It's raining in the Kuwaiti desert.

It's not supposed to rain here, and the downpour is snarling traffic, flooding barracks, and leaving military vehicles sodden and afloat at Camp Arifjan, the largest U.S. military base in Kuwait. Smaller than New Jersey, the country is home to more than 8,000 American soldiers -- the largest concentration of deployed Army personnel outside Afghanistan, Germany, and South Korea.

"So what are you guys doing here?" I ask the young private next to me in line at the camp's spacious Starbucks. "I mean, in Kuwait. What's your mission here?"

He offers a sheepish shrug. "Got me, ma'am. That's above my pay grade. I'm just trying to stay dry."

"Ours not to wonder why, ours but to try and stay dry," quips the lieutenant standing nearby, carefully maneuvering a lid onto his overflowing caramel latte.

In the age of the strategic corporal, "Got me!" is of course the wrong answer to journalistic queries. It has the distinct virtue of honesty, however. With the Iraq war over, the war in Afghanistan winding down, and Washington desperate to cut costs, the U.S. Army as a whole is struggling to define -- and defend -- its role and mission.

Why does the United States have over 8,000 soldiers stationed in peacetime Kuwait? More broadly, why does a country so seemingly determined to avoid another land war need a large standing army, with troops all over the globe? Won't the Navy and the Air Force, with their high-tech toys, be better suited to the conflicts of the future than the Army's half a million grunts, with their rucksacks and muddy boots?

Gen. Raymond Odierno, the Army's chief of staff, thinks he can answer those questions, and whether they know it or not, the soldiers stationed in Kuwait are part of his ambitious effort to reimagine the service.

To Odierno, the Army's future lies in "regionally aligned forces": Army units that will have long-term relationships with particular combatant commands. These regionally aligned forces -- or RAF, since the Army instinctively acronymizes everything -- will receive substantial region-specific linguistic and cultural training, making them more effective across what the military calls the "spectrum of conflict."

The idea underlying RAF (pronounced "raff") is that more culturally attuned soldiers will be better equipped to identify brewing conflicts before they get out of hand, enabling more timely and effective "shaping" -- that is, activities to make conditions favorable for U.S. military success. Such efforts can include influencing local populations, establishing friendly relations with local leaders, strengthening military-to-military cooperation, and the like. If conflict does break out, more culturally sophisticated soldiers will better understand the enemy and work more effectively with the host population.

"Before the most recent set of conflicts," Odierno wrote in March 2012, "it was generally believed that cultural awareness was only required in select Army units, such as Special Forces." In the general-purpose force, most units were deployed without regard to building up regional expertise. Thus, a brigade could find itself in South Korea one year, Iraq two years after that, Germany a few years later, and then in Afghanistan. Implicit in this force management system was the assumption that military skills exist largely in a realm outside culture -- that local populations are mostly just background noise.

Like others in his generation of officers, Odierno -- who spent several years commanding U.S. troops in Iraq -- learned the hard way that military skills don't exist in a cultural vacuum. "We went in there with a complete misunderstanding, regionally and inside Iraq, of what was going on," he told me in a recent interview. "I don't ever want that to happen again." The U.S.-led military coalition easily defeated Iraq's conventional forces, but lack of cultural, linguistic, and political understanding consistently hampered U.S. efforts to comprehend the insurgency. Meanwhile, many U.S. successes in Iraq hinged on painstaking efforts to acquire local knowledge. Mapping clan and family relationships turned out to be key to identifying Saddam Hussein's hiding place, for instance.

The regionally aligned forces concept represents Odierno's effort to lock in the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan on a global scale. The United States doesn't know which threats will prove most serious in the future or which parts of the world they will come from. So to Odierno, the best way to hedge against risk is for the Army to align forces to every geographical region.

It's a potentially transformative attempt to rethink the Army's role in the uncertain post-post-9/11 world -- to turn a clumsy, industrial behemoth into an agile, regionally engaged, globally responsive, and culturally savvy force, one that's more Mao than Bismarck and more T.E. Lawrence than Patton.

For the Army, it's also smart marketing at a moment when budget-cutters in the executive branch and on Capitol Hill are sharpening their knives. "There are many people that believe that through technology advancement, we can solve all of the issues of warfare," Odierno said at the 2013 annual meeting of the Association of the United States Army. "I absolutely reject that concept.… Human interaction in a complex environment is key to our success in the future."

There's a not-so-subtle subtext to his words: The Navy and the Air Force can brag all they want about their technologically sophisticated systems, but you can't build human relationships from the deck of an aircraft carrier or the simulated cockpit of a Predator drone. Building relationships requires putting human beings on the ground in regions all over the world -- something only the Army has the manpower to do.

Nevertheless, Odierno faces formidable obstacles. Some are external: It's far from certain that the other military services, the State Department, the White House, and Congress will buy into his vision. But many obstacles are internal. In any large bureaucracy, efforts to change long-standing practices can generate anxiety, confusion, and foot-dragging -- and the Army is nothing if not a bureaucracy.

It's like the old joke:

How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb? Only one, but the light bulb has to want to change.

Odierno knows that if the Army is to remain relevant and useful, it needs to change.

But does it want to?

When he commanded the military's now-defunct Joint Forces Command from 2010 to 2011, Odierno recalls, the military's geographic combatant commanders complained that they never knew precisely which Army forces would be made available to them and that they couldn't count on being able to access the precise mix of capabilities they needed.

With the advent of regionally aligned forces, declared the Army Times in June 2013, "Everything you know about deployments is about to change." For commanders, RAF would create a reliable source of Army troops that they could draw upon at will. For individual soldiers, "[T]he immersion in language, regional expertise and culture training will be the big difference."

The Army's efforts to operationalize the RAF concept started small, and in the middle of Kansas. At Fort Riley in 2012, the 1st Infantry Division's 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team -- "Dagger Brigade" -- was designated the Army's first regionally aligned brigade. The brigade and its several thousand soldiers "aligned" with U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), the youngest and smallest of the military's six geographic combatant commands. (The other five are European, Northern, Southern, Pacific, and Central commands. Each coordinates activities in its region for all the military services; thus, Central Command controls all U.S. missions in Afghanistan, regardless of whether Army, Air Force, Navy, or Marine forces are involved.)

Gen. Raymond Odierno, chief of staff of the Army, is the brains behind the concept of regionally aligned forces, or RAF.

In Kansas, Dagger Brigade struggled to figure out what it meant to be "regionally aligned" with AFRICOM. With no template for how to increase their sociocultural knowledge, brigade leaders got creative: They scrounged up African students and Africa experts at nearby Kansas State University and enlisted their help in designing a training course for troops preparing to deploy.

The training course was short -- roughly a week long -- but so were the brigade's regional deployments, which began in the spring of 2013. The brigade as a whole remained in Kansas, sending small units off for a few weeks at a time to work with African partner forces. Two dozen soldiers from Fort Riley helped train Mali-bound U.N. peacekeeping troops in Niger; several hundred Dagger Brigade soldiers conducted exercises in South Africa; two Fort Riley snipers conducted a short-term mission in Burundi; and so on.

It was hardly an "immersion" in local cultures, but within the Army, senior officials deemed Dagger Brigade's initial experiment a roaring success, and they accelerated the alignment of other Army units with the other geographic combatant commands.

In late 2013, senior Army officials also launched a full-court press to publicize the regionally aligned forces concept. The October meeting of the Association of the United States Army, the highest-profile gathering of service personnel each year, featured multiple presentations and discussions on RAF. Regionally aligned forces will ensure that the Army's "'Prevent -- Shape -- Win' Strategy is operationalized in the human domain," proclaimed a handout distributed by the service's manpower command. "People-to-people relationships matter!"

A RAF manifesto of sorts also appeared in the autumn 2013 issue of Parameters, a quarterly journal published by the Army War College. Written by three officers in the Army's strategy division, the article acknowledged that "few understand the basic elements of the concept, or the goals the Chief of Staff of the Army (CSA), General Raymond T. Odierno, wants to achieve with it." But the authors argued that regionally aligned forces are essential "in a changing strategic environment characterized by combinations of nontraditional and traditional threats." Successfully carrying out regional missions, they wrote, "requires an understanding of the cultures, geography, languages, and militaries of the countries where RAF are most likely to be employed."

Outside Army circles, RAF generated little interest beyond a few media mentions. Most were respectful, if slightly bemused. ("U.S. Army Hones Antiterror Strategy for Africa, in Kansas," the New York Times reported.) On the left, however, RAF has been viewed as further evidence of the United States' sinister, hegemonic ambitions.

A recent article by Nick Turse in the Nation charged that "AFRICOM releases information about only a fraction of its activities … preferring to keep most information about what it's doing -- and when and where -- secret." But, he continued, "[p]reviously undisclosed US Army Africa records reveal" that, in 2013, Fort Riley's Dagger Brigade took part in "128 separate 'activities' in twenty-eight African countries" as part of the Army's regionally aligned forces effort. "So much else … remains in the shadows," Turse wrote, including, he suggests, U.S. training of coup plotters and war criminals. "It remains to be seen just what else we don't know about US Africa Command's exponentially expanding operations."

On Antiwar.com, news editor Jason Ditz warned that "Gen. Raymond Odierno's 'Regionally Aligned Forces' plan [gives] the US the ability to quickly deploy troops anywhere on the planet.… [W]ith enough troops and enough countries involved, the question of what wars and where can be worked out at their leisure."

Army leaders dismiss the notion that RAF is a sign of growing interventionist bellicosity. "After 12 years of war," Lt. Gen. James Terry, commander of U.S. Army Central (ARCENT), tells me, "I don't wish another protracted conflict on my grandkids. If we get regionally aligned forces right, if we get the shaping right, we can hopefully help prevent another conflict."