A year after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the Army to take on a long list of tasks—including jettisoning unwanted vehicles and aircraft and re-focusing on unmanned systems—the Army Transformation Initiative is on uncertain ground.
Hegseth has said he’s giving the document “another look,” but has declined to be more specific, frustrating lawmakers who want a detailed roadmap and timeline they can fund—or not.
“We’d like to see a concrete plan on how the Army intends to modernize, where it invests, where the investments will be made, what risks to readiness will be absorbed, and what impact it will have on the industrial base,” Chairman Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., told the Army secretary and acting chief of staff on Friday during a House Armed Services Committee.
Those comments came three days after the defense secretary acknowledged that ATI might need a revamp.
The Army always intended ATI to be a living document, a U.S. official told Defense One, but the defense secretary’s office hasn’t reached out to the service to discuss any changes.
“No plan is designed to survive first contact with the enemy, and as conditions evolve, as things change, we must be willing and able to transform and change quickly with it,” said the official, who was granted anonymity to comment because they were not authorized to speak on the record.
The Pentagon refused to answer a query from Defense One about which parts of ATI Hegseth would like to revisit, or whether his office had discussed them with the Army.
Officials instead pointed to the secretary’s May 13 remarks, which included a response to a question from Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., about the Army’s proposal to slash helicopter procurement. DeLauro’s district includes the Sikorsky factory that manufactures the UH-60 Black Hawk.
“There are some very good things in the Army Transformation Initiative, and there are some things that we needed to get another look at,” Hegseth said. “And so I think you’ll see a review of some of those things, and we’ll get back to you.”
The conciliatory tone of the response was a departure from Hegseth’s customary ripostes to lawmakers’ questions, especially Democrats’.
“I don’t know all the depth of what was implied, but I absolutely agree that we will take a hard look with the Office of Secretary of War and make sure that we are synced with their strategy and their plans as they look across the joint force and balance their requirements and needs of the military as a whole,” Army Secretary Dan Driscoll told the House Armed Services Committee on Friday when asked about Hegseth’s remarks.
Though many of ATI’s items include initiatives the Army had been pursuing for months or years, Hegseth took ownership of the plan by unveiling it in a memo issued last April. The plan quickly drew questions from lawmakers during the Army’s budget hearings last year.
Many of the questions appear to remain unanswered, as Driscoll and acting Chief of Staff Gen. Christopher LaNeve make the rounds of the armed services and appropriations committees this month. LaNeve is on track to replace the ousted Gen. Randy George, who had relentlessly promoted the Army’s many “transformation” efforts.
“We want to make sure the Army has done a careful analysis of how transformation will affect our capabilities and force structure,” Rogers said Friday. “We want to understand how the Army intends to sustain the legacy capabilities our service members still need and use. We want to avoid spending this historic influx of money ineffectively and wasting the opportunity to bolster the [defense industrial base].”
Lawmakers’ questions reflected particular concern about how the Army’s plans to buy fewer aircraft might throttle production lines and supply chains, which can’t necessarily rebound a year or two later if the Army decides it wants to start buying again.
“Nobody’s saying we don’t need Chinooks or Black Hawks or Apaches,” the U.S. official said. “We need to modernize them, etc. But we have so many, based on the force structure side, that we think it’s what is required to fight a conflict.”
Instead, service leaders have been told to “tighten their belts,” the official said. So they are making trade-offs, spending that helicopter money to refill munitions stockpiles and buy, attritable drones, new weapons and cyber capabilities.
That appears to contradict Hegseth’s congressional testimony May 13, when he announced he wants to restore funding for the Air Force’s E-7 Wedgetail, which was not in the original fiscal year 2027 Pentagon budget request.
“I think that mindset was indicative of a mindset that we’ve shed, which is the divest-to-invest mindset,” the secretary said.
Ultimately, final budget decisions go through the White House’s Office of Budget and Management, so the U.S. official couldn’t comment on why the Army is making these specific tradeoffs.
The service has sent many experts to Capitol Hill to brief lawmakers on ATI, the official said, and will continue to do so.
Still, Congress wants more.
“What exactly is it that you intend to do? What are the top three or five parts of that initiative?” Rep. Jim Garamendi, D-Calif., asked Friday. “We’re going to have to give you the authority—or maybe we disagree and don’t want you to go in that direction—but what we’re seeing here is enormous inconsistency in direction, and that is not going to suffice as we put together the future direction and laws that the Army is going to have to carry out.”
A spokesperson for the House Armed Services Committee declined to provide a more detailed example of what lawmakers would like to see on ATI.
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