Army quietly pursues massive digital overhaul expected to save at least $89M: ‘Dealing with stuff that was for 25 years ago’
The US Army has been quietly working on an initiative to bring its digital infrastructure into the modern era, ditching decades-old systems and planning to save taxpayers about $89 million starting on Oct. 1.
The Army’s tech shop began “aggressively” reevaluating its internal systems in November and drafting plans to consolidate dozens of workflow, case management and other internal tools into a simplified suite of programs.
“It’s not the usual, hey, we’re going to take two years to study this problem, and then sometime in ’28 we’ll reorganize,” US Army Chief Information Officer Leonel Garciga told The Post. “It’s like, hey, we’ve taken the resources away, you have until the end of September to reimagine how you’re going to deliver.”
“This is a definitely fast-moving train to get us to where we need to be.”
One of the crown jewels in this undertaking has been the Army’s implementation of a language learning model to finish its routine task of updating position descriptions for 300,000 civilian workers — something that usually takes 30 analysts and four months to complete — in a week, thanks to the AI system.
Now they’re hoping to use similar technology to dramatically streamline the Army’s response time to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and records management requests.
Garciga divides the Army’s tech overhaul into two main buckets: its “small potato” initiatives and its more ambitious upgrade projects.
The “small potato” bucket is where the estimated $89 million in savings by Oct. 1 originates. This includes programs that typically cost under $2 million annually and often deal with internal management, human resources-related and workflow tasks.
Some of those were legacy programs that the Army began purchasing years ago.
In tandem with the “small potato” efforts, the Army is also trying to upgrade its large Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and cloud systems. Garciga doesn’t have an estimate for the savings on those efforts, but expects them to be adjusted around the same time as the “small potato” efforts.
“In one of our larger logistics programs … we’ve basically brought that cloud bill down by 50%,” he said as an example of an ambitious project overhaul.
During its ongoing review and reform of legacy digital programs, the military branch is also looking into areas that are still stuck in the 20th century.
“There are areas that are still very much in legacy mode,” Garciga reflected. “We’re dealing with a lot of stuff that was for 25 years ago.”
Top of mind for him is the Army’s “outdated” manual, paper-based process for retrieving veteran and family records, which costs an estimated $43 million each year.
Under federal law, the Army must pay the National Archives and Records Administration for the retrieval process system. But the costs keep rising as the number of veterans increases. This problem was exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic when the National Archives had a significant backlog.
“We’re just passing the bill along from one organization to another, as opposed to spending the upfront money modernizing NARA’s ability to do this,” Garciga explained.
Amid pressure from the Army, the National Archives has begun shifting toward a new case management system to “streamline” the process.
The records retrieval snarls illustrate the Army’s predicament with tech — its interdependency on other federal agencies for key tasks, which means it has to collaborate with them on upgrades.
Tech baron Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team had highlighted a similar issue to the record retrieval snarl earlier this year with the federal government’s paper retirement system that had been run through a limestone mine in Pennsylvania.
Motivating the modernization push was the realization that the Army needs to adapt to a smaller civilian workforce as it adjusts to a post-War on Terror environment. The Army employs about 1.2 million soldiers, reserves and civilian workers.
“The secretary is really focusing on how do we as an Army bring commercial capability into the department as quickly as possible and start automating and bringing machine learning to bear on some of our problems,” Garciga explained, referring to Army Secretary Dan Driscoll.
The Army has evaluated its digital infrastructure in the past. Five years ago, the branch had about 980 internal business systems, and now it’s down to “under 300,” according to Garciga, who estimates that by the end of fiscal year 2026, another 80 will be phased out.
But Garciga suggested the Army is modernizing more aggressively and faster than it had previously. Aiding them in the process has been DOGE.
“We have been actively engaged with DOGE on rethinking our approach to licensing, and service level agreements with especially some of our big vendors and some of the larger products,” he said.
“They have definitely been a great asset in helping us think through some problems.”
Garciga believes that standardizing and centralizing the Army’s digital assets will enhance security and lethality while lowering costs for taxpayers.
“These are the foundational things that enable readiness and lethality. If soldiers can’t get paid, they’re having a bad day. If we can’t make sure that soldiers’ spouses are safe on post — that’s a big deal,” he said.
