Army Program Executive Office reorg is ‘natural evolution’ amid larger transformation: Official

TECHNET AUGUSTA 2025 — A senior Army Futures Command official said today the service can expect a shake-up in the organization of its Program Executive Offices (PEOs) that are in charge of developing requirements and acquiring systems, in what the official said was a “natural evolution” as the Army undergoes a broader transformation.

“When you look at what we’re doing on requirements, since we have kind of gone away from the dozens and dozens of requirements that drive acquisition activity, it’s natural that the way that the acquisition side is organizing themselves to be able to manage and deliver against those,” Joe Welch, deputy to the commanding general of Army Futures Command (AFC), told Breaking Defense in an interview. “It’s just a very natural evolution. It would be unnatural actually to leave that the way it is, having significantly changed the requirements as much as we have.”

As part of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s Army Transformation Initiative (ATI), the service is expected to find ways it can streamline acquisition, including creating less prescriptive, more flexible requirements for systems, Welch said. Given that PEOs are structured around the format of requirements, he argued it makes sense that the service would reorganize its offices to create a more fluid ecosystem with less stove pipes in line with the way requirements are changing.

“Names, titles, etc, may change slightly, but, I think this is aligning [the Army] into where we’re already going,” he said.

​​Much is still unknown about what the PEO reshuffle will look like, and Welch declined to go into detail. Breaking Defense previously reported that under one proposal the service’s 13 PEOs could be consolidated into nine, with PEO Ground Combat Systems and PEO Combat Support and Combat Services potentially being combined. The proposal said PEO Command, Control, Communications and Networks (PEO C3N) and PEO Information, Electronic Warfare and Sensors (IEW&S) could be combined, and it was reported that the service was also considering eliminating PEO Simulation, Training and Instrumentation (STRI).

Also part of ATI, the service announced it’s combining AFC and its Training and Doctrine Command under a new command called the Army’s Transformation and Training Command, which is still in the works. 

As far as a timeline for when the new PEO reorganization will be complete, Ward Roberts, the deputy of PEO C3N, told Breaking Defense that sharing that information was “above his pay grade,” however he added that “right now, I think we’re just waiting for those final decisions from leadership.” 

“With Army continuous transformation, the Army’s restructuring how they do big acquisitions, requirements, testing, programmatics, that then that is leading to how ASA(ALT) [Assistant Secretary of the Army (Acquisition, Logistics and Technology)] might restructure to support that. Within the PEO, fundamentally, one of the goals that [Brig.] Gen. [Jack] Taylor [PEO of C3N] had when he came in was to shape the organization to be more agile, to lift capabilities and break down the stove pipes,” Roberts said.

Notably, the PEOs of C3N, IEW&S and STRI were absent from TechNet Augusta, and their deputies took their places.