By Robbin Laird
A colleague recently recommended that I listen to and read through a CSIS discussion between two senior Army officials, the Honorable Michael Obadal, Under Secretary of the Army, and the Honorable Ryan McCarthy, former Secretary of the Army, moderated by Jerry McGinn of CSIS’s Center for the Industrial Base.
Having done so, I found it a genuinely useful frame for thinking about where the Army is headed, and it strikes me as a good baseline against which to set my own recently completed work: a book on the way ahead for the Marine Corps, and a special report on how the MV-75 Cheyenne tiltrotor is set to change Army operations. What follows is my summary of the CSIS argument, and then the comparison I want to build on in follow-on pieces.
Obadal’s framing starts from a position that will be familiar to anyone who has followed the Army’s internal debates over the past several years: conflict remains, at its core, a human exercise, and the land domain exists to deliver two durable outcomes, persistent presence and decisive control, that only a dominant combined-arms force can provide. That force, in his telling, is not simply a collection of platforms; it runs from sensors and effectors at the soldier level, through armor and aviation, up to long-range fires, all bound together by a command-and-control layer robust enough to make the whole thing function as a single organization.
Crucially, Obadal frames the Army’s value less as its own thing and more as the foundation the joint force stands on. It is the Army, he argues, that seizes and holds the terrain, ports, airfields, key infrastructure, that lets the other services exercise dominance in their own domains. McCarthy’s contribution reinforces this from the demand side: on any given day the Army is meeting a majority of combatant commanders’ worldwide requirements, while simultaneously running hurricane response, border missions, and disaster relief at home. The tension both men return to is the one every service secretary eventually inherits: balancing today’s readiness against tomorrow’s modernization inside a budget that never grows fast enough.
Two threads in the conversation are especially worth pulling out.
Mass over exquisite performance. Obadal describes a deliberate shift toward a roughly 60/40 split between low-cost, producible-at-scale munitions and the smaller, exquisite systems the Army has spent decades perfecting. The logic is explicitly a trade of unit performance for magazine depth and breadth, the recognition that the cost curve in drone and missile warfare currently favors the attacker, and that the answer is not more expensive interceptors but more interceptors, period. This is, in substance, the same argument I have made under a different label, intelligent mass versus exquisite scarcity, and hearing it articulated from inside the Pentagon’s own fires portfolio is a useful confirmation that the logic is taking institutional hold, not just circulating among outside analysts.
Drones and AI as enablers, not replacements. Both officials push back on the idea that Ukraine has made maneuver warfare, or the tank, obsolete. Their argument is that Ukraine shows what happens when neither side has an actual maneuver combined-arms army, positional warfare, a First World War-style dead zone, with drones filling the role artillery once did.
The lesson they draw is not “drones replace soldiers” but “drones unburden soldiers” from the most dangerous or repetitive tasks, freeing commanders to apply judgment where only humans can. The same logic carries into their discussion of the Army’s new data-centric command-and-control effort (what the Vice Chief pointedly insists is not “next-gen” anything, just Army C2), where agentic AI is compressing fires workflows by an order of magnitude at the National Training Center with human decision points deliberately preserved.
The piece of the conversation most directly relevant to my own work, though, is the discussion of the Army’s aviation fleet. Obadal sorts Army equipment into legacy, enduring, and modern categories, and places the Black Hawk squarely in “enduring”, a fleet of just under 2,000 airframes that will be needed for decades, even as the MV-75 Cheyenne comes online and gradually draws those numbers down.
McCarthy sharpens the point with a range problem: the distance from Scarborough Shoal to Hainan is 550 nautical miles, and today’s Black Hawk simply cannot play in that space without extensive aerial refueling. The tiltrotor’s roughly two-and-a-half-times range advantage, married to a software-defined, electronic-warfare-capable airframe, is presented as the answer while both men concede that replacing a fleet the size of the Black Hawk’s is one of the harder political sells the Army will face, precisely because the relevant committees sit atop the jobs and factories involved.
Next up I will deal with how the projected Army modernization effort compares or contrasts with the transformation of the USMC I have documented in mu latest book on the character and nature of the effort before turning to the tiltrotor factor in that transformation and the role it can have in Army modernization.