The Army’s largest professional gathering kicks off Monday, traditionally a venue for the service to make big organizational announcements, like the advent of the black uniform beret or the launch of the Multi-Domain Operations concept. But with the government shut down and the Pentagon reining in public appearances by uniformed and civilian officials, it’s an open question how much the service will be able to participate in this year’s edition of the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference.
As of Tuesday, an AUSA spokesman told Defense One, impact to Army participation will be “minimal.” [Editor’s note: CNN reported Thursday evening that AUSA has donated $1 million to enable the attendance of senior leaders whose travel and per diem funding is frozen by the shutdown.]
An Army official told Defense One that the service has sought exceptions to the Pentagon’s new restrictions on public speaking so that Army leaders may speak to members of the press at the conference.
In addition to the standard panels and fireside chats, the 2025 AUSA annual meeting will feature a “Shark Tank”-like competition for developers to pitch their products, with a prize pool of $500,000. Winners will see their prototypes sent directly to the field for soldiers to try out.
“One of the things we know is we, the Army, are a bad customer for ourselves, but we’re also a bad customer for industry. We give demand signals, but don’t put dollars behind that,” Army Secretary Dan Driscoll told reporters last month. “And so small and medium businesses have a really hard time growing and scaling with us. And so we’re going to change that.”
The competition is a piece of the service’s larger FUZE program, which brings together xTech, the Small Business Innovation Research and Technology Transfer, the Manufacturing Technology and the Technology Maturation Initiative. The idea is that, like venture-capital firms, the Army will invest small amounts of money in buying existing technology and quickly unload what doesn’t work, rather than spending years developing the perfect product only to find it obsolete once it’s ready for fielding.
The service is also poised to make some “massively substantive changes to how we buy our stuff,” Driscoll said. “For us, what that looks like is our soldiers and our contractors and the people who come up with our requirements, putting them all together, empowering them with these big, hairy problems, and saying, ‘Go fix this for the soldier’.”
Other officials are slated to present updates on a range of initiatives, including the Mobile Brigade Combat Team concept, counter-small unmanned aerial systems development, and electronic warfare—all part of the service’s ongoing Transformation-in-Contact program.
On Tuesday, AUSA is to bring together the current and former commanders of U.S. Army North to talk about threats to the homeland, promising a rare public discussion on what has become the Defense Department’s top priority as the second Trump administration prepares to roll out its National Defense Strategy.
Other scheduled events include updates on the long-awaited Next-Generation Command and Control and the newly formed Joint Task Force 401, the Army-led effort to rapidly procure counter-small drone systems for all of the services.
NGC2, a joint venture by new-school contractors Anduril and Palantir, came under recent scrutiny after the Oct. 3 leak of an internal Army memo, first reported on by Breaking Defense, that warned of the system’s “significant risk to data, mission operations, and personnel by rendering the system vulnerable to insider threats, external attacks, and data spillage.”
The concerns were compiled as part of a normal audit of the development process, Anduril founder and CEO Palmer Luckey told reporters Thursday. Since it was shared internally, Luckey said, Anduril has since upgraded NGC2 with security protocols like user authentication and recording, which were always available in its Lattice software.
“The real answer is, we turned on all of the features that Lattice already had, which were not part of that initial prototype,” he said. “And the people who are planting that story are totally aware of that.”
The Army has talked about turning this around in its acquisitions process for years, and using these Silicon Valley firms to do it. Driscoll said he feels confident something is actually going to change this time.
“So from my perspective, I think if you look at the Army’s budget of $185 billion, that is a lot of money, and we should be getting much better outcomes to the American people and the soldiers,” he said. “And this is not intended to disparage previous administrations. But my understanding from people who’ve been in the building for 30-plus years is, it actually is different this time, that we are able to do the right thing as we think soldiers define it.”
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