Army promises detailed transformation plan to Congress within 10 days
Army officials told lawmakers they will provide a detailed briefing on the service’s new transformation initiative within the next ten days, following mounting pressure from Congress to explain plans for the sweeping overhaul announced more than a month ago.
Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll and Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George returned to Capitol Hill on Wednesday for another round of questioning about the Army’s fiscal 2026 budget request. But formal details about program cuts and investment shifts tied to the service’s transformation initiative remain scarce.
“The Army must change and modernize how it fights and must take into account significant changes in technology. But bluntly, months after you’ve announced the Army Transformation Initiative, this committee hasn’t received detailed or substantive analysis as to why the Army is planning to cancel or reduce 12 programs of record, consolidate or reduce staffing at 21 commands, or how the investments you’re proposing will significantly enhance battlefield lethality,” Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) said during the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense hearing.
When asked for a timeline to brief the subcommittee in detail on the transformation initiative, Driscoll responded, “We’d be happy to come by any time, but I think very specifically you will have that detail within 10 days.”
While lawmakers largely expressed support for the initiative, many questioned a number of the Army’s decisions tied to this overhaul.
“We want to see the analysis behind the specific bets the Army wants to place on ATI. We want to understand the second order effects on industry, other services and allies,” Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said.
Driscoll admitted during the hearing that the Army did not broadly consult with other services before announcing major program cancellations under the initiative — including the cancellation of the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV), which caught the Marine Corps off guard.
“When that consultation occurs, what would happen is the antibodies in the system come up to stop change. And so when we weighed the decision of how do we actually get the most likely chance of succeeding, we decided that the best chance was to sync with the Pentagon leadership and the administration and keep it very narrow until after announcement, but we consulted with them the night before we announced it, and then very soon after it came out,” Driscoll said.
Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisc.) still raised concerns about the potential economic fallout and the kind of ripple effects of canceling programs like JLTV would have on the defense industrial base. “In Wisconsin, we probably have 40 or more suppliers to the two canceled programs, and I very much worry about their health,” she said.
Driscoll acknowledged the risk but said the initiative would ultimately create new opportunities for small and medium-sized manufacturers across the country.
“We are incredibly optimistic that the Army Transformation Initiative will be of Renaissance for small and medium-sized businesses, not just on the coast and in Silicon Valley and the tech companies, but throughout the heartlands. And if you can make something that the Army needs, and we need a lot, and this inflection point in warfare, we are gapped in a lot of spaces. If you can make things that we need, what we are trying to do is close the loop on being able to purchase those things more quickly so that these small and medium businesses, and the large ones too, that make investments can get rewarded for those investments,” Driscoll said.
Another contentious element of the plan is the cancellation of the Robotic Combat Vehicle (RCV), a program that showed “real promise and could have served as a foundation for future innovation,” according to Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine).
“It’s the height of irony that you would feature this combat vehicle in your parade as the future of the Army at the same time that you’ve canceled the contract, the cancellation of a contract that was won over a lot of other competitors. This is equipped with the anti-drone technology. Drones are a threat to all sorts of vehicles. This one is autonomous. You’re not going to lose a soldier’s life if it’s taken out. I think you should review this decision. I think it was terribly unfair and a real mistake,” Collins said.
Driscoll defended the decision, arguing the RCV had become a textbook case of investing in expensive, over-engineered systems — the Army came out with too many requirements, it took too long to develop and ultimately it became too expensive to deploy at scale.
“An $ 800 drone with a very cheap munition can take out a $ 3 million piece of equipment endlessly. And what we, the U.S. Army, have done very poorly in the last 30 or 40 years, is we keep building exquisite pieces of equipment that we cannot even, as one of the wealthiest nations in the history of the world, sustain at scale,” Driscoll said.
Driscoll estimated that the Army will cancel or shift roughly $ 48 billion in spending over the next five years as part of the transformation initiative.
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