Ben Blane and Dale Hunter
In 1999, after introducing a bold vision to transform the Army by 2030, General Eric Shinseki spent his first year as chief of staff of the Army communicating the urgency behind his transformation vision. “If you dislike change,” he stressed, “you’re going to dislike irrelevance even more.” Yet, as General Shinseki has described, this vision didn’t gain much traction initially and was met with resistance across the Army. The Army of 1999, which he argued was in dire need of change to maintain its relevance to the joint force, had just achieved overwhelming success in Operation Desert Storm earlier in the decade. So why the need to change?
Simply put, any potential adversary that paid attention to Desert Storm would certainly take heed to never engage in that type of fight against the US Army in future conflict. The Army that fought in Desert Storm was organized, trained, and equipped during the Cold War era to counter an invading Soviet force in Europe. It was not a force designed to respond to the wide variety of small-scale contingencies and nontraditional threats emerging in 1999.
Likewise today, adversaries have evolved to avoid conditions that favor a US Army that fought in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past two decades or one that is simply reintroducing Cold War doctrine as a solution to the challenges of large-scale combat operations. And the pacing threat is evolving faster than ever. Once again, the Army faces a choice between change and irrelevance. Maintaining relevance will require continuous transformation in contact. And given that the senior US military commander of the most strategically consequential theater has stated that the United States’ pacing threat, China’s People’s Liberation Army, would be ready to invade Taiwan over the next 18–24 months, it must occur now. How can the Army expect to appropriately transform in such a short period of time?
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