AUSA 2025 Insights: Competing without the Spotlight
How smaller defense firms can turn overwhelm into opportunity.
Walking the floor at AUSA 2025, it’s hard not to feel the gravity of the major primes. The scale of their displays — massive booths, immersive demos, polished PR machines — dominates the landscape. Even mid-sized firms with strong traction often appear dwarfed by the presence of traditional industry giants. For early-stage companies and dual-use innovators, it can feel like an impossible game to break into.
But scale doesn’t always equal opportunity. And in fact, the most meaningful conversations — the ones that lead to transition, adoption, and contracts — often happen away from the lights, not beneath them.
The Message from the Top: Frustration with the Status Quo
During this year’s opening remarks, Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll made headlines by openly criticizing large defense contractors for driving costs beyond sustainability. His remarks cut through the optimism of the expo floor, directly confronting the inefficiencies, cost overruns, and inertia that continue to plague Army procurement.
Driscoll didn’t mince words. In a blunt assessment, he accused the Army’s acquisition enterprise of suffering from what he called “buying inertia”—a culture of bureaucratic delay, outdated processes, and risk avoidance that has made the Army, in his words, “too slow, too expensive, and too reactive.”
While Driscoll’s speech landed as a critique of the primes, the deeper message pointed to something more systemic. The defense acquisition process was designed to manage risk through layers of oversight and deliberate pacing—but in practice, those layers have become barriers.
Long timelines, unpredictable budgets, and compliance friction create downstream cost and delay. Big firms can absorb that through scale. Small firms? They’re forced to either weather the storm or exit the race entirely.
That’s the true “inertia” Driscoll was signaling—not just within the Pentagon, but across the broader ecosystem. A system built for control now struggles to deliver speed. One designed to reduce risk now prices in failure for the very companies it claims to welcome.
And that’s where the opportunity lies: in showing that capability can be delivered differently—with the right partners, right pathways, and a structure built for speed and credibility.
If you left AUSA feeling overwhelmed, you’re not alone.
Scale once signaled strength—but relevance now belongs to those solving real problems, moving fast, and earning trust. Success isn’t about outshining the giants. It’s about standing out where it matters.
Here's how:
Lead with specificity. You don’t need a 50-foot video wall. You need to clearly articulate the mission problem you solve, the environment you support, and the stakeholder who will benefit most. Simplicity is clarity. Clarity is power.
Get out of the echo chamber. Fancy decks and AI demos mean little if the end user can’t see the value. Position your tech where it matters—in the context of missions, logistics, sustainment, and survivability.
Build trust, not flash. Whether you’re fielding hardware, software, or a system-of-systems enabler, the real question from evaluators is simple: Will this work under pressure, with our people, in our environment? Trusted partners help answer that.
Use alternative pathways to accelerate. You don’t need to win a major prime contract to gain traction. OTAs, CSOs, and pilot programs are designed to let you prove value before you scale.
Competing Without the Booth Budget
At Arcana, we work with firms across the spectrum—from early-stage startups to mid-sized defense players —helping them move from demo to deployment.
To position for success, the bottom line is clear:
Invest in integration early
Understand how your tech fits into broader mission systems
Build bridges to end users through targeted pilots
Align to procurement timelines through compliance readiness
Show up with clarity and stay present with purpose
The ecosystem is shifting. The primes may always have the biggest footprint on the floor, but they no longer have a monopoly on capability. In fact, their biggest threat may be the smaller firms that can move faster, adapt quicker, and partner smarter.
———
About the Series
The Integration Brief is a weekly executive dispatch focused on the real-world challenges of transitioning emerging technologies into operational environments.
Published every Wednesday at 1000 ET, the series provides concise, field-informed insights for technology developers, acquisition professionals, and national security leaders.
