HUNTSVILLE, Ala.—The Army is doubling down on its Transformation in Contact modernization model, the service’s top operations officer said Tuesday—adding more units into the program and multiplying the number of systems they’ll test as well as the funding to make it all happen.
The service plans to spend $1 billion on the effort between now and the end of fiscal year 2027, Lt. Gen. Joe Ryan told an audience at AUSA’s Global Force Symposium. That’s a huge jump from the $15 million the Army spent on the first three TiC brigades in 2024.
“We’re in the process of turning the ship around to do things differently: process, materiel acquisition, organizational development, organizational change,” he said.
Transformation in Contact allows defense contractors to bring the systems they’re working on to Army units in the field, get live feedback, and make immediate changes—an attempt to break the Army out of a rigid cycle of drafting requirements and building systems from the ground up.
The first iteration tested 360 unmanned aerial systems, 800 mobility systems, 50 counter-UAS systems, 20 persistent lower-orbit communications systems, and 10 electronic warfare systems, Ryan said.
“So certainly not anything to sneeze at, but not a huge lift,” he said.
This next go around, the Army wants to bump that up to 1,100 UAS, 2,000 mobility systems, 1,200 counter-UAS systems and 250 electronic warfare systems, he said.
The program will also expand beyond the three infantry brigade combat teams the Army started with, to different types of units.
“I think there was probably some perception that there was risk, the way we were doing it up front—maybe it seemed a little haphazard…as we reallocated fieldings to prioritize certain units over others,” Ryan said.
A Stryker brigade and two armored combat brigades will participate over the next few years. And by fall, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George said at October’s AUSA annual symposium, “protection and sustainment” units will also be included.
At the same time, the Army is trying to break out of its acquisitions comfort zone, to varying degrees of success.
“I would articulate it the best I could that, and this might be a little provocative: I’m not sure we need acquisition reform as much as we need behavior reform,” Neil Thurgood, a senior vice president at venture capital-backed Anduril, and a retired lieutenant general, said during another panel. “I think we have lots of authorities from Congress. I think we tend not to use all those authorities have been given to us.”
Which is to say, the Army can use its funding to buy equipment in several ways, but it tends to favor a comprehensive program of record with requests for proposals, a competitive awards process and its own line item in the annual budget—a process that takes years, during which the Army’s needs tend to evolve and render the program irrelevant.
“We want to do fast prototyping, but they want all the metrics of a full program of record,” Thurgood said. “That behavior is inconsistent with the outcome that we want.”
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