Army logistics, MOSA, autonomy, and AI: A chat with GVSETS 2026 leadership

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August 31, 2026

McHALE: Could you each tell me briefly what your current role is and your experience in the defense industry?

PATTON: I'm an NDIA board member and the Deputy Chair of GVSETS. I'm also on the board of the Association of the U.S. Army [AUSA], and I have a company called Ares Technology. I've been working in industry for about 20 years, primarily focused on ground-vehicle subsystems.

GREEN: I'm also on the NDIA board and am the chairperson for the Ground Vehicle Systems Engineering Technical Symposium. I am a retired [U.S. Army] colonel with 33 years of experience.

McHALE: Why is GVSETS so important to the defense industry?

GREEN: GVSETS is where the U.S. Army, industry, academia, international partners all come together in Michigan, where it all started. Quite frankly, because it’s the heart of the nation's mobility corridor, where we have 5,000 defense industry partners, $31 billion of contracts coming through. It's the hub of all of that right here in Michigan to turn ground-vehicle modernization priorities into real capability for the warfighter.

PATTON: At GVSETS we’re focused on next-generation technology for ground vehicles and systems. We have the highest concentration of decision-makers and forward thinkers. We have a technical session that brings out of the engineers, the academics, the Ph.D.s, but we also attract the leaders of the industrial community as well as the Army leadership. We bring them all together in one place, and you can actually talk to them.

MCHALE: What are your goals for this year’s event?

GREEN: Basically, I've got to continue to make Michigan the center of gravity for the defense corridor. Make sure that it continues to be promoted across the United States and internationally. Continue to bring together academia, the Army, the Department of War, and academia to basically develop what we need to do to make sure that our troops have the next best thing to keep them safe and to fight and win our next battle on the field, and to make sure that they come home safely. I'm also looking at what it takes to make sure that our partners, our industry partners that are on the ground today, while they're here, have an opportunity to really be able to talk to, engage, collaborate with academia and those Army leaders on what they're looking for. And be able to basically walk out of here with a possible new idea, a new concept, a new person to be able to contact about: “Hey, let's collaborate on a new idea and a new concept,” or a new contract where they've got a way ahead with some new business.

PATTON: I'm going to lean on something that's one of the core tenets of NDIA Michigan. I'm sure we have a very well-crafted mission statement described on our website. But what I'd say that we do, and what we do best, is we facilitate communication between industry and government stakeholders, so that we can collaboratively produce the things that get into the hands of the warfighter. All the stuff Thom just talked about.

McHALE: One of the goals of the current administration is acquisition of commercial technology. How can the Army and other services leverage commercial innovation from the automotive industry? How are they doing it?

PATTON: There’s a lot of ways we can do it. The starting point can be at the supply chain. We can leverage commercial auto suppliers and help provide some of the incentive to produce that stuff in our country. You know, I talk a lot about electric motors because it's something that I've struggled with personally. They're all made in China. So electric motors, batteries – that’s all stuff that the automakers are doing a lot of. We can leverage that supply chain, try to bolster it, and ensure the automakers, in collaboration with the Army, are sourcing in this country, so we can support both.

But then, just the ability to build at scale is huge. The Army is doing a lot of work now with General Motors and Ford, leveraging some of their truck making capability, so that God forbid, we get into a conflict, and we need lots of things like we had to produce in World War II. We can lean again on the automakers and their ability to produce things and crank out 100,000 vehicles a year.

GREEN: And I go with, quite frankly, this is where it started. It was Ford. It was the assembly line. It was where the first tanks started rolling off the assembly line. Here is where we started putting tanks together. It was just down the street, literally, where this all happened, where it started, and where we went to war with the first manufactured tank from the Detroit Arsenal, and we still have the buildings.

Michigan is where the military and the industry all came together, and where the research converged. There's no other place in the country with this density of ground-vehicle talent and infrastructure. And that's why we have it here. It started with a visionary that decided that he was going to build a car. It may have only come in one color, but that's where it started, and by gosh, that's where we're going to continue to have it.

McHALE: I go to a lot of trade shows, and the fastest-growing areas on the exhibit floors seem to be in areas of autonomous systems and AI. How are those two innovations impacting the military ground-vehicle market, and how can Michigan companies relate to that?

PATTON: I think it's transformational across the board. AI is changing target detection, is changing autonomy. You can't really do the autonomy without AI. But then I heard from Brigadier General Beth A. Behn earlier, Commanding General of U.S. Army TACOM [Tank/automotive and Armaments Command], that they're looking at how they can use AI to better sustain things and reduce cognitive burden on their soldiers, having a finite amount of soldiers. Can we use AI to take a task that used to require a person and now replace it with a computer?

That’s the first piece of it, and really autonomy doubles down on that. Thankfully our recruitment numbers are back up. But for a few years there, we were really struggling with recruitment. We just don't have enough people to staff all those roles to get into a fight. So, what can we do to allow machines to do those roles?

The Marine Corps has fielded the Rogue Fires [Remotely Operated Ground Unit for Expeditionary Fires] platform, which puts the missile system on an autonomous truck. That's a capability we never had before, and the Army is following close behind there, developing comparable systems, but also looking at sustainment. Can trucks drive themselves to forward refueling points to ammo- and cargo-resupply locations, so you don't need to install a vehicle in harm's way?

McHALE: One of the tracks this week is on MOSA [modular open systems approach], a topic we cover a lot in Military Embedded Systems magazine. How are MOSA strategies enabling the Army’s modernization efforts for ground vehicles with MOSA initiatives like SOSA, Victory, CMOSS, etc.?

PATTON: That's a very complex question. I think that MOSA helps prevent vendor lock, which enables the vehicles to not only exist at a cheaper price point, but also continue to be upgraded. I moderated a panel this morning, and one of the panelists said something really interesting. General Dynamics Land Systems said they want to now have a vehicle approach that has a model-year format, kind of the way the automakers do it. So we're not going to have vehicle XA1 that is produced for five to 10 years, and then we move to A2, but you can't upgrade for 10 years. They're going to have incremental upgrades every year across the platform, and you can't do that without MOSA. So that's huge. That was really interesting for me to hear this morning. I hadn't heard that before, so it's great that they're leaning in.

But then platforms like the XM30, which are kind of leading the way in the ground-vehicle space with MOSA and GCIA [Ground Combat Systems (GCS) Common Infrastructure Architecture], it enables you to bring in all kinds of other technologies in the future. Can you make them optionally manned in the future? I know the Army drops a requirement for that in the program at some point, but maybe through MOSA and GCIA and these other architectures, we can bring that back in because the vehicle was designed to enable it from the get-go.

GREEN: MOSA helps develop that open system, but the challenge still [remains] about: How do we get the logistical data off of the system, and then where does it go? How's it being used? How's it being tracked? What are we doing with that data? And then, where's the data? Where is it going? Who's got it? What are we using it for? How's it being utilized? There's all those questions. And then who owns it? Is it the G4, G8? Who's got it, and then where's and how's it being used? Those questions are still being answered, and you've still got [areas] across the U.S. Army that have been not been fixed yet, and we're still waiting on those answers. And I think they will continue to be unanswered until finally a Secretary of the Army finally puts [their] foot down and says: "This is how we're going to do it.”

McHALE: Looking forward, what technology or paradigm shift do you guys think will be a game-changer for military ground systems? Predict the future.

GREEN: Honestly, if we figure out the logistics piece, that will be a huge game-changer for maintaining our systems across [military]. We can protect our troops, but how do we maintain the systems and be able to save our tax dollars in maintaining our systems across the fleet? If we figure out the logistics piece, I think that will be a huge game-changer for maintaining our systems across the globe overall.

McHALE: It's like you need not just acquisition reform, you need logistics and sustainment reform as well.

GREEN: Logistics sustainment reform – that's a great way of putting it.

PATTON: I'm going to go with autonomy. I think we've made tremendous gains in ground autonomy in the last five years. I think there's still a little work to go, but we're looking really good from both the hardware and the software side. I think that the next thing that will really bring about change is how do you get multiple unmanned systems working together collaboratively from a ground and air domain autonomously? That will be huge.