The Cipher Brief: As the country moves past the six-month mark since the COVID-19 pandemic brought about what many call our new normal, what’s your perspective on how this has impacted the Army?
Lt. Gen. Swan: From an Army perspective, this period has demonstrated the value of our military capabilities and personnel and expertise in homeland defense. The Army has played a central role in the national response to the COVID pandemic, largely led by my old command, Army North, in San Antonio, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the Army’s medical establishment. Those three elements have been key players. As a nation, we’ve found that the military and the Army especially, are a robust resource that can lead the response to something like COVID-19.
We’ve also learned a lot of lessons. This will not be the last event like this, whether it’s biological, chemical, or some other pandemic-like threat, and the lessons that come out of this will be very important for us going forward. The Army is gathering those lessons and applying them as we look to the future.
Lt. General Guy Swan III (Ret.), Former Commander, U.S. Army North
From a public health and societal standpoint, we have come to greater appreciate the value of human beings. The Army has spent a lot of time and effort on continuing its mission to find ways to protect its soldiers, civilians, and families. Some of the commands you’ve heard about, specifically in Korea and Italy, were early users of what’s now been termed the ‘safety bubble,’ which is putting a bubble around our people so they can be safe and continue the mission.
This has been extended to the training establishment for the Army in Basic Training and other skills training centers that have been able to continue training in a COVID-19 environment. West Point, the military academy, has gone back to full operation and with limited impact from the virus; we’ve learned how to protect our people. For the military, force protection is so important, and I think society can learn from that, whether for schools, hospitals, or other places where people gather, and use some of our techniques. I think it could be very helpful.
One minor, but significant, example was bringing cadets back to West Point. All of the preparation and techniques that the superintendent put into protecting the event of bringing cadets back and continuing to bring in a new class of cadets in the summer is being shared with other universities and institutions of higher learning. A lot of organizations have come to the Army and the other services to learn how to continue the mission and work during COVID-19. We’re going to face this again, there’s no doubt. It may not look like this, but we’ve learned some hard lessons here that we will be able to apply in the future.
The Cipher Brief: The AUSA FY20 report stated that the Army was able to exceed its year-end goal for recruiting and retention including 60,000 new hires with 47% minorities and 18% women. Tell us about the state of morale in the Army and the Army’s ability to continue to attract young Americans?
Lt. Gen. Swan: It is very encouraging to see those numbers this year. The past couple years, the Army has struggled with meeting its enlistment goals for new recruits. Interestingly, we’ve had great retention because people don’t want to leave, which has offset any shortcomings we have had in recruiting, but it does create challenges for the future.
I think what is happening right now is that, with the loss of jobs due to the pandemic, there is a pool of people who may not have thought about military service before when they were gainfully employed. That’s had some effect. More importantly, about a year and a half ago, the Army shifted its advertising and recruiting campaign to explain the wide variety of career opportunities within the U.S. Army. Up to that point, television ads were primarily focused on the combat missions of the Army, which has an appeal to a small group of Americans, but not to the wide range of people that the Army needs.
The recruiting shifted to over 150 occupational specialties in the Army that are available to recruits, and I think that has stimulated the numbers that you saw. The Army is no longer just kicking down doors in some distant land. It is also needs cyber experts, medical experts, and engineering experts. This new approach has been very positive. Not everybody wants to jump out of airplanes or drive a tank. There are others who want to develop other skills that the Army needs in the ranks today.
There has also been a greater emphasis in the Army, and in the military as a whole, on diversity and inclusion and ensuring that the U.S. military looks like the population it serves. When you see the number of minorities and women being recruited, that’s a reflection on an army that looks like society, which is absolutely the right thing to do. It demonstrates that there’s opportunity for everyone in the U.S. military and in the U.S. Army.
The Cipher Brief: What are some of the critical areas and subjects that are being discussed at AUSA’s’ 2020 meeting?
Lt. Gen. Swan: It will be a showcase of the Army's top priorities, the highest of those being people first. There will be a focus at several points during each of the three days on people and things like diversity and inclusion, talent management, and professional development for soldiers and civilians.
You’ll also see a focus on the Army’s top three priorities: readiness of force, modernization of the Army, and reform to the business processes of the Army. One of the very hot initiatives underway in the Army is called Project Convergence.
Lt. General Guy Swan III(Ret), Former Commander, U.S. Army North
Project Convergence is a series of experiments that fosters and furthers the Army as an all domain force. We’re operating in the air, land, sea, cyber, and space domains and Project Convergence is a means to exercise and experiment in all of those domains. This is the Army’s contribution that is part of a broader Department of Defense effort called Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2).
There will be a focus on the total Army. One thing we’ve made great progress with over the last 10 years or so, is an appreciation that the Army is not just the regular Army. The Army Reserve, the Army National Guard, and Army civilians make up the total Army and all of those elements have contributed to our efforts overseas, the COVID-19 response, and hurricane disaster response and that total Army focus will be highlighted.
Industry partnerships and the role of the defense industrial base, both the private sector and the portion owned and operated by the Army itself, will also be highlighted. There will be presentations by industry partners on what they are contributing to our forces.
Lastly, there will be in-depth discussion of the Army’s role in the pandemic response led by Army North so that people can get the latest and most up-to-date information on the Army’s contribution to that response.
The Cipher Brief: How has the total Army dealt with this rapid digital transformation that has swept not only our country, but the world in the last six months?
Lt. Gen. Swan: From an operational standpoint, the Army has found ways to continue its mission in a far more distributed manner. Many of us grew up in a military where all of our forces were massed together to attack an enemy. The whole effort was to mass against your adversary. Today, this all domain environment is going to be more distributed.
In many ways, what the rest of society is experiencing now with their employees and operations being distributed is where the Army is moving towards in terms of continuing their mission. This notion of convergence that I mentioned is converging those capabilities at a place and time of your choosing against an adversary, so the more congested or together a force is, the more vulnerable you are, whether it’s vulnerable to an enemy attack or to spreading a virus. Business and our armed forces are moving toward a system that can operate efficiently in a distributed manner.
We have learned some very sobering lessons about what happens when forces get together in Ukraine and Azerbaijan. It’s devastating because the ability with various sensors and drones to locate mass targets like that exist, and they are very good. We’re finding that this notion of operating more distributed is the way to protect the force and to protect data.
The Army is turning this situation into an opportunity. There has also been a re-energized notion of cloud migration across the force in both business processes and military operations. It’s not a panacea, but I think we’re seeing a process where you don’t have to own and keep all of the data on premises in your own servers. We need the military to be able to access data when needed. That’s part of this distributed mindset. When you’re operating distributed, you have to be able to access the data you need. The pandemic is forcing us to look hard at better ways to do that.
The Cipher Brief: What are some of the key near term procurement challenges that you think are going to bubble up?
Lt. Gen. Swan: The big one is going to be the budget. The 2018 national defense strategy continues to drive everything that the Army and the rest of the military does. It’s common understanding that to fully resource the direction in the national defense strategy, we need 3 to 5% annual growth in the defense budget, but the FY21 budget that’s currently on the Hill is a flat budget and will be about what it was for the past year. This presents a major challenge for procurement and acquisition. Research and Development is going to be a flat budget for the foreseeable future, and that’s alarming because of the rise of China, Russia, and challenges with Iran and North Korea.
The Cipher Brief: Do you think the Army’s ability as or organization to stay focused and ready has been compromised by the rise of disinformation and its prevalence in today’s society?
Lt. Gen. Swan: It has actually served as an incentive to the Army to stay focused. It’s counterintuitive, but when society is moving along in a normal state, it’s very easy for the Army to get off track and lose focus, but when the rest of society is doing that, it is a counterintuitive incentive to stay focused. Many senior leaders say they can’t block out the noise, but they shouldn’t block out the noise. They have to stay focused on what their mission is, but I think, by and large, they’ve done that pretty well.
If you’re overseas or if you’re training somewhere in the United States with the Army, that noise may not be as loud to you as it would be to us in the capital region. People are not immune from it and everyone is constantly bombarded by these issues in the news and media, but you can escape some of it by being away from the beltway.
The one area that worries me, probably because it is an election year more than anything else, is the political polarization of the military. The military has been much more visible this year whether in COVID response, civil disturbance response, or other things, it has been more subject to those political dynamics than usual and military leaders are constantly having to step back and try not to get embroiled in those discussions.
China’s role in the pandemic reinforced what was in that national defense strategy about great power competition. It reinforces what was in there about China and its objectives and impact on America’s role in the world.
The Cipher Brief: What are the other top issues being talked about at AUSA Now this week?
Lt. Gen. Swan: We’ll be talking about the Asymmetric Warfare Group and the Rapid Equipping Force that were products of our counterinsurgency efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Asymmetric Warfare Group came out of our special operations forces who were studying our adversaries in different theaters and studying their tactics, techniques, and procedures and how to counter their doctrines, ideology, and how it affects military operations. We went into Iraq and Afghanistan having lost a lot of those skills that date back to Vietnam and earlier, so we had to find a way to catch up, and the Asymmetric Warfare Group helped us do that.
The Rapid Equipping Force did a similar thing on the technology side by finding technology responses to what we were seeing on the battlefield and getting them into the hands of soldiers faster than via the normal acquisition process. This required going to private industry and using off-the-shelf technology to bypass long acquisition cycles. Those were very important to our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Now, we’re seeing the numbers of forces in those theaters being reduced and the national defense strategy is shifting to great power competition with the likes of Russia and China. There is less of a need for a focus on asymmetric warfare and more of a need to focus on countering large scale adversaries.
Because of this, we’re now having a conversation about where the functions of the Asymmetric Warfare Group and the Rapid Equipping Force migrate into the army structure. I had a long conversation with the director of the Rapid Equipping Force about three weeks ago, and even as late as three weeks ago, he wasn’t sure where those functions would migrate to, but they will migrate somewhere else in the acquisition community. I think the Asymmetric Warfare Group functions will migrate towards TRAY-dock, the Combined Arms Center at Leavenworth, Special Operations Command, and places like that. These functions will be needed in the future, they just won’t be organized the way they have been in the past.
The Cipher Brief: Any closing thoughts before you get back to AUSA Now?
Lt. Gen. Swan: Each year, the Association of the U.S. Army, (AUSA) presents its General George Marshall Award to a prominent citizen or person. Last year, it was awarded to General Martin Dempsey, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs. This year, the Marshall Award is being presented to the army family as a whole. Army families are supportive of our troops and have been for several decades now, and this is the Association’s way of recognizing their contribution, not just to the Army, but to the nation as well. It’s a bit of a departure from what we’ve done in singling out an individual, but about 10 years ago, we recognized the army soldier for the Marshall Award. In a similar vein, this is to recognize the army family writ large in the many ways it can be defined. We just want to recognize the different groups of people who support the army and our soldiers.
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