Innovate or Die: The Army Transformation Initiative and the Future of Allied Land Warfare

Commentary by Maj. Gen. Matthew Van Wagenen, Col. Arnel P. David, and Benjamin Jensen

Published July 10, 2025

Next Army is a collaborative series by CSIS Futures Lab and the Modern War Institute launched in honor of the U.S. Army's 250th birthday and the Army Transformation Initiative (ATI). The commentaries explore how emerging technologies, organizational reforms, and major shifts in the strategic environment will shape the force of 2040 and beyond.

A poignant lesson echoes from the battlefields of Ukraine, as a Ukrainian general, reflecting on the Russian invasion, lamented, "I wish we [had taken] defense innovation more seriously before the war started." This stark truth compels U.S. and European armies to embark on a rapid, transformative journey, for the alternative is obsolescence and a lack of combat preparedness. In short, militaries must innovate or die.

NATO has not had credible ground deterrence in Europe for more than 20 years due to a confluence of factors, including changes in Russian doctrine and forces, reductions in U.S. and NATO force structure, and shifts in strategic focus. Both Russia and China are competing to displace U.S. influence in Europe through various means that diminish our ability to create global dilemmas. They are outproducing the United States and its allies, investing in critical military and civilian infrastructure, and transforming their militaries at scale. Although NATO member states have the combined economic potential capable of surpassing Russia's productive capability and defense spending, they often lack focused implementation. Multiple U.S. and NATO wargames and simulations demonstrate the alliance's inability to address multiple anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) complexes and repel Russia's mass and momentum before they threaten tactical nuclear escalation. This dilemma requires a new way of fighting.

U.S. Army Europe and Africa (USAREUR-AF) is uniquely positioned to provide the necessary leadership, support, and empirical data to drive long overdue changes across European land forces through the Army Transformation Initiative (ATI). The ATI, a bold and ambitious agenda by the U.S. Army, can serve as a catalyst for these long-overdue changes, forging a credible and formidable deterrent on the continent of Europe. Specifically, the ATI can serve as a vehicle for aligning exercises, experimentation, and simulations in search of increased lethality and battlefield advantage.

Absent the undeniable verdict on a bloody battlefield, the U.S. Army must manufacture the competitive conditions that drive transformational changes with an alignment of exercises, cutting-edge experimentation, advanced wargaming, and immersive simulations. This integrated approach promises unprecedented insights, shaping future force design and defense investments, unleashing a scale of innovation previously unseen within NATO. These rapid and historic shifts will be underpinned by sophisticated analytics and AI applications, empowering the alliance to extract meaningful intelligence from vast datasets and swiftly adapt to dynamic strategic landscapes. Crucially, the ATI will imbue armies with the adaptability and agility essential for navigating the inherent uncertainties and frictions of modern warfare.

In Europe, there is no time to waste. Europe faces an immediate and long-term threat as Russia rebuilds its military for conflict. Intelligence indicates Russia aims to challenge NATO within five years, adapting lessons from ongoing wars in Ukraine, Israel, and Iran, which showcase the disruptive impact of new technology on warfare. As Secretary of the Army Daniel Driscoll stresses, "Our Army needs to transform now and . . . we can't waste even a single minute." This urgency extends to all NATO allies. The U.S. Army must spearhead this transformation in Europe, requiring sustained funding and increased forward-deployed prototyping to drive essential changes in land formations.

Eastern Flank Deterrence Line

Overcoming this legacy requires a more deliberate exercise campaign plan and defense strategy that simultaneously validates existing formations, rigorously tests new ones, and, most importantly, builds robust combat capabilities in forward locations. This proactive strategy leverages the ATI, builds upon lessons learned in Ukraine and Israel, while integrating national initiatives like the Baltic Defense Line, to establish a resilient and continuously evolving deterrence posture across Eastern Europe. Collectively, these efforts form the Eastern Flank Deterrence Line (EFDL).

The EFDL coheres systems that leverage emerging and low-cost capabilities to simultaneously reduce multiple air defense complexes and blunt an initial incursion by multiple divisions, while preserving an offensive combat-credible warfighting land force that holds the enemy at risk. The backbone of the EFDL is a command network capable of conducting previously sequential operations, simultaneously at an unprecedented speed using live data. At the forward edge of the EFDL is a grid of persistent acoustic sensors and unmanned ground, air, and littoral kinetic and non-kinetic capabilities capable of degrading an enemy formation in the unmanned zone before making contact with a manned formation.

Simultaneously, air defense complexes are reduced using ground-based munitions and unmanned systems that are positioned ahead of conflict, allowing the Air Force to target deeper in the theater to blunt the incursion. Decisive to this effort is a ground force that can hold terrain, rapidly transition to the offense, and hold the enemy's forces at risk. They would leverage unmanned engineering capabilities developed as part of Project SANDHILLS and protect their formations with offensive counter-unmanned aircraft systems and electronic warfare capabilities currently being refined as part of Project FLYTRAP.

Finally, both USAREUR-AF and NATO have aligned their exercises to rehearse and refine the various aspects of the EFDL. Each exercise will test the interoperability of munitions and platforms, use live data, and demonstrate the integration of new capabilities. This vital initiative, undertaken in close collaboration with allies and partners across the theater, will fundamentally reshape antiquated command post structures with the Avenger Triad series of exercises.

Command Post Crucibles

A core element of this transformation involves a radical rethinking of land headquarters. Future land headquarters will be significantly smaller and operate with increased decentralization. This shift necessitates a greater tolerance for risk within NATO exercises, which will be used to ruthlessly test and modify the size, electromagnetic signature, and staffing of these critical command nodes. These next-generation headquarters will heavily leverage automation through bots and agentic warfare to enhance decisionmaking, streamline operations, and reduce their physical footprint, making them more agile and less vulnerable on the modern battlefield.

The systematic attacks on Russian command posts in Chornobaivka, Ukraine, serve as a stark warning, illuminating the acute vulnerability of modern-day command posts and the urgent need for greater flexibility, agility, and resilience. A series of "command post crucibles" will generate the empirical evidence necessary to drive these changes, reversing an alarming trend of ever-increasing headquarters' size and capacity. Instead of expanding staff, these crucibles will demonstrate how advancements in software and AI can enable significant reductions. For example, tasks that historically required hundreds of staff officers for the conduct of targeting can now be accomplished by a mere few dozen. Equally important, targeting and decisionmaking time will be reduced. Mirroring the accelerated learning from the groundbreaking Scarlet Dragon experiments using the Maven Smart System, they didn't just tweak processes-they slashed the targeting timeline from over 12 hours to under a minute.

The recent acquisition of the Maven Smart System for NATO will profoundly change how headquarters operate and fight. For land formations, improvements in capability and reach will enable reconnaissance strike battle and significantly bolster the fight for information. The integration of an alliance network of sensors and shooters holds adversary strategic capability at risk. Moreover, emerging technologies are extending the operational range of weapon systems, directly leading to the development of novel force structures.

Conclusion: Forging an Adaptive Alliance

As previously asserted, multinational interoperability is the key to unlocking unlimited potential across the allied enterprise. A highly integrated multinational kill chain will serve as a powerful deterrent to potential adversaries and enable our alliance formations to operate with increased reach and dispersion in a fast-paced, interconnected environment. The U.S. Army must lead this integration of sensors and shooters for the alliance. It must be empowered to do so and have sustained funding to drive these revolutionary changes across European armies. No other army or nation can do this.

Close U.S. allies and partners must possess the capacity to win the fight for information, supporting deep engagements, probing enemy vulnerabilities, and, when necessary, striking hard and fast to inflict maximum damage with minimal friendly expenditure of force. The alliance must do this and remain on the right side of the cost curve by maximizing the use of unmanned systems. The U.S. Army must develop a cost-per-kill analysis to ensure the United States is not outspending U.S. adversaries and leverage economies of scale within the alliance.

Finally, land headquarters and tactical formations need the ability and capacity to coordinate across multiple echelons and domains within a highly dense digital environment. Success hinges on a synchronized alignment of exercises, experimentation, advanced wargaming, and simulations to accelerate these essential transformations. The present administration is creating the conditions for this renaissance to occur. The U.S. Army must lead and drive change.

Matthew Van Wagenen is a major general in the U.S. Army currently serving as the deputy chief of staff for operations in the NATO Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE). Arnel P. David is a colonel in the U.S. Army currently serving as the director of Task Force Maven in the NATO SHAPE. Benjamin Jensen is the director of the Futures Lab at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.

The views in this article are those of the authors and do not represent the views of Allied Command Operations, NATO, or any part of any government.

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