctrine cycle? Can it move capabilities across theaters without rebuilding organizations from scratch? Can it give the president credible options when there has been no warning and no time to prepare?
If the answer is yes, the Army stays relevant wherever the next crisis emerges. If the answer is no, no amount of optimizing for today’s preferred scenario will save it.
For generations the Army optimized for mass. After the Cold War it optimized for efficiency. In Iraq and Afghanistan it optimized for persistence, and adapted, repeatedly, by improvisation. The defining characteristic of the next Army should be that it no longer has to improvise. It should optimize for adaptability and build the framework, the leaders and the trained soldiers that make adaptation routine.
The Army should not wait to be told what it must become. It should already be organized to become whatever the nation needs, not because the president knows what the next crisis will be, but because nobody does.
John G. Ferrari, a retired Army Maj. Gen., is a senior nonresident fellow at AEI. He previously served as a director of program analysis and evaluation for the service.
