Breaking Defense analysis of AUSA data

WASHINGTON: As budgets dwindle, programs get cancelled, and the Army shrinks, the DC area’s biggest defense conference is getting smaller every year — but it’s still plenty big. That’s the story in the statistics provided Breaking Defense by the Association of the United States Army.

AUSA’s annual meeting is a huge event with huge institutional inertia to keep it going through tough times. It’s hallowed as the venue where officials from the Defense Secretary, the Army Secretary, and Army Chief of Staff on down to mere four-star generals and even project managers gather to make public announcements and have private talks, so attendance is always mandatory for media like Colin and me. But both of us got the subjective impression that the conference was quieter this year, and some of our sources felt the same.

So what do the numbers say? Total attendance has dropped every year since 2010, the height of the Iraq surge, and this year was no exception. But by far the steepest one-year drop — 17.6 percent — came between 2011 and 2012, when the US withdrew from Iraq. Since then the annual decline has slowed, and this year’s was the smallest reduction yet: 2015 attendance was just 1.2 percent below 2014’s.

The trendlines on exhibitors are even better, with a modest decline this year but some actual growth since 2013. Since a single “exhibitor” can be anything from a huge corporation in a huge pavilion to a small business with a small booth, however, it’s best to read these numbers cautiously.

Breaking Defense analysis of AUSA data

All this suggests AUSA is starting to level out — and at a level still substantially higher than pre-war attendance: 2015 is 24 percent above 2001. (AUSA happens in October, so most of the 2001 attendees would have registered before September 11th).

That’s a remarkable achievement in an era when budgets are this brutally tight — and this painfully uncertain, with even the vaunted National Defense Authorization Act getting vetoed. Welcome to the brave new normal, where “not shrinking too fast” is the new growth.