Transformation Without Training Isn’t Transformation—It’s Illusion

Why True Military Transformation Requires a Training and Doctrine Revolution

It’s not every day that a Special Forces officer admits an Armor officer might be right—but here we are.

Bruce S., a fellow West Pointer, former Armor officer, and father-in-law to my youngest, now leads teams that evaluate systems like the M1 Abrams for effectiveness, survivability, and doctrinal fit. In short, he lives at the intersection of tech, training, and real-world warfighting. We were catching up recently when, as tends to happen, the conversation veered into military transformation—specifically, the effort I’ve been helping shape to reimagine elements of the now-defunct Joint IED Defeat Organization (JIEDDO) and the Army Asymmetric Warfare Group (AWG).

Both organizations, where I served respectively as a Senior Advisor and Command Advisor, were designed to accelerate operational adaptation—pulling hard-earned insights off the battlefield and translating them into changes in equipment, tactics, and institutional processes. The work was urgent, gritty, and often uncomfortable. But it mattered, because it was grounded in what the fight actually demanded—not what PowerPoint said it should.

As I walked Bruce through the early contours of this new concept—still in its infancy but drawing real interest inside my company—he raised a hand and offered two insights: one a warning, one a reality check.

“Remember Shinseki’s Future Combat System?” he asked. “That’s your cautionary tale. We built a force on optimistic assumptions about transformative tech, defined effects around those assumptions, and plowed forward without the training and doctrine to employ it. That gamble set Army modernization back a decade.”

Then, with a smirk: “And nowadays, when I hear someone say ‘AI,’ I just assume it means ‘Anything Interesting,’ not Artificial Intelligence.”

That line stuck—and not just because it was clever. It cut to the core of a problem I’ve seen across my career: we chase transformation through technology, but too often neglect the institutional foundations—training, doctrine, leader development—that make that transformation real. We chase the shiny object but forget the human system that has to wield it.

Bruce said it best: “Technological transformation is meaningless unless it’s matched by a training revolution.”

That sentence became the anchor for this entire effort. If we keep mistaking acquisition for readiness, and innovation theater for real capability, we won’t transform—we’ll just modernize our way into obsolescence.

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Transformation’s Blind Spot

The U.S. military is undergoing its most ambitious transformation since the Cold War. Legacy systems are being retired, and billions are flowing into next-gen tech—hypersonics, AI, autonomous platforms, and long-range precision fires. Concepts like Multi-Domain Operations (MDO) and new global postures show we're aiming for tomorrow’s fight, not just refighting yesterday’s wars.

But there’s a problem. While acquisition is moving fast, the institutions that turn tools into battlefield advantage—training, doctrine, and PME—are lagging. The result: a force that looks modern on paper but may be unready when it matters most—in the opening hours of a high-end fight.

Unless we overhaul how we train and develop leaders, we’ll repeat an old mistake: betting on technology without adapting the force to wield it. War is still fought by people. And if our doctrine and training don’t evolve with our gear, we’ll end up with systems we can’t employ—or worse, that break under pressure.

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When Innovation Outruns Adaptation

Fighting in Our Own Image

History is full of militaries that developed capabilities based on how they wished the enemy fought—or how they themselves would fight—rather than how adversaries actually operate. We've mirrored threats instead of studying them. From the Cold War focus on Soviet tank armies to the high-tech race to defeat IEDs, we’ve often missed the point: our enemies innovate asymmetrically, not symmetrically. They exploit time, terrain, and improvisation—not just tech.

Tech First, Doctrine Later (If Ever)

New capabilities almost always outpace doctrine. Rifled muskets didn’t match Napoleonic tactics. The Pentomic Army planned for nukes, then faced jungle insurgency in Vietnam. Officers trained for big wars found themselves in decentralized, culturally complex fights with no playbook.

As a JRTC Observer/Controller in the ‘90s, I saw this firsthand. Heavy units, trained for Desert Storm-style high-intensity conflict, routinely got outmaneuvered by low-tech OPFOR at NTC. Fake heat signatures drew fire onto civilian decoys. Motorbikes and handheld radios routed armor into kill zones. The message was clear: tech doesn’t replace adaptability. Our tools were advanced, but our training hadn’t caught up to the threat. What we saw then—misapplied technology without operational adaptation—is exactly the pattern we risk repeating today.

The Pentagon’s recent drone integration push—outlined in the SecDef’s July 2025 Drone Memo—shows we’re at risk of repeating history. The directive calls for rapid integration of swarming tactics, autonomous ISR, and logistics drones across the Services. Intent is solid. Execution? Already shaky. We’re seeing unclear employment concepts, uneven training pipelines, and reliance on commercial tech that hasn’t faced a thinking adversary.

The risk isn’t just technical—it’s conceptual. If we bolt cutting-edge systems onto Cold War tactics, or assume our adversaries haven’t already planned counters, we won’t just dilute effectiveness—we’ll invite failure at scale. As always, ambition without tactical validation is a liability.

The Danger of Commercial Hype and Institutional Amnesia

If past modernization failures have taught us anything, it's this: glossy marketing and bold commercial promises are no substitute for battlefield-proven utility. Yet today, the defense-industrial ecosystem is awash in optimism—championing swarming drones, cognitive electronic warfare, and AI-enabled decision tools as the next revolution in military affairs.

But optimism alone isn’t a plan. The critical question is: to what end will these technologies be used? Are they delivering direct effects—such as lethal kinetic strikes—or enabling effects, like an EW system that allows maneuver forces to operate in a contested spectrum? Each has a distinct training and integration requirement. Kinetic effects may be immediate but fleeting. Enabling capabilities, when synchronized with fire and maneuver, can generate outsized battlefield impact—far beyond their individual contributions.

What’s largely absent is a clear-eyed assessment of whether our institutions know how to train with these capabilities, integrate them into combined arms operations, or counter how adversaries will adapt in kind. Just as the Army once placed hope in the Future Combat System (FCS) and Objective Force reorganization to solve undefined problems, today’s enthusiasm for drone swarms and AI-enabled targeting risks becoming another leap into the unknown—absent rigorous experimentation and iterative feedback. As the Army painfully learned with the collapse of FCS, betting on commercial tech without building the institutional muscle memory doesn’t lead to transformation—it leads to fragility.

Until we treat training and doctrine—not glossy PowerPoints or procurement checklists—as the real proving ground for emerging technologies, we’ll keep mistaking acquisition for actual readiness.

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Today’s Gap: Tech is Outpacing Training Again

The Department of Defense is looking at China (and to a lesser degree, the Ukraine-Russia conflict) and realizing that the current U.S. military may find itself outmatched in future conflicts—particularly in our ability to generate mass at the point of need, realize economy of force in theaters away from the main conflict, and employ maneuver, security, and surprise in a highly contested, multi-domain environment. Technology is being touted as the solution to create speed, deliver precision, and restore strategic advantage in depth. But many of these technologies remain unproven in combat, their concepts of employment underdeveloped, and the human skill sets to employ them undertrained.

We’re now trying to do two things at once: re-train a force for large-scale combat while integrating next-gen tech that hasn’t been proven under fire. It’s like rebuilding an aircraft in flight—with no guarantee there’s a runway on the other end. And the force isn’t just trying to learn new tricks—it’s relearning fundamentals at the same time, creating a dangerous bandwidth problem for units already stretched thin.
For 20 years, our warfighting skills atrophied. Maneuver warfare, indirect fires, C2 under jamming—these weren’t daily problems in COIN. Now, we’re expected to shift gears and fight peer adversaries who are moving faster than our institutions can adapt.
Programs like JADC2, AI decision aids, and autonomous systems hold promise—but promise isn’t capability. And China, for one, isn’t waiting. They’re training to win fast. We’re still building exquisite tools for a slow fight.

Consider China: its approach to a Taiwan fight emphasizes speed, volume, and regional mass. If we’re building for a drawn-out war but they fight to win in weeks, our exquisite capabilities might arrive too late to matter.

Or Russia: its strengths lie in proximity, massed fires, and disrupting C2 through jamming and cyber. Our playbook relies on clean ISR, precision networks, and multi-domain maneuver—none of which are guaranteed to function in a contested battlespace.

We're designing forces for elegant execution. They’re planning to punch fast and break things. If our training doesn't prepare leaders to operate joint and combined arms in friction-heavy, degraded environments, even the best tech won't save us.

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Training Is the Linchpin

We can buy cutting-edge systems all day—but without the training, doctrine, and culture to back them up, they’re just expensive props. Real transformation happens in training rooms and CTCs, not just in labs, demonstrations, and factories.
More importantly, training is what allows us to adapt when technology fails. Friction is inevitable. Deception, denial, and contested terrain will define peer conflict. Victory will depend on the force’s ability to improvise, disaggregate, and keep fighting.

During my time with the Army’s Asymmetric Warfare Group, I saw units that were exceptional at close-quarter battle—clearing compounds with precision and efficiency—but lacked the training, experience, and doctrinal foundation to operate beyond the immediate fight. They struggled to navigate terrain without GPS, had no practical understanding of how to employ unobserved, indirect fires, and were unprepared for the demands of combined arms operations. More critically, they had no conception of what it would mean to fight in an environment dominated by jamming, spoofing, contested logistics, or where they were denied access to the electromagnetic spectrum. Years of specialization in COIN had created tactical excellence in one domain at the expense of broader warfighting competence, and that gap only became visible when it was too late.

Unfortunately, the institutions we rely on to reverse that trend—CTCs, PME, and LVC training—are still structured for yesterday’s fight. Scenarios remain rooted in COIN-era templates. LVC programs are siloed, underfunded, disconnected from today’s pacing threat, and in many cases cannot even replicate technologies currently in the force, let alone new ones on the horizon.

The Combat Training Centers have unquestionably evolved since the COIN era—retooling scenarios to emphasize large-scale combat operations, revamping OPFOR to simulate near-peer threats, and integrating cyber, EW, and contested logistics into the training environment. But while the upgrades are real, they’re not yet revolutionary. Despite progress, CTCs remain constrained by their scale, simulation fidelity, and institutional inertia. They still struggle to fully replicate the integrated, joint, and multi-domain threats posed by China and Russia—especially in areas like space denial, strategic cyber, and dynamic kill webs. The core problem isn’t effort—it’s architecture. We’re trying to rehearse tomorrow’s fight inside yesterday’s sandbox. Without a concurrent transformation in training philosophy and doctrinal innovation, even the most advanced technologies being injected into the force risk becoming boutique capabilities: impressive on PowerPoint, but brittle in combat. As this paper argues, modernization divorced from experiential adaptation is theater. CTCs must not just validate readiness—they must become the proving grounds for how to fight with emerging technologies under realistic, degraded, and denied conditions. Until that shift occurs, we’re upgrading the gear but not the game.

Emerging capabilities like AI-enabled targeting, cognitive EW, and distributed kill chains require more than PowerPoint familiarity—they demand immersive, adaptive training. Without rigorous training that reflects new platform capabilities and realistic adversary adaptation, programs like the new Drone Memo—while promising—could produce fleets of capable systems that operators don’t know how to employ in contested environments, or that become obsolete as adversaries counter quickly.

Equally dangerous is the temptation to force-fit new technology into old tactics. A drone swarm is not a better scout platoon; an AI targeting tool is not just a faster staff officer. Each demands a rethinking of operational concepts, force design, and leader development. If we fail to adapt our thinking along with our tools—if we simply insert new tech into old formations without changing how we fight—we risk suboptimizing both. Worse, we play directly into our adversaries’ expectations. They’ve seen our modernization plans. They’re already training to jam, spoof, or manipulate the very systems we are racing to deploy.

Training is transformation. It’s where concept becomes competence. It’s where systems meet human judgment. And it’s the only hedge we have against a thinking, adaptive enemy.

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Conclusion: Tech Enables, Training Decides

Modernization is critical, but transformation only happens when gear, doctrine, and leader development align. The principles of war haven’t changed—only how we achieve them.

The next war won’t be won by sensors or AI. It’ll be won by leaders who can operate in chaos, make decisions under pressure, and outthink the enemy when systems break.
Tech gives us options. Training turns them into an advantage. But if we push systems we don’t understand, force-fit them into structures that can’t use them, or underestimate how fast the enemy adapts, we won’t transform. We’ll just stumble with newer tools.

It’s time to fund and prioritize training not as an afterthought or follow-on to technology development and insertion, but as the central pillar of transformation. Our next fight won’t reward promise—it will reward preparedness.

War’s always been a thinking game. The side that trains harder, adapts faster, and learns in contact will win. That doesn’t start with tech—it starts with training.