By Robbin Laird
This week I had dinner with Brig. Gen. Randy Lau, the Land Component Commander of the Nevada Army National Guard and his Sgt Major. We talked about leadership, warfighting, and how to prepare people and organizations for a world that doesn’t follow the plan.
Afterward, Lau summed up the evening in a line better than anything I could have written: “Adaptation is built, not briefed.” It’s worth taking seriously, because it describes how he is running his command.
Complicated Versus Complex
Lau draws a sharp distinction between complicated and complex problems. Complicated problems may be hard, but they have known solutions. Complex problems don’t. They change as you work on them, and leaders have to learn and adapt as they go.
He came to that distinction the hard way. In Afghanistan, he found that the planning doctrine he had been taught did not fit a problem that kept shifting. The Naval War College later gave him the language for what he had experienced. That framework now shapes how he trains his formation.
For the Guard, this is not an academic point. Most Nevada Guard soldiers also hold civilian jobs and have family responsibilities. Readiness has to be built under real constraints, not under ideal conditions.
Desert Forge as a Test of the Force
Desert Forge 2026, the statewide exercise held in June, was built on that premise. Public reporting called it the largest and most complex Army-led exercise in Nevada in more than twenty-five years. The scenario included a notional cyberattack, telecommunications outages, and an attack on a power-distribution station near Hawthorne.
Those events were scenario injects, not the point of the exercise. The point was to put friction on the formation and see what it revealed about command and control, communications, sustainment, medical support, and decision-making under pressure. Lau’s medical teams, for example, had to relocate a battalion aid station under a simulated drone threat and run night triage in the field. His message to them was simple: “There’s no front lines. You are the line.”
In our conversation, we settled on a name for this approach: operational discovery. The exercise isn’t there to validate a known solution. It’s there to surface what a formation doesn’t yet know it needs.
Why It Matters for the Army
At last week’s AUSA Annual Meeting, the Army’s senior leaders made a version of the same argument. They talked about endurance, stress-testing to find weak links, and starting from the mission rather than from materiel. Most of that discussion centered on the Indo-Pacific and acquisition.
Nevada is testing those ideas on the homeland mission, with citizen-soldiers, and is preparing for larger tests to come, including Vigilant Guard 2027. That part of the Army’s evolution gets less attention than it deserves.
What Comes Next
On Monday, Second Line of Defense will publish a fuller look at Desert Forge and Lau’s approach to command. That article opens a new series, “The Evolution of the U.S. Army Within National Security Policy.” The series will look at drones, the MV-75 Cheyenne II, the Indo-Pacific, and homeland defense. Its central question is whether the Army is actually transforming, not just acquiring new equipment. The Guard belongs at the center of that story.
Lau put his main takeaway this way: “The future belongs to leaders who can learn, adapt, and act faster than the challenges they face.” Desert Forge was an effort to build that kind of organization in practice.
The articles ahead will look at how well that effort is working, and what it might mean for the rest of the Army.
In September, I spoke to the Nevada National Guard’s Pre-Command Course on leadership and homeland defense.
Mastering Chaos: A Leadership Framework for Homeland Defense