The responsibility for recruiting, training and retaining US Army soldiers sits on the shoulders of the Sergeant Major of the Army; a job in which there is no training course and where experience is the defining factor.
To break down what the Sergeant Major of the Army does, the current state of the Army, and where the Army is headed, Fran Racioppi traveled deep into the center of the Pentagon for a conversation with Sergeant Major Mike Weimer, the 17th Sergeant Major of the Army and the first Green Beret selected for the role.
The SMA defined professional warfighting and the importance of an all volunteer force. He broke down the art and science relationship between commissioned and non-commissioned officers. He shared how his experience in the Special Forces shadows prepared him for the limelight of the SMA role.
And they talked about the future, including his vision for solving the recruiting challenge, how warfare is evolving from the kill chain to the kill web, how he’s planning to retain the right people, and how the integration of Special Operations and the regular Army is more important now than ever.
Take a listen, watch, or read our conversation with the Army’s most senior non-commissioned officer, then head over to our YouTube channel or your favorite podcast platform to catch up on our entire national security series from Washington, DC and Fort Liberty, NC.
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Sergeant Major, welcome to The Jedburgh Podcast.
It’s good to be here.
It’s a busy time for the US Army. I don’t care what anybody says about some post-war or interwar period. The US Army is hard at work all across the world. I appreciate very much your taking a few minutes to sit down with me at this beautiful conference. I didn’t know that we have a sixth conference down here.
We do and they are occupied all the time. To your point, we’re incredibly busy. We’re incredibly busy as a joint force and as a nation, but the Army is busy. It’s probably as busy, if not busier, than what I remember at the height of GWOT.
You took over in August 2023. One of the mantras that you’ve been very focused on as you’ve taken this position has been the idea of a professional warfighter. You refer to the soldier or the NCO as professional warfighters. You said, “The only reason we exist is to be the premier warfighters the world has ever seen.” How do you define a professional warfighter?
As an all-volunteer Army, 50 years of that, which is quite an accomplishment, I’ve had to think about what that means. We all joined the Army for different reasons. I’m a true Army brat, so I bought into this. My commitment came early. I blame my father and my grandfather for that. A lot of people come in and they’re not fully committed or even understand what it means to be part of the profession. That’s part of the journey that I talk about a lot.
Towards the end of our first enlistment, and referencing enlisted people mainly, you start to see compliance change to commitment when they start to understand what it means to be part of this profession. It’s still different for the officers. The journey is a little different. Pick your MOS, and then when you see that soldier, you remember because you had them, they start to get what is in the oath and what that means. They start to get the oath we took to defend the Constitution, what it means to put this on every day, and what it means to take pride in your job.
That’s the compliance to commitment. That’s the piece that I focus on because the earlier you come to that realization in your career, the better a warfighter you are at a younger age and a younger time in service. The only way that happens is through modeled behavior. That’s why those who are committed, I remind them the audio and video have got to match.
You brought up the fact of 50 years in this volunteer force. We talk about this professional warfighter. How does that set the US Army or the US Military apart from every other military in the world?
I have good relationships with our Five Eyes partners. We talk about this in different degrees. Our Army has gone from draft/conscript. Not necessarily our Five Eyes but some of our other coalition partners and teammates still have conscripts. It means something different to them. When we talk about strengthening the profession in the United States Army, it’s a little different. We all raised our right hand for different reasons to wear this uniform or the cloth of our nation.
Retention numbers are pretty doggone good. We don’t want to jinx it. Once people get into the Army, they find the purpose and the people worth continuing to serve. Some of our teammates across the globe are struggling a little bit with that. For us, when I say 50 years of the all-volunteer Army, that’s a big deal. We’re not a combination of the two. We don’t have an imminent war looming over our heads scaring people into service. These are Americans who say, “I’m interested.” We can’t lose that.
You said compliance to commitment. I like that term. When I hear you say that term and you define professional warfighting, I think about discipline. Discipline is another foundational task that you’ve talked a lot about. You said, “If you lack personal discipline, you lack team discipline, squad discipline, and company discipline. It goes up every echelon.” You’ve also called on leaders at every level to have the courage to hold each other accountable.
When I think about compliance to commitment, and you said you remember those soldiers, I immediately started thinking about the 4th I Infantry Division. It’s 3:00 in the afternoon and you’re sitting in the hallway waiting for the word. You’re waiting to be told you could go home by the first sergeant. The difference between compliance and commitment when we talk about discipline in my mind is the guys who sit in the hallway staring at the door and the guys who are looking for work. Talk about discipline and why discipline is so critical to the development of a professional warfighting organization.
We all know the saying, “You’re only as strong as your weakest link.” If you take a basic company, and we will keep it simple, an infantry company, and if 60%-plus of your company are weak links, how effective are you as a company? It starts with personal discipline and personal pride. You can be compliant and still be disciplined. That’s important for folks to know.
Following the rules is compliance. There’s nothing wrong with following the rules. Commitment is that extra piece of like, “I’m all in. I believe in everything we’re doing and why we’re doing it,” and no questions asked. That’s that piece that gets us across the goal line for the selflessness part that we talk about oftentimes about commitment. You’re no longer in it for the pure paycheck, although pay matters. Quality of life matters. Don’t get me wrong, but you’re in it for the mission and the people.
Following the rules is compliance. Commitment is the extra piece that comes along with it.
For me, compliance is okay. In the beginning, I was compliant in basic training, I was compliant in AIT. I was very compliant in SFAS and a few other places also. You want to stay off the radar, etc. It was when I had those first couple of leaders who demonstrated and modeled what it meant to serve your nation and be part of the profession that I slowly shifted into I didn’t want to just be compliant. I wanted to be committed. That’s why I’m hard on leaders in that say-do gap and how your audio and video have to match.
In this generation, our kids, and mine are a little older than yours, can smell out a fake. They know authenticity the moment they hear it, they see it, or they don’t. That’s hard to win back with them. That’s why I’m hard on making sure we’re living the standard. You hear me talk about standards and discipline often. It’s not perfection. There’s no such thing. The striving for excellence piece matters.
How do you turn the culture to embrace that?
Be consistent over time. To me, the most powerful culture I ever thrived in, if I can use that term because a healthy culture is a place you can thrive, was in an organization that had consistent leadership for more than two years in a row. One of the things that we struggle with a little bit in the service is our turnover. You remember this.
The junior non-commissioned officer usually is the person who spends the longest amount of time in that platoon, company, or battalion. They live through those first sergeant company battalions. They live through those changeovers. You are lucky if you can get two full years. We’re trying to work on that. If you can get back-to-back command teams that are consistent with a healthy culture you can thrive in, you can maintain a healthy culture. You can survive. I lived this. You could survive a less-than-stellar leader to come in there because you had 4 to 6 years of consistency if that makes sense.
The turnover when you’re switching jobs is every 12 to 18 months. It’s hard and it’s hard on the junior guys because they always want to be responsive to those who come in. What we tend to do a lot of times is every time somebody new comes in, they have some great fresh ideas that nobody ever thought about before except two commanders ago.
That isn’t bad. Don’t get me wrong. I like change. I don’t have a problem with change. My wife would say I probably like it too much. I do appreciate a fresh perspective coming in and a new approach. There’s nothing wrong with that. There’s a happy medium there.
Let’s talk for a second about people. Special Operations Forces truth number one, humans are more important than hardware. DOD, writ large, at least the talk on the outside of this building, is that there’s a lot of effort and a lot of focus that’s going into conventional force or weapon systems. Think about naval destroyers, aircraft carriers, Army long-range fires, and fighter jets for the Air Force.
We’ve seen the effectiveness of this in the last few months. Hamas goes into Israel and what’s the first thing we do? We deploy aircraft carrier groups because that’s a forward projection of power. We deploy patriot missile batteries. We put airplane squadrons forward. All of a sudden, the world is like, “These guys mean business.” We as an Army and a Military in America can project force more rapidly and at a greater scale than anybody in the history of warfare. I say that with pride. We all would say that.
I think about this. The Navy and the Air Force, by and large, man the arms. Meaning that they have these weapons platforms and they bring people in to then man these weapons platforms. We do it a little bit in the Army when we talk about helicopters and tanks, but the Army, by and large, arms the man. At the end of the day, the person is required to seize and hold the ground. When we talk about conflict, it’s people who inevitably have to seize and hold ground. Great people are needed to do that. Why is the soldier, the NCO, the most important weapon system in the Army?
All the services are platform-centric. The difference is the Army’s platform is its people. People are incredibly expensive and complicated. For all the leaders out there, you know exactly what I’m talking about. You can build a 5th-generation fighter and programmatically set it up for a 5-year FYDP palm cycle and be pretty consistent. People are a little more difficult on the programmatic side. It is a soft truth. I’m not creating Army truths, but humans are more important for the Army. They are our platform. I love some AI and some tech, but there will always be a human in the loop. I don’t ever see that change regardless of 2030 or 2040. That will be our US Army model going forward.
The non-commissioned officer is the asymmetric advantage. I’m a little biased since I’m a non-commissioned officer, but you know this. Look what’s happening to the Russians and Ukraine. They have no Non-Commissioned Officer Corps. Our primary near-peer adversary doesn’t have a Non-Commissioned Officer Corps either. I don’t see the Chinese developing one anytime soon, so tech and modernization of things become that much more important for them.
For us, it’s a happy medium. The character of war has changed to the point where advancements in technology can rule the day quickly. How do we make sure that we don’t have this massive gap in technological capability with our near-peers to let our competitive advantage win the day on the battlefield, which is the soldier? That’s why from space to subsurface seabed matters.
We’re trying to find that balance because people cost more now than they have ever cost before. You’d be surprised compared to when you were serving how much we cost from barracks to housing to feeding us to all our equipment. I wish tech would get cheaper. I’m waiting for tech to hurry up and get cheaper. It’s not there yet, so we’re trying to balance all of that stuff with our budget constraints. I’m sure you’re tracking where we are with that. It’s a wicked problem, but it’s important for everybody to always remember that humans will always be our most important platform.
I remember formidable moments in my career. Two of those revolved around coming in first to my infantry platoon and second into my Special Forces ODA where the very first person in both of those situations I encountered was my platoon sergeant and then my team sergeant.
Hopefully, they were both rockstars.
I owe everything to them. There are a lot of correlations. The Special Forces team is very different than an infantry platoon, but there are a lot of correlations when you come in as a young commander.
We tend to focus on the differences. There are a lot of similarities.
I remember in both of those instances, both of those leaders took me under their wing and said, “We’re going to invest in you. We’re going to empower you, but you have to be willing to listen too.” By doing so, even though you’re the commander, you learn so much from these folks. My team sergeant on my ODA had twenty years in the group. My platoon sergeant had eighteen years in the Army.
To come in and say, “I’ve got a year and a half. Subsequently, I’ve got three and a half years,” you’ve got to take a step back and listen to these senior NCOs who have experience and knowledge. They’re willing to transfer that knowledge to you and empower and help you grow. Talk for a second about that relationship and the relationship between those senior NCOs and those young officers who come in who may be in command. How does that work?
If there’s such thing as an art and science, it’s in that relationship. That’s why I made the statement I hope your platoon sergeant and your first ODA team sergeant were rockstars because it’s not always the case. We strive for excellence. There’s no such thing as perfection. At scale, not everybody is a Heisman Trophy winner. You get different levels of capability. It’s fair to acknowledge the fact that we all go through seasons in life too. I’ve been a different non-commissioned officer in healthier states in my career over time. I spent some time as an angry NCO. Thankfully, I didn’t stay in that state. It depends on when our paths cross in that experience you have.
That command relationship is the art side of leadership. It sounds like that’s your experience with both of those. You had a very empathetic NCO that was all about making you successful as the commander because they knew you were the commander. You were in charge. It was their job to make you successful because then the unit would be successful and we would be successful in the missions that we were all handed.
That’s that symbiotic relationship that Jim Collins and everybody else can write books about, but the art of execution and how that happens is different in each relationship. I’ve had a lot of different commanders over my time. I’ve had to adjust how I’ve led as a non-commissioned officer based on that commander style. That’s art. No handbook told me, “Step 7 is when the commander does this, skip to step 12, and recommend this.” That’s science.
For the people that struggle in this space, particularly the non-commissioned officers because you are the commander, I have to be the chameleon to the commander. I have to have enough emotional intelligence. There’s a lot to this, but that’s more the art side of this. That’s why I’m passionate about talent management because once you go to the battalion and above level and you don’t get this right, it can have drastic consequences on the lethality and readiness of a unit.
As a platoon sergeant level, you can get away with that a little bit more. That’s why I’m a big fan of the CAP process. I’ve been assessed my entire career so I don’t know anything else. As far as the big Army, that is a good thing. We’re developing better battalion, brigade-level commanders, and brigade-level sergeant majors through the CAP program.
Part of that is developing them earlier because it’s a little hard to work on the art side of this by the time you’re 40-plus years old. You’re baked. You’re like that chocolate chip cookie that’s overcooked. You’re getting left. This is where we’re taking a good wire brush to PME to all our professional Military education. CSM Harris is leading that force at TRADOC. The sooner you can get to Young Staff Sergeant Weimer about the art and science of the command team relationship, you’re going to have a better outcome than the out years.
That’s leadership from day one. We do a good job of that overall. It’s nice to hear you say that. That’s something the Army is thinking about. They’re like, “How do we drive this home?” I had that conversation with someone you know well in this building, Sergeant Major Troy Black. I had a chance to sit down with him in 2023. He’s an amazing guy.
He’s a good man, a warfighter.
We had that conversation. You go and see these posters and it’s all about leadership from day one. Great organizations adopt that culture. They say, “We don’t wait until you are at a certain level to then say, “You’re a leader now. Let’s figure it out,” because by then, it is almost too late. You have to start that from the very beginning. It’s driving that home and creating programs that do that to show even that person out on the street, “If I join this organization, I’m going to be a leader from day one.” It starts to breed that culture.
Back to personal discipline, who’s the first person we all have to learn how to lead? Ourselves. It goes back to personal discipline. It goes back to, “Am I at a minimum compliant to what the standards are? The sooner I go from compliance to commitment, the sooner I start to understand the art and science of a command team relationship as a non-commissioned officer.” It’s a journey. If you don’t ever learn to lead yourself, good luck trying to lead a company, battalion, brigade, ODA, troop, or whatever. It’s not going to work, and you’ve seen it. You see it fail. When people outrun their headlights in leadership, they probably weren’t even leading themselves very well.
Let’s talk about you for a second. You enlisted in the Army in 1993. You were in your Green Beret in 1996. You then spent twenty years across special mission units. You eventually served as the Sergeant Major for USASOC, and then you were at SOCCENT as well. The majority of your career has been in the shadows. The Army has asked you to come out of the shadows and take this very forward-facing role. You sit in front of Congress and testify in front of Congress. You are coming into a role where one of your primary objectives is to be the Army senior-most personnel manager, the senior-most recruiter in a lot of sense. How do we manage the force in a very public role? How has that transition been different?
It’s absolutely different. It has been incredibly rewarding. It’s a good reminder to me that the things that are usually the hardest in life are the things that are usually the most rewarding. I’m living that right now because it has been a tough transition. I have to give SMA Tony Grinston a huge shout-out. His experience coming into this seat shaped his thinking and how he wanted his replacement to come in. It’s hard to believe, but I swapped out with JoAnn Naumann. It was May 1. I drove to the Pentagon on May 2 on TDY orders to start the transition.
Four hours off.
Pretty much. It was his dedication to ensuring I had a quality transition before the fire hose completely opened up for August with me in the seat. Any type of success that somebody may claim I’m having, I’m rowing and trying to get after it for the Army. This is massive, 1.1 million service members in total Army, all three compos, and their families. That’s how Congress looks at it.
I’ve carried some heavy rucksacks in my career. That’s a rucksack like no other rucksack. How do you prepare for that? To be honest with you, it’s too late. Whatever you’ve done before coming into this seat is how you prepared for it. That is why I understand why SMA Grinston had us run through a special SMAP and CCAP that he ran for the selection of his replacement. This is going to wear you out. This is like an ultra marathon. You have to bring your A-game every day. You’re on the X at all times. There’s a camera and a microphone, but in all actuality, that’s pretty much how it is all the time, whether it’s a small group with the SecDef, testifying to Congress, or congressional office calls.
One that matters to me even more than all those is when you’re standing in front of 50 E-8s and E-9s at an installation who wants to know the truth. They want to know, “What is the Army doing? What are you doing to help solve my problem?” That’s the one that hits me home the most. It is looking them in the eyes and being able to tell them, “Here’s what the Army is doing for you.” Acknowledge an issue. If you don’t know it, tell them you don’t know it and get back with them. That’s the piece I’m enjoying the most.
Recruiting has been on everybody’s mind.
As it should be.
I know as you made your rounds to both Congress and on the Hill and the secretary, as well as the soldiers, that has come up in your conversations. In the public domain, there’s a perceived challenge around what I’ve called the propensity and the willingness to join. I saw this on Fox News. It came from The Heritage Foundation. It was the 2024 Index of US Military strength. I’ll run through them. It said that the Army’s strength was marginal. The Navy is weak. The Marine Corps is strong. The Air Force is very weak. The space force is marginal. Nuclear capability is marginal. What’s your perspective on the propensity and the willingness to join today? How do you assess where the Army is right now?
I’m familiar with The Heritage Report. I read more reports than I care to ever remember, but they are important to understand because the public perspective matters. Congressional perspective matters. As I like to remind everybody, the perspective of the current service members and their families matters also.
We’ve had some challenges. We’ve been seriously on the journey for two-plus years. This is a priority. General McConville and Secretary Wormuth have not mixed words. This is a priority. I don’t want to get out ahead of the secretary or jinx it, but we’re on track to make our numbers this 2024. The truth though is we need those numbers to be higher in the upcoming years because we need to grow the Army based on that global environment we talked about at the very beginning.
This isn’t the time for balloons, streamers, and celebration. It’s, “We need to identify,” which we’re doing through an innovation cell that the secretary and the chief decided to grow inside the recruiting command, “What’s working, what’s not, and do more of what’s working.” Part of that is understanding the American people that we’re trying to bring into the service.
We forget that after 9/11, we shut ourselves off to America. I was in the Army in the ‘90s and I was an Army brat in the ‘70s and ‘80s. We didn’t have ECPs and gates. It’s a real thing. I don’t know what goes on behind them. I’m not allowed. It’s an us versus them thing. This last year and a half, you’ve seen us come out from those gates and also invite the communities into the installations. You’re going to see a lot more of that. We’re America’s Army. They need to be proud of us. They also need to know that their sons and daughters could be a part of that. You’re seeing that big push. I think we’re starting to see some of those results.
I stay out of the political side of the house. It’s a beautiful thing being in uniform. I love it. I took an oath to the Constitution and it’s a fantastic thing. On the propensity to serve, there’s some misunderstanding out there we see from different survey data. It’s like, “I don’t want to put my life on hold.” Remember the influencer in this conversation, not just the eighteen-year-old. They’re like, “I don’t want my child to be in harm’s way.”
The predominance of the information environment is always negative. If they don’t have any other interaction with a service member, whether it’s a commercial, a recruiter, or a Military engagement from whether it’s guard, reserve, or active from pick your camp post station inside your state, if they don’t have a positive, then all they have is negative. We know where the media space is. Negative sells. We’ve got to keep beating that drum and make sure that they understand that it’s an amazing opportunity to serve your nation. It’s also a doggone privilege.
You brought up 9/11. For so many reasons in society, culture, and the Military, it is a defining moment. There are three cultures in the Military. You have the pre-9/11. It’s those who served who are at the most senior levels like yourself and your peers who knew the Army before 9/11. 9/11 occurred and they became a wartime Army.
You have my generation, which saw the towers fall and the plane hit this building and said, “That’s what I’m going to do.” I said, “I’m not going to go be a war correspondent or a traffic reporter out in Maine. I’m going to the Army and I’m going to do something great.” You then have a new generation who doesn’t know the war on terror. They were born post-9/11. Your job in this role is to find a way to bring these three cultures together. How do you do that?
First and foremost, we got to tell our story. At every opportunity we have, we’ve got to make sure we’re crushing the myths out there about what the Army isn’t. That’s first and foremost. After that, man, the youth has so many opportunities. It’s a good thing, We talk about it like it’s a bad thing, like, “There’s so much competition. We didn’t used to have the competition. Everybody joined the Army.” It’s a good thing with the low unemployment and the job opportunities.
We talk about student debt relief. It was like, “If you’re going to do that, then what do we do now?” That was one of the things we enticed people with. These are good things in American society. We need to be careful that we don’t turn that into an evil thing. We as an Army have to figure out a new sustainable model if those are no longer the only things we offer, and so that’s what we’re doing right now.
Merging the three cultures is a tough one. I was having breakfast with a senior leader here in the building. I had to think back to the ‘90s. Post-Desert Storm, I came in. I watched Mogadishu happen. That’s when I’m like, “That’s it. I’m done. I have to get out of school. I can’t wait anymore. I have to get in.” We were downsizing. The Army was changing back then. We were in a similar situation.
It’s a tough space to be in when you’re trying to merge those three. What I try to do, and I coach this with a lot of leaders, is don’t discredit people’s perspective because immediately, they’re going to shut down and then you have no opportunity to try to influence them and to crush those myths. You have to be empathetic to their perspective.
The biggest thing we need to remind the GWOT generation, and I use myself as an example, is I have a fair amount of combat, maybe a little more than the average individual. I’ve never been to war. It’s not war like we’re talking about. It is large-scale combat operations with a near-peer. If you haven’t watched the Pacific series, you know the difference between going to combat and then coming back and going into the KBR gym and the KBR chow hall on salsa night on a Wednesday. That is not war.
SEAC Black, I appreciate how he articulates that. This is the generation we’re trying to develop to understand why readiness matters so that we never remove the term near-peer. This has the potential to change the American way of life. I don’t want to discredit the GWOT generation because we did some things for our nation that most people will never know and understand and they’ll continue to sleep blissfully and peacefully in their beds, but that’s not a large-scale war where a whole nation has to mobilize. It is a little different. I haven’t even experienced that.
I have the honor of sitting down with General Votel. One of the questions I have teed up for him is right along that line, which is, is the business and industry of the country prepared for large-scale nuclear combat?
The real question is how quickly could we get it ready? If it isn’t, we then go back to your technology question, which is, can we buy enough time and space to mobilize everybody? That’s where we are with the character of war changing with technological advancements.
You brought up the GWOT generation. I wanted to ask you a little bit more about that. You talked about retention and the importance of retention. You said retention is good right now across the Army, but there are fewer combat patches, especially at the company level and below that experience, by and large, and also at the senior levels, a lot of counterinsurgency, counter-terrorism, and low-intensity conflict. The CTC, NTC, and JRTC are critical in the development of the force. How are you working with the CTCs, and how are they working with the broader Army to prepare for that near peer-to-peer fight?
That is a big push for us right now and has been for the last couple of years. We’re not necessarily late to need, but how do we keep up? How do the CTCs keep up with the changing character of war? The speed of relevance. We use Ukraine lessons learned. How are we injecting those into JRTC and NTC so that that laboratory would let no other world ever put its Army through? No other Army would do that. You’re like, “I’m going to put you in this crucible for about twenty-some days. You’re going to fail, but it’ll be okay.” Nobody else does that.
I went to NTC in August in Bradley. It was wonderful. It was a character builder.
Heat casualty 5 everyday. Heat Cat 5. I’m pretty proud of what we’re doing out there, taking those lessons learned. We completely pivoted from a coin focus to large-scale combat operations and all the warfighting functions associated. That’s important. It’s not just how you breach force on force. It’s all warfighting functions.
The part that we’ve done here since the fall, which has been a major effort for us with a combined arms center all the way out to Futures Command to FORSCOM because this is a total Army effort here, is the HiCon. How does the division and the core fit into that? It’s not just throwing the brigades and the battalions in the box and giving the commander an eval out of it, but how do you CT that and then take it to the next level? That has been our Project Convergence efforts.
We wrapped up our latest one, which was phenomenal. I give General Rainey and CSM Hester a huge shout-out for that one. How does the joint force fit into that? That is what Project Convergence’s focus has been. We’re not fighting a near-peer with an Army-centric Iraq or Afghanistan solution with just an air cap. The JWC, Joint Warfighting Concept, 3.0 and beyond matters. How do you CT that? How do you communicate? How do you sense? How do you decide? How do you shoot at scale in the INDOPACOM Theater, which is the most wicked theater we have? That’s the problem set we focus on. We’re doing that. I’m proud of the Army. We’re doing that right now.
1st Armored Division, I was out there for two days. I visited one of the heavy brigades out there in the box and watched them in the Crucible up against a near-peer. Black Horse is good and they keep getting better. It was good to watch that. We don’t lowball it. We make it hard because that’s the place to learn the hard lessons.
You brought up Project Convergence. One of its themes is the difference between evolution from a kill chain to a kill web. Can you describe that?
When you say kill chain, you generally start thinking of CT targets. When you think of the kill web, think about hundreds to thousands of targets that are all going on simultaneously in a near-peer fight or a near-peer adversary.
300 missiles and UAVs coming to Israel.
To be honest with you, that’s small compared to what we’re trying to be ready for. Believe me. Iran has the capability, but that’s not the near-peer we’re setting the mark for. When you think about that at scale and then think about how we’re going to need artificial intelligence, how you still have to have a human in the loop, and how you have to be able to speed to respond because you might not get a second chance if you can’t be prepared to defeat the first sortie, the consequences are drastic. That’s part of the evolution of the CT GWOT fight. You could get do-overs. You don’t necessarily get do-overs in the fight that we’re preparing for now, which is so important when we go back to commitment.
When you go back to the INDEF mark when everybody in your unit was indefinite, you hope for their commitment and that they truly understand what they’re training for to be excellent at. In this type of near-peer, as I remind everybody, there’s no more sanctuary from fort to port to pick whatever island chain you want to be in. It’s real. There’s no longer the pass through Kuwait, stop by and swing in Starbucks, dump into the theater, hang out, get big at the gym, and have your green bean, Starbucks, and Amazon packages delivered. That’s not this fight. That’s how we have to plan and prepare.
We talked a lot about people and how in order to fight this fight, it’s going to take the right people. When we think about retention, we tie it back to retaining the best and brightest. How are you retaining the best and brightest?
That’s something I’m pretty passionate about, not that that’ll surprise some of your audience that know me. It’s not just about retaining people. It’s about retaining the right people. That’s the quality over quantity piece that I’m very deliberate about. That’s the piece I’m trying to focus on. That’s why I mentioned CAP and some of those things. The army is not just about retaining people but also retaining the right people.
Every two weeks, I deep dive into retention. We’ve made some decisions on recruiting. We are moving out on recruiting. We have talented leaders. They’re crushing the recruiting problem for us and the recruiting challenges. I have pivoted to staring at retention by CMF, rank, and grade because I don’t want to wake up one day and try to figure out how we got into a retention crisis. Unfortunately, some of our closest allies in the world have a recruiting and retention crisis going on simultaneously. It is bad. It’s not good when it comes to real readiness.
We’re trying to see ourselves and know, “Is it duty choice of station in retention or is it truly the bonuses that aren’t tax-free anymore?” It is all the legacy stuff. How do you measure people on a mission? If you ask anybody that’s approaching retirement, what do they always say? Did they stay for the money? No. I’ve yet to ever hear that at a retirement ceremony.
They leave for the money sometimes.
That’s a true statement. It’s time to go make money. That’s usually at fifteen-plus years, somewhere in there. It’s usually because of the people in the mission. I always say you deserve quality housing and you deserve decent healthcare, but the one thing I’m passionate about is you deserve good leadership. Your kids deserve good leadership if they join the Army. You deserved it when you were in the Army and so forth.
I’m passionate about the leadership side of this because, in the end, the Army is a tough job. This is a tough career. If it wasn’t, anybody could do it. You see the small percentage of people who do more than one enlistment. It is tough but it ends up being incredibly rewarding. Without solid leadership though, that’s seldom the conversation we’re having. It’s usually the, “I couldn’t get out fast enough because I had a crappy leader,” if I can be blunt.
Serving In the army is a tough job. If it was not, anybody could just do it.
I focus a lot on leadership. I know money is important to people. I don’t think it’s more important than quality housing, being able to eat at a decent dining facility, or having a good kit. The Army is going to watch me focus on what a soldier wears, why plates are still the same weight, and why our kit is not staying up as advanced as UAS. Our people are our platform, so you’re going to start to see me focus on some of those things.
The chief and the vice are all about leadership. I work for the two most warfighting four stars I’ve ever seen in my life and they’re all about leadership. In the end, the job is hard. You remember. We’re going to ask our people to do hard things. You’ll do about anything for good leaders. It is a true statement. You got General Votel coming on here. There was next to nothing I wouldn’t do, and I worked for him multiple times. I’d do anything for that man. It’s because he was a great leader.
I got to ask you about SOF for a minute.
I figured you’d get it in there somehow.
The 1st Special Forces Command is very proud to have you in this seat and to represent the whole command across the Army. We’ve had a lot of conversations about the importance of SOF. Especially in this period, whether we want to call it this 1939 moment or interwar period or not, the reality is that SOF does a lot of its best work. Not to discredit anything that’s been done in the CT fight over the years, but a lot of the best work is in the world where you came from that we don’t ever hear about in these interwar periods where we shape operations.
The OSS, the Jedburgh, the OGs, all of these organizations came to fruition and were conceived in this idea that we’ve got to do our best to prevent the peer-to-peer fight and prevent conventional forces against conventional forces. SOF becomes successful when you fight through proxies. We see Iran arming Hezbollah and Hamas. That means we’re not directly attacking and going after superpower nations. It’s not that those are not superpower nations, but more superpower nations.
I know what you mean.
We talked about resourcing. We talked about the prioritization of DOD in the Army and this look to the conventional fight. The Army has asked Special Forces to reduce capability not so much but reduce numbers. How do you see the integration and the partnership between the conventional forces and SOF in the next fight?
I like how you framed it at the very end there. How do you see the relationship going forward for large-scale combat operations? That’s key. I’d be a complete hypocrite if I didn’t champion SOF’s roles and responsibilities and the impact they can have before large-scale combat. That’s a real thing. I spent most of my career, in some form or fashion, building relationships that have ended up being generational. I can pick up a phone and phone a friend in a lot of countries. In one country, and I won’t mention the name, I met him once and he was a major. He’s about to be the chief staff of their Army. That is a real thing.
Going forward in the resource-constrained environment that we’re in, budget and people, we’re trying to figure out that happy medium going forward. That’s the tension that we’re living in. The Army has to change, but to be honest with you, we can’t change fast enough to make sure near stays before the term peer. Simultaneously, how does SOF evolve from a GWOT formation to fit into that time now and going forward in 2030 and beyond?
People got tired of me saying this in USASOC. I’ll say it until they put me in an urn and my wife puts me on a shelf someday. It’s always got to be quality over quantity. There’s a certain portion of the Army that we need some quantity. We need some Private Weimers. There are no Private Weimers on an ODA. You remember this. We can never ever compromise on the quality inside SOF.
If the numbers are what they are, then we need to man SOF to the numbers we can man to make sure that we have the quality that we owe the country. That’s where SOF is. There’s no doubt in my mind. If we could have the Army, we know we need, not the Army we can resource, which is why recruiting is so important, we probably wouldn’t be discussing the cuts that we’re discussing. Since the Army has got to change, we’ve got to build a multi-domain task force. There’s a list of everything that’s out there in the public space that they know we’re growing. It’s all high-end capability.
For the first time post-GWOT, we’re at tension for the same talent. We’re in a resource-constrained environment. That’s a little bit of what you’re seeing. I go back to my SOF DNA. I don’t worry about it for SOF as long as we don’t compromise quality. We’ve accomplished a lot with very small numbers when it was the right people with the right leaders and trust. People with the quality and trust of the senior leaders, I’ll take that all day long. As a matter of fact, you’re usually more lethal and you get things done faster. I acknowledge the low-density enablers are where we’re struggling. I wish we had enough to go around. That’s what we’re trying to solve through recruiting.
It was nice when I was down at Fort Liberty and I sat down with the SWCS command teams, Sergeant Major Strong and General Beaupere.
It’s a wicked command team there.
They’re embracing the Army’s push and the Army’s directive of, “You’re going to stand up this psychological operations schoolhouse. You’re going to stand up this irregular warfare center of excellence.” They’re taking that mission and running with it. They’re embracing the challenge that the Army has put. It’s an opportunity to do more with a little bit less.
How do we double down on the standard and double down on the investment we’re making in our people but then also bring in the conventional Army to say that these programs are critical to the next fight? Do we need to put rounds down range? Yes, we do, but we also need to influence people. The influence operations allow us to be more effective in our combat operations.
There are a lot of people I could say this about inside the SOF formation, but those two understand what it means to produce quality. They won’t compromise quality.
You’ve been at the game for a long time. You’ve faced a lot of challenges. You alluded earlier this is one of the biggest challenges that you have. What’s the biggest opportunity? As you look forward over the next three and a half years that you have this role, what are you most excited about for the role and for the Army?
It has to be the opportunity to reset our focus. Standards and discipline can’t just be some whimsical thing we throw around. It’s like the term engaged leadership. That one we throw around a lot. It means different things to different people. Standards and discipline can’t mean a lot of different things to different people.
The 2.0 of the Army Blue Book is not for release yet, but it’s coming. This little thing is not magical. This thing is not going to cure cancer. This isn’t going to make everybody part of the 300 because everybody wants to be a Spartan. You don’t want to do the work that’s required to be a Spartan because it requires sacrifice and a lot of hard work. If in my tenure, we can get focused back to what it means to have standards and discipline in a warfighting culture, I will be tremendously happy with however much time the chief and the secretary allow me to be the sergeant major of the Army. That’s my focus.
Last question. Test question. This is the real one. If we think back, I mentioned the Jedburghs earlier and the OGs. The Jedburghs had to do three things every day as core foundational habits. I say the Jedburghs had to do it, but it’s soldiers, anybody in the Military. You have to have habits. Elite performers have to have habits.
We talk a lot in the Army about shoot, move, and communicate. If we can shoot, move, and communicate as foundational habits that become muscle memory, things we don’t have to think about to effectively do those every day, it allows us to think about more complex challenges. If you go into selection physically fit, you don’t have to worry about it. You can worry about the other challenges they throw your way. What are the three things that you do every day to set the conditions for success personally in your world?
First and foremost, you have to prepare the night before. You have to reflect upon the day you finished and what you have with the day coming. You can get away with a little bit when you’re a junior leader, but when you become a more senior leader, it’ll expose the chinks in your armor. You were not prepared for that day’s events. The more senior you get, you won’t survive a couple of those episodes. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a general officer or senior nominative sergeant major. You have to prepare.
The second one sounds cliche, but you still have to stay fit. It’s not always physical. It can be mental, spiritual, or physical. I’m a sleep weirdo. Sleep hygiene is a big thing for me. That allows me to do the second thing, which is to get up and do some type of thing for my body, mind, and soul. Some days, it’s all three. There’s nothing like a 40-minute MRAP to crush all three of those things. I then have a good breakfast. I will have to continue both of those when I retire.
The third one, and I didn’t always do this, is to read. You have to read and study. We do it unintentionally. You’d be like, “I read every day.” I’m talking about reading with intentionality. It goes back to what I was alluding to the night before, prep. What are you reading? There are some things you need to read for your mind, body, and spirit. You better be reading about your craft. This goes back to what it means to be part of this profession. What are you doing to read to get better at your craft? There are some things you need to read for your mind, body, and spirit. And you better be reading about your craft.
I’m a bit of a workaholic. I blame JSOC. I struggle to turn it off a little bit. My wife and my girls have helped me with this a little bit. Be inquisitive. The moment you lose being inquisitive to learn, what do you do after that? You probably become content. Hubris kicks in and you already have all the solutions and you stop critically thinking. Preparation the night before is key. Do something for your mind, body, and spirit every morning in some form or fashion. The third one is, and I don’t mean Instagram, to read and ask questions. That’s every day. Those would be the three I’d give you without having thought about it ahead of time.
We’re at an exciting time. The Army has evolved over the last twenty-plus years.
That’s a fact.
The Army will continue to evolve. I believe that there is no truer song than the Army song. The Army keeps rolling along. Whether we like it or not, when we leave, that’s what happens. That’s what has set the foundation for our nation and what’s the world order. Our conversations in this series that we’re doing revolve a lot around that. Where do we come from? Where are we going? What’s the vision behind that? More importantly, how are we going to get there? You got an Army to run. I thank you so much for taking the time to sit down with me. I look forward to your work over the next couple of years.
Thanks. I appreciate it. It’s been an honor.
#098: The United States Marine Corps – Sergeant Major Of The Marine Corps Troy Black
