A shocking September report from the watchdog Government Accountability Office detailed rampant problems in the barracks — mold, squatters, safety concerns, sewage overflows, lack of space, inadequate climate control and more.

On-base privatized housing for troops with families also suffers from oversight shortcomings that have proved difficult to overcome. The Army’s internal auditors concluded that 2020 housing policy reforms intended to make homes safer from lead-based paint and asbestos fell short due to ineffective oversight and confusion between housing officials and the companies administering the properties, according to a report obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

Ahead of the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference, Army Times spoke with two of the service’s top quality of life officials — Installation Management Command’s Lt. Gen. Omar Jones and Army G-9 Lt. Gen. Kevin Vereen — about the Army’s plans to address those issues, as well as their progress on improving access to childcare.

Vereen, who led the Army’s Recruiting Command from 2020 through September 2022, emphasized the importance of quality of life measures for securing the Army’s future amid falling end strength numbers. “Supporting our soldiers and families where they live, work and train…that is a fundamental reason why we are going to be able to recruit and to retain our soldiers and families.”

Barracks boost coming?

In a Sept. 27 House Armed Services Committee quality of life hearing following the GAO barracks report, the Army’s deputy assistant secretary for installations, housing and partnerships, Carla Coulson, told lawmakers that “the report, frankly, was not news to the Army.” According to Jones, nearly one-in-five of the Army’s permanent party barracks buildings — meaning those reserved for soldiers stationed at the base — are currently rated as poor or unacceptable under the service’s four-tier rating system.

Lawmakers appear to have noticed the challenges the Army has faced with funding such work, too. Rep. Mark Alford, R-Mo., pressed Coulson for a price tag on fixing all of the barracks.

But Coulson — along with Jones and Vereen — seemed optimistic that a proposed $4 billion barracks resourcing strategy would increase sustainment funding to keep good barracks in top shape and bolster the service’s work to renovate and replace poor and failing condition facilities. The money would be in addition to the $1 billion per year that the service has already committed to barracks improvement projects.

“We can see that we have 300 permanent party barracks buildings that are in poor and failing shape,” Coulson told lawmakers. “Across our…[current pre-strategy budget plan] we can address 113 of those barracks buildings. But at the same time, if we don’t fully sustain, we’ll have 110 existing barracks buildings that will move from good or adequate into the poor and failing category.”

The barracks resourcing strategy recommends that the Army fund 100% of barracks’ sustainment needs in addition to ensuring the multi-billion dollar “generational investment in our barracks,” as Vereen described it, is put to good use. Army Secretary Christine Wormuth, who drives the service’s budget requests, will make the final call, and Congress will decide whether to approve the funds.

Jones said the increase in sustainment funding, if approved, will help installation public works officials eliminate any deferred maintenance, be more responsive to new requests, and get ahead of the curve on stopping issues before they start.

“You will see increased effort and effectiveness and accomplishment of preventative maintenance because of that,” Jones added.

Privatized housing next?

But once the Army revitalizes its barracks, Coulson said, the next problem on the horizon is doing the same with “our privatized [housing] inventory that we struggle with.” Around 90,000 of the Army’s approximately 100,000 on-base homes around the world are administered by a private company as part of a public-private venture partnership at the installation level, Jones said.

The service faces a greater challenge to ensure the sustainment of existing homes, too, because it does not directly control their maintenance plans — the Army has an oversight role. The complexity of the decades-old agreements between the Army and the housing partners has increased the difficulty of updating oversight rules.

The Army Audit Agency found that 2020 oversight reforms intended to address environmental hazards in privatized homes have fallen short thus far. Army officials in garrison housing offices lacked standardized training to carry out their responsibilities, and the program couldn’t apply to the housing partners without consensual updates to legal agreements.

“In some cases, probably the cart got before the horse,” Vereen explained. “When you look at where most of our housing partners [and] management offices were, and how they were manned, I don’t think that we looked at their ability to be able to adhere to some of…the policy changes.”

In Vereen’s eyes, having trained personnel on both sides of the equation — larger company management offices and more soldiers in Army housing offices — will help both parties implement effective inspection regimes with proper oversight.

Jones, who interacts with the housing partners regularly as the general with overall responsibility for the service’s housing, said the recently implemented resident bill of rights is meant to “make sure that no soldier or family…[feels] unheard by the Army.” He highlighted the dispute resolution process, for which he serves as the final decision authority on formal complaints.

Securing childcare

Both Jones and Vereen pointed to the childcare front as one where the Army has received significant assistance from lawmakers, but also as one where there is still a lot of work to complete.

In late 2022, Congress surged funding to build childcare centers for the Army and other services, putting them on track to meet many of their facilities’ needs. That included a desperately needed child development center at Camp Bull Simons, Florida, where 7th Special Forces Group families have struggled for years with inadequate access to the service.

But the enduring problem is one felt in the civilian sector as well: staffing.

Jones said the service’s daycare centers — often lauded for their low-cost, high-quality service — have come a long way from their pandemic-era employment nadir.

“Right now, our employment rate is approximately 80%…we were, in some cases, just over 50% coming out of the pandemic,” he said. But he wants to exceed the Army goal of 90% and reach full childcare staffing.

He and Vereen are focused on using (and advertising) expanded incentives for child center employees, which includes commissary benefits for those not already military-affiliated, as well as bonuses, free or discounted care for their own kids and more.

Vereen explained that staffing problems have led the Army to place enrollment caps on some facilities. “We have some larger CDCs that we just can’t fill to full capacity with children because we just don’t have the workforce and that’s a limiting factor for us,” he said.

Both generals highlighted a pair of resurgent or new initiatives that are improving childcare center access and spouse employment.

As part of a recent push to improve portability of spouse employment opportunities, the Army now allows child development center employees who are military dependents to transfer employment to another installation if their spouse has a PCS. Previously they would have to resign and reapply at the new base.

Jones said the Family Child Care program, which allows the Army to pay bonuses to and train qualified on-base residents who provide certified in-home child care to their neighbors, is also bouncing back after the pandemic.

Vereen hopes the efforts, in addition to a subsidy that helps families seek off-base childcare if necessary, will combine to take pressure off Army families and give spouses with children the freedom to pursue career opportunities. And they may not stop there — the general said his team is “looking at other ways” to address “the capacity problem.”

“We are seeing progress, but I think there’s still some work to be done,” he said.

Lt. Gen. Omar Jones, who leads the command, explained that garrisons need to provide a “common experience” for services like childcare while simultaneously providing “tailored” solutions in other quality-of-life areas that fit each unique installation.

As examples, Jones discussed public transit and privatized barracks — two areas where the service is weighing improvements or expansions in order to address shortcomings that are impacting junior troops’ Army experience.

At Fort Cavazos, Texas, he said, the service recently approved an intergovernmental agreement with the neighboring city of Killeen that will establish city-administered public transit on the Texas installation. But not every post will need internal public transit, Jones said, emphasizing the need “to tailor that to the local environment.”

In his previous role leading the Military District of Washington, Jones oversaw one of the service’s five privatized barracks facilities at Fort Meade, Maryland. He argued that the project, which consists of apartments for mid-grade and senior noncommissioned officers, works because it was tailored to Meade’s “unique” community.

“You have a combatant command there with [Cyber Command], you have…a higher population of mid- and senior-grade people to support the other organizations that are at Fort Meade than maybe some other organizations in the Army,” he said. Jones also cited the area’s high cost of living as a key factor.

So when it comes to establishing more privatized barracks, he said, service policy officials will ask questions like, “Does this model make sense for this installation, given the local community, the on-post community [and] the units?”

Jones’ philosophy contrasts with some historical projects, such as the construction of VOLAR-style barracks across several installations in the 1970s, that imposed identical programs without regard to factors like geography.

The general said the shift in thinking — which he noted has also been pushed by Gen. Randy George, the service’s new chief of staff — is emblematic of a broader sea change in how the Army perceives quality of life concerns compared to when he first entered the military.

“Taking care of people improves the Army; it improves readiness and what the Army does for the country,” he said. “That’s a conversation that I’m not sure was happening 30-plus years ago — at least that Lt. Jones was aware of.”

A series of deadly helicopter crashes killed 14 soldiers between February and April, interrupting one of the safest periods in the Army’s flying history.

That led the service’s leaders to order an Army-wide safety stand down in May — the rare move grounded all non-deployed flying units until they completed a mandatory safety training program led by their commanding generals. The sessions, leaders said, also allowed junior troops and other community members to provide feedback on safety practices and challenges in the community.

Ahead of the Association of the U.S. Army annual meeting, Army Times spoke with aviation branch chief Maj. Gen. Mac McCurry, who commands the aviation schoolhouse and Fort Novosel, Alabama, about the stand down’s findings and ongoing initiatives in Army aviation. McCurry had not yet briefed senior leaders on the findings as of the Sept. 21 interview, so senior leaders have not finalized corresponding policy initiatives.

McCurry says he is optimistic that the service will learn the right lessons from the stand down as it shifts its focus to a potential large-scale war with a foe like China.

“I think Army aviation is at an inflection point — we’ve been here before; we have the right leadership in place,” he said.

The Army’s top aviator said the stand down confirmed some commonly understood or long-suspected phenomena in the community that are affecting safety and readiness.

McCurry highlighted the high op tempo that combat aviation brigades face.

“We knew that the units in our combat aviation brigades were running hard…and so that was confirmed,” he said.

Many of the tasks that take aviation troops from home include training and rotations overseas, which isn’t too different from the era of the Global War on Terror.

But because today’s preparations are focused on “training to employ [flight] platoons, companies and battalions,” the build-up is more intense and less predictable for planners, maintainers and others, he said.

During the counterinsurgency-focused years, Army aircraft mainly operated in two-ship teams, the general explained. That meant maintenance personnel could work in staggered teams and maintain 24-hour operations. But when you’re training to fight a high-intensity war, that requires having more helicopters in the sky — and more planning and last-minute work.

Maintainers also grew accustomed to having contractor support when deployed, McCurry added, so “in many cases…we deployed all the crew members but not all the maintainers.” That means a generation of mid-career maintenance personnel don’t have “the sets and reps” of experience that they could’ve gotten.

He’s optimistic that a revamped maintenance training program — which formally ties career badges to proficiency testing — can ensure units are able to accurately assess and enhance their maintainers’ skills.

McCurry also said the stand down highlighted how today’s younger pilots largely don’t have the War on Terror-style combat deployments that would allow them to accrue hundreds of operational flying hours.

“We’ve seen a pretty significant drop in the flight hour level of any given warrant officer cohort,” he said. That’s increased the importance of risk management and “tailored” mission design and briefing.

Other findings from the stand down were less intuitive, according to McCurry.

The general noted that today’s troops are very aware of the service’s strategic priorities, thanks to modern communications, which has units anxious to do complex training to prepare for high-intensity conflict. But some units, because of the experience gap and the heightened learning curve for such work, “were jumping to some collective things before we had focused on the fundamentals.”

“We saw some units were out-training their level of experience,” he added. To address that gap, McCurry said, the branch is trying to improve individual tactical and technical training courses, recruit more instructor pilots, and standardize crew certification on training progressions.

In addition to harnessing the lessons learned from the stand down, McCurry shared that the aviation branch is leaning into its heritage in an effort to build cohesiveness across the community.

The effort, dubbed “Operation 83″ after the year when aviation became a standalone career branch, uses historical lessons to impart pilots “with the sacred trust Army aviation enjoys with the soldier on the ground.”

Overall, McCurry is pleased with the progress the Army has made in preventing more deadly aviation mishaps after this spring’s accidents, and he expressed his “heartfelt condolences and care to the families of those we lost.”

“Since that time, we’ve flown over 213,000 hours,” while experiencing only one Class A mishap, he said. But McCurry added that he is “not satisfied.” And he won’t be until Army aviation has another year without losing any soldiers.

A recruiting crisis made it harder to fill the ranks — and project what future forces the service needs and how it can fill those units. A new Army-wide human resources system debuted after multiple delays. And Russia invaded Ukraine.

According to Lt. Gen. Douglas Stitt, the Army’s top personnel officer and leader of its G-1 directorate, these events combine to create a “growth industry” where the service’s personnel pros can apply new technology and tricks to the “lost arts.” Stitt and his senior enlisted adviser, Sgt. Maj. Christopher “Smoke” Stevens, spoke with Army Times at the Pentagon on Sept. 25 ahead of the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference.

The war in Europe has resulted in massive casualties on both sides, and the pair of U.S. officials took note of lessons learned from the fight that can be applied to human resources professionals. Rebuilding a shattered unit is a daunting task, as can the process of sending a large number of troops overseas for battle.

“Sgt. Maj. Stevens and I, when we first came in as HR professionals, we … spent a lot of time in division Warfighters and [training rotations] talking about casualties, replacements [and unit] reconstitution,” Stitt said. But those ideas fell out of vogue in recent decades — out of necessity — amid America’s focus on counterterrorism.

“Let’s bring in the next generation and make sure they’re trained and prepared to take on these tasks,” Stitt added.

The career field’s schoolhouse at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, has integrated Ukraine’s “real-world examples” of large-scale combat personnel doctrine concepts that the U.S. Army hasn’t employed en masse since the Korean or Vietnam wars, he said.

In Stitt’s eyes, those new HR soldiers are also entering the field “on the ground floor of some emerging technology.”

The service’s leaders hyped the potential of its new personnel platform — the Integrated Personnel and Pay System-Army, or IPPS-A — for years before its release in December 2022.

While many emphasized IPPS-A’s potential to improve HR customer service, the Army’s personnel pros were quietly excited for its business analytics tools that allow for powerful custom manpower reports. Now in a mater of minutes, personnel troops can create detailed reports that once required pulls from multiple databases and complex compilation techniques.

Stitt noted there is an increased focus on training data analytics in the Fort Jackson schoolhouse, too.

Now that IPPS-A and its reporting tools are here and personnel pros are improving their data proficiency, Stitt explained, it’s time to “really look at strength management [and] get into the weeds of looking out for strength forecasts and projections.”

Those capabilities and the revamped training couldn’t come at a better time for the service; a recruiting crisis has made it increasingly difficult for the Army to keep units filled and ready for missions around the world. The Army’s success at retaining soldiers has also raised the risk of some career fields being overstaffed in their mid-career ranks unless their career development needs are adequately tracked and managed.

Stitt confirmed the Army has issued new “manning guidance” to ensure priority units receive an adequate percentage of the troops they’re authorized to have. He noted it can be challenging or even disappointing for some units to learn they won’t receive full manning, but the recruiting crisis has forced the Army’s hand.

The three-star general said communicating the broader manpower situation is necessary to “ensure … commanders understand where their units are” in a training or deployment cycle, because “everybody’s important, [but] not everybody’s a priority.”

Another communication challenge Stitt’s team faces, he said, is making sure commanders and division- or installation-level assignment teams are harnessing IPPS-A’s potential to “really understand who you have in your formation. How are we integrating the business analytics so we can get after projections?”

Ultimately, as Army Secretary Christine Wormuth told Army Times in June, the service will make unspecified force structure changes — cutting some units and creating others — to ensure its manpower requirements align with its mission requirements.

Wormuth and Stitt declined to elaborate on the cuts and what new units will emerge, the details of which aren’t finalized until the service completes its so-called Total Army Analysis force management recommendations for fiscal 2025 through fiscal 2029.

In the meantime, Stitt asked the force “to have trust and confidence in us that we care about them. This isn’t just a bunch of faceless individuals behind the curtain trying to conspire against them.”

“We are soldiers, too, and we understand the importance of our jobs so that soldiers can do their jobs,” he said.

“Hold on a second here,” said Sergeant Major of the Army Michael Weimer at the start of a Sept. 29 interview with Army Times. “I’m just going to touch up a little bit.”

An electric razor’s gentle buzz emanated through the phone, followed by hearty laughter. Army Times spoke with Weimer ahead of the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference, but the conversation was barely underway before the Army’s top NCO poked fun at himself.

The razor stunt was a reference to a Reddit user’s viral “Beard Eraser” game, which lets motivated player-warriors help Weimer, who “woke up undisciplined today,” get a fresh shave. The SMA described it as “hilarious.”

The conversation with Weimer covered his approach to garrison discipline — his previous comments about which sparked the anxiety that led to Beard Eraser — as well as training tempo. The below interview was edited for length and clarity.

AT: I’m glad you appreciated the shaving game — soldiers do the craziest things. But that app grew out of a place of anxiety. Soldiers are desperate to hear more details from you about what you envision for the return to standards and discipline, which you’ve discussed in broad terms thus far.

At a macro level, we are all in on the four focus areas that Gen. [Randy] George and I have been talking about [warfighting, delivering ready combat formations, undergoing continuous transformation, and strengthening the profession of arms]. We’re gonna spend a lot of time talking about warfighting, because it’s the very reason we exist — there’s no other reason we exist.

You really trace it all back to: how disciplined are you as an individual? How disciplined are you as an organization? Until you understand what the individual’s discipline is, you really don’t have the sum of the whole organization. You’re gonna see me spend a lot of time on the noncommissioned officer.

Discipline is usually measured with clearly defined standards, right? If the standards aren’t clearly defined, and if the standards aren’t clearly modeled, and if the standards aren’t clearly upheld, then we’re not nearly as disciplined as we think. The more senior you get, it evolves, but you don’t take anything off the plate. It’s not like you become the sergeant major of the Army and all of the sudden haircuts don’t matter and doing PT stops.

If you’re asking soldiers or NCOs to live and uphold the standard, they have got to be clear — and not confusing. We can use technology … that can help us clear up any confusion on what a standard is.

AT: Creating a shared understanding across the force is challenging to achieve at scale. Where are you hoping to improve on messaging about standards and discipline in order to bring everybody on the same page?

This is where I love technology, but what I’ve learned over time is if we don’t have governance with how we’re using technology — the information space is a great example of this — we actually can create more confusion.

AT: There seems to be rising concern among the force that there’s a pretty high training tempo and there’s lots of time away from home. What are your thoughts about op tempo and the force right now — what do you think is the right balance there?

I’m not going to disagree on the op tempo. It’s a very squishy term, though.

The [Army] Secretary and the Chief [of Staff], we’ve talked about how we should call it “head-on-pillow-time.” How many nights and days was my head not on my pillow at home? Because, I could never leave Fort Liberty and still not be home for two weeks because we’re in the field.

Units are training really hard at home station now — we should be training hard — but there’s a balance. I think that’s what the soldiers are getting at.

We’re asking commanders to take a thorough look at all the exercises they are doing and making sure we’re assessing what really needs to be done. We acknowledge how much we’re asking our soldiers to do, and it’s having an impact in every theater we’re in, but the [overseas] demands aren’t going down.

So we’re really taking a hard look at what we’re asking our soldiers to do and the stress that it can be putting on their families. I don’t have a secret answer to roll out. It’s going to have to be leadership starting at the [Forces Command] level at echelon to be ruthless with prioritizing what we’re doing.

The Army can’t control childhood obesity rates. The Army can’t control the falling rate of applicants medically or legally eligible to enlist. Nor can the service stop seismic shifts in the labor market, or control the falling percentage of veterans, who are traditionally the most influential and trusted advocates for military service among the U.S. population.

But Wormuth, who announced sweeping recruiting reforms last week, is focused on what the Army can control.

Some of the organizational moves can occur almost immediately with a stroke of her pen:

• Recruiting Command, led by Maj. Gen. Johnny Davis, will now directly report to Army headquarters, instead of Training and Doctrine Command.
• The Army Enterprise Marketing Office, headed by Brig. Gen. Antoinette Gant, will now directly report to Recruiting Command.

Other changes will take years, though Army headquarters will soon issue orders detailing how the effort will unfold, Wormuth said.

Some of those reforms include: focusing on recruiting Americans who have attended some college; creating experimental recruiting units to try new approaches without having to meet a quota; abolishing involuntary recruiting assignments in favor of a specialized recruiting MOS; or even bringing in those without prior service, but with relevant experience, to serve as recruiters.

“I see these transformations as us taking charge of our own destiny,” said Wormuth in an exclusive Sept. 28 interview with Army Times ahead of the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual meeting. The Army’s top civilian provided an inside account of why and how the service, facing a shortage of new recruits and potential structure cuts, rethought and reformed its recruiting and marketing structure.

The far-reaching reforms will combine to largely align the Army’s recruiting practices with those of the private sector, Wormuth said.

Early efforts didn’t go far enough

When the Army’s top leaders realized in early 2022 that its recruiting efforts had collapsed, they rapidly rolled out a series of initiatives to avoid falling short of required troop levels. Army Times detailed the service’s in-progress efforts in June 2022.

Some of the efforts succeeded more than leaders anticipated.

The Future Soldier Prep Course, initially a pilot program, became permanent and has helped more than 10,000 recruits meet Army body fat or academic standards before renegotiating their contracts and shipping to basic training. A new referral program established ribbons and accelerated promotions for enlisted troops who pointed willing friends to recruiters.

Other programs fell flat or died on the vine. Juicing recruiting bonuses didn’t fix the problem. Offering merit-based education waivers to non-GED high school dropouts created a political firestorm, and leaders ended the program.

Despite the scramble, the Army still ended fiscal year 2022 short nearly 20,000 soldiers. That’s when Wormuth and now-retired Gen. James McConville, the Army’s then-chief of staff, launched a special task force to review the Army’s hiring enterprise — and “tear it down to the studs and see what’s out there,” as Lt. Gen. Doug Stitt, the service’s top personnel officer, characterized the effort during a September 2022 congressional hearing.

The task force’s director, Maj. Gen. Deborah Kotulich, quickly realized the service’s recruiting structures “had been built in the Industrial Age for the Industrial Age,” she said in Army Sustainment magazine. Her team eventually compiled “a rather exhaustive list of the policies, incentives, and processes needing revamping or transformation.”

But many of the ideas were rooted within the structure of recruiting as the Army has known it, where nearly every trick has been tried once. “Nothing was new to our recruiters, especially those sergeants major and master sergeants with 20 or 30 years of experience,” said Kotulich, a Reserve officer who previously was the Naming Commission’s chief of staff.

By early spring, the writing was on the wall, Wormuth said. “Doing more of what we were doing already — sort of trying to do it harder — was just not going to get us the returns that we needed.”

How to find the right answers

So Wormuth, McConville and Gen. Randy George began assembling a study group in May to redesign Army recruiting from a “clean slate.”

Earlier that month, the secretary told lawmakers that the Army was going to miss its recruiting goals again in fiscal year 2023. She warned of “substantial potential force structure reductions” if things didn’t improve.

In addition to the crisis’ rising urgency, Wormuth said her decision and guidance to the study group was motivated by an analysis of internal marketing data she’d read by West Point’s Office of Economic and Manpower Analysis, as well as work by students from professional military education courses in recent years.

Although Recruiting Command and its parent headquarters, Training and Doctrine Command, were involved in the process to provide feedback along the way and feed data to the study group, the Army did not have them lead the study.

Wormuth said she made the move because “it’s really hard to ask the person responsible for managing the present to think about how…we create the future.”

Wormuth and George ultimately tapped Stitt, the Army G-1 and a career human resources officer, as the study team’s leader — taking a page from the private sector’s playbook where many companies associate recruiting with HR.

Stitt’s office was supported by OEMA, Kotulich’s recruiting task force and the Army Enterprise Marketing Office, among others.

The secretary noted that retired Lt. Gen. Tom Bostick advised Stitt. The retired three-star turned around Recruiting Command in 2005 after one of the worst annual performances in its history through a series of tactical and structural changes — and with the help of slightly relaxed entry standards. Bostick, who also served as the Army G-1 and holds a Ph.D. in systems engineering, has worked as an organizational consultant since his 2016 retirement.

With the study team selected, Wormuth said she asked them to consider questions such as:

• Do we have our recruiting enterprise aligned properly to the labor market?
• Do we have the Army’s recruiting force designed, selected, trained and geographically distributed to generate maximum success in today’s labor market?
• Are we giving recruiters the right resources at the right levels?
• Does Recruiting Command have the right command and control or authority over the recruiting enterprise?
• Is Recruiting Command the right organizational approach for Army accessions? If not, how should it be restructured?
• How can the Army make its marketing approach more effective?

Stitt and his team had the summer to answer them, and they did.

Diagnosing the recruiting problem

Perhaps the group’s most important contribution, Wormuth said, was to “diagnose the problems and give us the opportunity to make sure that across the Army, we all…see the problem in the same way.” Stitt’s team focused on factors that the Army could influence.

In recent years, Army and Defense Department data has shown that fewer young Americans can see themselves in uniform, recruiters are increasingly less productive, the academic quality and fitness of applicants has declined, and the Army’s once numerous soldiers-in-waiting have dried up.

One of the major causes Stitt’s team identified: the U.S. labor market has evolved in recent decades, but the Army’s accessions structures had not, Wormuth said. The trends run deeper than recent phenomena such as high employment.

“The labor market has changed…in some very fundamental ways, and the Army has not changed how we recruit…whereas our competitors to a significant degree have,” the secretary explained. She highlighted how the Army has traditionally focused on recruiting recent high school graduates.

In 1973, the year the draft was abolished, only 46.6% of recent high school graduates were enrolled in college, according to federal government figures. That quickly changed. By 1990, more than 60% of recent grads were going to college, and the rate peaked around 70% in 2016 before the COVID-19 pandemic reduced college enrollments.

People with only a high school education represent 15 to 20% of today’s labor market, Wormuth said. But the Army kept going after high school seniors.

“The bulk of the labor market has more than a high school degree, whereas 50% of our Army contracts are high school seniors or high school graduates,” Wormuth said. “So we’re not focusing on a significant population of…the people who are thinking about employment.”

The study also identified that Recruiting Command lacked incentives to experiment with new tactics that could counter changes in the labor market — taking recruiters off the line risked not meeting current year targets. The command has also lacked the resources to accurately assess whether the changes it does make are having an impact.

“We don’t have a very good way of knowing whether the new things we’re actually trying are actually successful,” Wormuth confessed. “This year, for example, we tried so many things all at once — and frankly, we needed to do that. But sometimes it was hard to tell which things were really giving us bang for the buck.”

Another major systemic defect, Wormuth said, was the Army’s over-reliance on “a generalist approach to recruiting.” The service has long used involuntary tours for mid-career noncommissioned officers to fill the recruiting ranks, and they could volunteer to become career recruiters under the legacy recruiting occupational specialty.

“The training they get is shorter than most of the training we give to other [fields] during [occupation-specific training],” the secretary said. “The study team looked at the private sector and talked to Fortune 500 companies. What they found was almost all major companies have a specialized recruiting workforce — they do not take people from all over their company and say, ‘Hey, you’re going to spend a year or two doing recruiting.’”

The study group confirmed that the accessions enterprise’s structural instability may have impacted its performance. All of its elements, including marketing, were centralized under Accessions Command in 2002, then scattered to the winds when the command was inactivated in January 2012. Army marketing was lost in the woods until its 2019 reorganization, but the Army Enterprise Marketing Office reports to an assistant Army secretary, several layers of bureaucracy removed from recruiters.

What will unfold, and when

Wormuth believes that the reforms will address the problems that the study group highlighted, and she described them in detail.

First and foremost, she said, the Army is going to adjust its targets and techniques for “prospecting” in order to increase its share of new recruits who have attended college, including those who may have left school. The goal is to increase the proportion of enlisted accessions who have at least some college credits from its current 20% share of recruits to around 33% by fiscal 2028, she said.

Instead of “a table in a high school cafeteria” staffed by a handful of recruiters, Wormuth envisions an approach that integrates digital job boards and modern private sector recruiting techniques like showing up in force to career fairs in major cities.

She knows that won’t be enough, though, so Recruiting Command will also appoint a deputy commanding general to oversee experimentation units — without contract quotas — tasked with developing and testing new techniques, and the command will receive analytic support to track new initiatives’ successes and failures.

Wormuth emphasized the importance of not requiring experimental units to meet recruiting targets. Because “some of those things will fail,” she acknowledged, but the fear of failure can’t deter trying new techniques.

The reforms also will eliminate one of the Army’s longstanding ironies: using involuntarily selected recruiters to find new troops for an all-volunteer force.

“People who have chosen to be in a certain profession or industry tend to be better performers in that field,” Wormuth noted.

Doing so will abolish the legacy recruiting field, which the Army will replace with a new 42T recruiting track aligned with its human resources specialties, allowing it to tap into existing channels for civilian HR certifications, professional development and private industry fellowships. The Army will also create recruiting warrant officers.

The first 42Ts will be today’s top-performing recruiters, Wormuth said.

Internal recruiters will fan out across the Army to find promising candidates much like in-service special operations recruiting currently occurs, with the help of a specialized aptitude test. The service may also accept non-prior service recruits for recruiting roles.

When it comes to commissioned officers, Wormuth said the service isn’t yet certain how they’ll fit into this new version of Recruiting Command, but she wants them to be specialized to a reasonable extent as well. Currently, most recruiting officer roles are open to all types of officers.

The secretary also explained why she chose to bring Recruiting Command under her office’s control, elevate it to a three-star billet with a four-year command tour, and reassign the Army Enterprise Marketing Office to be under Recruiting Command.

“We need to have as flat a structure as possible to…[ensure we’re] giving all of the resources and authorities to [it],” Wormuth said. “When your [commander’s] tenure is only a couple of years on average, it’s hard to get up to speed, put new initiatives in place, see whether those initiatives are working, and make adjustments.”

Wormuth said those changes will ensure the Army’s recruiting and marketing efforts also mirror “best practices in the private sector, where you have [employment] marketing reporting to the same person who has responsibility for talent acquisition and talent management.”

Ultimately, the recruiting reforms emerged from a place of necessity for the Army, Wormuth said.

“The Army’s recruiting mission is an existential issue,” she said.

When officers from the Texas National Guard showed up to their 7 a.m. meeting with federal agents from Homeland Security Investigations in El Paso, they didn’t arrive empty-handed.

Six military intelligence officials turned over a list of names at the February 2022 meeting. The Texans were part of an intelligence directorate supporting Operation Lone Star, Gov. Greg Abbott’s state-run border mission. The officers, which included the group’s top two leaders, told federal agents they’d secretly infiltrated invite-only WhatsApp group chats filled with migrants and smugglers and wanted their help investigating the targets they’d identified, according to a sworn statement attached to a whistleblower complaint filed later that month.

The Homeland Security officials in the meeting rebuffed the Texans on the spot — with one official saying that they were an investigative body and “not an intelligence agency,” the whistleblower recalled.

An investigation by Military Times and The Texas Tribune has found that Texas National Guard leaders disbanded Operation Lone Star’s intelligence wing after whistleblowers reported the WhatsApp surveillance, which targeted migrant groups to track them through Mexico, because they believed it violated long-standing rules against state-run spy operations. During the same period, another team from the intelligence directorate allegedly sent classified FBI intelligence to their Texas Guard colleagues in an apparent violation of federal secrecy laws, according to an internal incident report.

At least four intelligence officers have faced interim administrative discipline in the debacle’s wake:

• Lt. Col. David “Eric” Tyler led the border intelligence section from December 2021 to fall 2022.
• Maj. Dezi J. Rios, the intelligence wing’s deputy director, allegedly oversaw the WhatsApp collection operation.
• Chief Warrant Officer 2 Eric E. Hack led the El Paso team that allegedly shared classified FBI intelligence.
• Then-1st Lt. Emmanuel L. Pierre, a military intelligence officer from a subordinate unit, allegedly began the WhatsApp intelligence operation about a month before Rios arrived at the border.

The Texas Military Department’s inspector general, with assistance from the National Guard Bureau, investigated “potential questionable intelligence activities,” the agency confirmed in response to questions for this story. The agency said in a statement that the watchdog concluded its investigation in September 2022 but has not yet shared its final report, adding that it will “finalize” discipline once leaders receive it. Leaders initially reorganized and eventually disbanded the intelligence directorate in fall 2022, folding the remaining personnel into the mission’s operations section, a source familiar with the mission’s organization said.

According to an official document that Rios provided to Military Times and the Tribune summarizing part of the investigation, the inspector general’s office found that the WhatsApp scheme was an unauthorized foreign intelligence operation and faulted Rios for overseeing Pierre’s work — a finding Rios disputes. It’s unclear if the inspector general concluded that any other officers broke the rules.

Two of the implicated officers, Tyler and Rios, told Military Times and the Tribune that senior leaders set them up to take the fall for the operation. Both claimed they shared concerns about the legality of Pierre’s WhatsApp work to the mission’s top brass at the time, Brig. Gen. Monie Ulis and Col. Kevin Boates, but were unable to convince them to end it.

According to a sworn statement Rios made June 25, he and state intelligence officials “were unable to convince [Col.] Boates or [Brig. Gen.] Ulis” to stop the WhatsApp operation. In a Dec. 27, 2021 email — obtained through an open records request — Rios claimed to have “expressed my reservations with [Col.] Boates and [Brig. Gen.] Ulis” about the WhatsApp operation to no avail.

In his sworn statement — included in his own June complaint with the inspector general alleging the state failed to set clear guidelines for intelligence activity at the border — Rios said Boates “ordered me to oversee” Pierre’s WhatsApp operation while simultaneously blocking Rios from stopping it. He filed the complaint because the investigation blocked his promotion to lieutenant colonel, he said.

Tyler, who has served in the Texas Guard for 33 years, said through his attorney that he was “disappointed that … I’m being sanctioned based [on] an investigation report that I’m not allowed to see.” The lieutenant colonel added, “I assume the reason that they won’t tell me anything or provide me any evidence is that if I somehow failed to supervise a junior officer that reported directly to [Brig. Gen.] Ulis, then Ulis should be accountable.”

Ulis was appointed as the deputy commanding general of U.S. Army South in June, a role held simultaneously with his appointment as the state’s assistant adjutant general.

Hack, Boates and Ulis did not respond to interview requests made via phone and email. Pierre declined to comment.

For this story, Military Times and the Tribune obtained more than 750 pages of internal Texas Guard records, spoke with intelligence oversight experts, and interviewed three verified Texas National Guard service members who had direct knowledge of the events. They requested anonymity because they feared retaliation from state officials and have not been accused of wrongdoing.

“Uniquely vulnerable to abuse”

When the WhatsApp intelligence operation began in fall 2021, Operation Lone Star was undergoing a multibillion-dollar expansion from a lean, volunteer-staffed outfit into a long-term domestic military deployment of unprecedented scale staffed by part-time troops who are effectively temporary state employees.

The pseudo-military mission — which at its height deployed 10,000 Guard members across the state — had growing pains, including payroll problems and poor living conditions for the service members, that occurred due to poor planning and a lack of bureaucratic preparedness. Its intelligence efforts weren’t exempt from the planning gaps.

Operation Lone Star’s commanders demanded military-style intelligence from their intelligence personnel, according to Tyler and three other troops with direct knowledge of the work.

“Everyone [in charge] wanted to pretend it was like Iraq in 2003,” one service member said in an interview. “They wanted to do Army stuff, even though this is [legally] not Army stuff.”

“All the Generals wanted to know about the next mass migration,” Tyler said through his attorney in an email when asked if he was ever pressured to violate intel rules.

According to official planning documents and three soldiers with knowledge of the mission, leaders directed the border intelligence wing to detect the “capabilities of transnational criminal organizations” in Mexico and track their “criminal activity,” in addition to predicting where migrants would try to cross the border.

Such intelligence work is essentially unheard of for National Guard members on state active duty — a state-funded status typically used for short-lived missions. Typically, Guard intelligence personnel deployed under such orders are limited to predicting and assessing the severity of disaster damage, perhaps following a storm or during riots.

The demand for intelligence posed a problem, too. According to National Guard Bureau regulations and a Guard intelligence representative, personnel on state active duty are barred from doing national security foreign intelligence work, and they’re banned from using Defense Department intelligence systems or techniques, known as tradecraft. Instead, they may, to the extent permitted by state law and regulations, support partner law enforcement agencies.

State-level intelligence oversight officials wanted to coordinate closely with the National Guard Bureau to ensure compliance. But as transgressions piled up, one state intelligence official, Chief Warrant Officer 4 X’Lenske Sampson, emailed border intelligence officers and warned of “the potential fallout if the media [were] to find out or assume the Texas National Guard is conducting Intelligence Operations on the border.”

Sampson did not respond to interview requests.

His counterparts on the border — including Tyler, the top intelligence officer there — disagreed and argued via email that federal regulations didn’t apply to their conduct on state duty so long as they didn’t use federally controlled intelligence systems and tools. Tyler’s attorney, Doug O’Connell, echoed that argument in an Aug. 16 statement to Military Times and the Tribune.

“Any competent attorney that understands basic Constitutional law will tell you that when the militia is deployed by the Governor, for a state mission, federal regulations are inapplicable unless federal funds or equipment are involved,” O’Connell said.

Tyler chafed at the restrictions.

“All I get is ‘No,’” he lamented in a February 2022 email to a state official over limits on intelligence training. “I need a way to ‘Yes.’”

The internal documents show widespread confusion and debate over what rules applied and when. And with intelligence work, the stakes are high — today’s strict oversight procedures exist because Defense Department personnel ran massive domestic intelligence operations during the Vietnam War that targeted Americans based solely on how they legally exercised their First Amendment rights.

National Guard intelligence efforts like the WhatsApp operation are “uniquely vulnerable to abuse” without prior coordination with state and federal law enforcement, said lawyer Charles McCullough, who oversaw intelligence oversight for the intelligence community’s 18 civilian and military organizations from 2011 to 2017 as its Senate-confirmed inspector general.

McCullough, who also served as the National Security Agency’s top investigator, described the authorities governing intelligence work as “overlapping and arcane,” and said that the Texas Military Department, like any agency undertaking such an effort, owed clearer guidelines to its personnel from the mission’s outset.

The former watchdog added that if commanders override concerns from intelligence oversight officials — as two implicated officers claim Boates and Ulis did — they should bear responsibility for any violations.

Michael German, a former FBI special agent who studies intelligence policy as a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, warned that if states try to run their own foreign military intelligence operations, they risk upsetting the delicate ecosystem of international diplomacy with unpredictable spin-off effects.

German also said operations like the WhatsApp scheme put intelligence operatives at risk and endanger national security.

“Having untrained people running ad hoc operations puts them at risk and dilutes the value of [real intelligence]…because it gets mixed with information that doesn’t go through the same vetting process,” he said. “Adding another layer of inappropriate [intelligence] activities isn’t making America safer.”

Burners on the border

When around 15,000 migrants of Haitian descent streamed across the Rio Grande near Del Rio in September 2021, then-1st Lt. Emmanuel Pierre found new demand for a decades-old skill set.

Pierre was born in Haiti in 1978, according to a 2017 interview. The native Haitian Creole speaker learned English and translated for U.S. and United Nations personnel before immigrating to Florida. He enlisted in the Army in 2006, and eventually became a Texas National Guard intelligence officer.

After volunteering for Operation Lone Star in early 2021, the lieutenant quickly became an assistant intelligence officer based in Weslaco with Task Force Salerno, which later became Task Force East after the border mission expanded, three sources said.

According to internal emails, Texas Department of Public Safety and Border Patrol officials tapped Pierre as a translator during the Del Rio crisis, authorizing him to wear civilian clothes.

The emails offer conflicting tales. In one version, Pierre simply translated. Other officials claimed the intelligence officer concealed his identity and did “clandestine” interviews on U.S. soil, possibly violating rules against using human intelligence “tradecraft” while on state duty.

An official from Customs and Border Protection, the parent agency of Border Patrol, denied that its agents requested Pierre — or any Texas Guardsman — for translation services during the Del Rio crisis. The Texas Department of Public Safety did not respond to emailed questions.

But all accounts agreed on one thing: Pierre carried a cellphone that had access to WhatsApp chats from migrants and smugglers. Many migrants use the encrypted messaging app to communicate internationally during their journey to the United States.

In an email to Tyler, Rios claimed that Boates, the Operation Lone Star deputy commander, purchased the phone for Pierre.

The WhatsApp chats were in English, Creole and Spanish, later emails claimed.

Texas intelligence officials were alarmed by Pierre’s conduct.

On Oct. 26, 2021, a state intelligence officer, Chief Warrant Officer 3 Matthew Sugars, emailed the border intelligence directorate to request written statements about the work a soldier — whose name was redacted in records — did with Border Patrol intelligence agents. Sugars did not respond to an interview request. Three people from the mission identified the redacted soldier as Pierre.

In the days following Sugars’ email, he and border mission officials feverishly worked to update their “guidance” for intelligence personnel on the border. But the two sides struggled to settle on a rulebook, and a final version was not completed for about 10 weeks. As they debated, the WhatsApp operation continued.

Boates, the mission’s deputy commander, shot a Nov. 4, 2021, email to Rios ordering him “to assist with analysis of the information” that Pierre received on the phone.

In order to comply, Rios began monitoring Pierre’s WhatsApp activity through a DoD computer linked to the phone, according to the whistleblower’s sworn statement and emails from state officials. Investigators later found he used the computer between Nov. 1, 2021, and April 2022, though he disputed that timeline.

Rios also assigned a junior soldier to translate Spanish messages from the migrant groups, two sources and documents confirmed. A Guardsman with knowledge of the operation said Rios “would have her just go in and ask questions,” but could not definitively say what she asked. The source noted that under federal authority, sending messages in targeted conversations, as opposed to passive listening, requires high-level approvals and strict controls.

In his June 2023 sworn statement and his contemporaneous emails, Rios insisted he used the WhatsApp-linked computer to monitor Pierre for potential wrongdoing. He reiterated this argument in interviews, and he also emphasized Boates’ alleged role directing the operation.

Because Rios wouldn’t let others use the computer, his peers and subordinates grew suspicious, a whistleblower’s sworn statement said.

Alarm bells

In late December 2021, a service member on the border mission reported Pierre’s WhatsApp work as questionable intelligence activity. It was the first of three such reports confirmed by Military Times and the Tribune.

A former signals intelligence specialist who spoke with Military Times and the Tribune likened such reports to pulling the emergency brake on a car — they often immediately shut down units for investigation.

“Even the accusation of a questionable intelligence activity could bring an office to an immediate halt,” said the specialist, who requested anonymity because he works on defense contracts.

State officials tried to do that after receiving the complaint.

Air Force Maj. Meredith Zinni, a state intelligence officer, sent an urgent email on Dec. 30, 2021, that announced the complaint against Pierre’s “continued clandestine style operations.” Zinni, who did not respond to an interview request, insisted that the WhatsApp operation “MUST IMMEDIATELY CEASE.”

In a subsequent email, Sugars also said “all actions” Pierre had taken using WhatsApp violated National Guard restrictions banning intelligence work while on state active duty. He claimed Texas Military Department attorneys agreed the actions “are violations of [state active duty] status.”

Tyler waited a week before he ordered Pierre to stop communicating with “any foreign national using WhatsApp or any other app or platform” on Jan. 6, 2022. A week later, Tyler asked Rios to help monitor Pierre for violations of that order, according to an email and a statement from his attorney.

But the lieutenant colonel also argued the state was wrong about how and when intelligence oversight rules applied, claiming Operation Lone Star and Pierre’s actions presented a “unique situation.”

Rios claimed the WhatsApp operation ended in January 2022, when he transitioned to preserving evidence of Pierre’s transgressions, according to emails and statements he wrote. But another soldier’s questionable intelligence activity report claimed Rios, through his computer, had access to the WhatsApp account and used it for more than monitoring.

The soldier’s report was made in the wake of the Feb. 1, 2022, meeting with Homeland Security Investigations officials, where the Texans purportedly presented the list of names gathered from WhatsApp for further investigation. The complainant attended the meeting, which they detailed in a sworn statement to investigators.

Rios and Tyler, who were the senior Texas Guard intelligence officials present that day, confirmed the meeting occurred but denied handing over a list of names from WhatsApp.

According to documents and Guard members with knowledge of the events, investigators stepped in after the soldier’s report and started interviews about the WhatsApp operation in March 2022. The Texas Military Department confirmed its inspector general investigation, which began at an unspecified date, brought in “National Guard Bureau intelligence oversight officials” for assistance that same month.

It’s unclear why Texas National Guard officials tapped Rios as the mission’s deputy intelligence director in October 2021. The intel officer had resigned from the San Antonio Police Department that same month after his involvement in a third road rage incident in four years led to misdemeanor criminal charges. (In May 2023, the Bexar County district attorney’s office ultimately dropped the charges against Rios. The former police officer was not arrested or charged in connection with the first two road rage incidents.)

Secrets spilled

Meanwhile, another policy debate raged over Operation Lone Star’s efforts to embed intelligence officers with federal agencies throughout Texas.

It had been months in the making.

In January 2022, the FBI’s El Paso Field Office invited Operation Lone Star to embed a small team there to bolster its intelligence ranks. The FBI’s invitation email also noted that a memorandum of understanding, or MOU, would set limits on who could work on what and when. Such agreements also delineate access to classified information.

Similar arrangements had been successful elsewhere. Under formal agreements in Laredo, a number of Texas Guard members successfully joined an anti-cartel joint law enforcement task force named Blue Indigo.

But El Paso’s FBI agreement was never signed amid various delays and leadership changes.

Meanwhile, Hack, the intelligence warrant officer whose civilian job was as an intel analyst at the FBI’s El Paso office, moved home and embedded in his old workplace as an Operation Lone Star representative. A second soldier joined him there.

An operations officer on the border mission learned of the El Paso team in late March and filed a questionable intelligence activity whistleblower report on April 1, 2022, that included screenshots of messages and phone records.

The officer argued that the collaboration violated intelligence oversight rules because there wasn’t a signed MOU.

The officer did not respond to an interview request from Military Times and the Tribune.

Within hours of the report, Tyler argued with state intelligence officials again over the legal authorities that allowed state active duty soldiers to work with federal agencies. In an April 3, 2022, email, he claimed that National Guard Bureau intelligence oversight procedures don’t apply to Operation Lone Star.

But then, in late May 2022, Hack’s team at the FBI El Paso field office allegedly “used classified systems that were not authorized” and sent classified FBI intelligence back to Operation Lone Star, according to an internal Texas Guard incident report.

A service member from the mission said the incident occurred on May 24, and the internal report said that state intelligence officials discovered it May 26.

Fallout

Within days of the alleged spill, the Texas Guard suspended Tyler’s security clearance, and investigators came calling, according to emails he sent in June 2022. The lieutenant colonel told investigators he thought they were “misled and misinformed,” arguing that any transgressions were born of “confusion.”

Hack’s military personnel record was flagged for administrative investigation on June 2, 2022, the day of the incident report, and he was sent home from the border mission. Flagged troops are blocked from awards, promotions or other favorable personnel actions.

Classified document spills can be punished as criminal offenses, but they’re often quietly handled via administrative means, according to German, a fellow at the Brennan Center. He decried the practice.

“If you’re not going to get in trouble for breaking the rules, and you have a very important issue, the rules aren’t going to be a very strong bulwark against that kind of abuse,” he said.

It’s not clear whether Hack has faced any formal discipline in either his military or civilian careers. The FBI, through an unnamed spokesperson, refused to comment on Hack or his status.

“The FBI takes the unauthorized removal, retention or transmission of sensitive information, whether classified or unclassified, very seriously and will continue its commitment to prevent any mishandling of sensitive information,” the bureau said.

Rios and Tyler were sent home from Operation Lone Star in fall 2022 amid the investigations, they confirmed to Military Times and the Tribune.

According to the partial summary of the investigative report Rios provided, the inspector general substantiated intelligence oversight violations by at least Pierre and Rios. The officer received the document, a summary of “adverse information” in a restricted Army database, because the investigation’s findings blocked his promotion to lieutenant colonel. Military Times and the Tribune could not independently confirm whether other officers had adverse findings.

But it was nearly a year before Tyler, Rios and Pierre also received administrative investigation flags on their military personnel records in May 2023 — one day after Rios emailed a Texas Military Department general to ask why his promotion had been blocked. Tyler and Rios also confirmed that their security clearances are suspended.

The three anonymous service members who spoke with Military Times and the Tribune said their experience left them disillusioned. They lost faith in the Texas National Guard’s ability to ethically execute its missions.

“If they’re willing to compromise their integrity over something like that,” one soldier asked, “who knows where they’ll stop?

A second service member said he’s fearful that other states might use federally trained intelligence troops in state-run intelligence operations unless the federal government makes an example out of Texas.

“You give intel soldiers enough tools — we’re violating many constitutional rights very quickly,” he added.

The third was shaken by what he felt was a failure by Texas National Guard leaders to use its intelligence troops in a legal and effective manner.

The service member said a Guardsman from the border intel directorate had volunteered to build a tool to track the Rio Grande’s water flow and alert leaders when conditions were unsafe for migrants and soldiers alike, but it was deemed “not important.” Spc. Bishop Evans, a 22-year-old Guard member from Arlington, drowned trying to save two migrants in April 2022.

“And that’s the frustrating thing about this,” he said. “We did all this shit, we broke all these rules. And for…”

He trailed off.

Correction, Aug. 30, 2023 at 4:49 p.m. EST: In a previous version of this story, a helicopter was incorrectly identified in a photo caption as belonging to Customs and Border Protection. It is the property of the Texas Department of Public Safety.

WASHINGTON — Leonel Garciga, most recently the top technology officer for U.S. Army intelligence, will be the service’s next civilian chief information officer, C4ISRNET and Army Times have learned.

Garciga is expected to take the post in mid-July. He will succeed Raj Iyer, who after nearly three years as CIO rejoined private industry, according to an internal announcement. The position has been vacant for months now.

An Army spokesperson on June 26 said Garciga “will spearhead the Army’s technological transformation efforts, ensuring the effective management and utilization of information systems across the organization.”

“Having led the Army Intelligence Community CIO for four years, Garciga has extensive experience in developing innovative solutions and driving digital advancements” that will “play a pivotal role in enhancing the Army’s capabilities in an increasingly complex and rapidly evolving digital landscape,” the spokesperson said in a statement.

Garciga did not immediately respond to a message on social media seeking comment.

Garciga currently serves as the director for information management within the Army’s G-2 intelligence directorate, where he oversees the service’s implementation of revamped intelligence community information and data practices. He has held that position since early 2019.

His next gig will be a step up: As CIO, Garciga will oversee an information technology portfolio totaling billions of dollars, including hundreds of millions for cloud computing and adoption in fiscal 2023.

The Army, the military’s largest service, is pushing what it calls “digital transformation” — the phasing in of new technologies, connectivity and online techniques. Army Secretary Christine Wormuth has said achieving force-wide digital fluency is her No. 2 objective.

Before taking the tech reins in the G-2, Garciga spent more than seven years at the Defense Department’s improvised explosive device research arm. Garciga was also an enlisted Navy submariner and a graduate of the Naval Nuclear Power School.

Army Futures Command leader Gen. James Rainey and the director of the Synthetic Training Environment Cross-Functional Team, Brig. Gen. William Glaser, have said the service wants to integrate the simulation environment directly into its combat vehicles.

“I don’t think we need to have [both] the combat vehicle and the simulator,” Rainey said Wednesday morning at an Association of the U.S. Army event. “I believe the technology exists that we should be able to train on platform.”

Later that day, Glaser described the onboard simulators as a “panacea.”

“A platoon leader can wake up in the morning, do [physical training], go to the motor pool to do command maintenance, [go] to lunch, [and] they can come back and actually train on the same piece of equipment he has been maintaining,” the simulations officer hypothesized.

Harnessing the capabilities under development at his Orlando, Florida-based center, Glaser detailed a potential future where units in garrison can perform collective simulated training “right there in the motor pool.”

Combing the Synthetic Training Environment’s One World Terrain project with onboard simulators could revolutionize pre-combat rehearsals for deployed soldiers on a virtual version of the ground they’re preparing to fight over, Glaser suggested.

One World Terrain, one of the cross-functional team’s most heralded capabilities, has already helped commanders plan real-world missions.

“When it gets to the point where commanders are demanding this tech capability while they’re deployed so they can actually use it as a rehearsal capability before putting soldiers in harm’s way — [that] is really what we’re trying to look for as we move out to 2040,” Glaser said.

But both generals cautioned that onboard simulations in the motor pool, no matter how large or integrated with other capabilities, will never replace live training events.

“That only gets you so far,” Rainey said. “You’ve got to get out in the dirt and do the combined arms maneuver.”

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — Aspiring tank-killers around the world could soon blast armor in an upgraded simulated environment powered by a graphics engine used for the video game Fortnite.

This reality is only awaiting an upgrade to defense contractor SAIC’s block I version of the Javelin missile’s Basic Skills Trainer. The upgrade will integrate Epic Games’ Unreal 4 engine into scenarios.

SAIC experts demonstrated the upgraded trainer to Army Times on Wednesday at an Association of the U.S. Army event, allowing a reporter to destroy a simulated T-72 tank, a platform that Russia operates.

Updates can take significant time and effort, but the upgrade is expected to reach soldiers by 2025. The existing Javelin trainer was developed in 2001 and modeled on real-world training ranges.

Both U.S. and foreign purchasers of the Javelin receive an allotment of trainer devices, and approximately 900 are in operation around the world.

SAIC officials said the trainer is typically employed in a classroom setting, where troops become familiar with the device and its controls. While U.S. personnel sometimes progress to fire expensive, live missiles in their training, not all users around the world have that opportunity. That means the trainer could be their only experience with the Javelin platform until it’s time to face down an enemy vehicle.

And the new Unreal Engine-powered version of the trainer will ensure a more realistic experience, SAIC experts said. After viewing the current software and comparing it to the forthcoming one, Army Times observed significant improvements in picture quality, terrain options and target realism.

The company is hopeful that bringing the program up to modern graphics standards can help “born-digital” Gen Z troops focus on training rather than graphical shortcomings.

Adopting an off-the-shelf physics and graphics engine will make maintaining the trainer and developing new scenarios — customized to each customer’s specifications — easier and cheaper, SAIC officials said. The Unreal Engine has a large user community across several industries, making it easier to solve problems, find talent and continue building additional capabilities into the new trainer.

The next-generation trainer’s expected 2025 release will come on the heels of an expansion of the anti-tank platform’s production line.

The Javelin is among several Western weapons that gained popularity over the last year, as Ukraine fights off its Russian invaders. In spite of the demand, Army Secretary Christine Wormuth pushed back on the narrative of a “Javelin crisis” at a March 15 event.

“We’re making 2,500 Javelins a year already,” the Army’s top official said. “And we’re going to be getting that up to 5,000 Javelins a year in the next year or two.”