If the Army had any remorse about the Afghan Debacle it was little in evidence at the Annual Meeting. An Officer was heard to say "You know the Vikings always burned their ships on their raids". Ahem, that was to insure there was no retreat.

An article in the AUSA Daily called the departure "An effective readiness exercise". 

Oh well. Everything was Multi-Domain and the challenges thereof. And the challenge foremost in their minds was China's AI superiority. 

Any of the Military types who spoke were confident and on Mission. The only nay-sayers were Civilians and some were adamant that the Army was not taking the threat seriously enough and like the discussions around recent events everything is hunky-dory.

They may be right, I don't know but the resignation of the Air Force top Software guy yesterday seemed to send a shiver down a spine or two.

Our connection to the Multi-Domain, of course is Elbit and I was a little shocked to see how that company's presence grew from a fairly small contingent pre-pandemic to Raytheon Level number of Reps standing around. Nothing to touch but a lot of related gear under glass. Ironvision is making progress, it was hooked up to an BAE Armored Vehicle (no former eMagin Employees hanging around), X-Sight, a lot of signage with one on display, same SBNVG, L3/Harris had an ENVG-B. Future Vertical Lift looks awesome, there will be X-Sight in those. A lot of Robotics, Boston Dynamics dogs running around, GD had a Autonomous Vehicle with Javelin.  Notably absent was SmartEye or related.

The Army is pivoting away from SpecOps Centric WOT to Near-Peer Adversaries. I always learn more from conversations from "Boots on the Ground" people and a conversation with the Commander of the National Training Center sent a shiver down my spine. Talking about Flashpoints, when I asked what he thought would be the result of a Chinese Invasion of Taiwan he blanched and said "World War III". 

General Richardson had a seat on the Convergence Panel and he only brushed up against IVAS in his remarks saying that he would have something at a later date on "Sensors and Shooters", not much there. The other thing is that they ran all the tasks planned for Convergence through a Model in a Lab built for that purpose and it was good. What I take from that is that the Hardware is set to a degree that it made it's way to the Finals and the winnowing process is over. What's holding them back is the complexity of "Data Sharing" and now are calling coming exercises "Data Convergence" Exercises.