The Army’s largest professional gathering kicks off Monday, traditionally a venue for the service to make big organizational announcements, like the advent of the black uniform beret or the launch of the Multi-Domain Operations concept. But with the government shut down and the Pentagon reining in public appearances by uniformed and civilian officials, it’s an open question how much the service will be able to participate in this year’s edition of the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference.

As of Tuesday, an AUSA spokesman told Defense One, impact to Army participation will be “minimal.” [Editor’s note: CNN reported Thursday evening that AUSA has donated $1 million to enable the attendance of senior leaders whose travel and per diem funding is frozen by the shutdown.]

An Army official told Defense One that the service has sought exceptions to the Pentagon’s new restrictions on public speaking so that Army leaders may speak to members of the press at the conference. 

In addition to the standard panels and fireside chats, the 2025 AUSA annual meeting will feature a “Shark Tank”-like competition for developers to pitch their products, with a prize pool of $500,000. Winners will see their prototypes sent directly to the field for soldiers to try out. 

“One of the things we know is we, the Army, are a bad customer for ourselves, but we're also a bad customer for industry. We give demand signals, but don't put dollars behind that,” Army Secretary Dan Driscoll told reporters last month. “And so small and medium businesses have a really hard time growing and scaling with us. And so we're going to change that.”

The competition is a piece of the service’s larger FUZE program, which brings together xTech, the Small Business Innovation Research and Technology Transfer, the Manufacturing Technology and the Technology Maturation Initiative. The idea is that, like venture-capital firms, the Army will invest small amounts of money in buying existing technology and quickly unload what doesn’t work, rather than spending years developing the perfect product only to find it obsolete once it’s ready for fielding.

The service is also poised to make some “massively substantive changes to how we buy our stuff,” Driscoll said. “For us, what that looks like is our soldiers and our contractors and the people who come up with our requirements, putting them all together, empowering them with these big, hairy problems, and saying, ‘Go fix this for the soldier’.” 

Other officials are slated to present updates on a range of initiatives, including the Mobile Brigade Combat Team concept, counter-small unmanned aerial systems development, and electronic warfare—all part of the service’s ongoing Transformation-in-Contact program.

On Tuesday, AUSA is to bring together the current and former commanders of U.S. Army North to talk about threats to the homeland, promising a rare public discussion on what has become the Defense Department’s top priority as the second Trump administration prepares to roll out its National Defense Strategy.

Other scheduled events include updates on the long-awaited Next-Generation Command and Control and the newly formed Joint Task Force 401, the Army-led effort to rapidly procure counter-small drone systems for all of the services.

NGC2, a joint venture by new-school contractors Anduril and Palantir, came under recent scrutiny after the Oct. 3 leak of an internal Army memo, first reported on by Breaking Defense, that warned of the system’s “significant risk to data, mission operations, and personnel by rendering the system vulnerable to insider threats, external attacks, and data spillage.”

The concerns were compiled as part of a normal audit of the development process, Anduril founder and CEO Palmer Luckey told reporters Thursday. Since it was shared internally, Luckey said, Anduril has since upgraded NGC2 with security protocols like user authentication and recording, which were always available in its Lattice software.

“The real answer is, we turned on all of the features that Lattice already had, which were not part of that initial prototype,” he said. “And the people who are planting that story are totally aware of that.”

The Army has talked about turning this around in its acquisitions process for years, and using these Silicon Valley firms to do it. Driscoll said he feels confident something is actually going to change this time.

“So from my perspective, I think if you look at the Army's budget of $185 billion, that is a lot of money, and we should be getting much better outcomes to the American people and the soldiers,” he said. “And this is not intended to disparage previous administrations. But my understanding from people who've been in the building for 30-plus years is, it actually is different this time, that we are able to do the right thing as we think soldiers define it.”

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President Donald Trump’s novel use of National Guard troops for law enforcement purposes has reopened a debate over states’ authority to control police powers, as dueling briefs from current and former state leaders filed in Illinois’ lawsuit against the president show.

A bipartisan group of former governors said Trump’s federalization and deployment of National Guard members to Chicago to control “modest” protests upended the careful balance between state and federal powers. 

At the same time, a group of 17 current Republican attorneys general told the court they supported the administration’s move that they said was necessary to protect immigration enforcement officers.

Both groups submitted friend-of-the-court briefs in the suit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois Eastern Division brought by Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson to block the Trump administration’s deployment of National Guard troops to the nation’s third-largest city. 

Trump on Wednesday called for the arrest of Johnson and Pritzker for not assisting Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, a provocative demand that raised further concerns about his administration’s relationship with state leaders.

The bipartisan group supported Pritzker and Johnson’s call for a restraining order to block the deployment, while the Republicans said the restraining order should be denied.

Democratic attorneys general back Oregon 

In another case, in which Oregon is challenging Trump’s order to deploy troops to Portland, Democratic governors or attorneys general in 23 states and the District of Columbia argued in support of the state’s position.

Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who was among those siding with Oregon, said Wednesday he did so to “put an end to the dangerous overreach of power we are seeing with Donald Trump’s Guard deployments.”

The brief was also signed by Democratic state officials from Washington state, Maryland, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Rhode Island, Vermont, Wisconsin, Kansas and Kentucky and the District of Columbia’s attorney general.

Former govs say deployment robs state authority

The federalist structure of the U.S. government, which bestows powers to both the federal and state governments, leaves broad police power to the states, the bipartisan group wrote. 

Sending military forces to conduct law enforcement would unbalance that arrangement, they said.

That group includes Democratic former Govs. Jerry Brown of California, Steve Bullock of Montana, Mark Dayton of Minnesota, Jim Doyle of Wisconsin, Parris Glendening and Martin O’Malley of Maryland, Jennifer Granholm of Michigan, Christine Gregoire, Jay Inslee and Gary Locke of Washington, Tony Knowles of Alaska, Terry McAuliffe of Virginia, Janet Napolitano of Arizona, Deval Patrick of Massachusetts, Bill Ritter Jr. of Colorado, Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas, Steve Sisolak of Nevada, Eliot Spitzer of New York, Ted Strickland of Ohio, Tom Vilsack of Iowa and Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania.

GOP former Govs. Arne Carlson of Minnesota, Bill Graves of Kansas, Marc Racicot of Montana, Bill Weld of Massachusetts and Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey also signed the brief.

“The present deployment of military resources, based on an assertion of nearly unfettered federal authority, is unlawful,” they wrote. “The president’s assertion of authority to deploy military troops on domestic soil based on his unreviewable discretion, and without the cooperation and coordination of state authorities, threatens to upset the delicate balance of state and federal authority that underlies our constitutional order.”

The Trump administration misunderstands the section of federal law that Trump has relied on to federalize National Guard troops, the group said. 

The administration’s claim that only the president can decide if the conditions are met for National Guard units to be federalized “not only undermines state sovereignty but also deprives governors of a critical public safety tool,” they wrote.

“If federalization of the National Guard is unreviewable, a president motivated by ill will or competing policy priorities could divert Guard resources away from critical state needs, including natural disasters or public health crises,” they continued.

States need ICE enforcement, GOP govs say

The group of current Republican attorneys general argued their states are harmed by the protests in Chicago and other cities that impede federal ICE officers from doing their jobs.

The attorneys general are Brenna Bird of Iowa, Austin Knudsen of Montana, Gentner Drummond of Oklahoma, Alan Wilson of South Carolina, Steve Marshall of Alabama, Tim Griffin of Arkansas, James Uthmeier of Florida, Chris Carr of Georgia, Raúl R. Labrador of Idaho, Todd Rokita of Indiana, Lynn Fitch of Mississippi, Catherine Hanaway of Missouri, Michael T. Hilgers of Nebraska, Marty Jackley of South Dakota, Ken Paxton of Texas and John B. McCuskey of West Virginia.

They described the protests in Chicago as acts of violence that require a strong response.

“Rather than protest peacefully, some of those protests became violent, threatening federal officers, harming federal property, and certainly impeding enforcement of federal law,” they wrote. “President Trump’s deployment of a small number of National Guard members to defend against this lawlessness is responsible, constitutional, and authorized by statute.”

The attorneys general added that their states had been harmed by immigrants in the country without legal authorization who had settled in their states, which they said gave the president a public interest purpose in calling up troops to assist. 

“The President’s action of federalizing the National Guard furthers the public interest because it allows ICE agents to continue to perform their statutory duties of identifying, apprehending, and removing illegal aliens, which is the only way to protect the States from the harms caused by illegal immigration,” they wrote.

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You need to fix alarming mission-capability rates and rising sustainment costs for the Air Force’s F-35A fighter jet, senators told the service’s chief-of-staff nominee on Thursday.

“The F-35 remains the most advanced fighter in the world, but too many of them are sitting idle on ramps. The readiness rates of our aircraft continue to fall short of Pentagon goals. This is known on this side of the ocean and around the world,” Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., the Senate Armed Services Committee chairman, said during Thursday’s hearing. “The Air Force cannot protect power if its most advanced fighter cannot get off the ground.”

The warning was directed at Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach, the former head of Air Combat Command and Pacific Air Forces, who was nominated last month to serve as the service’s top uniformed leader. The current Air Force chief of staff, Gen. David Allvin, unexpectedly announced in August that he would retire, effective in November, after his ties to a massive reorganization effort focused on China seemingly broke with the Pentagon’s renewed homeland focus.

Wilsbach was not questioned by lawmakers about Allvin’s sudden departure and was not heavily grilled on the Trump administration’s domestic deployment of the National Guard or ongoing military actions against alleged drug-runners. Senators mainly focused on technical problems facing the Air Force—and in particular, the F-35’s parts and maintenance problems.

F-35 maker Lockheed Martin has regularly delivered the jets late and without necessary upgrades, according to a Government Accountability Office report released last month. Between 2019 and 2023, mission-capable rates for the fifth-generation fighter have floated between 71 and 51 percent while sustainment costs ballooned, another GAO report found last year.

Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., the SASC’s ranking member, told Wilsbach that idle F-35s need to get flying because pilots sitting “around in a simulator all day” will harm aviator retention. Wilsbach agreed and told the lawmakers that his service’s weapons-sustainment accounts need more money to fix the problem.

“We definitely have to invest in those accounts so that the parts are on the shelves when the aircraft flies,” the general said. “The problem with the F-35 is now they have to wait for the part to be shipped…All that time where it's sitting waiting for that part is downtime where we can't use the aircraft to train.”

The 2026 defense budget working through the cogs of Congress would allow for the purchase of 47 F-35s, including two dozen A-models for the Air Force. The massive defense-focused reconciliation spending bill passed this summer included no additional funding for the F-35. Discretion for implementing those funds ultimately falls to the Defense Department.

When asked by Wicker if Wilsbach would “carry out congressional intent” with reconciliation funds, the general declined to explicitly answer and said he “will carry out the funding in accordance with the law” and “will strive to do my best.”

One of the major efforts led by Allvin and former Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall was a sweeping organizational shift for great power competition, an influx of increased strategy and spending focused on countering China. Wilsbach did not commit to continuing these reoptimization efforts. He did acknowledge during questioning by Sens. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, and Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., that China was a threat to national security and worth further investment from the committee. 

Mirroring comments made by Air Force Secretary Troy Meink last month, Wilsbach stated in submitted written answers to lawmakers’ policy questions that both the homeland and the Pacific would be prioritized. 

“Homeland Defense is our top priority. At the same time, our Service needs to be able to project power into critical regions to prevent wars when possible, or to win them if and when we must,” Wilsbach wrote in the document. “The Air Force must deliberately preserve our high-end readiness for the nation's most consequential challenges, such as that posed by China in the Western Pacific.”

When asked outside of his hearing Thursday morning if he planned to support those past reoptimization efforts, Wilsbach said, “That’s outside of my lane,” and added that it is Meink’s decision to make. 

“I’ve had some private conversations,” the general said, and said he wouldn’t be sharing details of those talks with reporters.

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