“Transforming for a Complex World” was this year’s theme at the Association of the U.S. Army (AUSA) Annual Meeting and Exposition. Taking place at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C., from Oct. 14-16 and welcoming more than 33,000 attendees and 750 exhibitors (up from 650 last year), the event is the largest land power exposition and professional development forum in North America.

AUSA is a nonprofit educational and professional development association serving the Army and U.S. defense supporters. This year’s event topics ranged from ways to increase service recruitment to replacing the Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle to helping small businesses work with the Army.

Transformation Initiatives

Woman behind podium speaking at US Army conference

U.S. Army Secretary, Christine Wormuth (photo credit: U.S. Army)

In keeping with the conference’s theme, Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth spoke of a decade-long shift away from counterinsurgency and counterterrorism and toward preparation for large-scale combat missions.

“This shift was underway long before Russian tanks rolled into eastern Ukraine or Hamas invaded southern Israel,” Wormuth said, referring to two major international conflicts.

She highlighted three areas of success so far: transforming weapons systems, specifically modernizing air and missile defense units, replacing legacy radar, and using new battle command systems to connect sensors; establishing multidomain task forces to support operations such as fire protection, countering small unmanned aerial systems and Maneuver-Short Range Air Defense, an Army system that defends against low-altitude threats; and increasing recruitment, with a goal of bringing in 61,000 warfighters.

But things need to move faster, noted Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George. To speed the service’s ability to adapt to changing threats, he announced a new initiative that emphasizes giving new and emerging tech to warfighters’ hands for testing and feedback.

“The battlefield is increasingly more lethal, more brutal, and less forgiving,” George said. “We’re seeking adaptive, modular systems, dual-use technologies that can work together with interchangeable parts … to adapt to the battlefield and technology changes. We have to buy smart and fast.”

Additionally, officials said that artificial intelligence needs to be part of all Army initiatives. “I think we have to integrate it into everything we’re doing,” said Command Sgt. Maj. JoAnn Naumann, senior enlisted adviser for Army Special Operations Command. “It is everything from understanding our manpower and how we’re utilizing our manpower and the readiness of our manpower, just taking some of those tasks off of leaders so that leaders can focus on the things that only leaders can make decisions about is critical.”

Small-business Support

The Army will create a way to make it easier for small businesses to securely work with sensitive military information, said Gabe Camarillo, the service’s undersecretary.

Called NCODE, which stands for Next-gen Commercial Operations in Defended Enclaves, the project will run in 2025-2027 as a $26 million pilot. The Army estimates that about half of the 12,000 small businesses it works with are exposed to medium- or high-risk threats.

“This essentially provides … a secure environment for small businesses to participate in, where they can collaborate, share information, and most importantly, do their own work … that would otherwise present a threat vector,” Camarillo said. “What’s great about it is that it’s compliant with CMMC [Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification], so all of the department’s requirements would be met by operating in this environment.”

Additionally, because Army cyber experts will operate the program, but small businesses won’t be part of the Army network, they can use their software without first going through the authority to operate process required to install new programs on Defense Department computers.

“We really do need the innovation support of our industrial base, and a key font of that innovation is all in our small businesses,” Camarillo said.

New Acquisition Approach

Three U.S. military service men sitting next to American flag

U.S. Army Undersecretary, Gabe Camarillo (photo credit: AUSA)

For its Next Generation Command and Control (NGC2) project, the Army’s new approach to a data-centric C2 architecture, the service is looking for industry teams rather than one GovCon partner, Camarillo said.

“We want to open up the competition [and] have different teams competing, both together, on teams, and against each other, in many cases,” he said, adding that it should start in the third quarter of fiscal 2025. “We want to get vendors on contract. We want to try something out. We want to do it under the auspices of a formal program that we can show Congress that we’ve got a different approach.”

The Army is also looking to invest in modernizing weapons systems to defend against drone attacks. Between October 2023 and February 2024, warfighters in Iraq, Syria, and Jordan faced more than 170 attacks by Iran-based militias, many of which were from UAVs. More than 200 service members were injured in those attacks.

The service proposed $5.6 billion in the fiscal 2025 budget proposal, up 77% from last year. “The way the threat employs capability, and the way the threat constantly innovates, has a say in how we apportion some of our funding,” said Lt. Gen. Sean Gainey, commander of Army Space and Missile Defense Command.

Given the uncertainty swirling this year because of the current conflicts abroad and the upcoming presidential election and what new leadership will mean for the Army, we will be staying closely tuned in to how the efforts laid out this year play out next year.