SCHOFIELD BARRACKS, Hawaii—In a few years, visitors to this Army installation northwest of Honolulu will likely see something that today is still in the realm of fiction, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll said Tuesday.
“I think what you will see in a couple of years when you drive back on this base is you’ll see an infantry squad vehicle going out into training with some autonomously led robots beside it, and some drones that are capable of swarming flying above it. And I think you’ll start to see this mixture of human and machine in a way that used to be kind of science fiction, but we’re right on the edge of it.”
Driscoll and Army Chief Gen. Randy George stopped in Hawaii this week as part of a trip through the Indo-Pacific that includes visits to Australia, for the massive Talisman Sabre exercise, and to the Philippines. Friday, they watched as a Lockheed Martin Precision Strike Missile was fired from an Australian HIMARS, marking the first time the long-range missile was fired west of the international date line and the first time it was fired in Australia.
“Our soldiers deserve the best capabilities and today we just demonstrated one of the newest munitions in our arsenal,” Driscoll said.
The PrSM—pronounced “prism”—has a range of about 300 miles, and can hit moving targets on land or at sea. Two of the missiles can be fired from one HIMARS.
On Tuesday, standing before two of the 25th Infantry Division’s new HIMARS rocket launchers with division commander Maj. Gen. Marcus Evans, Driscoll underscored the importance of the region to the service.
“The threat in INDOPACOM is more real than ever before,” he said, noting that during their tour of training areas and units here, “what the soldiers were telling us is a lot of the equipment we’ve been giving them for the last decade or two—the Humvees, the [Joint Light Tactical Vehicles]—it just doesn’t work in this terrain. When they’re deploying to the Philippines, it doesn’t work.”
What the Army is doing instead, Driscoll said, is give them new capabilities that do work, such as the Infantry Squad Vehicle and new types of drones. It’s part of the Army’s ongoing transformation initiative, called “transformation in contact.”
The HIMARS, of which the division will receive 16 in total, are part of that transformation.
George noted that 25th ID “is kind of leading a lot of the [transformation] efforts that we have across the whole Army,” and as a result the service is learning a lot about how the new gear works in Pacific environments.
“This unit is moving fast. The Army is moving fast to make sure that we’re transforming.”
The Army talks “a lot about what’s changing on the modern battlefield,” and 25th ID is also figuring out how to train differently, he said.
In Australia on Friday, Driscoll told reporters that the U.S. is “actively designing our Army so that we are capable of responding to any threat from China,” but noted that “if you look at how warfare has unfolded throughout human history, most humans have gotten guesses wrong about where war will happen,” so the service is also focused on being “flexible, and agile, and innovative” enough to respond anywhere.
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