US special operations commander says the next war may require the military to 'creatively destroy' old ways of training

Special operations chief says military must drop some old training methods

The Pentagon is under pressure to transform its ranks after 20 years of the Global War on Terror

Future wars will likely require new priorities and tougher tradeoffs, admiral says

Adapting to new battlefields may mean that the US military needs to clear its training calendar to make way for new priorities, a top admiral said.

"Some things that we used to do, we're going to have to stop doing," Adm. Frank Bradley, who leads the military's Special Operations Command, said last week at the annual SOF Week event in Tampa, Florida.

Bradley recalled how, as a junior sailor, he and his teammates measured the depth of water using a line weighted with a lead block, writing their measurements on shards of plexiglass with grease pencils, but as methods and tech evolved, the Navy began adopting other tools for training.

"There are only so many hours in the day and so many days in the week, and some of those hours you have to sleep to be ready and to be sharp," Bradley said. "And so you have a limited amount of time to prepare and train, and so we aren't going to just add new things onto the calendar for our SOF formations or any of our formations. We have to creatively destroy parts of that calendar to make room for the new things we have to do."

As the Pentagon tries to transform the training, tech, and acquisitions processes that calcified during the 20-year Global War on Terror, letting go of irrelevant training could be tough.