The U.S. Army is introducing a plethora of new technology and AI tools to its troops. A former top technology official at the company says it’s easy to deploy them. The challenge is adapting soldiers and organizations, a lesson against inflexible operations.
“The hardest part is not the technology,” Leonel Garciga told Business Insider. This encourages employees to rethink how and why they work, as well as use new tools in a supervised sandbox. “People are always nervous when automation and technology is introduced.”
Garciga, whose three-year term as the Army’s chief information officer expired last Friday, said the job was fast-paced and marked by efforts to upend decades-old processes, break through bureaucracy and give soldiers and civilians more room to experiment.
The key to achieving that, he told Business Insider, is to release new tools quickly and prioritize user experience, while accepting the risk that things don’t go as planned.
“Let’s break the glass.”
This is the kind of rapid change Pentagon leaders are currently pushing across the U.S. military, from drones and new weapons to artificial intelligence platforms and digital tools. But transforming the Army at such a speed, especially its vast business operations, runs counter to the traditional way the military operates.
Rather than sticking to the typical years-long development process with excessive deliberation, Garciga’s approach was simpler. “Let’s just make it ubiquitous and see what happens,” he said. “Let’s break the glass.”
The chief information officer serves as the Army’s chief advisor on technology to run the service, from mundane software used by soldiers and civilians in daily operations to technical safety oversight. This is a daunting role given the scale of the service and how much work has to be done behind the scenes to enable progress.
He added, “I think you need this mental agility to do this job really smartly because the portfolio is large. Because the ability to move your perspective and your mindset across different areas makes this job a lot easier.”
Acquisition reforms in the Army began under the Biden administration and accelerated under the Trump administration. US military courtesy photo
Garciga said many of the Army’s biggest problems stemmed from the user experience, with soldiers and civilians sometimes waiting weeks to access the system and facing extensive paperwork for routine processes. At the same time, various branches of the Army, from the legal department to the medical department, are purchasing proprietary software with little coordination or compatibility across the services.
Basic communication tools frustrate troops. The Army’s strict memo format was designed for paper-heavy bureaucracies, not modern digital work.
Garciga said one of the most popular requests from soldiers is for help converting messy notes into documents that easily comply with Army formatting regulations.
“Don’t make it a process.”
Bureaucratic processes that consume time and unnecessary friction points that erode people’s actual work can cause some of the biggest headaches for Army employees.
Garciga said part of solving these problems means pushing decisions down and empowering commanders to make their own decisions.
“Don’t make it a process that takes time and delays people from gaining the capabilities they need,” he said.
Garciga said the tension stems from the Army’s rapid adoption of AI technology, which is moving faster than initially expected and causing some whiplash as workers struggle to keep pace.
The Army has made many new AI capabilities available with low barriers to entry for soldiers and civilians to experiment with, but dealing with the flood of new tools can be difficult.
“Probably the biggest request signal we get is, ‘How can I get trained on this if I don’t understand what I’m looking at?'” Garciga said. “And the other challenge is, ‘How do we maintain policy?’ These are not challenges unique to the Army.
Garciga is a first-generation American and his family is from Cuba. Caleb Thompson/Army Chief Information Officer
The situation Garciga described is a prime example of how military and civilian workers, including white-collar workers in the corporate world, are adapting to the benefits and challenges posed by artificial intelligence. Many of the processes workers are accustomed to have changed, infuriating some.
That creates obstacles to getting people to adapt, but Garciga called that the biggest challenge, not the technology itself.
“How do we push it forward?”
Garciga was appointed to the CIO by Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth in the Biden administration, and his appointment comes after decades of, as Garciga described, never saying no to new work or learning opportunities.
Garciga is a first-generation American whose family is from Cuba, and he enlisted in the Navy after high school because he couldn’t afford college. “Before I knew it, I was on a submarine,” he said. Garciga later earned a submarine warfare pin on the Los Angeles-class USS Memphis submarine.
An early proving ground for his subsequent role as Army CIO was in the 2000s, when he helped lead the Joint IED Defeat Organization. The organization was tasked with quickly providing the military with the tools, weapons, and training needed to counter improvised explosive devices. It’s a deadly threat that the military has yet to solve. He will next head to Booz Allen Hamilton, where he will serve as an AI and technology advisor.
“I think I spent most of my career in an area without the constraints of the Department of the Army or the intelligence community,” he said, where access and information was decentralized and the workforce was less controlled from top to bottom.
“I have a very different perspective on it, and that’s driven a lot of our policy. When you look at it, it’s really been focused on, ‘How do we push it as far as it can go?'”
Garciga said his successor will need to test how much expansion and speed it can sustain and whether there are certain areas where guardrails should be raised. “What are the standards by which governance must be put in place? Unrestricted sprawl is never a good thing, right?”