Until last summer, key equipment linking Greenland’s undersea cables to North America and Europe was supplied and managed by a company linked to China’s Huawei, raising security concerns as the U.S. moves to expand its military presence on the island under a new defense pact. U.S. Space Force Base Pituffik, which is slated to grow under the pact, currently uses satellite communications instead of Greenland’s undersea cable infrastructure for missile warnings, missile defense and space surveillance.

National Security Correspondent Bill Gertz examines the situation in a deep-dive report, writing that Greenland’s undersea cable control terminals were produced, installed and run by Huawei Marine Networks, a joint venture affiliated with Huawei Technologies that was later sold to Hengtong Optic-Electric and rebranded HMN Technologies — a state-linked Chinese telecommunications giant that the U.S. government has sanctioned for electronic espionage and potential sabotage threats.

Greenland’s state-owned national postal and telecommunications firm Tusass announced Aug. 21 — a month before a new defense agreement with the U.S. was signed Sept. 22 — that it had completed replacing unspecified SLTE equipment on both cables with more secure equipment from European companies Itectra and Nokia. A Tusass spokeswoman declined to say if the new terminals replaced the Huawei terminals, but she stressed that “security and reliability are fundamental priorities for Tusass.”

The U.S. military is in the midst of a “generational” overhaul to prepare for a potential clash with China. The Pentagon is fundamentally revamping its business model and will move at the speed of private industry, not government. And the U.S. Army, despite major budget questions and lingering tension with the Pentagon’s political leaders, is prepared to fight and win conflicts around the world.

Those were a few of the biggest takeaways from this week’s AUSA conference, the nation’s largest defense show and ground zero for the display of cutting-edge military equipment, from missiles to drones and communications equipment to ground vehicles. Threat Status was on the ground for the conference and will have more exclusive stories, podcasts and videos from the event in the coming days.

One key headline was Mr. Hegseth’s declaration Wednesday that adversaries such as China threaten to outpace the U.S. military in AI and other advanced defense technologies if the Pentagon does not move more quickly to modernize. Moving quickly and embracing reform in a world of rapidly evolving advanced weapons technology was a major theme across AUSA.

U.S. Army Chief Technology Officer Alex Miller tells Threat Status in an exclusive interview that vital U.S. Army weapons and communications tools are undergirded by software that must be updated at lightning speed, a reality that’s crucial in keeping the nation’s largest military service’s systems from becoming obsolete on modern battlefields.

“You get 21 to 90 days before the thing that you’re fielding is near obsolete,” Mr. Miller said in the interview at AUSA. He stressed that while major hardware such as missile systems will continue working for years, keeping the underlying systems current is critical. “If you wait five years to update the tracking software that guides the radars, the sensors, the communication, you will be obsolete in a modern battlefield,” he said.

For the Army specifically, Mr. Miller cautioned that the pace of technological innovation is so fast that there is a risk of soldiers becoming overloaded with information and training. “Here is the 80% solution for 80% of your users. Here’s how it needs to be: Simple to learn, easy to operate, easy to adapt,” he said. “We really want to focus on, no matter how complex this system is, our soldiers know what their mission is. Our soldiers know what their task is.”

Threat Status goes inside the world of U.S.-sourced and -manufactured advanced tech drones with an exclusive video from the floor of AUSA on the newly released Guardian 3 Drone Interceptor that the fast-growing advanced tech drone company Powerus — which went public on Nasdaq this month and touts itself as a leader in “American-made autonomy” — is producing for the U.S. government.

Brett Velicovich, co-founder and president of Powerus, which sponsored the video, shows off the Guardian 3, a fully automated, self-sacrificing drone that costs less than $10,000 and flies 217 miles per hour to stop incoming drone threats. He explains how the interceptor is designed to work in conjunction with any current U.S. military radar system to launch automatically to destroy threats such as the Iranian Shahed one-way drones being used against U.S. troops in the Middle East. 

“We just received a massive order from the U.S. Air Force for some of our counterdrone products, which includes the Guardian series,” Mr. Velicovich said. “I spent years on the ground operating in Ukraine and seeing how they build these things like ammunition. … We started realizing that the U.S. government wasn’t building these type of systems in the same way that they’re being used every single day on the front lines.”

The U.S. race to maintain global AI dominance centers on staying ahead of China and maintaining human control over increasingly powerful AI systems, according to Leah Siskind and retired Navy Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank. They write in a column for The Washington Times that “a capability you cannot control is not an asset; it is a liability waiting to be exploited.

“The experts building these systems say so, too,” write Ms. Siskind and Mr. Montgomery. “More than 1,300 employees at leading AI companies have called for ‘Pacing the Frontier,’ including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki; rivals such as Mr. Amodei and even Elon Musk have warned that AI capabilities are advancing faster than our ability to control them.

“The answer cannot simply be to slow down America and hope Beijing behaves responsibly. Yet neither is the answer to move as fast as possible and hope that AI magically aligns with our values and secures itself,” Ms. Siskind and Mr. Montgomery write. “The president has argued that slowing American AI development risks benefiting China and has dismissed some AI safety fears as a ‘hoax.’ He is wrong. The concern is real, and racing ahead recklessly could undermine the very advantage we are trying to protect.”

• Oct. 19 — U.S.-Taiwan Relations in the Trump Era, Stimson Center

• Oct. 21 — A Discussion with U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Andrew Puzder, Hudson Institute

• Oct. 22 — What’s at Stake in the Israeli Election? Brookings Institution 

• Oct. 27 — Chemistry of Combat: Rebuilding America’s Energetics Base, Hudson Institute

• Oct. 28 — China’s Power: Up for Debate 2026, Center for Strategic and International Studies

• Oct. 30 — Gen. Dagvin R.M. Anderson, Commander of U.S. Africa Command, on U.S. Strategy and Security in Africa, Atlantic Council

• Nov. 20-22 — Halifax International Security Forum in Nova Scotia, Canada, HFX