The show must go on.

Although the “Army family reunion” aspect of the Association of the United States Army’s annual meeting won’t be possible due to the COVID-19 pandemic, attendees will still hear from Army leaders and defense industry representatives and visit the exhibit floor — all virtually.

“This has certainly been a challenging year. 2020 has been for all of us in lots of different ways,” retired Gen. Carter Ham, president of the Association of the United States Army, told Army Times in an Oct. 6 interview. “But here at AUSA, where we have for many, many years conducted in-person events to educate, inform and connect, to relate to our members, to support the Army — that’s just not possible in 2020.”

More than 33,000 people attended last year’s annual meeting. But like other professional associations, AUSA had to adapt and bring the annual meeting to a virtual space this year to accommodate the thousands of soldiers and defense industry representatives, along with Army veterans, families and civilians, who plan to take part.

See our complete coverage of AUSA Now, the 2020 Annual Meeting and Exposition.

That’s why AUSA members, service members and others can tune into the AUSA annual meeting from their home this week, from Tuesday through Friday, thanks to virtual programming.

“That was a significant undertaking for us and for all of the associations,” Ham said, noting that other associations shared their knowledge and experience related to virtual programming during the planning process.

While Ham admitted he was initially “disheartened” about missing the in-person aspect of the meeting, he said AUSA welcomed the opportunity to connect with others who haven’t historically attended for various reasons — such as travel.

But attendees can expect some changes this time around.

“What I call the Army family reunion aspect of AUSA will be very different this year,” Ham said.

Visitors to the Association of the U.S. Army's 2019 Meeting and Exposition browse through the defense industry exhibits. More than 400 exhibitors will be featured virtually at this year's event. (Army Times)

“People who often come to Washington, D.C., with the hope, with the expectation, with the experience of seeing their friends, their soldiers they have served with before … that simply is not possible in this virtual experience,” Ham said.

One challenge during the planning process was finding a way to feature an exhibit floor, which historically features hundreds of defense companies and other businesses.

“We wanted to keep that aspect of AUSA, but how do you do that virtually?” Ham said. “So we were able to find a platform, a virtual platform, that does in fact allow people to go virtually, to visit businesses, and there will be over 400 of them exhibiting.”

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AUSA is staying true, however, to some traditions of the in-person meeting, such as the opening ceremony and remarks from the secretary of the Army and the Army chief of staff to detail their vision for the future, provide an update on the state of the Army, and outline key priorities moving forward.

Additionally, another key event that will remain in place is the presentation of AUSA’s highest honor, the George C. Marshall Award. The award is designed to honor “service in more than one area or under extraordinary circumstances,” according to AUSA’s website.

Ham, who pinpointed this event as the highlight of the annual meeting, said that the award will not be given to an individual this year.

Instead, like in 2004 when the award was given to the Army soldier, this year’s award will be presented to the Army family, he said.

“We thought this year, particularly this year, with the pace of operational deployments, with the uncertainty of COVID-19, with all that is going on inside the Army, [presented] an opportunity to thank and celebrate the Army family really being the bedrock foundation of the Army’s strength,” Ham said.

The theme of this year’s gathering, “The Time is Now,” aims to address several issues the Army is tackling at the moment, Ham said.

That includes the sense of urgency the service faces with modernization efforts, along with personnel changes the Army is making in the wake of the national dialogue surrounding race and diversity. For example, the meeting will have a conversation titled “Warriors Corner: Diversity and Inclusion are Critical to the Army.”

“The Army will take that on directly in some of the conversations to be held … during AUSA,” Ham said.

Ham identified several other challenges facing the Army, including the absence of a federal budget and national defense authorization act for fiscal 2021. Congress instead passed a continuing resolution that funds the Department of Defense through Dec. 11, maintaining budgets at fiscal 2020 levels.

But that causes problems for the Army, Ham said.

“It is unhelpful to not have either of those matters passed for the Army,” he said. “It inserts an element of uncertainty and unpredictability into what is already a very challenging resource environment. So, that’s unhelpful and the Army has got to — like all the services — wrestle with that.”

But the more enduring challenge is coming up with an operational concept for how the Army fights and how it will operate in a changing strategic environment as the Department of Defense continues to adjust its focus to near-peer adversaries like Russia and China.

“The development of an operational concept, in concert with the development of modernized capabilities, are two big challenges that the Army faces,” Ham said.

Despite these difficulties, Ham asserted that the people who make up the Army are the service’s greatest strength, and their competence and resiliency has shone through during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“It has been very encouraging to me as an old soldier to see how quickly the Army adapted to this COVID-19 environment, to altering their recruiting efforts from being largely in-person face to face meetings, to shifting very rapidly to recruiting through social media in the virtual space,” Ham said.

“The Army has a depth of capability to respond to national crises in an extraordinary way,” Ham said. “And I think that is something the American public should be very, very proud of.”

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