AUSTIN, Texas — Austin has long attracted high-tech startups and innovators, bringing the U.S. Army to the Texas capital seven years ago with the promise of a community that would carry the service’s ambitious modernization push.
The Army created a new four-star outfit – Futures Command – in the late summer of 2018, right in the city center, empowered with a mandate to quickly develop new requirements for modern capabilities.
Seven years later, Austin’s vibes have grown even more future-forward. Cowboy-booted pedestrians side-step robots lumbering along sidewalks delivering takeout food while driverless taxis blend into regular traffic and robotic-armed baristas serve up lattes at the airport.
And as Austin’s high-tech evolution continues, so does the Army’s.
The decision came as a surprise. After all, AFC hadn’t even made it a whole decade.
The last time a four-star command had been deactivated – the Continental Army Command – was 52 years ago, which triggered the creation of TRADOC and U.S. Army Forces Command.
On Oct. 2, on the second day into a government shutdown, the Army cased the colors of TRADOC and of AFC, with its anvil insignia meant to signify its mission to forge the future, and unfurled the colors of the Transformation and Training Command, or T2COM, to a sparser crowd than expected.
Army leaders have chosen a sword as the insignia for T2COM, with command personnel already sporting the new shoulder patch at the activation ceremony.
“Just for the record, T2COM is a good decision. This is a good decision for the Army,” Gen. James Rainey, the outgoing AFC commander who will retire on Oct. 31, said at the event.
“There is no organization more responsible for the Army of Desert Storm, the Army of [Operation Iraqi Freedom], the Army we now have, than Training and Doctrine Command,” he said.
As for Futures Command, Rainey described its creation as “one of the boldest and best decisions” the Army ever made.
“You’d think it’s the most un-Army thing ever to stand up a four-star headquarters in a tech hub, but AFC has proven that you can be flat, fast, disruptive and you can punch way above your weight,” he added. “So the chief’s decision, the secretary’s decision, to take those two organizations and put them together, it’s not about efficiencies as much as opportunities.”
The seven-year itch
AFC was established during President Donald Trump’s first administration under then-Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, whom President Trump has since sought to disgrace.
Milley proposed the four-star command he dubbed Army Futures Command as a new way forward, breaking free of the bureaucracy and organizational silos that had hampered the service’s previous major modernization efforts.
Working with other top service officials, Milley shifted billions of dollars into modernization programs including the top priority — long-range, precision fires — and based the new command in Austin, Texas, an area known for its innovative, technology-focused workforce.
AFC was formed to focus on requirements development within the modernization process. Prior to its formation, the requirements development process played out within TRADOC, where it competed for attention alongside training, recruitment and professional military education.
The more focused organization was built to enable the Army to move faster.
The command received attention and gained traction as it opened its headquarters in a University of Texas building downtown. Across the street, it opened the Army Applications Laboratory based at the Capital Factory, a hub that helps entrepreneurs meet investors and has since connected startups with Army decision makers.
Over a two-year period, it pushed more successful programs into reality than the Army had done in the previous four years, Milley told Defense News in an interview in 2022.
Although some of those efforts were already in development, the command has touted it was able to push programs through development and into soldiers’ hands faster than previously planned.
The command also created Project Convergence, an enormous experimentation effort that continues year-round with culminating events to tie new capabilities together across mission sets.
AFC also established the Software Factory, which has been developing software-based applications for the force internally, giving soldiers the opportunity to become coders, helping to solve operational problems.
But other large and ambitious programs were canceled over the course of seven years, including plans to build a Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft and an Extended-Range Artillery Cannon.
During the first Trump Administration, AFC was given unprecedented authority to move forward with programs, but when Christine Wormuth became Army secretary in May 2021, she quickly identified some ambiguity in the direction given to the command and the service’s acquisition office about their roles and responsibilities.
Wormuth also moved to centralize investment authority at Army headquarters. Some critics said the move basically gutted the entire intention of AFC.
At the same time, the Army struggled to find a commander to replace AFC’s first leader, Gen. Mike Murray, who retired in 2021. With no one in the top job, Lt. Gen. James Richardson, Murray’s deputy, served as an acting commander for nearly a year.
The personnel optics of a stand-in boss seemed to cast doubt on the future of AFC itself.
Rainey took over in the fall of 2022, and while remaining focused on the many modernization priorities already in development, he said he was looking deeper into the future. He emphasized the work the Army would need to do to figure out how humans and machines would fight together on the battlefield now and in the future.
Rainey famously coined the quote-du-jour to describe the role robots would play: “We will never again trade blood for first contact.”
Working with Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George, who took the service’s helm in the fall 2023, the command centered its focus around developing an entirely new command-and-control architecture leveraging the tech industry.
The command helped the Army take leaps in fielding advanced technology by putting new capabilities into operational formations, bypassing the usual cumbersome development, testing and acquisition processes.
The chief dubbed this effort “transformation in contact.”
“In seven years, this team helped our Army gain ground in next-generation combat vehicles, long-range precision fires, future vertical lift, soldier lethality, air-and-missile defense, and our number one priority, the network,” George said in a speech broadcast from the Pentagon during the ceremony here.
“You helped our Army drive rapid change through our transformation in contact rotations. You helped build capacity in our formations across every warfighting function and you pushed the entire enterprise to field next-generation command-and-control to a division in record time and I know that is going to transform the Army,” George added.
From ‘vision to victory’
The newly established T2COM, whose new motto is “From Vision to Victory” is now the largest command in the Army.
“The world isn’t slowing down and neither will we,” George said. T2COM “will help our Army change how we operate. As we all know, transformation is not just about product innovation, it’s about process innovation. By reducing headquarters and streamlining authorities and responsibilities, T2COM will help us cut out redundancy, reverse stagnation and push talent and leaders into our fighting formations.”
The new command will help ensure “our training and education is modern and world class, whether at our combat training centers, centers of excellence, Army university or home station training and T2COM will help us get state-of-the-art tech into soldiers’ hands quickly, putting tacticians with technicians, so that we are making interactive, substantive and continuous change,” George added.
Its first commander is Gen. David Hodne, who has held a variety of roles at both TRADOC and AFC in his career, most recently serving as the leader of AFC’s Futures and Concepts Center.
AFC placed a bet on proximity to innovation when it set up shop among startups and venture capitalists instead of within a traditional base. Now, T2COM is charged with doubling down on that idea, fusing its future-looking modernization effort with the institution that trains every soldier who will use those technologies.
T2COM’s headquarters will remain in Austin and the Army is looking at how it will bring more personnel into the locations in the area it now has.
“I think we’ll get more people into the footprint, but we have, definitely, the capacity to do it,” T2COM chief of staff, Maj. Gen. John Cushing, said. In addition to the downtown location, AFC has also established space in Round Rock, Texas.
Three subordinate three-star commands are also established as part of T2COM.
AFC’s Futures and Concepts Center based at Fort Eustis, Virginia, will become Futures and Concepts Command. TRADOC’s Combined Arms Center, which sets doctrine, the intellectual building blocks for the service’s flavor of combat, will become the Combined Arms Command, remaining at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Army Recruiting Command will remain at Fort Knox, Kentucky.
AFC creations like the Army Applications Laboratory and the Software Factory are here to stay. The lab will remain in its home at the Capital Factory in Austin, and the Army is working through where it will make the most sense to locate the Software Factory, according to Cushing.
The new command should not be seen as the closure of two commands and the creation of a new one, or an organizational shuffle, Hodne emphasized at its activation ceremony.
“It’s a reset,” he said. “It’s the deliberate blending of two proud traditions into something new, purpose-built for the challenges that we as an Army face today.”
The Army has, for the first time, “unified the functions of force design, force development and force generation,” Hodne said.
“Technology alone never transformed war. The tank, the airplane, the drone – none changed battlefields by themselves. They required new tactics, new concepts and new organizations to integrate them into coherent warfighting systems. Where militaries failed to align these elements, they failed on the battlefield,” he added.
Hodne stressed the need to move rapidly, pointing to the wars in Ukraine and in the Middle East that pose evolving challenges like one-way attack drones, remote maritime systems and advanced battlefield networks.
“The question is whether our institutions can adapt fast enough to keep pace with these changes. T2COM is the Army’s answer,” he said.
Jen Judson is an award-winning journalist covering land warfare for Defense News. She has also worked for Politico and Inside Defense. She holds a Master of Science degree in journalism from Boston University and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Kenyon College.