TENURE AT DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE

Nomination and Confirmation

The U.S. Senate confirmed Dr. Mark T. Esper as the nation’s 23^rd Secretary of the Army on November 15, 2019, by a solid 89-6 bipartisan vote of support. He was sworn into office a week later on November 21, 2017. Esper had worked on Capitol Hill for many years, particularly in the Senate. As such, he attributed the overwhelming support he received to the fact that he had established a reputation with many senators for being bipartisan, even keeled, eminently qualified, and reasonable. Secretary Esper considers himself a traditional Republican with conventional views – a fiscal conservative, social moderate, and defense hawk who believed in free but fair trade, protecting the environment, legal immigration, and limited government – who worked across the aisle on a broad range of issues. 

In his statement before the Senate Armed Services Committee during his confirmation hearing, Dr. Esper told members that “Today’s Army is the greatest ground combat force in history,” but that it “faces many challenges” and is “at a critical inflection point.” He said, “The next secretary must lead the world’s premier ground force to success in these difficult times, and ensure it is prepared for the future fights as well.” Esper told the senators “My vow, if confirmed, is to leverage my values, my experiences, and all my energies to make the hard choices and address these issues.” 

Dr. Esper said that “readiness” – recruiting and retaining the best our nation has to offer, ensuring these young men and women are well-trained and well-led, and equipping them with the best weapons and technology available – would be his top priority. 

He then said his second priority would be “modernization – building capacity and capabilities in the longer term.” Esper added that the Army must be reshaped to be “more robust and successful in all domains, and modernizing it with the best weapons and equipment available to guarantee clear overmatch in future conflicts.” For modernization to be successful, Dr. Esper stated that “the secretary must articulate a clear vision, reforms championed by this committee must be fully implemented, and the acquisition process must be greatly improved,” adding that this included “modifying the personnel system to promote success and ensure accountability.” 

Esper’s third priority was “efficiency,” adding that he intended “to play a very active role in the Army’s top acquisition programs, reduce bureaucracy, wring inefficiency out of Army organizations and processes, and promote an audit-ready culture that will facilitate much of this.” He added that “We must free up time, money, and manpower to be utilized or invested in our top priorities.: 

Finally, Dr. Esper told the committee that “If confirmed, I will approach my duties with the values and behaviors proven to maximize the effectiveness of any team: act with integrity; collaborate broadly; treat others with respect; encourage innovation, critical thinking and straight talk; empower people; and hold leaders accountable. These principles must be lived, promoted, and upheld day-in and day-out by leaders at every level.”

Secretary Esper made readiness, modernization, and efficiency, plus taking care of soldiers and their families, his top priorities. He and other service leaders assessed in late 2017 that, nearly thirty years after staring down the Soviets and defeating the world’s fourth largest military in the 1991 Gulf War, the U.S. Army was not well prepared for conflict against China or Russia. Both countries had begun modernizing their armed forces to defeat the U.S. military well over a decade earlier. 

During the same period, America’s high-end war-fighting advantages had eroded. After sixteen years of conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq, the continuous back-and-forth deployment of brigade combat teams to places like Europe and the Middle East, and a dramatic reduction in annual defense dollars over several years, the U.S. Army was tired, broken, and old. The service was still very capable, but Esper and his team determined the force was not where it needed to be, nor on the right path, to preserve the peace, fight and win against near-peer rivals, and maintain America’s role in the world for the next thirty years.

The Army’s readiness metrics by 2016 were dismal. Its nondeployable rate—meaning the percentage of soldiers unable to go to war—grew to an unacceptably high 15 percent.  And out of fifty-eight total brigade combat teams—the standard war-fighting maneuver unit of the Army—the number considered fully ready was in the single digits. These units, which averaged 4,000 to 5,000 soldiers each, needed to be above 50 percent when it came to readiness.

Meanwhile, the Army was still heavily reliant on the foundational combat systems of the Reagan buildup decades earlier: the Abrams tank, Bradley fighting vehicle, Apache attack helicopter, Blackhawk utility helicopter, and Patriot air-defense system. Army leaders improved them over the years, but upgrades could only go so far. The service tried in the past to introduce new systems but failed miserably with projects such as the Crusader mobile artillery system and the Future Combat System family of vehicles.

The Army had become exceptionally good at fighting insurgents and terrorists over the last sixteen years. To meet the demands of the future, the types of combat units critical to winning wars against threats like North Korea, let alone China and Russia—heavy armor, artillery, and air defense, for example—had to learn to fight like the light infantry. For many, the daily tasks of maintenance, gunnery, and maneuver training went by the wayside; fighting as a combined arms team atrophied; being concerned about enemy aircraft, electronic surveillance, and long-range missiles waned. The last decade and a half was about counterterrorism, convoy security, foot patrols, and running checkpoints.

To make matters worse, the Army lowered recruiting standards at times. This would solve the immediate manpower shortages resulting from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but created deeper problems when it came to maintaining proficiency, good order, and discipline. Army readiness was not good, and it seemed headed in the wrong direction. Bold, comprehensive change was needed.

The Army Vision

By the end of his first six months as Army secretary, Dr. Esper had written and published a new Vision statement for the Army. In two short pages, the document covered not only what Secretary Esper wanted to achieve by 2028, but also the ways and means to get there. The Vision emphasized the centrality of the American soldier and their leaders, and the importance he placed on everyone remaining committed to, and living by, the Army’s values. 

The Vision also spoke to the need to grow the force to more than 500,000 active-duty soldiers. This would not only give the Army greater operational capacity, but also allow the service to reduce the strain on its soldiers and their families by spreading the burden of frequent deployments. A deployment “cycle” typically alternated between a nine-month tour abroad, followed by an eighteen-month stay at home, and then another nine-month deployment. The Army had been on this demanding routine for years now. 

To further improve soldiers’ professional experience and quality of life, Esper and his team planned to implement a new market-based, talent-centric personnel system that would better optimize the Army’s manpower pool. This initiative would go a long way to retaining more of the Army’s service members by giving them greater say when it came to where they worked, what they did, and how often they moved.

The Vision also made clear that the United States now faced a new range of future threats, beginning with China, and that the Army had to focus training on high-intensity combat operations under constant surveillance that would mark conflict with the People’s Liberation Army. This type of warfare was on the other end of how the service had fought the last sixteen-plus years—low-intensity warfare—so it would be a dramatic and overdue shift.

The challenges the document cited in making this shift began with the fact that technological change was accelerating and that the armed forces would face continued downward pressure on their budgets. As such, Secretary Esper wanted to prepare the Army to pursue needed reforms that would free up time, money, and manpower to put back into his top priorities. Moreover, to be successful, the Vision affirmed the leadership’s objective of standing up a new command that would improve and focus Army acquisition to modernize the force, its biggest challenge.

In Esper’s view, the Vision statement would not only be the road map for the Army’s “renaissance,” he would also use it as a yardstick to measure the service’s progress. And by the end of his tenure after nearly twenty months, Secretary Esper and his team started the ball rolling on all the major items included in the Vision, and accomplished several of them.

Recruiting A Higher Quality And More Representative Force

In 2018, the U.S. Army failed to meet its recruiting goals. It was the first time in over a dozen years. This shortfall was easy to attribute to a strong job market, but there were other issues at play. First, the Army probably reached too high the year prior, before Esper’s arrival, by trying to grow too fast, failing to recognize the challenge presented by an expanding economy that offered America’s youth more opportunities.

Secretary Esper was troubled to learn what the data and people outside of Washington told him as he dug into the Army’s recruiting woes and its impacts. To begin, and most troubling, the Army was sacrificing quality for quantity. Too many recruits received waivers for histories of drug use, bad conduct, breaking the law, medical problems, or even mental health issues. In Esper’s view, all this did was create problems down the road within the service. To him, quality took priority over quantity any day of the week, even if that meant a smaller Army.

Therefore, if the Army was to meet its recruiting goals, the service needed to be more innovative and commit more resources. More important, Secretary Esper did not believe the answer was to lower standards. People want to believe they are part of something special, something elite if not unique. In his view, the answer was to raise the standards.

Traditionally, 95 percent or more of Army enlistees are high school graduates, the top category. Two-thirds score in the top half in verbal and mathematical aptitudes. However, DOD allows up to 4 percent of recruits to come from the lowest tier, Category 4. Secretary Esper immediately cut that in half, allowing no more than 2 percent in the Army. Further, a failed drug test now meant automatic disqualification. Esper and his team also removed prospective recruits with indications of mental health issues—such as “self-mutilation” or suicide attempts—as well as young people who committed serious crimes. These actions and others mostly took care of Esper’s quality concerns.

Secretary Esper and his leadership team were also conscious of extremism in any form entering the Army’s ranks. The service carefully screens new recruits for any tattoos or body markings that suggest membership in or support for extremist organizations. The Army also conducts social media and other background checks as warranted. The Army had some bad experiences in the past, and every year would come across a small number of cases. The service worked hard to keep those corrosive views and behaviors out of its ranks by swiftly dealing with these cases. Secretary Esper expected America’s soldiers to be committed to one organization, the U.S. Army; loyal to their fellow service members, regardless of race, ethnicity, and gender; committed to defending the country; and sworn to an oath of supporting the U.S. Constitution.

When it came to missing its recruiting numbers, the Army was late to discover the serious problems in its recruiting operations, beginning at the Pentagon. Secretary Esper and his team uncovered issues of mismanagement, poor leadership, and squandered dollars that also caught the attention of lawmakers on Capitol Hill. For example, some marketing ideas had extremely low if not nonexistent returns on investment. All of this prompted the Army’s leadership to investigate—and eventually conduct a complete overhaul of—the operation. This took months and months to sort out, and in the meantime, Army recruiting continued to suffer.

Eventually, Esper directed a series of reforms that would completely overhaul the Army’s recruiting operations, including hiring a different marketing firm, initiating a new ad campaign, fleshing out and diversifying recruiting teams, and making other changes imperative to meeting its annual numbers with quality personnel.

The Army also transformed its marketing campaign to portray more of the noncombat skills—medical technicians, mechanics, cooks, truck drivers, etc.—that the Army needed, and that were less dangerous, more interesting, or provided a better transition to the civilian job market for young people. Secretary Esper also pushed for a return to the “Be All You Can Be” slogan of his generation, but was told doing so was not legally possible. Further, the service changed its strategy by going more online, in all forms of social media, and requiring recruiters to use Instagram, moves that would pay off in 2020 once COVID shut down many recruiting offices. It meant reducing TV ads in favor of targeted advertising on Facebook and Twitch. And it meant putting money behind unconventional ideas coming out of Recruiting Command that would make the service look cooler and more appealing, from the creation of a competitive Army CrossFit team to the establishment of an Army eSports cadre that would participate in online competitions.

As Esper began pushing the notion of an Army “renaissance,” he and his leadership team believed that reinstating the World War II–era “pinks and greens” uniform—the iconic Army attire of the greatest generation—would be a big morale booster for the force. It would remind everyone of the Army’s tremendous history, help burnish the service’s appeal, and strengthen its connections to society. Dan Dailey, the Sergeant Major of the Army at the time, was a real leader on this initiative. He made the case that recruiters should be issued the new uniform first, and he was right. One of Dr. Esper’s favorite days as Army secretary was approving the return of this historic uniform.

Secretary Esper also knew the composition of the Army’s recruiting teams needed to change to give them local appeal with local knowledge. This meant getting the service’s sergeants and officers in Recruiting Command back to the towns, cities, and states where they grew up. The Army also needed more women in recruiting and more people of color. Finally, the service had to expand across the country and across demographics.

Esper and his team viewed the service as “America’s Army,” and if that was the case, then the Army needed to better represent its fellow citizens they swore an oath to defend. Faced with the fact that nearly 80 percent of recruits have a relative who served – suggesting military service had become somewhat of a family business – and that an inordinate number of recruits—41 percent—came from the South. In short, the Army needed to broaden its recruiting base.

In the fall of 2018, Secretary Esper and his team developed a “22 City” initiative that put an intense recruiting focus on nearly two dozen of America’s largest cities. The aim was to go where the young people were, especially urban areas where many high school graduates were looking for more and different opportunities, but probably did not know much about the Army. By doing this, the Army would broaden its reach into other regions, and into many states that did not have as much identification with or exposure to the U.S. military. This strategy would take time, but the Army needed to start doing this before the recruiting pool became too narrow, too regional, and too hard.

Under Secretary Esper’s leadership, the Army’s leaders fanned out to the twenty-two cities identified in their new strategy. Esper personally visited metro areas ranging from Boston and Pittsburgh to Cleveland and Atlanta, and to Denver and Los Angeles. The purpose was for him, and Army leaders visiting other cities, to hear from recruiters on the ground, speak with mayors and governors, and spend time with local media at each stop. After nearly two years of effort, the Army saw a 15 percent annual increase in recruiting from these cities from where it began in late 2017.

Improving Army Readiness

Unit readiness in the U.S. Army is largely shaped by four factors: having enough time and resources to train to your assigned tasks; ensuring the right number and type of soldiers are in your units; possessing the correct numbers and types of equipment; and maintaining a sufficient level of serviceability of that equipment. The confluence of all these assessments, plus a commander’s evaluation, constitute a unit’s readiness level. In early 2017, only a few out of the thirty-one active-duty brigade combat teams were fully ready to deploy. To quickly improve this, Secretary Esper and his leadership team dug into every element of readiness.

Mandatory training—the classes and instruction often directed from above, including from Congress—had grown ridiculously high since Captain Esper commanded an airborne infantry rifle company in the early 1990s. In 2017, it now took the typical unit at least forty days to complete all this instruction. Esper had served in both Army National Guard and Army Reserve units as well. He understood that if a soldier was a traditional reservist, one only has about thirty-eight days to begin in a normal year. As such, it was not possible for the Guard and Reserve to find time for their unit training if they had to complete nearly six weeks of required classes first.

In Secretary Esper’s estimation, some of these mandates were completely unnecessary; most gave commanders little say in how to adapt the training, if at all, to their unique situation. In his discussions with junior leaders, Esper also learned it frustrated the soldiers. Mandatory training took authority and judgment away from leaders – officers and NCOs alike – who were entrusted with their soldiers’ lives in wartime. It did not make much sense to Esper and other Army leaders. 

Beginning in the spring of 2018, Secretary Esper eliminated several dozen mandatory training, inspection, reporting, and other requirements. It had a big effect on training time, and in the confidence the Army was expressing in its junior leaders, even though it took some time to get the bureaucracy to purge these programs and this tendency from the system.

Secretary Esper and General Milley then worked hard to improve collective training, which is military jargon for when everyone trains together as a team. The National Training Center (NTC) was the Army’s premier training site, with thousands of acres of open land in the California desert for Army brigades to go head-to-head in a mock war fight for two-plus weeks against a heavy armored force that fought like the Russians. Developed in the 1970s to prepare the Army to fight the Soviets, it was the next best thing to actual combat.

Esper had gone through an NTC rotation as a lieutenant in the 101st Airborne Division decades earlier, so he understood the demands it placed on units. Most would agree that the NTC was critical to the Army’s swift defeat of the fourth largest army in the world during Operation Desert Storm in 1991. However, over the last ten years, the NTC adapted its program to meet the needs of units deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan. There were not nearly as many “high intensity” rotations as in the past, and certainly nowhere near enough as the Army entered this era of great power competition with China and Russia. Secretary Esper’s plan was to return to these types of heavy operations, with lessons learned from the Russians’ actions in Ukraine (for example, incorporating the use of drones) and elsewhere, and then completely max out the number of rotations to the NTC.

These are a few of the major initiatives Secretary Esper and his leadership team pushed while in office. And when coupled with a significant increase in training dollars and other actions—such as personnel policy changes to keep units together longer—the number of brigade combat teams fully ready to deploy by late 2018 had increased 400 percent, with half of all brigades (both active and Guard) considered ready.

Overhauling Basic and Advanced Individual Training

After graduating from West Point in 1986, then Second Lieutenant Esper attended the Infantry Officer Basic Course at Fort Benning, Georgia, for about five months. The course prepared him to lead a forty-plus-man platoon. Ranger school followed; it was there that he learned a great deal about leadership and infantry tactics. It built upon on Esper’s earlier graduation from Airborne school to become a paratrooper, and later Pathfinder school, Air Assault school and much later, Jungle training. By the time Esper became a rifle platoon leader in the 101^st Airborne Division in the spring of 1987, he had nearly a year of individual schooling under his belt. While he felt well prepared to do his job, the same was not true for the Army’s newest enlisted soldiers, which was obvious when they arrived at their first duty assignment.

The assessment of Secretary Esper and other Army leaders was that too many of these young privates showed up at their first unit underprepared to meet the demands of an active-duty Army brigade combat team. Many were not fit enough, did not possess all the right skills, and usually did not understand tactics well. This placed a burden on the sergeants now responsible for them; it would take a lot of time and hard work to get them ready. Secretary Esper had a different vision, a simple one: ensure that our newest soldiers were ready to deploy the week they arrived at their first assignment.

To do this, the Army would have to overhaul initial entry training and add more money and people, especially staff sergeants. It would end up being the biggest change to basic and advanced infantry training since 1974, and a major part of the Army’s renaissance. The results were impressive.

To achieve the goal of ensuring new soldier readiness, Secretary Esper directed the extension of basic and advanced infantry training by over 50 percent, to twenty-two weeks; this made it one of the longest (if not the longest) in the world. The additional training time allowed the Army to broaden, lengthen, and deepen weapons training, vehicle-platform familiarization, combatives instruction, field training, and night operations, while adding a 40-hour combat-lifesaver certification course, among other things. Initial reports in early 2019 showed a 50 percent reduction in attrition and injuries, with significant improvements across the board, including in physical fitness, land navigation, and marksmanship skills. The additional training time and a significant reduction in the drill-sergeant-to-trainee ratio were major drivers of these results.

There was a great deal of excitement and expectation regarding these improvements. Early reports from the field were that the active-duty units receiving this new batch of soldiers were equally impressed. The new soldiers quickly integrated because they were fit, proficient on every weapon, understood tactics, and had mastered basic soldier skills. This was a sea change. Esper and his leadership team decided to expand basic and advanced training for other branches, such as armor and cavalry.

The Army Combat Fitness Test

Another major pillar of the Army renaissance was the introduction of a new fitness test that was far more combat relevant and drove higher levels of functional fitness. When coupled with a new program of holistic health and training, soldier readiness and deployability increased dramatically.

Since 1980, the Army used the three-event Army Physical Fitness Test (APFT), consisting of push-ups, sit-ups, and a two-mile run, to gauge soldiers’ fitness. It was a simple exam that could be administered anywhere, but it was easy to prepare for and pass. Most troubling was that it had little correlation to the fitness needed by soldiers in wartime.

In the years prior to Secretary Esper’s confirmation, the service began experimenting with a replacement for the APFT that would be based on the Army’s wartime experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, more than a hundred critical “warrior tasks and drills” required of soldiers, and modern fitness regimens.

The service also had good data on how, where, and why soldiers suffered physical injuries. For example, the department knew that musculoskeletal injuries—broken bones, muscle strains, and cartilage tears—prompted more battlefield evacuations than enemy action. Similar things happened during training. Many of these injuries—which reduced deployability and combat power on the ground in war zones—were preventable through proper technique training, practice, and strengthening. As such, an improved fitness and training regimen could help units maintain higher levels of readiness, effectiveness, and deployability.

Born from these studies and assessments was the Army Combat Fitness Test (ACFT). The six-event ACFT mimicked the skills, movements, and other physical tasks associated with combat, and would measure attributes such as power, agility, endurance, and speed. Whereas the current APFT was only around 30 percent relevant to combat movements and tasks, the ACFT was well over 70 percent.

Secretary Esper and his leadership team also made the test both age- and gender-neutral, with performance standards pegged to the soldier’s military occupational specialty. This was consistent with direction given to them by Congress. In short, the new test reflected the realities of the modern battlefield and resonated especially well with the service’s younger soldiers. Army leadership knew that many could meet the test’s high standards, and with hard work and proper training, nearly all should be able to do so.

The ACFT was only one aspect of Esper’s plans to transform the Army’s fitness culture. He and his leadership also wanted to put sports trainers, physical therapists, nutritionists, and other specialists down into the Army’s brigades and battalions to help units and individuals be the best they can be. This part of the plan was called “holistic health and fitness;” it promised to “optimize soldier readiness, reduce injury rates, improve rehabilitation after injury, and increase the overall effectiveness of the Army.”

Secretary Esper and others looked at the Army as a professional sports team—"tactical athletes,” they were called—that needed to understand the importance of nutrition, sleep, strength training, flexibility, and aerobic fitness—to be the most lethal and ready players on the modern battlefield.

Esper approved the new fitness test in the summer of 2018 after taking and passing it himself. He was convinced it would deliver on its promises, as would the Army’s holistic health and fitness plans. Combined, over time, they would ensure our soldiers were as healthy and fit as modern warfare demanded.

By the end of 2019, the accumulation of changes addressed above, and others, resulted in the Army’s nondeployable rate shrinking to 6 percent, in consonance with increased unit readiness rates across the service. The initiatives, investments, and effort that Secretary Esper and his team were making to advance the Army’s vision was showing good promise and paying early dividends.

Re-Shaping the Ground Force

To further prepare the Army for high-intensity conflict against China and Russia, Secretary Esper and his leadership team determined it was time to begin reshaping the force. The insurgencies of the past fifteen years put less emphasis on “heavy” units such as tank brigades, and combat systems such as short-range air defenses and long-range artillery.

The most lethal Army ground formation is the armored brigade combat team (ABCT), which has over 4,500 soldiers, 85 Abrams tanks, and 150 Bradley fighting vehicles. These units carry quite the punch and would lead the fight in a major ground war. Infantry brigade combat teams (IBCTs) could deploy more quickly but were not nearly as potent or operationally mobile as an ABCT. Therefore, during Secretary Esper’s tenure, the Army began rebalancing its force structure by converting two IBCTs to ABCTs.

At the same time, the Army launched innovative programs to build longer-range artillery systems and mobile air-defense battalions, and looked at other ways to make the ABCTs even more robust, such as adding additional mechanized infantry companies to their formations, along with electronic warfare and cyber capabilities.

Secretary Esper and his team also worked to resurrect a fourth corps headquarters that would focus on Europe to improve command and control and help organize the war planning and preparations of the United States’ and its NATO allies.  The Obama administration deactivated V Corps (called “Fifth Corps”) in Germany in 2013, about eighteen months after announcing the withdrawal of two brigades and 7,000 soldiers from Europe. A year later, Russia annexed Crimea and occupied eastern Ukraine. In February 2020, the Army announced the V Corps reactivation and basing at Fort Knox, Kentucky, with a small forward headquarters established months later in Poland. The uncasing of the corps flag came on the heels of the largest deployment of U.S. forces to Europe in decades.

At the same time, the Army experimented with a new Multi-Domain Task Force construct in the Indo-Pacific designed to counter China by integrating conventional military capabilities with cyber, information, and electronic warfare functions. The service also began studying whether and how to restructure its fighting formations. For example, would the Army stick with brigade combat teams, go back to the division structures of the 1980s, or move to something completely new? These were critical issues to dig into if the service was going to win in the years to come.

Army Modernization

While the Army knows how to train for combat, it did not have a great record when it came to modernizing the force. The Reagan buildup in the early 1980s saw the introduction of the so-called Big 5 weapons systems designed to defeat the Soviets. These systems crushed the Iraqis twice, yet were still in use more than three decades since their introduction. The service needed a new mix of speed, lethality, survivability, and mobility that only modern technologies, such as robotics and AI, could provide.

To avoid the abysmal failures of the past, Secretary Esper and his team knew the service needed a new acquisition system that could deliver. This was the backdrop behind the Army’s Six Modernization Priorities and the establishment of Army Futures Command (AFC). Both were critical pillars in the Army’s renaissance.

In 2018, Secretary Esper directed the biggest change in the Army’s structure in over four decades—since 1973—when Futures Command was established in Austin, Texas.  After months of reviewing and debating the organizational purpose and structure, the roles and responsibilities, the systems and processes, and who would lead the cross-functional teams for each of its modernization priorities, the Army now had a way forward. Important, for the first time in the Army’s history, one commander would be driving concept development, requirements determination, organizational design, science and technology research, and solution development.

One of the reasons so many major Army programs failed in the past was that the acquisition system itself was broken. It was not due to a lack of promising ideas, skilled professionals, or extraordinary effort. The department had all of that. But overall, the acquisition system was risk averse, prone to say no to innovative ideas and yes to more process, and constantly demonstrating that classic bureaucratic tendency to protect turf and budget. At the end of the day, however, it was Army capability and soldier effectiveness that paid the price for this behavior.

Another issue Esper and his team had to sort through was the constant tension between the demands of today and the needs of tomorrow. Modernization had suffered in the past because those organizations charged with thinking about future war and its requirements became burdened with today’s problems, such as combat operations in Iraq or the conflict in Afghanistan. In short, the present was constantly elbowing out the future.

To address this dynamic, Secretary Esper and his team decided when AFC was created that all those organizations responsible for future warfare, identifying enemy tech trends and investments, studying advanced operational concepts, and so on would be assigned to AFC and would not be allowed to work on current problems. Futures Command could work only on issues and programs beyond the five-year Future Years Defense Program. This was not a hard black line, but it was a particularly good demarcation point to protect the future from the present, and vice versa.

To guide AFC’s work, the Army leadership had established a clear set of modernization priorities that they publicly committed to not change. This made it much easier for the private sector to be a good and helpful partner.

The six priorities critical to modernizing the Army were straightforward. First up was long-range precision fires, focused on improving the range, accuracy, and lethality of the cannon artillery and missiles needed in an Indo-Pacific fight. Second was next-generation combat vehicles, a new optionally manned tracked combat system to replace the Bradley fighting vehicle; these would be critical in the intense urban warfare the Army envisioned. Future vertical lift was the service’s third priority. The Army needed a new helicopter fleet with greater range, speed, and survivability if the force was going to fly against Chinese air defenses in the western Pacific. Fourth up was the Army network, a broad term for ensuring the Army had a resilient and secure tactical communications network that would work against Russian and Chinese jamming and intercepts—something ISIS and the Taliban never had. Air and missile defense was the fifth priority. Because the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan required more foot soldiers, and our enemies did not have air assets, the service cannibalized these units to free up troops and money. The Army now needed to rebuild these capabilities. Moreover, in an era of cruise missiles and drone swarms, ground forces needed directed energy systems that could provide a “deep and cheap” magazine that missiles could not offer. Finally, the last of the Army’s top six modernization priorities was soldier lethality. The infantry usually suffered the largest numbers of casualties on the battlefield. Secretary Esper and the rest of the Army leadership were committed to changing this by providing their soldiers with advanced rifles, next-generation vision systems, and improved body armor.



To find the monies necessary to fund these six modernization priorities, and the thirty-one programs associated with them, Esper knew the Army could not rely on new funding. The Army vision statement released in June 2018 made clear the service would face budget pressures in the future, and twice said that tough decisions would need to be made when it came to spending.

All these initiatives, especially force modernization, became the impetus behind Secretary Esper’s hard push for the Army to reform and make the tough choices.  Esper needed a way to pressurize the system and apply the heat to find as much money as possible to sustain the renaissance. As such, Night Court was born.

Night Court

During an initial budget meeting in early 2018, Secretary Esper was presented a standard Army budget proposal for the next fiscal year. The associated briefing explained how the service’s annual $182 billion was allocated for people, operations and maintenance, military construction, and equipment modernization, for example. When asked about funding for the Army’s top six modernization priorities and other new initiatives, the Army staff said there was not enough money left over to fund these items. Esper and his leadership team quickly realized that the staff had not adjusted the budget to meet leadership’s goals. There was little prioritization.

Secretary Esper directed the group to “start over,” to rank every single one of the Army’s five-hundred-plus modernization programs in priority order, and then come back in and tell him why each one was more important than the Army’s new modernization goals. Esper told those assembled that the thirty-one modernization programs would be funded first, and that the staff should plan to cut or reduce programs from the bottom of the five-hundred-plus-program list upward until the Army can afford the remaining programs at the top.

Moreover, the staff was told not to feel beholden to finding savings only in the accounts that needed more funding. If more dollars were needed to be put into acquisition, Esper told the staff, then they should look at drawing funds from non-acquisition accounts, such as personnel, too. Everything was prioritized and assessed. 

Esper, Milley and others began going through hundreds of programs, week after week, hour after hour. They canceled, cut, trimmed, delayed, and asked every question they could to get to the ground truth. The Army staff learned a lot about the Army. The bureaucracy consumed billions of dollars, year after year, buying equipment simply because it was on an organizational chart. Thousands and thousands of dump trucks, forklifts, and trailers, and now they were asking for new models. The service’s wartime experiences showed it never used all this stuff. As such, Secretary Esper would have to press staff to defend these acquisitions. “The Bradley fighting vehicle is decades old, and we’ve reached the end of its upgrading,” he would say. “If we have to fight the Russians in ten years, or the Chinese in twenty, would you rather have new forklifts and dump trucks, or a new fighting vehicle?” 

Several weeks, five-hundred-plus programs, and over fifty hours of personal time later in Night Court resulted in the Army leadership finding at least $25 billion in savings, with the accounting still ongoing. They eliminated or reduced 186 programs to fund the service’s modernization initiatives as well as such things as expanded basic training, a new recruiting campaign, and an overhaul of the Army’s physical fitness program.

By the time the budget arrived at the House and Senate on March 11, 2019, the final amount saved over five years would be $31 billion. Every single one of the top thirty-one programs bundled under the Army’s new six modernization priorities received the money it needed. At the end of the day, Congress supported all the department’s 186 proposals except one.

The support from Capitol Hill was extraordinary. But the importance of Congressional backing was more than the dollar and cents facts that we were freeing up money for the future. It sent an important message to the Army that its efforts and tough decision making would be rewarded. It was helpful in terms of purging bad habits from the system and working to adopt better ones.



The Army continued its Night Court proceedings into the fall, and then into 2019. By the spring of that year, only a few months before Esper became Secretary of Defense, the service canceled another forty-one programs, and delayed or reduced thirty-nine more, to find an additional $13.5 billion in savings. The good news was that Army leadership never found fraud or waste; these were good programs. The Army simply needed to put their dollars into higher priorities. With the budget flat at around $178 billion, Esper and his team knew that they had to keep digging deep or risk the future. Their efforts were paying off.

Talent Management

As the Army rolled into 2019 with its modernization initiatives moving forward nicely, Secretary Esper wanted to make the upcoming year about replacing the clunky Army personnel system with one based on talent management. He wanted to go from an “up or out” philosophy to a “perform or out” approach. This would be a major change for the Army—the personnel pillar of the renaissance—but it was long overdue and much needed. It would go a long way toward advancing the Army’s credo of putting people first.

Secretary Esper was joined in this initiative by General Jim McConville, the Vice Chief of Staff of the Army. Together, they formed a Talent Management Task Force to turn what many called “an industrial age personnel system” into a digital one for the twenty-first century—and one that promised to do a far better job of meeting the needs of the soldier, the family, commanders, and the Army. Esper and McConville went about setting up a market-based, talent-focused model that gave commanders and soldiers (beginning with the officer corps)—the buyers and sellers, respectively—more say in their careers, their timelines, and the assignments they took.

Within the constraints of a military system where the needs of the Army still had to come first, there was no reason the department could not give service members more say in their careers. Past studies and ongoing pilot projects demonstrated that a market-based system would work more efficiently, and with higher rates of satisfaction, than the current command-directed one.

The system was not completely broken, but it could have been a whole lot better. In a volunteer force, people vote with their feet, and the service was losing too many top performers. In 2018, soldiers did not make decisions to stay or go based solely on their career; now their duty location, their spouse’s job prospects, and their children’s schools were also factors.

Secretary Esper and his leadership team knew they needed to give their service members the opportunity to stay at one duty station longer than three years if they wanted to because, for example, their spouse had a wonderful job, their kids loved the schools, the community was wonderful, or aging parents were nearby.

By May 2019, the leadership team was speaking publicly about the Army Talent Alignment Process program, which would allow officers to search and apply for jobs across the Army. They would post their military résumés and any other information they felt relevant to the assignments they were seeking. Commanders, conversely, would be able to see applicants and make better choices about who served in their units. They could attract top talent by advertising things such as their command philosophy, training regimen, and the expectations they had of their subordinates. The inaugural iteration of this program was launched in the first half of 2019, and the initial feedback was particularly good.

That summer, the Army also piloted a new multiday approach to select battalion commanders based on the NFL’s Combine. Under this new system, selected officers underwent “a series of cognitive, non-cognitive, and physical assessments,” such as fitness tests, assessments of verbal and written communications skills, and a double-blind interview with a panel of senior officers, over a period of several days.

The first major gateway to becoming a future commander and senior Army leader began with battalion command. As such, picking this initial pool of leaders is critical to the future of the service. The Army had to get it right; it was important to select officers who not only excel at the battalion level, but also have the potential to be a general officer who could perform at the four-star rung. This change turned out to be a dramatic and historic one.



The Army leadership was pursuing other personnel initiatives at the same time, such as giving service members the opportunity to take yearlong unpaid sabbaticals without being penalized, and making it possible for soldiers to make seamless transitions between the Regular Army, the National Guard, and the Army Reserve. Secretary Esper had made these switches over his twenty-one-year career and found it to be needlessly difficult. Esper and McConville believed building ease and flexibility into career management could go a long way toward keeping people in the service.

All these things were innovative ideas, but the top issues for many Army families were spousal hiring and childcare. Military spouses may well be the most overqualified and underemployed group of people in the country, Esper felt. It was an unfortunate by-product of an Army system that moved people frequently, and sometimes to states and locales that did not recognize their professional credentials, want the business competition, or need their skills. It was a bad mix of things that worked against spouses and families.

Secretary Esper and his team went about approaching this problem by making professional license reciprocity a condition for installation investment decisions, working with members of Congress on federal mandates or state-level assistance, and other initiatives. He also worked with his fellow service secretaries to write all fifty governors to inform them that “family issues,” such as the quality of local schools and license reciprocity for spouses, would be factors when their services evaluated future basing questions. Esper made progress, but not as much as he wanted. It would take becoming Secretary of Defense to add more heft to this push.

Another major frustration for Army spouses was the on-base hiring process, which took an average of 130 days to get someone working. While some on the installations thought that was quick, Esper viewed it as terribly slow. The Army needed to get the process down to no more than 45 days. After going through a very tedious, multi-month process that examined every step of the hiring system -- from background checks and drug tests, to multiple review boards – to eliminate unnecessary time and steps, Esper was able to get the hiring process down to under 90 days.

The fact was the extended hiring process also made it difficult to tackle the biggest issue for many families: childcare. When you looked at locations with long wait periods (months)—such as the Washington, D.C., area or Hawaii—the first problem that jumped out was the fact that some child-care facilities were only 70 percent or so filled. The 30 percent vacancy rate was due to a lack of child-care providers, and that was often because the civilian hiring system was so slow. The reforms Secretary Esper and his team put in place, like a centralized background check process and getting direct hiring authority, began fixing this.

Addressing the supply side of the equation could take us only so far in the near term. The demand side of the problem also required review. Once he became secretary of defense, Esper focused on this side of the childcare problem as well. The bottom line was that the demands being placed on the DOD child-care system were too great to accommodate the needs of our service members under a first-come-first-served basis. Too often, junior enlisted personnel could not get on-base childcare because the children of DOD civilian workers filled many of the slots. So Secretary Esper directed that military children take priority over the children of DOD civilian employees. Prioritizing military children rankled a good many civilian employees, but the Pentagon’s first obligation had to be to its service members, especially its junior enlisted.

In Esper’s view, the department had to put its service members first. Many lived on base, which made driving back and forth off base twice a day to drop off and pick up their kids a hassle, and sometimes a hindrance to the service member’s work schedule. It could be a round trip of more than thirty minutes each time. Second, most civilians employed by DOD either grew up in the area where they worked or rarely moved, so they had established friend and family networks to help them out. Military personnel who were coming and going every three years or less did not have this advantage. And finally, many service members worked unusual hours, including getting up early in the morning for physical training, which made having access to the on-base child-care center to accommodate these things important to their work performance.

Mission accomplished for Secretary Esper would have been having sufficient on-base childcare for those service members seeking it, plus the ability to do hourly care, and finally the option to have 24/7 services for those bases and career fields that needed that type of flexibility. The same was true for improving the Exceptional Family Member Program, a system by which a service member with a child in need of specialty care or medical attention would get easier access to both. Moreover, the family’s needs would be considered when assigning the service member to a new post. Each of these programs worked well at different installations around the U.S. military, so Esper knew what was possible. DOD needed to adopt, adapt, and standardize them across the armed forces. The Defense Department had settled on a plan for hourly childcare in the fall of 2020, just before Secretary Esper left the Pentagon. It is unclear whether it was ever implemented. 

Summary

Secretary of the Army Esper felt blessed to have a strong leadership team and capable staff. This made all the difference when it came to transforming the U.S. Army. After more than nineteen months of demanding work together, Dr. Esper and his team had launched a true renaissance that would resonate and endure long after they left. The Army was well on its way toward regaining the readiness posture it needed to not only fight and win the nation’s wars, but also demonstrating the determination and prowess necessary to deter them from happening in the first place.