After ‘hemorrhaging talent,’ the Army created a path for NCOs to become software warrant officers, graduating first batch

Then-sergeant first class Jacob Gaskill felt uneasy last year. He had been in the Army for more than a decade as an explosive ordnance technician before heading to the Army Software Factory. There and over the course of multiple years, he helped fix some of the service’s most pressing digital issues.

But in 2025, his software tour was coming to a close. Armed with an “additional skill identifier” that denoted his qualifications as a software developer from his time at the ASWF, he was set to go back to the EOD branch and finish out his service in the job he entered back in 2010. 

At the time, he heard rumors that the Army was going to set up a functional area for enlisted soldiers like him to stay in the software field. Officers and warrant officers could apply to the new functional area, known as FA28, where they would wield software and artificial intelligence skills against Army problems. Enlisted soldiers like Gaskill wanted a shot too.

“We weren’t sure what was going to happen, because it was up to the Army to decide whether or not they were going to approve this functional area to be built,” he told DefenseScoop in an interview last week. By fall 2025, the Army approved an NCO-to-software-warrant track and therefore a path for soldiers like Gaskill to stay in the field, which allows the Army to bring enlisted backgrounds to tech problems that face the enlisted-heavy force, officials said.

“We are the audience,” Gaskill said.

Now a warrant officer, he is one of three software operations technicians (280A) to graduate from the rank’s basic course Wednesday. Another four will attend the basic course this month. Though a small cohort, officials said their graduation marks a significant step for the service by helping retain organic software talent, which it had been losing to private industry for years, and employ it widely across the force.

Enlisted soldiers who go the warrant route will incur an additional six-year service obligation. ASWF graduates require three years of additional service, too, which begins once they receive their ASI. That’s at least nine more years of service the Army is getting from these warrant officers who are set to help anchor the force’s software trajectory. 

Army officials have repeatedly said the ability to quickly exchange data between sensors, weapons and units could define success or failure on the battlefield, pointing to the Russia-Ukraine war as an example. Commanders need access to such information for “faster, better” decisions, officials said, highlighting a need for in-house expertise to build the apps, programming and plumbing around such a data-heavy environment.

Initially, the Army sent software-savvy troops across the force individually, according to officials. Now, the service is attempting to build out expert software teams composed of product managers, designers and engineers assigned to operational commanders as part of their direct staff where they will build tools, including AI-enabled applications, to help fix unit problems. 

“That’s a powerful capability to provide a commander,” said Howard “Howie” Brewington, deputy director of the Mission Command Center of Excellence and architect of the NCO-warrant software track. There are only a few dozen soldiers in the software functional area now, he said. The service is now looking to quadruple that, in part with help from the NCO-warrant track.

Warrant Officer 1 Bruce Black Jr., a former enlisted combat medic who also took part in the pathway, said that his unit at Army Pacific Command was building out one of these teams. He’s part of USARPAC’s chief data office, where he fields problems from staff, advises the commander and builds tech resources, such as a “to-do” app for a Philippines-based exercise, for example.

“You’ll be the leadership anchoring that team technically,” he said of his role. 

Those software problems could be different in Europe or stateside where Gaskill is stationed, the warrants said, and will require an expert force to keep fresh on the rapidly evolving tech world while bringing those lessons back to the bigger Army. 

Both warrant officers said they expected to do some self-advocacy with commanders who may be unfamiliar with the new skill the Army is building, not unlike other specialized skills that commanders have had to employ but don’t have experience in. But they pointed to the growing reputation of the ASWF and the new know-how being employed across the force as examples of that perception fading.

“If you’re not able to give a capabilities brief to the commander to let them know what you can and cannot do, we can’t expect that they will be able to employ us well if we can’t do that,” Gaskill said, “I think that we need to be able to maintain the skill to be able to articulate to a non-technical soldier what we can do, and then deliver on those … promises.”

‘Hemorrhaging talent’ 

In 2020, the service announced the ASWF, a novel Texas-based unit baked into Austin’s tech hub where active duty soldiers, sergeant and up from across the force, could work at the forefront of the Army’s innovation effort and fix some of its most pressing digital issues. 

ASWF’s goal is to find “hidden” technical talent in the Army, develop soldier software skills (namely with commercial systems), and marshal them against the service’s tech problems with an organic force of its own creation. It consists of three phases, is about 18-months long depending on a soldier’s career track, and is competitive, according to officials and the organization’s website. Hundreds of soldiers applied for the last cohort, and only about two dozen were selected.

It is meant to attract all types of soldiers, not just ones with established tech backgrounds, in an effort to bring different experiences from the Army into the software pipeline. Units can send their software problems directly to ASWF. Its website boasts a list of troop-made applications for units to use, from air assault planners to recruiting widgets. Its motto: by soldiers, for soldiers. 

But by 2025, the Army was losing software talent, especially among its non-commissioned officer corps, to a booming private tech industry. After ASWF, soldiers like Gaskill would get their additional skill identifier, conduct a two-year “utilization tour” at a division or corps-level unit, for example, and then head back to their non-software base branch, such as infantry or medicine.

There was no good path for soldiers, who often came to ASWF from these non-tech backgrounds, to stay in the software track. Once they had left their base branches to study software, potentially for years, it became a difficult choice to go back to their conventional jobs. 

“We were hemorrhaging this talent to industry,” Brewington said, echoing senior Army leaders. Last spring, after he got the directive to create a new career field, the Army made paths for officers and warrants to enter a software functional area to help retain talent. But, Brewington said, “we realized we had a major hole in our swing, because we had non-commissioned officers that we were training as well, with no career path for them.”

He did not have data to say how much talent the service was losing, but described a concerted effort to rectify a high-priority problem the Army needed fixing. Now, enlisted soldiers can go through ASWF and immediately apply for the warrant track to stay in the software field. 

Brewington, who served in the infantry for 21 years before becoming an Army civilian in 2008, said his team “muscled our way through the system” to get that pathway set up. In the past, it took up to two years for an NCO-warrant track, he said. Now, backed by priorities from Army leadership to stop the talent bleed and elbow grease, according to Brewington, it’s four months.

It was not exactly clear why the service couldn’t create this track for NCOs without having them become warrant officers. 

“If you have officers, warrant officers and non-commissioned officers, you have a branch,” Brewington said in response to a question about the topic. In his opinion, “especially given the way technology is changing, I would love to see a software operations branch at some point in the future.”

The two warrants DefenseScoop spoke to said the new track offered them a more stable, predictable way to stay in the software field and serve in the military simultaneously. While a pay bump may have been a consideration for some, which DefenseScoop has reported on for other fields like cyber, it wasn’t in their experience.

“I don’t think pay is the primary purpose of switching over, I think it’s a sense of purpose and predictability in their career,” Black said. “Being able to say ‘This is what I will be doing for the rest of my career,’ versus before the warrant officer track … we didn’t know what was going to happen to the enlisted.”

The warrant officers described the necessity of having troops with enlisted backgrounds, especially from different non-tech jobs, to address actual software problems soldiers face in the force.

“Building software for a soldier comes with a lot of different considerations that oftentimes contractors or contracted firms or corporate companies don’t consider,” Gaskill said. “It’s often not what we needed, and a lot of the difference is just nuance, but that’s nuance that an officer in the Army, or a warrant officer in the Army, can understand.”

“But NCOs and officers and warrant officers have different priorities,” he added. Warrants and officers also make up only a small portion of the service compared to the enlisted corps. “So by including NCOs in that, you’re bringing all the perspective that NCOs and their junior enlisted soldiers have into the process that we use to deliver software that’s actually valuable right now, instead of maybe stuff that isn’t.”