Then-Sergeant First Class Jacob Gaskill began feeling unwell last year. He served as an Army ordnance technician for more than a decade before joining the Army Software Factory. There and over several years, he helped solve some of the service’s most pressing digital problems.
But in 2025, his software tour was coming to an end. Equipped with an “additional skill identifier” identifying his qualifications as a software engineer from his time with the ASWF, he was expected to return to the EOD branch and complete his service in the position he had assumed in 2010.
At the time, he heard rumors that the Army was setting up a functional area for enlisted soldiers like him to stay in the software field. Officers and warrant officers could apply for the new functional area FA28, where they would apply software and artificial intelligence capabilities to Army problems. Enlisted soldiers like Gaskill also wanted a chance.
“We weren’t sure what was going to happen because it was up to the Army to decide whether or not they would approve the construction of this functional area,” he said in an interview with DefenseScoop last week. By fall 2025, the Army approved a path from sergeant to software warrant, a path for soldiers like Gaskill to remain in the field that allows the Army to bring enlisted backgrounds to bear on technical issues facing heavy force enlisted personnel, officials said.
“We are the audience,” Gaskill said.
Today he is a warrant officer and one of three software operations technicians (280A) who completed the rank’s basic course on Wednesday. Another four will attend the basic course this month. Although it was a small cohort, officials said their graduation represents a significant step for the service, helping to retain organic software talent that had been lost to the private sector for years and deploying them broadly across the force.
For conscripted soldiers who choose the arrest warrant route, an additional six years of compulsory service applies. ASWF graduates also require three years of additional service, which begins upon receipt of their ASI. That’s at least nine more years of service the Army is getting from these officers to help anchor the force’s software trajectory.
Army officials have repeatedly said the ability to quickly share data between sensors, weapons and units can make the difference between success or failure on the battlefield, pointing to the war between Russia and Ukraine as an example. Commanders need access to such information to make “faster and better” decisions, officials said, emphasizing the need for in-house expertise to create the apps, programming and installation in such a data-intensive environment.
According to officials, the army initially sent troops with software skills into the armed forces individually. Now the service is trying to build expert software teams made up of product managers, designers and engineers assigned to incident commanders as part of their direct staff, who will develop tools, including AI-powered applications, to help troubleshoot unit problems.
“This is a powerful capability for a commander to provide,” said Howard “Howie” Brewington, deputy director of the Mission Command Center of Excellence and architect of the NCO warrant software track. Currently, there are only a few dozen soldiers left in the software functional area, he said. The service is now trying to quadruple that number, in part with the help of the NCO warrant trail.
Warrant Officer 1 Bruce Black Jr., a former military medic who also participated in the Pathway, said his unit at Army Pacific Command is in the process of establishing one of these teams. He is part of USARPAC’s main data office, where he handles personnel issues, advises the commander and creates technical resources such as a “to-do” app for an exercise in the Philippines.
“You will be the leader who anchors the team technically,” he said of his role.
These software problems could vary across Europe or the states where Gaskill is stationed, the warrants say, and require a force of experts to stay abreast of the rapidly evolving technology world while bringing those lessons to the larger Army.
Both commanders said they expected to do some self-advocacy with commanders who may not be familiar with the new capabilities the Army is building, similar to other specialized capabilities that commanders have had to use but in which they have no experience. However, they pointed to the ASWF’s growing reputation and the new expertise being deployed across the force as examples of this perception fading.
“If you’re not able to give the commander a capability statement to let him know what you can and can’t do, we can’t expect him to be able to use us well if we can’t do that,” Gaskill said. “I think that we need to be able to maintain the ability to make it clear to a non-technical soldier what we can do and then follow through on those … promises.”
“Bleeding talent”
In 2020, the service announced the ASWF, a novel Texas-based unit integrated into the Austin Technology Center that would allow active-duty Soldiers, sergeants and senior Soldiers from across the force to work at the forefront of the Army’s innovation efforts and address some of its most pressing digital problems.
The goal of the ASWF is to find “hidden” technical talent in the Army, develop soldier software capabilities (particularly with commercial systems), and deploy them against the service’s technical problems with a homegrown organic force. It consists of three phases, lasts about 18 months depending on a soldier’s career trajectory, and is competitive, according to officials and the organization’s website. Hundreds of soldiers applied for the final cohort, and only about two dozen were selected.
It is intended to appeal to all types of soldiers, not just those with strong technical backgrounds, to bring diverse experiences from the Army into the software pipeline. Units can submit their software issues directly to ASWF. The website provides a list of troop applications that can be used by units, from air strike planners to recruiting widgets. His motto: by soldiers for soldiers.
But in 2025, the Army was losing software talent, particularly among its NCOs, to a booming private tech industry. After the ASWF, soldiers like Gaskill received their additional skill designation, performed, for example, a two-year “operational tour” with a division or corps-level unit, and then returned to their non-software base branch such as infantry or medical.
There was no good way for Soldiers, who often came to ASWF from non-technical backgrounds, to stay in the software lane. After leaving their regular offices to potentially study software for years, they found it difficult to return to their traditional jobs.
“We gave that talent away to industry,” Brewington said, echoing senior Army leaders. After receiving instructions to create a new career field last spring, the Army prepared officers and officers to enter a software functional area to retain talent. But, Brewington said, “we realized we had a big hole in our momentum because we also had NCOs that we were training for whom there was no career path.”
He didn’t have data to show how much talent the service was losing, but described a concerted effort to address a priority problem the Army needed to fix. Now enlisted soldiers can contact the ASWF and immediately apply for a warrant to remain in the software field.
Brewington, who served in the infantry for 21 years before becoming an Army civilian in 2008, said his team “fought through the system” to pave this path. In the past, it took up to two years to get a noncommissioned officer bond, he said. According to Brewington, it’s been four months now, supported by Army leadership’s priorities to stop the loss of talent and elbow grease.
It wasn’t entirely clear why the service couldn’t create this track for NCOs without making them warrant officers.
“If you have officers, warrant officers and non-commissioned officers, you have a branch,” Brewington said in response to a question on the subject. In his opinion: “Especially with the way technology is changing, I would like to see a software operations department at some point in the future.”
The two warrant officers DefenseScoop spoke with said the new career path offers them a more stable and predictable way to stay in the software field while serving in the military. While for some a raise may have been a consideration that DefenseScoop has reported on in other areas such as cyber, in their experience this has not been the case.
“I don’t think pay is the main purpose of the move, I think it’s a sense of purpose and predictability in their career,” Black said. “The ability to say, ‘This is what I’m going to do for the rest of my career,’ as opposed to before becoming a warrant officer … we didn’t know what was going to happen to the recruits.”
The staff officers described the need to utilize troops with recruiting backgrounds, particularly from various non-technical professions, to solve actual software problems faced by Soldiers in the force.
“Building software for a Soldier involves many different considerations that are often not taken into account by contractors, contractors or corporations,” Gaskill said. “A lot of times it’s not what we needed, and a lot of the differences are just nuances, but those are nuances that an Army officer or an Army officer can understand.”
“But NCOs and officers and warrant officers have different priorities,” he added. Arrest warrant officers and officers also only make up a small part of the service compared to the enlisted corps. “So by bringing noncommissioned officers in, you bring the entire perspective that noncommissioned officers and their junior soldiers have into the process that we use to deliver software that’s really valuable right now, rather than maybe things that aren’t.”
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Written by Drew F. Lawrence
Drew F. Lawrence is a reporter at DefenseScoop, where he covers defense technology, systems, policy and personnel. A graduate of George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs, he has also been published in Military.com, CNN, the Washington Post, Task & Purpose and The War Horse. In 2022, he was named one of the top ten military veteran journalists and received awards in podcasting and national defense reporting. Originally from Massachusetts, he is a proud New England sports fan and an Army veteran.
https://defensescoop.com/2026/07/01/army-created-path-for-ncos-to-become-software-warrant-officers/
