Strategic Landpower Dialogue: A Conversation with General Andrew Poppas

This transcript is from a CSIS event hosted on June 5, 2025. Watch the full video here.

Seth Jones: Welcome, everyone, to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. My name is Seth Jones and I run the Defense and Security Department at CSIS. We are very proud to partner with AUSA for this conversation today. And this is going to be the seventh in this series of Strategic Landpower Dialogue. We are also grateful for the support of General Dynamics. So thank you to General Dynamics and the whole team there for supporting this series. This conversation would not be possible without GD.

I am honored here to welcome General Andrew Poppas. He is the commander of U.S. Army Forces Command. And we will discuss today the broader subject of the Army’s force readiness, transformation of war fighting, and preparation to face today’s emerging threats. I’m only briefly going to summarize his bio. You can find a much longer version on our website and on his website as well. But he graduated from the U.S. military academy at West Point with a bachelor of science in national security affairs, and also holds a master in science and occupational education from Kansas State University, which, if I am correct, is the Wildcats. Is that right?

General Andrew Poppas: It is.

Dr. Jones: All right. He served in a variety of Army roles throughout his career. Again, I’m not going to go through all of them, but some of them include Third Infantry Regiment at Fort Myer, Virginia, foreign area officer, served on the Joint Staff, and as commander of the 101 Airborne Division. After more than three years as a senior leader on the Joint Staff he assumed the command of Forces Command in July 2022. In this role, he commands 212,000 active component soldiers and 174,000 members of the U.S. Army Reserve, while also providing training and readiness and oversight to the Army National Guard.

So we’re really fortunate to have him here with us today. I’m looking forward, as all of you are, to hearing his insights. And I will hand the microphone over to my colleague, Tom Karako, who runs our missile defense program. So, Tom, over to you.

Tom Karako: Hey, thanks, Seth. Really appreciate it. And, again, thanks to the whole AUSA team for partnering with us on this, especially General Bob Brown, who reached out and managed to get our speaker today, of course, General Poppas. Yeah, I always like to start by saying, for all the talk about multidomain operations sometimes it bears repeating the obvious that land is one of the domains, that happens to be the domain on which human beings spend most of their time. And that’s kind of the basis for this dialogue series.

So we’ve got a lot to cover, because the Army is a big organization. I will just say to the folks online, I’ve got a tablet. Please submit questions, for those in the room as well as online, and I’ll take them and direct them to our speaker. So, General Poppas, good to see you. Thanks for coming. We’re happy to be hosting you. I think I narrowly missed you at a conference in California last week. Sorry about that. But we always start with basically our signature question for this series. And that is, start with what is your role – what is your view of the role of land power within the joint force, both today and in the force of 2040? 

Gen. Poppas: Well, it's a great question, especially being an Army officer. But, you know, and especially coming on the – a week prior to our 250th birthday as a land component army.

Dr. Karako: Happy birthday.

Gen. Poppas: But if you look at those 250 years, I mean, we have – we have fought and dominated on land throughout multiple different campaigns and wars. That was true in our history and it'll be true in the future moving forward. And whenever I think about the land power specifically, I remember as a cadet we had to read Fehrenbach’s book, “This Kind of War,” about Korea. And it was coming out of World War II and the atomic age. And I’m sure I’ll bastardize his statement, but it was to the effect that, you know, post-atomic age, you know, he spoke – you know, you can fly over it, you can bomb it, you can pulverize it, you can atomize it, but if you want to keep it, if you want to protect it, if you want to defend it, you’re going to have to put troops on it just like the Roman legions in the dirt. And I think that’s as true then as it is today and as we move forward.

Now, obviously, saying that as an Army officer but a lot of joint time, and we can’t do it alone – it is a joint force and the way that we’re going to fight and our own doctrine drives us to ensure that we fight in the multiple domains that are all synchronized together in order to meet success in the future battlefield. That’s the way that we’re structuring. That’s the way that our doctrines are driving us. And it’s the way that we train together, and there’s multiple examples of that.

But when I look at the Army again, just going back specific to, you know, our branch of service it’s – you look at the capabilities that the Army has had and I’ll use just the Russian invasion of the Ukraine. And when you look at a physical presence, a manifestation of will, you know, the 82nd within 48 hours was over in Poland as an assurance and deterrence force.

The Third Infantry division draws tanks within a week, is doing gunnery in Germany, you know, inside of that. That is a deterrence capability that only the Army has the capability to do.

Dr. Karako: Well, let’s situate that, and just in terms of the big security environment, big picture again, how do you – how do you think about the security environment today and how has it changed in the past number of years over the course of your career, for instance?

Gen. Poppas: Yeah. Well, look, I think it’s great. When I came in though, you know, don’t let my youthful appearance fool you. I was here when the Wall was still up, you know. But it has shifted.

But I would just go back to the last 20 years of continuous conflict where I was, you know, a battalion brigade commander with Jody in Afghanistan, then again back as a DCG SAR there. But in that 20 years I would say, you know, our future is written when I took command.

Why? Because we were very predictive at that point. You know, after 9/11 I could tell you when we were going to deploy, literally, where we were going to deploy to. We knew the human, the physical terrain that we were going to deploy to. I mean, we could do a pre-deployment site survey. You could literally dictate what bed you were going to be sleeping in.

Well, that level of predictability is gone. The future is not written and, in fact, is a much more uncertain and a much more lethal world, and as you look at the current events, when I talked to commanders, you know, previous I’d tell them – you know, I’d go back to 1914, two bullets that changed the history of and trajectory of the world when Archduke Ferdinand was shot. Within 30 days, you know, the world was at war.

You don’t have to go back a century-plus. You can just look at the October 7th invasion when the Hamas came across. You just take a look at the Russian invasion of the Ukraine or even when we do a number of our exercises in the Indo-Pacific and how it’s addressed and seen by the Chinese, you know, or even in the Middle East, you know, with General Kurilla every day. 

I think that we are continuously on a precipice and it’s going to take one strategic miscalculation, and it might not be 30 days until that war comes upon us but it could be within 30 minutes, and that’s the world in which we’re operating today and that is literally worldwide.

Dr. Karako: The unpredictability is worldwide but so much tension, nonetheless, except for the fact that Europe is – Ukraine is on fire and the Middle East is on fire in some respects.

Nevertheless, the pacing threat is in Indo-Pacific. There’s been a lot of attention to, well, what’s the role of the Army with all this water, with all this, you know, airspace and things like that.

So how do you think about the salience of ground forces and of the Army in the Pacific?

Gen. Poppas: And I do look at it within the joint context, but I think Admiral Paparo hit it best, and he’s, you know, an incredible friend and warrior but he said, you know, although his command is named after water and oceans, you know, people live on the ground, live on land.

But when you look at what the Army contribution to that is and the way that we’re integrating in both the exercise programs and our engagements throughout the region, you know, the first and foremost is the physical presence that we provide on land.

Most of – the largest components of these Indo-Pacific nations are armies so it’s our partnership with them, the assurance that we provide and then physical presence, obviously, is a deterrence also.

We also provide survivability in terms of long-range precision fires that could be maneuvered and placed in multiple locations out there. And then the last is, you know, you spoke – we spoke earlier, I guess, not in this room but just in the logistics and the sustainments, especially in a contested environment.

You know, the role that the Army plays in each one of those realms is imperative for the overall fight that Admiral Paparo has.

Dr. Karako: Yeah. So let’s start by introducing Forces Command. What all is the scope of your command? What do you do? And how would you describe your disposition? 

Gen. Poppas: Well, first, I’ll tell you, at this level it’s the best command to have in the Army. If you’re in the Army it’s all good karma because everything you love about being in the Army resides in Forces Command, and I say that tongue in cheek but it’s true.

Dr. Karako: (Laughs.)

Gen. Poppas: The key to that, though, is when you look at what Forces Command – and we talked about the size, scope, and scale of it; you know, it’s all components – but there’s three key pieces that we really do.

First, you know, we man the formation. You know, we have to build that formation because we’re responsible for the collective training. Individual basic training falls under Training and Doctrine Command, but then they fall under the units. We have to build that formation into a fighting formation. And that building entails, first, the manning of it, where we’re going to put the manning that’s going to be a portion of that; then the equipping, whether it’s the new equipping that’s coming in or maintaining the equipping that we have to make sure that we’re fully manned and we need to be – that we’re equipped. And that’s the baseline that we have, and that’s that leadership that builds the team going forward.

And then, once you have that team, you have to train the team. And that training is a progressive position from, again, the individual in the formation all the way up to the higher-level collective. And we’re nested now, as we’re look at that training, as our own doctrine changes; you know, we’re elevating up to the division. So how do we make sure that we have mastery at all those separate echelons so that in the future right that we have, that when we walk forward we are 100 percent prepared to move forward and dominate, which is expected of our formation?

And then the last portion, once, you know, you build it, you train it, we have to be able to mobilize and deploy it. The only drawback to me is I don’t get to fight the formations that I built in war. By our own structure, I hand them off to those combatant commanders and then they’ll execute that warfighting portion of that. But we have to get them to that location. What we owe them is fully trained, ready, and equipped validated formations, but we have to deploy them out of our nation to make sure that they can get there in time in a cohesive entity in order to execute the tasks that are provided.

Dr. Karako: So what are your top priorities for FORSCOM?

Gen. Poppas: We just walked through those. The first I have –

Dr. Karako: Oh. You know, quick –

Gen. Poppas: Yeah. That’s not fair. I didn’t mean to be, I just said those. (Laughter.) But we really have four. There’s four areas that we focus on, and we call them the four wins, you know, because winning matters. Nobody wants to be part of a losing team.

But it’s – the first one is, you know, win trust and empower our leaders, because that’s – you know, the Army, you know, it’s the human dynamic that keeps the formation together and it’s about people. So winning that trust and empowering our leaders so you can build that team, that cohesive entity that can be – and leadership is one of the primary dominant variables in combat anywhere you go. So you have to set the foundation so that the leaders are empowered, that there’s trust in the formation, that there’s competence at every echelon, so when you walk forward you look and say: That’s my team leader, squad leader. You know, that’s my division commander. And they trust them. That trust is built through shared experiences.

The second win is, you know, we have to win the first fight. That’s the contract that we have. If something happens tonight, there’s an expectation and a demand that we are ready to move forward with the formations we have to win and dominate that fight, and that’s what we have to do today. You can see it in our training methodology. As we walk out, we have to make sure that we’re masters at the basics, that we can execute at the higher echelons to synchronize in time and space, and then at the highest echelons fight across all the domains and integrate both with our coalition and our allied partners.

The third win is we have to win the future fight. Now, that fight’s coming, so we have to make sure that we are developing the formation that the future is going to have to execute. And that’s – there’s a little bit of predictive analysis in that, both in structure but then also in the equipping. And though the demands on Army forces today, I mean, are as high as I’ve seen since – I remember sitting in the basemen as a – as a major in the Pentagon doing global force management. Army forces are in demand. But if you’re going to modernize from a FORSCOM perspective of bring that up, you have to make sure that you have the opportunity to pull them, modernize the equipment, give them the opportunity to train on that, and then be able to move forward for the future fight.

And then the last win, the fourth win, is we have to win as a balanced Army. You know, the way that we’re structured and the way that we fight is not as a(n) active-duty component alone. We are absolutely dependent on the inner strength of the active duty, the National Guard, and the Reserve. It’s the way that we’re structured. It’s the way that we have to fight. So we have to set – to make sure that as we talk about that modernization of the – of the future right that all components – all components – are modernizing simultaneously, and that we’re also finding opportunities in which we train together so that the strength and weaknesses as we talk about a team of those shared experiences – you know, the wins, the losses, and such – we have to do that together so that we become a cohesive entity as we move forward and fight.

Dr. Karako: So let’s go back. We’ve alluded – you mentioned the unpredictability of Ukraine and the Middle East. You talked about how quickly things developed in both of those areas. But talk to us a bit more about some of the operational lessons that you’re seeing, and observations, and the – kind of the lessons. And how is that influencing your thinking, your command’s thinking for readiness and all these other things.

Gen. Poppas: Yeah. Well, like any professional organization, you continue to assess what’s taking place worldwide and those which impact us. I mean, just as late as, you know, yesterday’s attack that we saw, or two days ago, you know, in Russia. I mean, that’s – you know, as, you know, Max Boot, you know, called it, that’s, you know, a change in the way in which we’re going to fight in the future. But there’s a couple of lessons that we draw out. I won’t say it’s just operational, but actually down to that tactical level.

We talk about, you know, winning trust and empowering our leaders. You know, we just talked about it. It’s the will to win, the will to fight. How do you build win within a formation and a national will that drove them forward, to stand forward as an entity? And that’s leadership, the presence of leadership, the impact of leadership. And you see that within the formations within the Ukraine. And they have stood tall over the years, you know, in the face of a, you know, numerically and economically superior opponent.

A couple other lessons if you look at the operational level, which is great, is, you know, we talk about the introduction of drones and their ubiquitous nature that you see across the battlespace. Now the Institute of the Study of War came out, and they identified four of the five greatest innovations that we’ve seen have all been within the UAS, and then from UAS, counter-UAS, and long-range sensing, kinetic capability, non-kinetic capability, comms capability. With the fifth being electronic warfare, operating and fighting within that spectrum.

And then also, you can’t hide on the modern battlefield. You know, whether it’s our EW and our ability to work and identify with – you know, anytime you push the talk you can be identified, to the use of space-based capabilities, that you’re not going to hide. So how do you hide in that plain sight? And how do you – how do you mask, you know, your electronic warfare signature in that spectrum?

So we’ve drawn these lessons learned, and then we are incorporating those in the way in which we train. And you look at both at home station training and then at our premier training environments out at the National Training Center and the Joint Readiness Training Center. So you set the environment that’s going to mirror that, so that you can both operate offensively in that, then also prepare yourself defensively. And that’s what we’re doing.

I mean, the last rotation we had a JRTC just a couple weeks ago with the 101st, you know, we provided them with almost 400 drones within a brigade. I mean, 400. Think about that. And we’re learning a lot of lessons about, you know, spectrum management and, you know, soldier cognitive load. But then also drone swarms on the offense. How do you plan? How do you synchronize? How do you deconflict your airspace and airspace management? And then also in the defense of such, how do you do that?

Dr. Karako: And how’s that going, in terms of the training with the with the drones and the training center? And how are you seeing that?

Gen. Poppas: Well, I watch these iteratively. And each one – the first strength we always have is that our ability to communicate at the command level and below. And our chief, you know, he’s directed – General George, said, we want to get out, we ought to – we need to write more from the soldier level all the way up to the leader level. So lessons learned are getting out quicker. But then also crosstalk among our commands and the formal nature of after-action reviews that we have. And I’m finding those lessons learned through flat communications of our commanders is really seeing an increase of all of our formations as they move forward.

And I watch it. That was the second iteration for the 101st. It was second brigade the first time. This was first brigade. And the challenges that they had, whether it was network management, airspace management, drone control, or just overall, you know, the C2 and maneuver, we’re learning new lessons. They’ve incorporated that. The new challenges that we’re providing them, and then they’re learning from that, and they’re adjusting. And we’re getting better at each one.

You know, the hiding in plain sight, the ability to remote, you know, your antennas, so if you do get collected on they’re not at the same location where your headquarters actually is, which is – goes to the survivability. I saw one of the wonderful things that was 1st Armored Division out at the National Training Center, as he moved his small tactical ops center, four vehicles, he incorporated a wrecker in it. And, you know, why would you do that? Because if you’re scanning the battlefield and you’re looking what’s a high-value target, you’re never going to think that a command of – you know, the colonel’s commanding from a from a wrecker. Sorry, the division commander. It was in a division command node. A two-star’s driving around with a wrecker.

So it just adds to survivability, putting out decoys that put out false emitters that are going to draw, and it’s drawing fires from the enemy because it’s mirroring what would be a battalion brigade or lower level headquarters, which is part of their high-value target, while masking your own for survivability. And, again, from second brigade to first they even had that in their prep and they discussed that, is how we’re going to do that, based on lessons learned from previous.

Dr. Karako: And much of that is a species of passive defense. But you mentioned counter-UAS as well, which is now in basic training. When we had the former head of the JCO over here now, Sean Gainey, he said, look, there’s two things first and foremost, capacity and training. And how do you get the capacity sufficient for that? How are you thinking about that? And then on the training side as well, how – you mentioned the training on the UASes. But how are you thinking about the training for the counter?

Gen. Poppas: Well, we’re not just thinking about it. We’re actually in execution of it. But the beauty of, like anything else, it’s continuing to develop. And one of the other lessons we saw from the Ukraine is within three weeks whatever new initiative has been proposed, there’s a counter that will come out within three weeks. So that is the speed in which innovation is taking place. And we’re seeing that also with our own drone and counter-drone technology, and the way in which we approach that. And, you know, we have a number of areas that we’re training on because, with our formations that rotate through the Middle East, I mean, that is an imminent threat.

So we have both the capabilities that we’re providing them before units rotate over there. We go through the academics, and then they work through the actual implementation of those capabilities. And it’s a layered and integrated capacity that we have to have. And that comes from the individual that’s standing out there with the Dronebuster, all the way up to, you know, theater capacity that we utilize.

And what I love, though, and I just – you know, as we were out at with you – you had General Rainey out here – as we looked at the last capstone event, with the innovation, the experimentation, bringing industry in, what we’re doing – whether it’s within the EW spectrum, with microwave capability, with, you know, all sorts of new technologies that are being brought online – integrating them, testing them at the rate of our training capacity, and putting them out there, and then validating those which work and incorporating them very quickly. And then you can – then we deploy them forward, and they’re being utilized and refined.

Dr. Karako: Let me just pull this a little bit more because it’s such a big deal, because it’s just central to war, as you quoted earlier in that article. You know, you see Coyotes taking out UASes in the Middle East, to shift to that theater for a minute. What are you bringing back on that front on the learning side, on the training side, in terms of the active engagement, for instance?

Gen. Poppas: Well, the active engagements, obviously – you talk a lot about the passive, but our active capability is how best to employ them. What are the enemy TTPs that they’re going to utilize? And then, what is the full capacity if you have a Coyote? And then what is the saturation point where you need multiple capacities in order to deny the enemy the ability to meet that success? And then, you know, Coyote is one capability, but then you integrate those with passive capabilities. And those are the lessons we bring back, and continue to test them.

Then, as we see the capacity – that’s what I love about the training centers and having a professional opposing force down there. They’re more like a sparring partner. They’re not there to win. They’re there to find those gaps or push you to the point of failure that you get to adjust from. And UAS is one of those. So where we find we’ve met success with our Coyote, or we integrate them now with, you know, the Dronebuster, or other capabilities we have, we know where you can saturate and meet success and overwhelm it. And we do that. So it forces you in the protection war fighting function, OK, how are you integrating those? And where you, as a commander, going to have to assume risk in order to make sure, if this is your priority, how are you protecting that?

Dr. Karako: I don’t know who came up with Dronebuster, but that’s just a dang cool name.

Gen. Poppas: Yeah. Good marketing.

Dr. Karako: Yeah. Security force assistance brigades. How do you think about them in your overall global mission set? And what lessons are you taking from working with partner nations there?

Gen. Poppas: Well, they’re a great economy of force capacity. And what I have found – I remember, I was there during their inception, and the thought process of how we created them, and what their mission is going to be. And you can see the demand from each of the combatant commanders, because what they do. From a FORSCOM perspective, I’ll get back to those, if you recall when we were doing that mission we had tasked a full brigade but it didn’t need the full complement of 3,500 soldiers. It stripped out the leadership. So all of a sudden, you’d have this – you’d have a large element of soldiers left behind.

You know, that’s lost capacity to utilize. You know, it’s not the kinetic energy. It’s now potential. So a purpose-built formation with the expertise. And we’ve seen through repetition and their execution forward, the demand is there. It professionalizes other formations in which they engage with. It also provides the assurance formation, builds the bonds as we move forward. And they’ve been proven highly successful where they’ve been utilized, especially as an economy of force with Southern Command. And in that region they’ve been highly successful because that’s another formation that doesn’t have a lot of assigned forces to utilize what they need to. So, again, as an economy of force, the utilization of these elements, they go to multiple nations and be very precise where they’re engaging. And then you’ve got the metrics of success of where they’re increasing the capacity of those foreign formations. You’ve seen an incredible increase. The demand continues to go up. That’s for all of them.

Dr. Karako: Well, you mentioned earlier your core mission of warfighting readiness. Talk to us a little bit about your philosophy of that and how concretely your – on a daily/weekly basis you’re focusing on readiness.

Gen. Poppas: Every day. It is, because that’s what we’re held accountable for.

Dr. Karako: (Laughs.) I did say daily. Yeah

Gen. Poppas: Yeah, daily. Moment to moment. But it is a continuous conversation that we have.

And again, a couple of the ways that we’ve approached this in terms of readiness, you know, we have so many challenges. We’ve taken on a little bit more. The Army manning guidance, we have taken on the actual allocation of some of the formations of the individuals so we can build a capacity. And we tie it to SecDef-directed missions, so we want to make sure – look, many of us in this room lived through, you know, Army Forces Generation Model, and doing the deployment because of the demands you’d meet people at the departure airfield and you kind of storm, form, and norm with components of that as you moved into combat. So we need to back that up.

So we want to make sure that if we have an element that’s going to be deploying on a mission that we make sure we provide them the manning to get them up to a higher percent – right to 100 percent a year to nine months out, and then continue to fill them. Why? Because if you’re an armor unit, you have to go through gunnery. You got to build those skills within the – your formation. You’ve got to be able to synchronize and execute. And that only comes through repetition of a task. Same thing with an infantry unit. Same thing with any formation that goes forward. You want to man it – just spoke – so you can build the formation, so you can train the formation, and then it’s ready to fight on inception.

Now, we continue to man throughout. We also change, you know, part of the rotation, the YMAV it’s called, when you rotate. You’re two years in a job and you rotate out. Infuriating to me.

Dr. Karako: (Laughs.)

Gen. Poppas: Why? Because you never do that. You know, and if it’s about the best team you’re going to put on the field, especially something that has such risk as combat, you want the best team that you’ve built to go forward and fight at every echelon. And not because of a false horizon – hey, you’ve been in the job two years; you got to go so somebody else gets a chance – no.

Look, I hate the Patriots because I’m a Packer fan, but you’d never pull Tom Brady –

Dr. Karako: (Laughs.)

Gen. Poppas: – after winning two Super Bowls and say, hey, you’ve had your opportunity, no, now we got to bring in another person. No, you put the best person out there to win.

So the change of this was, if we’re building a team that’s going to deploy and you hit the false horizon of two years in command, you’re staying in command to go through. And what we’ve now passed, we’ve taken it from, you know, our personnel section and put it to the commander.

Now, Joe Katz is a brigade commander. What we tell him is, you hold everybody, but here’s what you owe back to us: Tell us when we can rotate them out. Because you don’t want to come back after that and all of a sudden 3,500 people have this waterfall and you become unready. When are you going to rotate out those NCOs that have to go through your education system, when the commanders have to rotate out so you have fresh commanders and you rotate over time? And then even you as a battalion or brigade commander, depending on the environment, we’ll rotate you forward when the time is right, not because the time is that horizon. So we look at ways – that’s the manning of it.

And our training, as we spoke before, we put out training guidance, and part of that guidance is we look to the future, our new doctrine. You know, our 3.0 – and I won’t ask people who’s actually read it, because most of you will lie – but there’s a part of that that, you know, used to be the brigade now it’s the division, which is your principal unit of action. All right? So that means we have to go back to the division for large-scale combat operations. So we have to train back to the division as we had previously. But now we’re training that division, unlike the ’90s, in domains that we didn’t in the previous. So our training guidance has to reflect that, and our resourcing has to reflect our ability to do that.

And as – like anything else, it’s a progressive, making sure that from that individual level where we make contact, we never sacrifice our ability to dominate the first fight at the point of the bayonet, but all the way up to synchronizing at echelons – at the battalion and the brigade, and now the division. So as we write out how we’re going to train and put the demands on them, to include extended field time – so you have to do at least one 14-day exercise at a minimum so that the whole formation goes to the field. You can’t – you know, over a three-day exercise, if something breaks you can wait. Fourteen days, you’re going to have to bring your maintainers out to the field and do field maintenance. You’re going to have to bring your aviation brigade to the field. You’re going to have to bring your fires formation. And it’s an extended period and you learn that fieldcraft and survivability.

We also make you train at night. Fifty percent of your training has to be at night. Live-fire training, directing all this. You know, out-of-sector air assaults that have to go at distance so you can move both the logistics and your flight planning.

So we as we lay that out there and we resource that for our home-station training, but then also drive it – because we run both CTCs – is to make sure that environment is set. So once we bring you up to that level, when you hit the CTCs you are going to hit that near-peer, sometimes superior enemy capability, and train and refine what you have to do in that environment.

And we’ve introduced, as we talk about readiness, since the division is now the unit of action, you know, our warfighters would get our divisions and our corps and ease up to the theater army. That’s where you get your staff competencies because it’s simulation. Well, that was great. But now, as we’ve seen with brigades, you need to put them in the dirt. So we are now rotating division headquarters with their functional brigades – the whole aviation brigade, the whole sustainment brigade, the artillery brigade.

Then we EDRE rocket capabilities – HIMARS and MLRS, because that’s what the division will fight with – out to the National Training Center and the Joint Readiness Training Center, and we put them against an opposing force. We attach SFABs, Special Forces, to force the division what they’re going to have to do in combat in that same training cauldron that the brigades went through. And that’s – and we’re learning an incredible amount of lessons.

And that’s – the one that I’ll tell you, so you can be great in simulation, but we do it after the warfighter so that the simulation – your staffs are proficient; so you can take that highly trained staff, now put the friction of, you know, real life in there. And I – there was an artillery unit that was out there to Vardy and they’d just gone through their warfighter. And if you’re running short of water, ammunition, or anything, you hit the button because you’ve done a good log stat and it says, you know, resupply, pow, you’re now green on water. When they got out to the rotation, they did not have good log stats. They’re green, green, green, realizing they weren’t doing the right log stat in the – in the running estimates. And then one morning they – the morning update, it went from a hundred percent to black. They were literally out of water. And these are real humans out there that get very thirsty.

And just the night before, they’d had a sandstorm that knocked out the communications. It also impacted their trucks and their ability to produce water. So suddenly they had a crisis where they couldn’t produce the water, they had trouble communicating it, the trucks couldn’t move it, yet you still had thirsty people out there. Those are the lessons that you have to learn that only being out in the environment drives.

And then the last piece I’ll talk – I know I’m drawing this because I love it –

Dr. Karako: No, you –

Gen. Poppas: We drove this, this long-range air assaults. You’ve got China, like, that’s got the most up-to-date integrated air defenses of our – you know, the best of breed of all of our adversaries, and the Air Force used that. So we nest with the Air Force on a number of their exercises where they have to penetrate and do their attacks and they’re rehearsing that. Well, how do we nest with them so we can synchronize on multiple objectives with our capabilities?

And in doing that, we put it at a distance where you’re going to have to – you’re going to have to refuel up there. You don’t get enough loiter time. So it makes to the commander: Plan your flight route so it’s survivable. And then, as a commander: Do I refuel before, which puts you at risk anytime you touch down, as I look at my aviator friends, that you might not break friction again coming up? But if I don’t and I go to the objective, I have less loiter time, and then I do have to come out.

So it’s forcing the logistics forward. It’s forcing the planning. It’s forcing the execution. And if you fly and execute your flight plan, it’s survivable against the most current IEDs that are out there.

Dr. Karako: So you mentioned the move to a division-centric force construct. Could you break down a little bit more in terms of what that means in practice? And then, likewise, you mentioned, you know, large-scale combat operations, a.k.a. war. How do you quantify and measure readiness, given especially this is so dramatically different from what we’ve been doing the last 20 years or so?

Gen. Poppas: And we have the requirement for validation of the formation. So we have to go back, and I send a note to the chief: This unit I validate at this level of readiness, training level one, you know. And I – the CTCs are the best indicator of that coming out, and you have so many feedback mechanisms in order to do that to draw those conclusions.

But part of that training that you spoke about, and I – you know, we spoke about the warfighter with the division, but one of the key pieces – now we’re in – you know, the corps now are being incorporated either the high comm or as an operating unit, so you’re communicating directly with an actual headquarters that you’re going to operate with. 

And as the high command over the top we’ve now incorporated our theater armies. So the one we just did over in Europe that just ended the other day, we – you know, we had U.S. Army Europe as the high comm, you know, with Fifth Corps and Third Corps, U.S. base, as part of the training audience with a British, a French, an English, and American divisions underneath them.

But when you incorporate the theater army along with the corps that’s going to fight there, and remove the corps to different theaters – 18th did an underneath USARPAC, not just First Corps, you get used to the other areas in which you’re going to have to operate. You get used to working with higher headquarters that might communicate differently. You learn personalities of those commands. You’re not learning it in contact for the first time. And you also learn by doing that – and the division’s imperative – is we’ve elevated capabilities from the brigade. We’ve harvested them to the division that’s going to really be that synchronizing headquarters across the battlespace.

And now we’re operating cyber, space, soft integration, areas we hadn’t had to previously. There’s capacity that we have to build at the division. But they also have to learn what capabilities are out there, because the brigades – and this is where the division is important – brigades don’t have a deep fight anymore. The division has to set those conditions for the brigade. So understanding what capacity the division has for me as a brigade commander, and how do I communicate that – to put that in terms of, here the effects I need and here’s a mechanism to talk to me about that. And the division has to make sure that their staff understands that and there’s now responsibilities to create products for the brigade to execute that previously were inherent in the brigade.

And what does our divisional staff have to look like now that we put these new demands and work in new domains? And we’re creating that. And the CTCs are identifying that, because when you ask for something and there’s nobody there to answer, you know, you got a gap. And if they haven’t provided it, which they’re supposed to, you know, you got another gap. And you write that down. But then also up to the theater level, because as a theater army you’ve got the ability to do things, especially within space and cyber, that’s not relevant even at the JTF level of the division. So that cross-communication, because it’s symbiotic, in order to execute those tasks, that’s how we’re driving the higher echelon formations in order to communicate, to set the conditions. So, again, back to the individual that’s at the pointy end of the bayonet is going to be successful.

Dr. Karako: You mentioned, you know, units coming back from other parts of the world, coming in, doing trainings, all this – all this sort of thing. But what about the Guard and Reserve? How does that rotate in and out for your readiness efforts?

Gen. Poppas: Yeah. And, again, back to the fourth win, because everybody loves winning. But the fourth, of the balanced armor, we have to do it together. And we’ve started that. Now, the limiting factor we have, obviously, with Guard and Reserve is time. So how do you make sure that we can train them up to get to that level, because we’re going to fight together and build the competencies? And first we put out, at the FORSCOM level, it’s kind of really a partnership. Not directive, but each of the corps, so that we can train and work together, so that you have a habitual relationship where you’re going to work – analytics, combat support, and service support.

And I’ll use the division. The Guard’s got eight divisions. You know, TAGs can’t train divisions. They recognize that. Who trains our divisions? Corps, theater armies, and FORSCOM. So we put the guard divisions underneath corps. And the down-trace units, we’ve nested them, especially in the combat support and service support, with corps and divisions. So we formalized that. So as they develop training plans – and I just came back from Fort Lewis. We had to brief, here’s our training plan, and here are the Guard and Reserve units that are being nested into our training so that we’re working together. And we tell them – on other operations, where it’s not – we call it derivative UIC, where a derivative is just a portion of it – that doesn’t build readiness for the formation.

If you’re going to bring a Guard and Reserve unit, get the whole formation, and give them tasks that they have to execute so they’re building up that higher echelon of readiness. So they’re developing plans in advance, nested four years out for these major exercise, little tighter turn at lower levels, that we synchronize at the four-year level, so that we get the Guard and Reserve nested into those. And just some of the initiatives that they have, John Stubbs, who’s in charge of the Guard, great partner. Moving forward. Is you have a CTC rotation. It’s very tough to train a whole armor brigade to get into the CTC. And the time horizon for doing that doesn’t fit within the constraints that they have.

But what can they do in the way that we fight in the future? Everybody in combat has had an attachment of a platoon or a company, even up to battalion. So he’s developed a minute man approach, and I love it. So when you’re out at NTC or JRTC, you’re going to go on a major attack. And you’re going to have losses. So a couple of things when I come back to that. So you still have missions that come forward. In the minute man routine, they can’t be out there for the entire duration of the rotation. But within their training days they can take a company, and we EDRE that Guard company. And we put them out there. And then the gaining unit, the brigade that’s out there, has to do the reception, you know, the integration, the onward movement of that formation, and tie them in.

And then they’re going to be part of a specific operation for a duration of time. We’ve got an attack coming up. Here’s an attached Guard company. So they get integrated, and they get that higher level training, nested with a battalion, brigade, whoever echelon they come in at, and they execute the task, and at the end of the task they come out. And then the continuation of the training. They get that level of training, and it’s integrated in, and the relationships continue. And we’re doing the same with the combat support and service support. I mean literally, as we speak now, Mojave Falcon out at NTC, there’s going to be a brigade rotation.

But on top of that, you know, oftentimes when we train they set up a scenario. And it says, hey, we’re in an attack. And this is separate from our CTC. And the Reserve says we’re going to have MASCAL. And they bring out the dummies and they move them. Well, anybody who’s been part of a training rotation knows you’re going to have a MASCAL every operation out in the desert or in Louisiana. So we nest. We bring out a whole field hospital. And we put it out in the desert. And we took their ability to move bulk fuel, which is one of the responsibilities in Reserve, and we took them out of Hunter Liggett. And every day they’ve got to push 50,000 gallons of fuel out of Hunter Liggett down to the NTC.

The MASCAL is right outside the box, even though it’s an operational unit, and its casualties would come out of the rotation. They have to evac them, triage them. And then those that have to get further evac for higher, they’ve got the capability of doing that. And then return to service for those that are. That is putting stress in the formation through all three compos. And that’s things that we coordinate at our levels. I will tell you, at the divisional, the brigade, even at the battalion level there is cross communication to get smaller organizations and echelons into that level of training. And we drive that. And those relationships are building.

Dr. Karako: Well, this might be a good place to put a – bring in a question from the audience. Could you share any current or planned talent management initiatives from FORSCOM to generate the propensity for public service from Generation Z and beyond. I have to confess, I don’t know what’s beyond Gen Z, but I’m sure somebody will tell me.

Gen. Poppas: Wow. Propensity for service for Gen Z and beyond. Let me talk first inside the formation till I’m influencing outside. So this last rotation, who sent that question? (Laughter.) I’ll tell you the –

Mr. Karako: I’ll protect you.

Gen. Poppas: Internally, when you look at talent management, the requirements that we have, this last rotation, you know, the ubiquitous nature of the UAVs, you know, we had a platoon – there 15 Whiskeys that are aviators that used to fly our shadow. Well, that’s great when you’d have two or three shadows flying. But now we realized we need more of those type of individuals down at echelon, division, brigade, down at the battalion, and then a capability to train up. This is the talent management we have to grow within our formation in order to incorporate. And that’s just for our UAS.

And part of that UAS, we realize, is frequency management. And not only frequency management, but airspace management. And, again, I look to my helicopter pilot friend, and say, when you had one or two shadows it was easy. When you have 400 UAVs possibly being in your airspace, that’s a risk if you don’t do the proper airspace management. And if you’re on the ground and you see a UAS flying around, you don’t know. And that Dronebuster, the Coyote, might apply against drones, which we’re seeing over in the Ukraine. A lot of the UAVs that are shot down, they’re shooting down their own because they don’t know.

So we’ve got to build those competencies in airspace management, UAV execution. And then even in electromagnetic spectrum. You know, as we do separate labs we have capability to collect on the enemy, you need multiple capabilities beyond what we had previously. And not at the brigade or battalion. We learned in the last rotation, you need to push that forward. You need to push that forward with the scouts, with your forward-most elements so that you can identify – you do frequency management, both what the enemy is using, you know, what they’re blocking and what they’re utilizing, so that you can block that and you know where you can fly. And that supports offensive capabilities.

You can’t always do that from the back. So we have to build out – you’re talking about managing the intellectual capacity of our individuals and what talent management we need. So that’s inside. And that’s just two examples. And cyber is growing. Space is growing. We have to build those competencies. We don’t have the warrant officer corps yet. That’s got to grow over time and in competencies. And we’re going to train that. And we’re identifying more in every rotation that we have because of the new capabilities brought on.

Dr. Karako: Well, maybe let me reformulate a little bit to focus on the – just the Gen Z part. Which is to say, what are the qualities that you’re seeing in some of your youngest soldiers to get after those new competencies you’re talking about?

Gen. Poppas: Yeah. And some of those competencies, when I go back to the UAS, you know, the common – you know, the manipulation of the of the common controller. And we’ve gone back to that. Like, my – I got a Gen Z. But my young-ins, they can pick it up and they understand it right off the bat. The way that we use apps on our phone that we’re incorporating now into our C2 capabilities, to them it’s second nature. They can easily modify, adapt, and incorporate that into everything they do. The train-up isn’t there.

There’s an incredible amount of, you know, what they call them, digital natives coming forward that, in this future fight, space, cyber again, SOF, comms integration, anything digital, the UAS capability, they already have the ground-based skills in order to do that. Now this comes back to – I’m not sure it’s to the propensity to serve – but letting people know that, hey, if you’re a cyber person, and that’s something you want, if you’re a coder, you’re absolutely necessary on the future battlefield. If you’re an electromagnetic spectrum mass analysis and, you know, that takes a TS clearance, we need you on the front part. UAS, all of these.

But just let people know that that is something that our recruiters go out and bring in. And we’re changing the way in which we actually recruit the individuals, and changing the MOS so when the recruiters talk about – I mean, if you came in today – we found you can still come in and Shadow mechanic is an MOS. We don’t have Shadows anymore. We’ve got to move quicker than that, so that the recruiters are out there and they’re getting a 15 Whiskey, that you can be an individual UAS flyer with a first-person viewer – like you in your basement, but now you’re on the battlefield. And I think we just have to let people know that that’s out there, and those skills are things that they enjoy doing, or working on UASes, or doing 3-D manufacturing, are skills that we’re bringing into the military today.

Dr. Karako: Well, let me shift to kind of the big topic, the big word of the day. And that is, of course, transformation. A number of our recent Strategic Landpower Dialogue speakers been talking about TIC, transformation in contact. I wonder if you might say, what does TIC mean to you, or to FORSCOM, and kind of how have you been implementing that? And also implementing, frankly, some of those lessons from Ukraine, whether it be thinking about armor or light vehicles. How are you implementing that on the TIC side?

Gen. Poppas: Well, I’m actually a big fan of transformation in contact. And, one, because of the speed in which we’re executing. And transformation in contact has a 12 to 18 month execution window. That’s why it’s “in contact.” You know, you still have some major programs. You know, if you’re bringing in the new v3 – M1A2 v3, you’re not going to do that in contact. There’s a little more deliberate approach. But for the formations we have today there’s three really components to TIC. And we have to tell some of our formations, it’s not like Christmas, you open a box, you have UAVs and new, you know, communications. There’s three components to it.

First, it was structure. What do we have to look like for the future fight? And, you know, the second was the equipping. What is it that we’re inducing into this new formation to make it more lethal and effective, and then to start to reflect that? Then the third piece is training. And what I’ve – what I’ve loved about the transformation in contact, through that acceleration you bypass some of the older processes, especially with equipping, where, you know, you’d develop it, you’d hand it off to a quick lab – not quick lab – but a lab test. Then you give it to a test formation. And then you start to expand it over time, over the course of, literally, years.

Well, now, as it’s being developed we’re handing it to the formation, because nothing’s going to test it better in realistic conditions than handing it to a formation in the dirt. And they’ll let you know how quickly it breaks, how quickly it works, or doesn’t work. And we’re adjusting out there. And we have actual engineers that are forward with that, and coders forward. So by introducing it to the formation, that’s the equipping side. And then the structure. As we looked at how we’re going to fight, we went to the formations that are actually fighting that. And we looked at the 25th Infantry Division, we looked at the 101st, and then, for us, the corps.

So we looked, what do we need to have? What does the structure need to look like moving forward? And we had tested it. All right, do we need a – do we need a scout platoon? How many people are the squad that still fits? Introduction of the vehicles, now we’re bringing in, you know, LASSO and loitering munitions. What structure do we need? And you’re having this dialog. And then as you – as you scratch it out, and you put, you know, your alpha model out there. Then you war game it. You test it. Say, OK, we found a couple gaps. And you come with the beta.

And then we take it out to the field and start to fight it. We did multiple iterations at home station with the 101st, the 25th, and the 10th Mountain. And then we – as we refine it, rehearse it, then we go down to the training center. So as we refined our structure, we introduced the equipping throughout the time frame, hopefully got time to train up with it. Some came at time of need when they’re actually down at Fort Polk and said, hey, here’s a new capability we want you to incorporate. And we’re learning lessons about, you know, can they communicate with each other, and needed coders. And then it’s the training methodology for that and moving forward. How do we best incorporate that?

And we’re learning a lot in that approach and doing it in that manner. But it’s accelerating it. We’ve just come out with the structure for the mobile BCT. We started that just under a year ago. And now through multiple iterations in training we had our final discussion last week with the chief, said here’s our recommendation, here’s the equipping that we see, here’s the structure that it needs, and here’s our training methodology going forward. And we’re just going to slap the table and we’re going to move forward. It’s not in stone, and we’re going to continue to learn more – new equipment will come and we can change – but it gives us something to move forward from. And I love the mobile concept.

Dr. Karako: Well –

Gen. Poppas: That was the light. You talk about heavy –

Dr. Karako: Keep jumping in. (Laughs.)

Gen. Poppas: But as I talk about the heavy, no, now we’re going into our armor formations and we’re not replacing all tanks with, you know, infantry squad vehicles because the tank still has a dominant role in the future fight. But what does the armor formation need? It’s our next-generation command and control, our communication on the move. It’s our ability to use the UAVs for our armor formations that have different requirements. It’s the electromagnetic spectrum so that they can hide and can be – you know, that they can hide and also identify the enemy and be much more effective in their execution. It’s protection capabilities.

You know, as a light person, even ISV are moving, I only move so fast. But a tank can move pretty damn fast and that formation can. So do we have the right capabilities for protection so that they can be effective when they make contact and they make contact on their terms?

Dr. Karako: Well, another big, giant piece of the ATI memo was command structure – creation of a Western Hemisphere Command, aligning several commands that weren’t – were separate, for instance. What does that mean for FORSCOM? And what’s that – what problems or challenges is that going to pose for you?

Gen. Poppas: I think it’s a great opportunity for Forces Command. Take it all on.

Dr. Karako: (Laughs.)

Gen. Poppas: There’s a – right now we have teams that are going through what that looks like, because, you know, right now Forces Command is a functional command. We have – you know, we’re driven by 10-87 on the readiness. We’re the field force headquarters and the force provider for the Army. Army units are assigned to us that are not assigned to the combatant commands, and we’re responsible for the readiness. That’s a functional headquarters. You know, when you look at the components that support NORTHCOM and SOUTHCOM that are going to be absorbed into this new command, those are operational requirements and I’ve dealt with them. You know, those are – those are requirements that are out there that we, inherent in our own formation, do not have.

So, as we look at approach to that – and the team is meeting right now, so I can’t give you a block chart on what we’re going to look like because we’re looking at all requirements – we got to start with, what are the authoritative documents? What are we told to do? What do you have to do under the Unified Command Plan as a component? What are all the tasks that those – ARNORTH and ARSOUTH execute? You write that down. What are the 10-87 tasks that the secretary has placed upon Forces Command? You put those down. Then all the subtasks. Then we look at the tasks. Then you can start building out the staff – OK, in order to do that, here’s what we require. And then you look at where does it need to reside. What do we not have? You know, SOUTHCOM has some incredible capacity – you know, Spanish speakers, Portuguese speakers, regional expertise – that is not – that is not resident in my headquarters today. It will be. You know, the OP centers – the battle tracks; you know, NIFC, which is the fires; the hurricanes; everything that takes place here; the defense of CONUS that, you know, General Guillot has an expectation that ARNORTH is tied into and the responsibilities they have – those are going to have to be absorbed.

And we have to have – I mean, it’s a logical progression to get there with rigor of thought to make sure that, first, that there’s no mission that we’re required to do that doesn’t migrate over to the new headquarters. That’s our responsibility. Then articulating risk. And the final part is the wear, and we’ll – that’ll be refined.

Dr. Karako: So you were kind of lighting up when you were talking about electronic warfare and masking your signatures and things like that. I wonder, what other emerging or maybe emergent – newly emergent technologies are you thinking about? I have in mind here directed energy. Could be any other number of things. But what else are you thinking about on that front?

Gen. Poppas: Well, I – as you look across the spectrum of capabilities, first, next-generation C2. How do we communicate on the move? How do you have – especially with low-Earth orbit mesh networks that allow you to continue to communicate, move forward, the capacity to continue to push information down, really, the division and brigade. Our capacity at the lower level – what information do they actually need, so you’re not overwhelming them; then, how can you incorporate that up? So that whole C2, the next generation of command and control, that’s going to give us greater flexibility and lethality to mitigate some of the ability of our enemy to interrupt with us. To me that’s huge, because if you got the right leadership in C2 you can maneuver and put the enemy at a position of disadvantage at any time.

Capability-wise, especially in the UAS as we’re looking at the laser technology. We are finding microwave technology being refined and electronic warfare spectrum, space-based capabilities in order to do all that. Those are continuing to progress, you know, at an exponential rate, you know. And I would love to have Jim Rainey here, who’s my partner in crime, as we talk about the capabilities, because we build requirements that he then articulates and puts those on industry, and this is an industry that is really nesting with us. And I saw that out at NTC last, where CTOs of a number of our major corporations – our major tech firms – were out there, which I think five, 10 years ago you wouldn’t have seen. But they are out there and they’re pushing their own money, their own development to the betterment of the defense of this nation. And those areas alone I’m very impressed with. With our UAS capability – you know, the loitering munitions, the new capabilities and the distances that they can operate at, and our ability to protect those so that they’re – that they’re not subject to counter-capabilities of our adversaries I think is highly effective.

Dr. Karako: Let me go back to the DE thing for a minute, directed energy – lasers, high-powered microwaves, other things. How do you think about that, especially from a – from a training thing? I mean, first of all, this is – this is invisible, for the most part. And also, if you point lasers and such in the wrong place, a soldier points them in the wrong direction, that’s a – that may be a bad day. So how do you think about that from a training side?

Gen. Poppas: Well, there’s challenges to training with any of those, obviously, and it’s a post by post; we do a full assessment. Even flying our UAS, you know, where you’re constrained at Fort Campbell because we have two major approach routes for airlines, you know, there’s some things we could do; there’s a lot of things we couldn’t do. And it’s hard to get exceptions just because of the safety, and we have to clear those through. But other posts are a little more permissive.

So where we can do that, you know, we set up areas in which we can train. And we found – so post by post. Sometimes it’s planning, you can do it at lower levels. We’re not at the point of, you know, executing microwave technologies out there at Campbell or others, but how do you incorporate that. Intellectually you know the capacity and you can plan for their integration. But then there are locations, especially at our CTCs, that are much more permissive. And so that you’ve planned, you can execute.

Now, once you get to the CTCs, you know, that National Training Center and Joint Readiness Training Center, that’s for CONUS, and obviously you’ve got one in Europe and one in Hawaii and Alaska. But for ours, the ability to execute those tasks that you’ve planned and warfightered, now you’re going to do it in real life because you can execute those there. And that’s the implementation of it.

So you’re trained where you can, where you’re at. Those other areas that we have centers of excellence for execution. Tenth Mountain’s one where we use UAS and counter-UAS because the rotations have the Middle East and they’ve written a great SOP that we’ve adopted, and it’s a great place to go train on before you go, so it’s easy to migrate there – send the training element there because it’s a permissive environment. And then, when you want to get to that highest level of execution of the actual implementation of the utilization of the capability, you go to the CTCs to do that.

Dr. Karako: Apart from the CTCs, though, how are you thinking about transformation in contact and – especially for home-station training, and then the iterating of the lessons back and forth?

Gen. Poppas: Well, if you’re talking about a specific capability, if it’s the UAS, microwave –

Dr. Karako: In general.

Gen. Poppas: Well, each one of those our home-station training, obviously, is the – is part of the progression moving forward, you know, CTC being the capstone, and not everybody gets a CTC every year. So we really put a lot of emphasis back on the organization and the unit. You know, the division commander that owns that post, how are they training? How are they executing those tasks we put upon – on them, and then, obviously, their own guidance that they’ve provided with the feedback mechanism?

Part of that training is when you – you know, as I said before, we put them out there for an extended period of time. They’re going to do the building blocks and the enabling tasks at the lower level. But when, when they start bringing it together, forcing all the element – the division staff to be out there, the functional brigades – you know, the operational brigades are usually out in the field for periods anyway. But when you bring everybody together, that’s where you start bringing all the synchronization of the warfighting functions, if I can use that, together. So if it’s, you know, your protection assets that we spoke about here, the division’s coordinating that. The brigade that’s in the field is going to be executing that. So that planning and the execution of what they can do post by post, the planning’s being executed and then the actual implementation is being executed also at that point. And then the cross talk that we have amongst commanders in the forums that we have, obviously, the readiness and training forums, you know, we have that cross communication of what was effective, how to best implement it, and then if there’s something that we can do at one location then we’ll try – not try, but we’ll put elements that are up there in order to get better if it’s specific.

Then they can bring them back to their post and bring it together as a collective at the higher level. Yeah, I think higher level is battalion to brigade, and then the brigade to the division, with the functional brigades in the field.

Dr. Karako: So early on, towards the very beginning, I think you mentioned something about the Ukrainians, and you highlighted some leadership qualities that you were seeing that was helping them withstand a numerically superior force. How do you think about leadership? How do you focus – what’s your philosophy on that for FORSCOM, for training generally?

Gen. Poppas: Well, I’ll tell you, to me leadership makes a difference. It’s the intangible in combat. And you know – and physical presence makes a difference. And the team that you built, you know, we talk about the people, and teams are cohesive because they’ve been together. They have shared experiences. You know, they have shared hardships. They have shared successes. And I’ll start at that lower level, and then we’ll talk about infusing the warrior spirit into the individual all the way up to the collective.

And I tell them it starts every morning now at 0630. That’s PT – not time to get your teeth fixed, car fixed, stay at home. That’s when you’re in there, PT. Why? What I love about it – and some of you have heard this before – because, though it’s 6:15, everybody’s milling about because you don’t want to be late to the formation. So if I’m a team leader, I’m listening. You know, and I hear that, you know, Private – (laughs) – Katz just bought a motorcycle he’s bragging about. I also know Private Katz doesn’t have a license, you know? (Laughter.) And Scott Pence, Corporal Pence, you know, his daughter’s on the honor roll, or somebody’s having marital troubles. Whatever it is, you pick up these things. But it’s the human contact that you have and you’re discussing things, and I think that’s important.

You know, then it’s 6:30. You know, you fall in, you salute the flag. And then another key point, you know: Those that aren’t physically fit to do physical training that morning fall out to the back and you look at them. And my point is – and that’s why everybody’s got to be there, a guy being hurt and you’re going to get back in. But if you’re broken and you can’t do PT, you can’t lead where you can’t go. And if you’re broken as a leader and you’re not going to be there in the fight, I can’t keep you in the formation; I got to move you out, you know, and you can recover elsewhere. But that’s a fighting formation. Offensive line of football, if you’re missing your – you know, your right guard, you know, that they’re not in the game, your quarterback’s going to die. Everybody’s got to be there. But then, as your right-face and you step off, you’re doing PT together, and leaders are out there leading. And I used to tell them: The worse the weather, the more visible you got to be. And then, throughout the day, leaders have to be there. Got to unencumber the company commanders we’ve talked about, unencumber the squad leaders. They’ve got to be out there so they’re going through it together.

On top of that, the expertise. That company commander, that first sergeant, they’ve got expertise that they’ve got to share. Battalion commanders in some instances are the first echelon that have done things that we haven’t done for a while, so they’ve got to be out there coaching and mentoring prior then also being out there to make sure and supervising. That presence builds the team. That’s that leadership team.

And we all take – you know, nobody comes back and high-fives because they did something easy. But if you had a success – there was a hardship, you overcame it as a team – that builds the bonds. Why have I talked about not moving people, that carousel of leadership? You got to keep them together because you don’t want to continually be forming bonds every three to six months; you got to keep it together. That is a cohesive fighting force. That’s one that’s going to fight together.

And as we talk about the resiliency, that’s the one area I think that we’ve got – when I walk away from the lessons of the Ukraine, you know, you just put out a report yesterday – cited by the president, by the way – but when you look at the lethality of the battlefield today in the Ukraine, I got it, real fight difference, but it’s a high casualty producing environment. You know, 20 years of continuous conflict, we took losses, but we dictated the tempo of the formation. You know, we take losses; we had the ability to pull back, assess the formation. You know, we had counselors, chaplains come in, talk to the formation, make sure they were OK, put them back out. That’s if we lost one or two or three people off in a formation, nine one day. You don’t have that in the next fight. This Ukraine fight, what if it’s not three that were killed but three survived? Do we have the resiliency to continue to fight the next day? Because you’re not coming off the front. Do we have the strength in the formation – (inaudible) – that, to stay out there, that leaders have the ability to put it on their back?

And that’s a lot to ask, because these are teams. You know, we talk about building these bonds. That makes it a very personal touchpoint. These are people you care about, that you’ve been together. I mean, you know their families. Now they’re not with you – they’re wounded, they’re dead. And guess what? The next day you’re back in the fight. Are we training ourselves to be able to do that day in and day out, the resiliency to fight as a formation going forward? And that only comes – you don’t build that in conflict. It’s got to be built before conflict so you can sustain it in that conflict.

Dr. Karako: Well, you mentioned moving – different types of moving people around there, but I want to go back to a comment you made just a bit ago about large-scale combat operations. You called the – you highlighted the moving to Poland very rapidly, for instance. And I think it was just a couple weeks ago that the U.S. moved some Patriots from South Korea, I think it was, to the Middle East, and our team put together some graphics about the number of aircraft it takes to move just a single Patriot battalion, for instance. It’s a lot. So how do you think about and how do you measure and, no kidding, train for very large mobilization of from here to over there for a real large-scale combat operation?

Gen. Poppas: It’s a great question. And I’ll tell you, in the three years – and that falls under – part of that is one of our responsibilities as Forces Command. So every year at least one time we bring everybody together and we do a large-scale mobilization exercise. And part, you know, that starts from notification to movement. The initial element, you know, if it’s 82nd that’s going off to combat, any of our immediate reaction forces, I don’t have a deep concern. They’re going to move quickly. They’re resourced. They’re ready to go. But if it’s a large-scale operation, combat operation, that’s going to take the capacity of COMPO 2, COMPO 3, multiple divisions that are going to be moving. You know, we are going through and we have assessed throughput at those locations where you have to mobilize them.

And when we did an exercise around mobilization, we EDREd another brigade out of another organization to show up, kind of unannounced, just to show where our capacity and our limitations were if we had to do it at scale. So each of the locations, every division’s come back. Have they done an assessment? Here’s what we have. Here’s our really low capacity. Here’s our shortages. Here’s what we need. If our mobilization sites have done that, and then also the capacity that we have within our Guard and Reserve to move to those locations. And then as we walk through that, and we know where those are, and we start to – you know, A, identified risk has to be solved. Where it can’t be, where can you mitigate? And then they’re identified in advanced.

But then also we put in, in the last exercise, so once you get that framework and you know where your strengths, limitations, and your capacity is at, the second year now you introduce friction. You introduce cyberattacks. We don’t – we think it’s going to be – you know, it’s going to be a contested logistics from – you know, we say from the fort to the port. Nobody’s going to let you build up combat power over time. And then from the port forward, you know, how do we make sure that we secure that which is moving across our seas? You know, because we are a global nation. We need to have the ability to project power. So if we’re able to project power, can we make sure we get it to locations, the projection platforms, and then from the projection platforms to locations they need to be?

And it is – it is – as you identified with the Patriots, the beauty is, with our U.S. Air Force, and our lift capacity, and our Seagull capacity, it takes a lot. But we got a lot. And I think we’ve proven our ability to move that quickly. And what I loved about the Air Force on the couple multiple historical events they’ve exceeded their own OR rate when time came, and they kept things flying, and they moved an exorbitant amount of capacity, people, equipment, under time.

Dr. Karako: OK. I’ve got two final questions to kind of wrap up. The first, which I have started to weave into this series regularly, you talked a minute ago about leadership. And you were talking about the – starting up here knowing soldiers, communicating, things like that. Part of that is what you’re reading. And I wonder, as you think about the problems of Forces Command – I didn’t tell you we have this – but you think about the problems of Forces Command, what do you think it would be helpful for people to read, and what are you reading right now?

Gen. Poppas: Oh, great question. No problems. Just identified challenges.

Dr. Karako: (Laughs.) Challenges.

Gen. Poppas: Yeah. But when I talked to – you know, it’s really at echelon. It counts on who you are and what where you’re at. You know, when I went into – when I tell formations, and Scott took a unit after me in legacy, first, I love the Spartan analogy. If you look at our coin, I went back to that when he stood up this squadron looking to deploy to Iraq used, you know, the Spartan icon. But what I love about it – and I the first book I say would say, it’s “Gates of Fire.” All right? Go back to Thermopylae, the 300.

But when you read through that book, I tell lower-level formations, and soldiers, and junior leaders – because when you read through that there’s a couple of examples of different types of leadership. And the Spartans, holistically, I would say, look, they embraced individual excellence. There was an expectation you are a master of your profession. You know, from the agoge forward, you had to be mentally agile, you had to be physically fit, you had to be resilient. But the strength of the Spartan wasn’t the individual. It was the phalanx. So they had to know how to operate together.

And the beauty of the phalanx and the shield – you know, the shield didn’t protect yourself. It protected the person to your left. So unless you operated as an entity, you’re an individual expert, but it was the organization that was important. It elevates it. And when you read the book, you draw that out. And there’s great examples. And it’s – you know, I call it, you know, level of OPDs. But there’s also individual leadership examples, different types throughout it that you say, now, who are you?

And what virtues of that individual? There’s none wrong, but what virtues did you draw, and why is that the person you want to be? OK, now, that’s an example for you. Now, are you going to be able, you know, emulate and venerate that conduct? What are the things you don’t want to have? So it sparks a good conversation for formations, both for the individual and then also for the collective. So I like that one at the lower level.

For leaders, this is Simon Sinek. We’ve read that, and he came and spoke. I’m not – if you’ve read them, it’s easy reads. It’s digestible. And a lot of it’s intuitive. You know, it’s, you know, leaders eat last. Well, of course they do. But why? You know, and this is the next book, you know, “Start with Why.” I love the way that he presents his philosophy. And it’s applicable to the military. It’s applicable to business. And it’s – again, things that I think that we do intuitively, but he refines the narrative. And you compare it and you’re, like, oh, OK. I got it. So I – you know, for our leaders, I say, hey, read that. Read that.

The personal book I’m reading now? It’s “Freedom’s Forge.” And that’s, you know, World War II. And, again, Rainey told me I had to read it, so I am. Because he references it all the time. And he’s a friend. But I’m reading that now. I’m not through it so I can’t give you the depth, but, you know, during World War II, you know, two icons drove the industrial base to build, you know, the arsenal of democracy. But how do you mobilize a nation to get there? And a lot of it was force a will. A lot of it was predictive capacity. So I’m just starting that book, but I’ll come back and give you a report.

Dr. Karako: Not to break the – it does have a happy ending, so.

Gen. Poppas: (Laughs.) Yeah.

Dr. Karako: So I interviewed General Rainey a couple months ago for this series. And he mentioned that. And he also mentioned “Lonesome Dove,” which I think is about the perfect novel.

Gen. Poppas: “Lonesome Dove,” of course. I guess if you live in Austin you have to do that. You’re a Texas guy. It was probably a course in high school.

Dr. Karako: (Laughs.) That’s right. That’s right.

So I’d be remiss to close out without acknowledging, of course, that we’re coming up on the Army’s birthday, June 14th, Flag Day. So it’s the 250th. What are your birthday wishes for the Army?

Gen. Poppas: Shoot, just when you look what the Army has been able to accomplish and who we were, and what we meant to this nation, I love the fact that we’re celebrating that. I mean, it was the Army, you know, a year before the nation. You know, the Army fought to free this nation to become what it was. You know, and fast forward, you know, the Army fought to keep this nation together during the Civil War. World War II, you know, and what came after that. It freed us from, you know, the yoke of totalitarian oppression throughout Europe; freed my father to come from Greece in ’45. You know, that’s who we are. And it’s set – you know, I think the Army stands wherever we go as a global icon for peace throughout the world. And I think that’s a good reputation to have wherever you go. And that’s what it was to my father. It was a signal of freedom. And I think that’s where we go. That’s who we are. I take pride in that.

Dr. Karako: Fantastic thing to end on. I just want to thank everybody, first of all, for coming out, the great questions. I tried to weave in as many as I could. And, again, thank you to the AUSA team. Great partners on this series. And our sponsor, GD, as well. So please join me in thanking General Poppas. (Applause.) Thank you. This was great.

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