State of the Army at AUSA: AI, leadership turmoil and a budget question mark

The Army’s pitch at AUSA is AI and speed. The questions are about who’s leading it and who’s paying for it.

Washington Times national security reporters Ben Wolfgang and John T. Seward break down what they’re hearing at AUSA: the Army’s push for autonomy and commercial technology, leadership changes at the top, and a budget question that Congress has yet to answer.

[WOLFGANG] What is the state of the U.S. Army? From the integration of autonomy, leadership changes atop the service, major budget uncertainty, and reports of dissension or tension with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s office.

I’m Ben Wolfgang, National Security Correspondent for Threat Status at The Washington Times. I’m here with Defense and National Security Reporter John T. Seward. Being at AUSA, John, is the perfect opportunity to talk about this elephant in the room question of what is the overall state of the U.S. Army today as we stand here. What’s your take on that? What are you hearing from people here at the convention?

[SEWARD] A hundred percent. This is the perfect environment to talk about it and to try to understand what’s going on, see and talk to some of the folks that are actually doing the work out in the Army. I mean, you mentioned autonomy. Autonomy is a very big part of what’s happening right now. There are a couple of announcements this week that have been very focused on autonomy that are going to sort of push the amount of what Trump’s called Super Intelligence. 

[WOLFGANG] Not AI, super intelligence. Right. 

[SEWARD] … into warfare. One part of that is something that we’ve covered a decent bit, which is the NGC2 or the Next Generation Command and Control System. Listen to a panel with First Corps Commander General McFarlane about how he’s going to have his formation using that system now, from Alaska all the way to Hawaii, out in Washington State. And that a huge part of that is predictive logistics. It’s predictive analysis. It’s trying to leverage AI. A lot of those conversations, too, when it comes not just to how you use those systems but also the equipment itself has started to be this very specific phrase of “human on the loop,” not human in the loop, human on the loop. So a lot of Army leaders are talking about having autonomous systems where they have an opportunity to watch what’s happening, but not necessarily be doing sort of the Press Go all the time. So a lot of systems and processes that just keep going.

A big part of it, too, is we’ve seen this modernization push from the interim secretary, Secretary Telle. He’s mentioned something in his speech that he called the speed of business. He really wants to rev up industry, see them running extremely, extremely hot. When that’s trickled down to a lot of other Army leaders, the phrase that I keep hearing is “commercial first.” 

Ben, when we’re talking about modernization, I understand that you actually had a chance to sit down with Army’s Chief Technology Officer, Alex Miller:

[MILLER] Traditionally, if we were going to design, develop something new, that process, on average, took about a year for us to write a requirement. It took us about another year to approve the requirement. So let it go through the Pentagon and all the wickets and have everybody who… wants to say no, say no, or specialize it or gold plate it. And then it would take us on average five to seven years from the time that that requirement was approved to the time that the first unit got that new thing. And then it would take us another five to seven years from the first unit that got it until full fielding. So the Army writ large would have it. And those are averages. So some things went a little bit faster. Most things went longer on the long side. So what I say, you know, in the old days, you could enlist or commission into the Army and retire from the Army and maybe not see the new thing. So when I think about the speed of commercial business, you have, like the automotive industry has the model year, business model, where every two years or every year, they’re actually putting out the next version. And there could be some minor tweaks. There could be design updates. There could be major updates based on where the rest of the commercial micro electronics ecosystem is. 

[SEWARD] It’s this idea that a company has already built something, though Army isn’t the one investing the money to have that product developed. They’re just able to go out and actually purchase the thing.

[WOLFGANG] That’s the narrative that the Army wants to talk about this week at AUSA. 

[SEWARD] There’s a lot that they don’t want to talk about.

[WOLFGANG] There’s a lot they don’t want to talk about. And that mainly is the leadership changes atop the service. I mean, this is the first time, been coming AUSA for a few years now, we’ve got an acting Secretary of the Army. We have an acting Chief of Staff of the Army. Of course, General Randy George fired earlier this year. Former Secretary Dan Driscoll resigned earlier this year. So Acting Secretary Telle, I mean, he’s been projecting this lockstep with the Trump administration, with Secretary Hegseth. We’re all on the same page, all singing from the same hymnal as far as modernization, all those things that you just talked about. But we know talking to sources, that hasn’t been the case over the past couple of years, that there were reasons that Dan Driscoll resigned. There were reasons that Randy George was fired. And that was, according to the sources we talked to: not everybody on the same page in terms of Army leadership and Secretary Hegseth’s office.

You know, part of that, of course, is policy. There are differences on what they want to do with modernization. Some of it is personality. You and I both know that there are folks inside the Army who didn’t take very kindly to Pete Hegseth talking about fat generals at Quantico last year and other comments like that. There’s some personality conflicts, I think, that have been at play here as well.

But that bleeds over directly into policy and, more important than policy, into money. Because you have now an Army that needs a ton of money to do all the things that you’re talking about. And there are questions about whether they’re actually going to get it because the Trump administration’s budget proposal is giving a lot more money percentage-wise to the Space Force and to the Marine Corps and to department-wide programs like a Defense Autonomous Warfare Group (DAWG). Those percentages are going way up. The Army’s going up, but not as much. So you have this budget question hanging over everything, and I don’t think we have an answer to that question yet.

[SEWARD] No, I mean, we’ve already written about this, but it is something that’s come up in conversation here at AUSA, which is that Congress’s reconciliation leaves $350 billion out of the DOD budget, and that’s money that a lot of the folks that are here, that were hoping to have contracts with the Army for a lot of this modernization push, you mentioned the DAWG, right, these other initiatives that the Pentagon has taken on, those dollars are in that reconciliation bill that has yet to sort of come to fruition.

Right now the way that Congress is slated, they’re looking at actually starting to work on that reconciliation in the very short window that they have later this year after the midterm elections. When depending on how things go, they’re going to be a lame duck Congress and not really have a lot of sway, if you’re the Republicans and it doesn’t go your way. 

[WOLFGANG] There’s a reckoning coming, it seems like, on this. Right? And you don’t know which way it’s going to go. And I think if you’re the Trump administration, if you’re Secretary Hegseth, it’s important for you to get somebody like Adam Telle, who’s kind of on the same page, when you’re making those budget decisions now. Right? You’re not trying to sort of relieve that tension, get that tension off the table so maybe you can resolve some of these issues as you move forward. 

Read more:

• U.S. Army leadership: Tech modernization push has to keep pace with China
  
  
• ‘Generational’ overhaul: Hegseth warns of Chinese tech advances, slams Biden’s defense failures
  
  
• Army must move ‘at the speed of business,’ rethink capability delivery, acting secretary says
  
  
• Acting Army secretary says government bureaucrats need to get out of the way of soldier support
  
  
• Driscoll’s resignation surprised staff, was motivated by toxic Pentagon environment, officials say
  
  
• Army’s AI-fusion system is ‘ready but not done’
  
  
• Hegseth slams ‘fat generals and admirals’ and racial quotas, announces new fitness standards
  
  
• ‘He lost us’: Generals, senior officers say trust in Hegseth has evaporated

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