Guy Taylor, National Security Editor with Threat Status at the Washington Times and John T. Seward, lead NATSEC Tech correspondent at Threat Status, with the themes they see across the 2025 AUSA conference.
[TAYLOR] We are at AUSA, the Association of the United States Army Annual Flagship Conference in Washington, D.C. and it is a huge event. We’ve picked up a couple of interesting themes this year that we want to tell you about.
[SEWARD] It’s great for me as an Army guy to come to a huge Army conference. So I got to have a nice homecoming and meet a bunch of folks that I know. What I saw, though, was that at every single booth, you had to have something that was drone-oriented. I mean, we saw folks even basically just cutting off the pilot nose cone for the UH-60 Black Hawk, developing it as a drone package, being able to do drone swarms.
[TAYLOR] We had counter-drone technology on display.
[SEWARD] And we’ve started to talk to some of the companies about how basically mid-tier and new entry companies are trying to cooperate with each other to really meet the Army’s challenge of having more open architecture, having more fast-paced technology come into the sector.
[TAYLOR] What I’m identifying as a major theme at this year’s AUSA, 2025, are smaller disruptor-like companies, much smaller than the mid-level primes or the big-time primes, trying to show that they’re working together to compete with the big-time primes, especially on drone technology. While you’ve got mid-tier companies that are trying to show that they’re flexible enough to integrate new technology in this fast-evolving technology space, with existing dominant systems that may already be fielded, but don’t have AI integration. I would say, I think people who’ve never been to AUSA, this is probably the biggest weapons show, defense industrial complex event in the United States that happens every year. It’s the only thing that the U.S. has that compares, for example, with IDEX, the international defense exhibition that happens every two years in the United Arab Emirates.
[SEWARD] AUSA is still very international. We have an article coming out soon talking about how SAIC is partnering with some Israeli companies that are doing some loitering munitions. We obviously had a lot of folks that talked to us about different weapons platforms from essentially any of the allied partners and their development, trying to get into part of this new Army integration strategy for developing both the AI integration but also just modernizing the force. We saw Army Materiel Command talk about being able to actually 3D print parts for drones and really get from a place where you had this long contracting string to be able to have any technology get into the hands of soldiers and get onto the battlefield, and really compressing that down to just a few months, maybe a year to get new technology into those people’s hands.
[TAYLOR] AUSA kicked off this year for 2025 amid a government shutdown. So there are wider politics hanging in the backdrop here. There are a lot of behind-the-scenes, back hallway discussions about the future of funding U.S. defense. I think that’s on everybody’s mind, but really it’s a show of, is the defense industry delivering on new technologies specifically in the drone space that the Army feels that it needs right now after watching what’s going on in the Middle East War in Gaza, Israel, Hamas, but especially also the conflict in Ukraine.
[SEWARD] The Army Transformation Initiative is Driscoll’s sort of big push to get a lot of this modernization into the hands of soldiers. And of course, I’m talking about Secretary of the Army, Dan Driscoll, who spoke this morning on the first day of the conference. But transformation is not a new word to the Army, right? We saw this after 9-11, and what came out of it was the Stryker Brigade Combat Teams. We have yet to really see that massive shift of new tech that’s already being developed or has already even seen battlefield testing come into the hands of Army soldiers.
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