WATCH: How does the Army decide to upgrade or replace old systems?

How does the Army keep up when technology can be near obsolete in weeks?

Army Chief Technology Officer Alex Miller joined Threat Status at the 2026 AUSA conference in Washington to explain why new equipment once took years to reach soldiers, how quickly modern threats like drones can outpace slow fielding, and how the Army is working to make complex technology easier for soldiers to learn. He also details how leaders decide whether to upgrade an old system or replace it.

[WOLFGANG] I’m Ben Wolfgang, national security correspondent with Threat Status at The Washington Times. I’m here at AUSA, the Association of the U.S. Army Conference in downtown Washington. Fortunate to be joined by Dr. Alex Miller, the chief technology officer for the U.S. Army. 

We heard Acting Secretary Telle mention this morning in his keynote address, the Army moving at the speed of business, not being able to move at the speed of government anymore. From your perch as CTO, what does that mean? What are the differences between those two things?

[MILLER] It’s a good question. And there are really a couple of duty cycles in there. Traditionally, if we were going to design, develop something new, that process on average took about a year for us to write a requirement. It took us about another year to approve the requirement. So let it go through the Pentagon and all the wickets and have everybody who wants to say no, say no, or specialize it or gold-plate it. And then it would take us, on average, five to seven years from the time that that requirement was approved to the time that the first unit got that new thing. And then it would take us another five to seven years from the first unit that got it until full fielding. So the Army writ large would have it. And those are averages. So some things went a little bit faster. Most things went longer on the long side.

So what I say, you know, in the old days, you could enlist or commission into the Army and retire from the Army and maybe not see the new thing. So when I think about the speed of commercial business, like the automotive industry has the model year, business model, where every two years or every year, they’re actually putting out the next version. And there could be some minor tweaks. There could be design updates. There could be major updates based on where the rest of the commercial microelectronics ecosystem is. So it was one big jump in the commercial where you went from rolling up your windows to power windows and then power everything. And then there was another big jump where you went from, hey, there’s no dashboard, to you actually have an iPad or similar as your sort of C2 command-and-control touchscreen. And those happen just as a matter of course rather than all of the consumers getting together and go, I really want this. Somebody just dove in and then everyone followed and it moved really quickly. And those software updates happen daily, monthly, weekly rather than annually.

[WOLFGANG] Waiting five to seven years in today’s environment, that’s just not practical. I mean, you and I were talking off camera about counter drone technology. If you’re trying to field a piece of counter-drone equipment and you have to wait five years… I mean, we’re talking a matter of weeks here, not years.

[MILLER] You get 21 to 90 days before the thing that you’re fielding is near obsolete. And it’s not every component. A lot of our missile systems, they’re amazing. They work now, they’ve worked for years, they will work for years. But if you wait five years to update the tracking software, the guidance, the radars, the sensors, the communication, you will be obsolete in a modern battlefield.

[WOLFGANG] There’s obviously a ton of cool technology behind us. You can see here on the convention floor here in AUSA. But you, I know you’ve said this and Acting Secretary Telle said this, it’s all about human beings. It’s still all about soldiers and the men and women that are operating all this cool stuff. How difficult is it to bring people up to speed on all of the stuff that we’re seeing here? I know it’s a big, broad question, but it’s just mind-blowing for me to walk around this convention floor and see all of this stuff. Is it daunting to try to teach people how to use it? Are people intimidated by some of this tech? What’s that like on a daily basis for the Army?

[MILLER] It’s a good question. And I like that you bring up the human aspect because the other leader in the Army is General LaNeve, the current Vice Chief, and he owns requirements. So what he’s thinking about is, okay, we’re doing all these technology things. How do I field them to my units at Echelon? So ultimately, how do soldiers get them and use them? And the question that we have been working through is, normally when a new piece of tech came into the Army, we would do this thing called NET/NEF, new equipment training, new equipment fielding. And for the most complex things, that was a 40- to 80-hour block of instruction, and for the least complex things that was a 40- to 80-hour block of instruction because we try to same size or Swiss Army knife everything. What we are seeing is a lot of the modern technology is easy to learn, and I use easy to learn rather than intuitive because that’s the metric that Apple puts out in terms of okay, this is a very complex machine. It does very complex things. Have we made it easy enough for the human being that’s going to operate it to operate it without needing to have a PhD?

And the metaphor that I use is the calculator on your iPhone. So when you open up the normal calculator, four function, great for 90% of users. What most people don’t know is if you add a little bit of training, there’s a scientific calculator in there, whether you switch to it or you flip your phone sideways. So what we are trying to focus on is, we are ultimately enabling soldiers or enabling formations and we want to help industry understand here is the 80% solution for 80% of your users. Here’s how it needs to be simple to learn, easy to operate, easy to adapt. And then for our power users, for our super users who are going to get into the weeds, who are actually going to look at the telemetry data, the parametrics, who are actually going to read radar type of tracks.

We can specialize there and we can train them extra. But we really want to focus on no matter how complex the system is, our soldiers know what their mission is. Our soldiers know what their task is. How do we meet them where they’re at rather than trying to make them meet the engineers where they’re at?

[WOLFGANG] How do you know whether you need a new system or a new piece of equipment versus just updating or upgrading something, whether we’re talking about communications or some other system? What are you looking at? What are the metrics you’re looking at to make that kind of a determination?

[MILLER] It’s hard, and I don’t want to pretend that it’s not. There are some systems in the inventory that have been around since the 70s or the 80s. And as we think about what current technology brings, we talk about things like modularity. Can I orchestrate the pieces of this system in a new way to adapt to a fight? And if the answer is yes, yes, I can orchestrate this, yes, I can tailor it, then that piece of equipment can be incrementally refined over time based on the new fight. If we find that the answer is no. This is very much locked in. I have no flexibility. I can’t actually tailor it to a new fight or a new theater or a new echelon. Those are the decisions that the Army leadership are making in terms of, okay, maybe it’s time to replace that. If the supply chain is so brittle that we no longer have it, that no one makes the parts anymore, that’s where senior leaders are making the decisions on, hey, we should probably shift to something else and build in the modularity, build in the adaptability.

From a tech roadmap strategy, when something is so bespoke that it is no longer able to adapt to the current fight, that’s when we make a decision and go, this is no longer the right thing. And what we are trying to do through things like Operation Jailbreak, which Secretary Telle talked about this morning, through the battlefield geometry and how the Army fights that General LaNeve put out last week, and he’ll talk about at the Eisenhower lunch. That is how we are layering the, what are the tasks that we expect Army units to do? What are the tools we expect them to do them with? And then what is the tech that actually delivers those tools? Instead of starting with, well, here’s a new bright, shiny piece of equipment. Go figure out how to employ it.

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