By Chris Servello
I was at AUSA this week, and here is what I picked up: The Army is moving with a sense of urgency, industry is responding with some impressive technology, and many of the challenges being discussed sound awfully familiar to those of us who spend most of our time focused on the Navy and the broader Joint Force.
AUSA is always an impressive event. Thousands of military leaders, industry executives, and defense professionals fill Washington’s convention center. The exhibit halls are packed with weapons, vehicles, drones, and just about every technology imaginable. There are plenty of big announcements, ambitious promises, and sales pitches.
But what interests me most isn’t what’s on display. It’s what the conference tells us about where the military is heading, what problems it’s trying to solve, and whether we’re moving fast enough.
This year, the lessons from Ukraine and the war with Iran were hard to miss. So was the recognition that we can’t spend another decade studying problems we already understand.
I left encouraged by much of what I saw. But I also came away thinking that nearly everything the Army is wrestling with has implications well beyond land warfare.
Seven things stood out.
First, it’s time to put unmanned systems to work.
Drones and autonomous systems were everywhere. The Army is clearly serious about making these capabilities part of how it fights, rather than treating them as interesting experiments.
The Navy should be paying attention. We’ve spent years testing unmanned surface and underwater vessels, with some impressive results. But at some point, testing needs to become operations.
That means assigning missions, training crews, developing maintenance plans, and buying enough systems to matter.
Experimentation is important and should never stop. But experimentation by itself isn’t a strategy.
Second, the drone threat isn’t going away, and everyone needs to deal with it.
There was no shortage of counter-drone technology at AUSA. Sensors, electronic warfare systems, interceptors, and a growing number of relatively inexpensive ways to defeat threats.
The lesson from recent conflicts is pretty straightforward. We can’t keep shooting down cheap drones with million-dollar missiles and expect to sustain that approach in a prolonged fight.
This isn’t just an Army problem. Ships, airfields, ports, logistics hubs, and forward-deployed forces all face the same threat.
There should be far more commonality in how the services approach counter-drone defense. We don’t need five different solutions when one or two can do the job.
Third, the Army has an important role to play in a maritime fight.
This was one of my more encouraging takeaways.
Long-range fires, integrated air defense, distributed logistics, and resilient communications are all capabilities that could make an enormous difference in the Indo-Pacific.
But they need to be integrated with what the Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force are doing.
An Army missile battery targeting an enemy ship is part of a much larger operation involving aircraft, ships, satellites, sensors, and commanders from several services.
We need to be practicing that integration today, not trying to figure it out after a conflict begins.
Fourth, we need to stop treating acquisition speed as something unusual.
The Army is making some encouraging moves to accelerate procurement, particularly when it comes to drones and counter-drone systems.
Good. Now let’s make that normal.
We know the Pentagon can move quickly when it wants to. We’ve seen it during wartime, and we’ve seen it during the annual end-of-fiscal-year contracting push.
But the military’s needs don’t suddenly become urgent every September.
If the Army is finding better ways to get capability on contract and into the field, the other services should be looking hard at adopting those approaches.
Fifth, connecting the force matters as much as buying new equipment.
There was plenty of discussion about sensors, software, artificial intelligence, and command and control.
That’s important because the next fight won’t necessarily be won by whoever has the biggest ship, fastest aircraft, or most expensive missile.
It will be won by the force that can find the enemy, make decisions, and act faster.
That requires systems that actually talk to one another, networks that can survive attacks, and commanders who have access to useful information when they need it.
We’ve talked about joint integration for decades. It’s time to make it work without requiring a room full of contractors and technicians to connect everything.
Sixth, manufacturing and logistics deserve as much attention as the weapons themselves.
Every time I saw an impressive new system, I kept coming back to three questions.
Can we build enough of them? Can we get them and their replacement parts to the fight? And can we protect the factories, suppliers, and distribution networks that make all of that possible?
The war with Iran reminded us that weapons get used up, equipment breaks, and maintenance backlogs grow quickly.
We need more production capacity, stronger small and medium-sized manufacturers, better logistics, and serious attention to cybersecurity and supply chain protection.
And we need to remember that manufacturing something is only the beginning. Getting it to the warfighter, keeping it working, and replacing it when necessary are just as important.
Seventh, we need to do a better job bringing our allies into the process.
The Army’s efforts to make drone and counter-drone capabilities more accessible to international partners are a good example of where we should be heading.
Our allies shouldn’t have to wait until an exercise or deployment to discover that our systems don’t work together.
Common standards, shared procurement approaches, and opportunities for allied manufacturing should be part of the conversation from the beginning.
Our allies have capable industries, innovative technologies, and valuable operational experience. We should be making better use of all three.
So what does all of this mean?
I left AUSA encouraged by what the Army is doing. There is clearly a willingness to challenge old assumptions, move faster, and rethink how the service prepares for war.
But the bigger opportunity isn’t simply building a better Army. It’s building a better Joint Force.
Nearly every major issue discussed at AUSA has implications for the other services. And in many cases, we should be looking at common solutions rather than allowing each service to work independently.
Take counter-drone defense. An Army installation, a Navy ship in port, a Marine Corps expeditionary base, and an Air Force airfield all face versions of the same threat. Their defenses won’t be identical, but why aren’t we doing more to develop common sensors, electronic warfare systems, affordable interceptors, and shared command-and-control tools?
Or unmanned systems. The Navy is working on autonomous vessels, the Air Force on collaborative combat aircraft, and the Army and Marine Corps on unmanned ground and aerial systems. The missions differ, but there are obvious opportunities to share software, autonomy architectures, testing infrastructure, training approaches, and lessons about sustaining these systems in the field.
The same goes for logistics. The Army’s work on contested distribution should inform how the Navy moves weapons and repair parts across the Pacific. The Air Force’s experience with distributed operations should help shape joint approaches to forward maintenance and resupply. And the services should be working together to identify vulnerable suppliers, protect critical manufacturing facilities, and increase production of components they all depend on.
Then there’s targeting. If an Army long-range missile battery is going to engage a ship in the Pacific using information from a Navy aircraft or a Space Force satellite, the data, communications, authorities, and command relationships need to work before the first shot is fired. That should be a routine part of joint exercises, not a special demonstration that requires months of preparation.
These are practical opportunities to save money, move faster, and build a more capable force. None requires every service to buy identical equipment. They require the services to stop treating common problems as exclusively their own.
That’s where senior leadership across the Department of War needs to step in.
Identify what’s working and scale it across the services. Establish common requirements where they make sense. Give combatant commanders a stronger voice in determining which capabilities need to work together. Remove acquisition barriers that prevent shared solutions. And give industry clear requirements and predictable demand so companies can invest in the people, facilities, and production capacity needed to deliver.
Most importantly, hold leaders accountable for results.
The Department has considerable momentum right now. There’s leadership attention, industry engagement, congressional support, and hard-earned lessons from recent combat operations. Those conditions won’t last forever.
A year from now, we should be able to point to joint counter-drone defenses actually fielded, unmanned systems routinely operating alongside manned forces, Army and Navy weapons sharing targeting information, and expanded industrial capacity producing the weapons and replacement parts our forces need.
Not another collection of pilot programs. Not another set of promising demonstrations. Actual capability in the field.
Because the next war won’t wait for our acquisition system to catch up, our services to agree on common standards, or our industrial base to increase production.
The Army is showing signs that it understands the urgency. Now the rest of the Joint Force needs to match it.
And senior leaders across the Department of War need to make that happen. Not next year. Not after another round of studies or conferences.
Now.
Chris Servello is the co-founder of Provision Advisors government and public relations firm and the co-host of the award winning CavasShips Podcast.