Reform Without Purpose Is Just Motion
The Army needs to put doctrine ahead of requirements.
COL (Ret.) Thomas A. Balish served 28 years as an Army aviation officer and scout helicopter pilot, later as Chief of Operations and Integration in HQDA G-8. He now leads LH6-Services, LLC, supporting Army modernization and defense-industry initiatives. He lives in South Carolina.
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth wants to replace JCIDS with a faster, service-led approach—complete with new institutions such as the Requirements and Resourcing Alignment Board (RRAB), Mission Engineering and Integration Activity (MEIA), and Joint Acceleration Reserve (JAR). Each is meant to speed the path from idea to fielding. Yet faster does not necessarily mean smarter. The Army still struggles to define what its formations are supposed to do in twenty-first century warfare. Until that doctrinal foundation is clear—especially for armor, light, and expeditionary forces—no amount of acceleration will help. Doctrine defines purpose: it tells the force why it exists and how it fights. For too long, the requirements process has sprinted ahead of doctrine, building capabilities for environments that no longer exist.
Doctrinal Foundations Must Drive Requirements
In the late Cold War, Field Manual 100-5 Operations and the AirLand Battle concept it codified showed how doctrine can reshape requirements. AirLand Battle moved the service from a narrowly attrition-driven mindset to one emphasizing initiative, depth, and synchronized joint action. That doctrinal turn rewired what the Army demanded of its materiel and organizations.
AirLand Battle pushed requirements toward systems enabling deep operations. It prioritized long-range fires and corps-level strike systems, demanded new artillery command and control, and required logistics capable of sustaining high-tempo campaigns. Persistent reconnaissance and security formations became essential for striking beyond the forward edge of battle.
Platform requirements followed doctrine. Mobility, survivability, and combined-arms integration rose to the top: designers had to deliver vehicles, attack aircraft (e.g. AH-64 Apache), and weapons that maneuvered rapidly, survived intense combat, and operated as part of task-organized combined-arms teams. Acquisition shifted from single-platform specifications to system-of-systems performance—how platforms worked together to deliver effects, not merely individual capabilities.
AirLand Battle also tightened the links between doctrine, training, and acquisition. Doctrine produced concepts of operation; concepts generated validated capability needs; experimentation confirmed them; and acquisition delivered the tools required. This alignment produced the Army’s “Big Five” programs—Abrams, Bradley, Apache, Black Hawk, and Patriot—each a direct expression of AirLand Battle’s logic.
The Real Starting Point: Doctrine Before Requirements
The Army’s last doctrinal reset—The U.S. Army in Multi-Domain Operations 2028—outlined how to converge effects across domains. Yet it did not fully define how formations should operate inside contested, sensor-saturated environments. Requirements are again being written around platforms—tanks, drones, sensors—without a unifying operational logic. A new generation of requirements officers is building checklists, not concepts of employment.
Fixing that begins with defining what each formation is for. What is an Infantry or Armor Brigade Combat Team in the drone age—an airborne raiding force or a lighter armored brigade? What is a corps headquarters—an administrative hub or a multi-domain command node synchronizing land, cyber, and space effects? Until those questions are answered, any reform will be cosmetic. Speed without purpose leads to failure.
An example will help to show how doctrinal ambiguity breeds failure. The M10 Booker emerged under the old JCIDS regime—a system built for control, not clarity. Concepts froze early, validation cycles stacked up, and doctrine lagged. The result was a tank optimized for bureaucratic survival, not for the fight the Army was evolving to win. By the time production began, the battlefield had shifted—from dense armored formations to dispersed, multi-domain fights demanding agility, networks, and attritable platforms. Was there a need for the Booker? The answer is probably yes. But how it fit into the modern battlefield was never clearly specified.
From Platforms to Ecosystems
Secretary Hegseth’s memo stresses mission engineering—shifting from platform-centric procurement toward solving operational problems through integrated ecosystems of manned, unmanned, and networked systems. The next fight will be won by how fast the Army can connect them into coherent kill webs, not by any single vehicle or sensor. Requirements must start with the operational problem: how a dispersed formation senses, decides, and acts faster than an enemy who can see everything.
The MEIA should become the proving ground for these integrated approaches—testing concepts through live and synthetic experimentation—but only if the Army treats experimentation as a continuous campaign, not a one-off demonstration.
Exercises such as Project Convergence, Transformation in Contact, and Combat Training Center rotations are more than readiness events—they are laboratories. Embedding requirements officers and capability developers in these events turns feedback into data. Artificial-intelligence analytics should translate soldier observations into design decisions. Every operational experiment ought to produce an updated mission thread: a validated problem statement, draft concept of employment, and prototype solution. The MEIA then links these to the RRAB for funding through the JAR—completing a full loop from field feedback to investment.
For this ecosystem to work, major stakeholders—Army Transformation and Training Command, G-3/5/7, and G-8—must function as one. The RRAB must be empowered to enforce trade-offs, deciding what not to fund as much as what to accelerate. The MEIA should lead experimentation and tie it directly to resource decisions. This mirrors the Marine Corps’ Force Design 2030 process—tight coupling concept, force design, and funding. The Army needs its own version: doctrine-driven, data-informed, and relentlessly iterative.
Getting the Requirements Right
The most important reform must come from culture. Officers have long been rewarded for compliance, not curiosity. The surest way to stifle innovation is to make the safest answer the best career move. Modernization is not an acquisition process; it is a command responsibility.
The RRAB, MEIA, and JAR can fix what JCIDS broke—but only if they connect requirements to doctrine, operational need, and experimentation. The Army does not need a faster paperwork drill; it needs a system that continuously links how it fights to what it builds. Reforming JCIDS was necessary, but reform without doctrinal purpose, operational focus, and cultural courage will yield the same results—just sooner. If the Army succeeds, it will finally field capabilities that reflect how it fights. If not, it will deliver wrong answers at high speed—proving once again that efficiency without clarity is just another way to fail.
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