Mark Esper is the 23rd secretary of the Army, responsible for manning, training, equipping, and leading the 1.1 million soldiers of the Army, Army Reserve, and National Guard. A West Point graduate, Esper served 10 years on active duty and then another 11 years in the Guard. He was an infantry officer during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, a captain assigned to the 3rd Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division. He sat down in his Pentagon office recently with the Washington Examiner.
Examiner: How is the Army of today different from the Army that you fought with in 1991?
Esper: What jumps out at me immediately is far more combat experience. I mean, today’s Army is an Army that’s been at war for 17 and 18 years, so it’s remarkably proficient in combat. Second, I think today’s Army are experts in low-intensity conflict. In my day, we had mastered high-intensity conflict, which is why I think we were so successful in Desert Shield, Desert Storm, and then eventually the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Examiner: How does the Army of today compare to what the Army needs to be in the future?
Esper: In some ways it’s going back to the past. The Army I grew up in was focused on high-intensity conflict against a peer competitor called the Soviet Union. That’s what we’re going back to in many ways. We now know that we’re in an era of great power competition. China and Russia are our principal concerns. And so we need to be able to fight high intensity conflict against a Russia or China. Now, high-intensity conflict is a fancy word for saying tanks on tanks, aircraft shooting each other out of the sky, a great deal of violence at a level we haven’t seen since probably the Korean War or World War II, where you have big armies facing off against one another. That’s the type of combat we need to be ready for.
Examiner: Many people look at the last two decades and say most of what the United States has been involved in has been counterinsurgency. What makes you think we’re going to need all of these big weapon systems for a high-end war?
Esper: As you think about the spectrum of conflict, as we like to say, the least likely is some type of global nuclear war. The most likely is terrorist events, low-intensity conflict, so we need to be prepared to deal with that. However, one of the most dangerous places is high-intensity conflict. That’s where we could lose a major war, and it would have very significant impacts on the United States. So we have to build a military that’s capable of dealing with Russia or China because we know that over the last 18 years, as we focused on Iraq and Afghanistan, the Russians and Chinese focused on modernizing their force and trying to close the gap with the United States. That’s what has our attention right now.
Examiner: What kind of toll has almost 18 years of war taken on the U.S. Army?
Esper: There are always pros and cons. We have a very combat-experienced force. We have mastered low-intensity conflict in many ways. We certainly have the best special operations forces in the world and know how to do counterterrorism extremely well. But to pay for that we sacrificed modernization of our force. So we continue to use the platforms, the Abrams tanks, the Bradley Fighting Vehicles, the Apache helicopters, all those things that I grew up with in the 1980s when I was a young officer. These systems are now decades old. We’ve upgraded them, but they are decades old. It is time, now that we’re moving out of those conflicts of the past, to focus our efforts on modernizing for the future.
Examiner: Normally when the budget comes around, the services look at what they did last year. They add a little bit here, take a little bit away there. This year, it looks like you did a complete top-to-bottom scrub of the budget.
Esper: The chief of staff [of the Army, Gen. Mark Milley,] and I think we did something that was unprecedented. We actually read the National Defense Strategy. We completely accepted the fact that we need to focus on high-intensity conflict against Russia and China. But rather than just incrementally improving our current programs, we went top to bottom in everything we do and asked, “How do we reorganize the Army to do that?” In the process, we freed up more than $30 billion over a 5-year period to focus on our six top modernization priorities that will ensure we’re ready to fight in the future.
Number one is long-range precision fires. That means the ability to use indirect fires, missiles, and rockets and cannons, at a much greater distance than the Russians and Chinese. Second, the next generation combat vehicle, a vehicle that can move soldiers around the battlefield much more safely and much more effectively. Third, future vertical lift, which is a fancy word for next generation of helicopters. Fourth, integrated air missile defense. We will be fighting against enemies who have attack helicopters and attack aircraft, so we need to be able to defend against that. Fifth, we need to have a network that allows us to talk and communicate. And finally, soldier lethality. I was an infantryman. Infantry sustains 80% of the casualties on the battlefield. We want to make sure our soldiers are well protected, that they’re well armed. So we’re building new weapons to arm them for future fights. Those are the big six.
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Examiner: You’ve done something else that none of the other services have done, which is you’ve stood up an entire new command that’s charged with looking into the future. How does that work?
Esper: We did. We stood up what’s called Army Futures Command, which really consolidated a number of different commands that were spread out across the Army to really focus on the future, to not be trapped by the demands of the present. And so their charge is to look deep into the future — 10, 15, 20 years — imagine what future conflict will be like based on emerging threat doctrine and technologies, and then help us build the force of the future to do that. And then subsequently help us develop and field the technologies that will ensure we win. So it’s very exciting. It’s the biggest change organizationally in the Army since 1973, and we really think it will pull us into the future and keep us there.
Examiner: And you located it in Austin, Texas. Why Austin?
Esper: Because it’s a technological innovation, entrepreneurial hub in the United States. It’s a fast-growing town. A lot of exciting things happening in there with regard to innovation, particularly from small entrepreneurs and businesses. And what we wanted to do is get outside of the Army forts, get beyond the walls and the barbed wire and the MPs and really be very open. So we are embedded in the University of Texas system, in their buildings, and we’re constantly in that city meeting with companies that are moving in, entrepreneurs to make sure that we’re at the cutting edge of technology as it happens here in the country.
Examiner: You’ve been fortunate in the last two years that Congress was able to reach a bipartisan agreement to lift the spending caps that had been hamstringing the Pentagon for years. It’s not entirely certain, however, lawmakers are going to be able to pull that off again this year. What happens to your momentum if you don’t get the kind of stable funding that you’ve had in the last two years?
Esper: You’re right, the last two years have been great. It’s allowed us to reverse what we call the readiness decline. So today we’ve improved the rightness of our brigade combat teams by 55%, which is remarkable. We’re still not there yet. We need another two or three good years to do this, but it’s a great trajectory. If for some reason we don’t get a budget that meets the numbers we need, which is about $750 billion for DoD and $182 billion for the Army, or if we get it late, it will have tremendous impacts on both our ability to continue to grow readiness and modernize the force. So one of the things we’re pressing lawmakers on the Hill right now on in bipartisan fashion is: “Please pass a budget and please pass it on time, which means by Oct. 1 of this year.”
Jamie McIntyre is the Washington Examiner’s senior writer on defense and national security. His morning newsletter “Jamie McIntyre’s Daily on Defense,” is free and available by email subscription at dailyondefense.com.
