You are listening to the War on the Rocks podcast on Strategy, Defense, and Foreign Affairs.

My name's Ryan Evans. I'm the founder of War on the Rocks. In this episode, I spoke with

Secretary of the Army Daniel P. Driscoll and Chief of Staff of the Army, General Randy George, about the new sweeping transformation of the U.S. Army ordered by Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegeseth.

Enjoy the show.

So why do we need the Army Transformation Initiative?

And what is it really at a high level?

I think at the highest level,

what's occurred in the Pentagon for the last 30 years has been a very contorted decision-making

process that has not optimized first for what's best for soldiers, making them the most lethal,

efficient fighting force that they can be. Instead, what it's been is a parochial-driven enterprise

that has served as a welfare system for a lot of different constituencies, namely certain congressional

districts, certain states, and it's been driven primarily or in a lot of ways by lobbyists

rather than soldiers themselves. And so what ATI is is a

complete reset of how we are going to start to make decisions going forward with what's

occurred across the world in the last couple of years. When you look at Ukraine and how the

battle is being fought, it is no longer sufficient to have a long procurement process that takes

two and a half years to get the first prototype,

two more years to get it at scale, and then four years to get in the hands of soldiers.

Those eight years contrasted with the two weeks right now that drones are being updated in Ukraine

have made it an imperative that either we do this now or we do it in the first six months of a

conflict when American soldiers are losing their lives. I just would add, Ryan, the modern battlefield is changing. I think we've seen that,

and we have learned a lot over the last year and a half with our transformation and contact.

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