Threat Status is reporting from the exhibition floor of the annual AUSA conference playing out in Washington, where a slew of private defense firms and weapons builders are collaborating and competing on the development of advanced counter-drone systems.

Honeywell Aerospace Technologies is among those displaying new counter-drone tech. The company is showing off its Stationary and Mobile UAS Reveal and Intercept, or SAMURAI, which can be outfitted on a truck or other platform. The layered system includes radars and cameras to track as many as 400 incoming drones.

The expansion of the counter-drone industry represents the flip side of the explosion of commercial and military drone proliferation. The kinds of tactical drones, many costing a few thousand dollars or even less, that have been used to great effect in the Russia-Ukraine war or even by terrorist outfits such as Yemen’s Houthi rebels are nearly impossible to combat with large, expensive ground-based missiles.

New counter-drone tools are also crucial for U.S. law enforcement at home. Key lawmakers have sounded the alarm about the threat that small drones could pose to the Super Bowl, the 2026 World Cup, the 2028 Summer Olympics and other major gatherings on American soil, including political rallies.

Army Secretary Daniel P. Driscoll slammed the defense acquisition system on Monday, saying it prioritizes the desires of government bureaucrats and defense lobbyists over the needs of the American soldier. He told a ballroom filled with high-ranking military officials at the AUSA conference that while U.S. troops have always had each other’s backs on the battlefield, the service’s civilian leadership hasn’t always done the same for them.

The traditional 12- to 18-month contracting cycle is no longer feasible, and tech advancements move too fast for multiyear acquisitions. Mr. Driscoll said the Army is going to “completely disrupt” a system that has held the service back for decades while lining the pockets of defense contractors. 

The Army’s acquisition enterprise is more complicated than it should be, and that’s getting in the way of empowering soldiers, Mr. Driscoll said. “We will combine it all under a single organization that reports directly to senior Army leadership. We want simple, fast and efficient,” he said. “We want to get soldiers the tools they need now, not a decade in the future.”

Chinese electronic penetrations of key critical infrastructure systems in the United States are an example of Beijing conducting “unrestricted warfare” against the U.S., according to a four-star general who until recently headed the National Security Agency.

Chinese state-sponsored computer intrusions include break-ins to control systems running critical water distribution systems, electric power grid networks and transportation systems, retired Air Force Gen. Tim Haugh, who was forced out by Mr. Trump in April, told CBS’ “60 Minutes.”

“I think initially we were surprised that China would target every American with these capabilities,” he said, adding that it violates international norms and U.S. military targeting rules. In his first public comments since being forced into retirement, Mr. Haugh mostly sidestepped questions about Mr. Trump dismissing him as NSA director and commander of U.S. Cyber Command.

Peter O’Donoghue, chief technology officer of Tyto Athene, and Deshawn Bell, a mission technology strategist with the Virginia-based company, joined the latest episode of the Threat Status weekly podcast for an exclusive interview exploring how the 21st-century race for global data dominance is now a central part of great power competition between the U.S. and China.

“We’re in an arms race where the entity or the nation that is able to understand its data and exploit its data in the most efficient and the most expeditious and the highest quality manner actually will prevail in the next conflict,” Mr. O’Donoghue said. “If you think of what’s happening in the Pacific … we’re up against an adversary,” he said in reference to China and its development of artificial intelligence, large-language models, or LLMs, such as DeepSeek.

“We’re up against a pretty formidable competitor, right?” Mr. O’Donoghue said, emphasizing that for the U.S., the race centers on mastering “the ability to understand our data, get access to the data, proliferate data, put data in the right hands, and to be able to do it securely, and then being able to exploit that data for mission advantage.”

Last week, Beijing made one of its “most revealing strategic blunders in recent memory,” writes Miles Yu, director of the China Center at the Hudson Institute and an opinion contributor to Threat Status.

“The Chinese Communist Party demanded that all global exports and technologies containing any Chinese-sourced rare earth component must first obtain China’s approval,” Mr. Yu writes in a Washington Times op-ed.

“In other words, if even a single gram of neodymium, dysprosium or praseodymium mined or refined in China enters your product, Beijing claims the right to veto its sale to the rest of the world,” he writes. “This stunning demand is more than an act of economic coercion; it is also an unmasking of the CCP’s true strategic blueprint for global dominance.”

• Oct. 14-15 — AUSA 2025 Annual Meeting & Exposition in Washington, Association of the U.S. Army (AUSA)

• Oct. 14-16 — Aviation Week MRO Europe, MRO Europe

• Oct. 15 — Vanguard of Manufacturing: Fortifying U.S. National Security, Hudson Institute

• Oct. 20 — Are Geopolitics Leading to Fragmentation of the International Financial System? Brookings Institution

• Oct. 21-22 — Missile Defense Agency Small Business Conference, Tennessee Valley Chapter of the National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA)

• Oct. 22 — Europe’s Energy Transition: From Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine to Trump’s ‘Energy Dominance’ Agenda, Brookings Institution