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The U.S. Army will move at “the speed of business,” not the speed of government, acting Secretary of the Army Adam R. Telle told a major military conference Monday as he doubled down on the Trump administration’s ambitious plan to fundamentally overhaul how America’s largest military service innovates and operates in the 21st century.
In his first major public remarks since assuming his post last month, Mr. Telle said the Army was working closely with private industry in unprecedented ways. He said future battles require an Army that can move far faster than the traditional wheels of federal bureaucracy have allowed.
To do that, Mr. Telle said, the Army’s core approach to acquiring and fielding new technology is changing in real time as part of its historic modernization push.
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“Cut the red tape so we can win again,” Mr. Telle said during the opening ceremony at this week’s Association of the United States Army convention in downtown Washington, which runs through Wednesday. “We can’t evolve the Army at the speed of government. We have to evolve it at the speed of business. That’s easy to say, but really hard to do.”
“We were taking too long to find and fund good ideas,” he told an audience at the AUSA event, one of the nation’s largest military conferences. “That’s because we based who we did business with not on how well they could deliver equipment or innovation to our soldiers, but based on whether their bureaucracy was big enough to interface with our big bureaucracy. Agile, hungry companies with brilliant ideas were starved while we forced them to wait.”
Mr. Telle cited the Army’s FUZE program, described as a venture-capital-centric strategy for finding nontraditional companies building cutting-edge capabilities, as one example.
“Think of it as ‘Shark Tank’ for the Army,” said Mr. Telle, referring to the popular TV reality show. “It pipes American ingenuity directly into the Army.”
That effort is one piece of the Trump administration’s broad “commercial-first” strategy. That strategy centers on finding companies that produce capabilities with a commercial application, such as an artificial intelligence tool usable by the public that also can be employed for military, law enforcement or intelligence missions.
For the Army, rethinking its relationship with defense companies is part of a sweeping transformation initiative to modernize and restructure the force. Project Janus and the Army-led Joint Interagency Task Force 401 — a plan to use nuclear microreactors on military bases and a major counter-drone initiative, respectively — are two other examples of new initiatives inside the Army.
Amid all that change, current and former Army officers say the fundamentals of the service’s mission remain constant.
“Territory must be secured, and populations must be protected,” said AUSA President and CEO Robert B. Brown, a retired Army general who formerly led U.S. Army Pacific. “That requires the work of soldiers on the ground securing terrain from which the joint force operates, providing the logistics upon which the joint force moves, delivering air and missile defense sustainment and communications, which rarely make headlines but which translate combat potential into combat power” for the U.S.
A key moment for the Army
The AUSA event draws tens of thousands of Army personnel, defense industry leaders and other stakeholders from around the world.
The conference, which opens as the Iran war enters its eighth month, also serves as a showcase for cutting-edge drones, robots, missiles and missile defense capabilities, firearms, AI tools, manned ground vehicles and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance equipment.
This year’s conference comes at a moment of upheaval atop the service. This is believed to be the first AUSA conference with no Senate-confirmed Army secretary or chief of staff.
Mr. Telle took over after Mr. Driscoll’s resignation in late August.
Gen. Christopher LaNeve is the Army’s acting chief of staff after Gen. Randy George was fired earlier this year.
Sources have told The Washington Times that both men clashed with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and his inner circle on various matters.
In a statement to The Times this week, Mr. Telle said the Army is in lockstep with the goals of President Trump and Mr. Hegseth.
However, there are major questions about whether the Army will have sufficient funding. One source familiar with internal Pentagon budget debates told The Times that “the Army is just not winning the budget wars” in its fight for resources.
The administration’s $1.5 trillion fiscal 2027 defense budget proposal called for a significant Army funding boost, around 23% above 2026 levels. That is far below proposed increases for the Space Force, whose budget could grow by more than 70%, while the Marine Corps budget could rise by 35%, according to data compiled by Air & Space Forces Magazine.
Major increases have gone to Pentagon-wide spending programs outside the traditional military services, including more than $54 billion for the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group, a new umbrella initiative to field drones at scale.
On Capitol Hill, key leaders with a direct role in approving the Pentagon budget say there is a right way and a wrong way for the Army to pursue its modernization push.
“Here’s the wrong way: Undertake sweeping reorganizations, propose major divestments and accelerate nascent technologies without giving Congress the budget details, trade-offs, risk assessments and end-state vision necessary to understand where the Army is headed,” said Rep. Rob Wittman, Virginia Republican and chairman of the House Armed Services subcommittee on tactical air and land forces.
“The Pentagon and the Army need to move fast. They need to experiment rapidly, identify failures early, learn from them and incorporate those lessons before flawed approaches are scaled across the force,” he wrote in an op-ed for The Times this week. “But funding, resources and, most importantly, time, are finite.”
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