The Secretary of the Army announced this week he is creating the “Institutional Army Transformation Commission” to determine how the Army can become more agile and cost-effective. Speaking at a town hall meeting for Army Senior Executives, Secretary John McHugh said he is asking Army managers to “change the way they think,” as well as how they budget.
This is the second panel McHugh has established to find ways to change the way the Army is managed. Earlier, he established a task force to look at the Army’s management structure and business practices and find short-term improvements and long-term structural changes. So far, this task force has begun efforts to identify redundancies in R&D, find unneeded organization, and consolidate and streamline requirements processes.
The “Commission” will take a longer-term view of changing the “institutional” Army. It will not only implement changes proposed by the task force, but look for new opportunities for improvement over the coming three years. McHugh said it will especially focus on how to restructure the Army, now “loosely divided into two separate organization—the currently deployed operational Army and the institutional or “generating force” that trains and supports the deployed forces. While the operational Army has changed continuously to meet new challenges, the institutional Army has changed little since the 1970s.
