What will the Trump administration's Army look like? | Defense News Weekly Full Episode 6.14.25

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On this episode of Defense News Weekly, we head to the Pentagon for a conversation with the new Secretary of the Army, Daniel Driscoll

With new leaders at the helm, how is the nation's largest branch looking to restructure

Plus, on an evolving battlefield, how can soldiers become more adept across different domains

And we pull back the curtain on a new mindset about defense spending

Coming to you from the nation's capital, it's the latest in news and ysis from the Pentagon to the platoon, here on Defense News Weekly

All right, Mr. Secretary, thank you for joining us here at the Pentagon

You have been busy in your first months here and visiting troops all around the world

and you're gearing up to execute a great deal of change laid out in a memo you published last month

as directed by the Secretary of Defense, and you're calling this the Army Transformation Initiative

which has a familiar ring to it. the Army Chief of Staff, General Randy George, was already implementing an effort to transform

Army in contact with units and operational exercises and training events. But this effort

directs change across the board from command consolidations to restructuring formations to

canceling or altering the path of a variety of weapons acquisition programs. So can you talk

about how some of these changes came about? How are they directed? And walk me through the rationale

to consolidate certain commands, such as Army Futures Command with Army Training and Doctrine

the consolidation of U.S. Army North and U.S. Army South with Army Forces Command

Those are just two of the major consolidation efforts. But if you could walk through some of that rationale

Absolutely. So I think we're pretty close to day 10510 right now

And one of the things that General George and I try to do really early on is get out

and go see what are our troops doing? What are they learning? where are they stuck, where are we succeeding, and where are we failing

So we did a trip to the West Coast. We went up to JBLM and then Seattle to see Microsoft

and we tried to balance everything out, see troops, go see the best of the commercial sector

Went to Silicon Valley. We were with Meta and Google and OpenAI

Then we went out to Project Convergence, which is like our big tech demo, and then down to the border to see 10th Mountain

So we had this trip over seven days where we got to spend a ton of time with soldiers

We got to see what was our transformation and contact looking like practically, what was kind of on the future edge of what we were thinking of acquiring, and then what were our soldiers actually doing when they were taking over the border

And I think my big takeaway and from connecting with General George on it, what we've realized is that the calcified bureaucracy that a lot of people complain about and have complained about for decades was going to fundamentally get in the way of us being able to empower our soldiers to be as lethal as possible and to do the mission set that I was given from the president, from the secretary of defense to go give those soldiers what they want and need to go be the most effective killing machine on behalf of our nation

And may we never need them, but to have them standing by and standing ready to provide peace through strength

And so what we did is we collected those lessons. We tried to figure out what are the four sets of blockers that we think exist

We put it into this memo. We talked with the Secretary of Defense about it. He was completely bought in

And when he signed the memo, we have basically started executing against it. Diving a little bit more into detail on those command consolidations, talk about why, you know, it makes sense to put Army Futures Command with Training and Doctrine Command, for instance

That was, I think, Army Futures Command was sort of born out of Training and Doctrine Command, and you're sort of combining them again

So what is that going to look like? You know, I know that it's still very early and you're working through a lot of the details

But, you know, why does it make sense to put those back together

So I'll go high level and then bring it back down. So from a high level perspective, the fourth bucket of things we wanted to do was just cut soldiers from the bureaucracy and push them back out to the units to do what they signed up to do

So just for far too long, and we like to blame the Pentagon and we like to blame Congress, but we had to look in the mirror and say, we are doing the same thing

We have too many four stars and three stars and two stars just smushed together, pushing paper back and forth

And more than just the sin against their time was the inefficiencies that were created from all of these leadership structures

All of this siloing had this kind of incredibly negative effect on our ability to move quickly

One of the things that we've reflected on most is, and this is a cultural thing, we the Pentagon and we the Army have become so risk averse in everything we do and all of our purchases that we are not even just like a little bit slower than the commercial sector

We who should be willing to take on more risk are oftentimes five and ten times slower

And so when you think about merging together these commands, the specific purpose and intent is get rid of some of the headquarters, put people working together

The things that we're buying necessarily need to be informed from what our soldiers are learning in combat

And then it is completely useless to buy a tool for our soldiers and then not have the training kind of immediately changing to take advantage of that

So one of the things I'm most proud of is just to take that very concretely, like drones are now part of our basic training course where five weeks in, soldiers are getting to look and in their after action reviews, see from the drones lens, what do they actually look like on the field

And that matters. And so we think it all needed to be as streamlined as humanly possible

Okay, that's very interesting. In terms of, you know, I think with Army Futures Command, there was a concern they wanted to create it because the requirements process was getting a bit buried in training and doctrine command

So how are you thinking about ensuring that you are, in fact, I mean, the requirements process needs its own revamp, of course

but ensuring that it continues to get the attention that it needs, that it wasn't getting, you know

really that triggered the creation of Army Futures Command in the first place? I think if you look, we've done things like RICTO

We've created all of these workarounds to just try to avoid. The fundamental problem is that we as a United States Army have a broken procurement process

We have noble people trying their best. But we are not going head on to actually fix the problem

And we keep trying to create these workarounds. And the workarounds, I think, on paper look good

I think in their first quarterly briefing, they're fine. It's creating a new bureaucracy

It's just a new site. And so what I'm incredibly optimistic for under the leadership of Secretary Hegseth and Deputy Secretary of Defense Feinberg is we just met about it this morning

We are creating lists of regulations to just cut in places where we, the Army, can take on more risk in testing and where we, the Army, can purchase things faster

It is just not sufficient in the world of drones and how quickly technology is moving forward to come up with these massive requirement lists shop them to industry wait for them to build a prototype wait for them to bring it back test it and then try to scale it

That's many years compared to the two weeks that we're going to have to be able to adapt and innovate at best with some of these things

And so what we are trying to do is, in all instances, as an Army

and create the list of the things that we don't think are adding to soldiers' lives

and making them safer and more lethal, and cut it out of the process. Okay. All right

In terms of the timeline for some of these consolidations, what are you looking at

What are your goals? When would you like to say, all right, consolidation completes

General George and I testified on this last week, and so I want to disclaim, this is not intended to be intentionally vague

It is intended to say these things are processes, and we believe that we will start to push out the first orders toward this in the coming weeks

and start to give clarity on how we believe after communicating with leadership in all of these

different areas how we believe it should function and roll out and so all of that is to say I think

in the coming weeks it will be announced and then we're hoping to have everything completed within

kind of 12 to 18 months. Okay wow it's gonna be fast. Which is fast and I want you to know the

The first pitch of the timeline was much longer. And what we are trying to say is just wherever we can create speed, you've got to go fast

It's the right thing for soldiers. After the break, learn how new Army leadership is taking an economic approach to the defense contracts of the future

Don't go away. Can you talk about the development of the four multi-domain commands as were laid out in the

execution orders that were issued last month? Why are they being created? What might they look like

How might they be structured? So warfare has hit an inflection point, and I think most of the

listeners to this probably feel it too. When you look at Operation Spider's Web that just happened

in Russia. Air and land and sea have now all kind of mixed together with space, and it is no longer

sufficient to specialize in one. The United States Army cannot function on land if it can't protect

the air. And so what we are trying to do fundamentally is start to think about how do we

create expertise and get assets and experience in all of the different domains, and how do we learn

lessons from those that can impact the rest of the force. And so we were up in JBLM and seeing

one of the task force, it was just incredible what they were working on, but it wasn't sufficient

And that is our problem as leaders to try to figure out how do we take those lessons

get them what they need to test it, and then take what's working and get it to the broader force

And how would multi-domain task forces fit into these multi-domain commands that you're creating

I think a lot of this is if you think about the tech startup community and you think of this

concept of minimum viable product. Like the idea is that if you're a company and you're small and

medium and you think you have something that works, get it into the hands of your customers

as fast as humanly possible and get lessons from them that can impact the broader force

And so essentially the way we're thinking about these is they are our testers at small scale so

that those lessons can spread up to the larger force. Okay. And so would these commands sort of

take those lessons and be able to organize and disperse them across? Okay. All right. That's

helpful. You also canceled and curtailed programs where the Army has already spent billions of

dollars. There's a lot of hard burn over this, ITEP, and Proof-Termine Engine Program, M10 Booker

What's the strategic logic behind walking away from programs the Army previously has fought hard

to get? I know this has always been a huge debate ending programs after there's been a great deal

of investment that's happened in the past. But talk a little bit about what you're trying to do

here, you know, because so much has been invested in this and so rapidly over the last, you know

four or five years. I think it's tough for some folks in the Army to see that come to an end. So

the strategic vision. No, and this is one of the things that General George and I

have aspired to do. And we should be held accountable when we've missed the mark on this

But we've told every senator and every congressman that we've annoyed with these cuts

every business that we've tried to get on the phone with them and explain to them our logic

and tell them why we don't think what we had said in the past holds true anymore

and show them where we are hoping to go. This concept of sunk cost fallacy, and it is a thing that human beings generally struggle with

which is if you've invested a lot in the past, and we do this in our personal lives

you get anchored to things that are suboptimal for the future. If you could just start again and detach your brain from the emotions

you would think, well, what's best going forward? And so what we've tried to do is, taking the booker as an example

It was intended to be a light tank that served all of these new purposes

It ended up medium. I don't think the manufacturer liked it all that much. And we, the Army, as a customer kind of helped create this Frankenstein that came to be

No one seemed to be all that excited about it. And I think what would have historically happened is I think we would have continued to acquire it

We would have needed the parts. We would have needed to train soldiers. And we would have just made it work

And so what we did is we went into the leadership, Deputaries, Depth, SecDef, and SecDef, and said, we, the Army, got it wrong

We don't think it's the right idea to purchase it anymore. The same with a robotic combat vehicle

It's a $3 million, amazing, amazing piece of technology that is made by people that we want in our ecosystem building for us

But the problem was we put out requirements that were just not synced with this idea of $800 drones being able to take out exquisite equipment

And we just, it's a lesson we learned. And so we are trying to have those hard conversations and try to empower these small and medium businesses to build the small and attributable things that we actually need going forward

Absolutely. Is there anything laid out in the memo or in the execution plans that previously signed by the Army that might change, where you might change your mind or you might shift gears based off of what you think you're going to do versus what you end up doing

How are you working through some of the continued ysis, if you will, on the impact of some of these decisions, such as the effects of some of these decisions may have on the industrial base in the United States

And I know lawmakers last week, they're going to push back on certain things

They expressed concern that the industrial base is brittle and the Army needs to make investment strategies that recognize that and that take into account those second and third order effects of the industrial base

So how are you working through that? And are you already seeing the potential need to maybe walk back on some plans or change some plans that you have

So I am going to bifurcate my reply and I'm going to narrowly focus on what I define as or General George would define as parochial issues first

And then I'll give the second reply. So the first one is to date that I know of

We have not taken a single, call it congressional district or specific state or specific company issue into account to do what we think is right for the soldier

And so what we believe is for the longest time you basically had way too much energy and effort from lobbyists who were kind of empowered I think by the building and kind of the calcified nature of this thing to get what they want against the best interest of soldiers We have not that I know of compromised a single time on that to date And that is actually helpful in conversations because I can say hey to date

we've made zero compromises. That being said, to the other part, if everything we have said we

believe to be true six weeks ago holds true, that probably means we're not doing a good enough job

learning from soldiers and learning from the community and learning from the defense industrial

base about ways to do things better. I would be shocked if there aren't things that we said that

turn out to be less true or not true that we believe. And so the process of kind of iteratively

getting better should mean definitionally to me, it will be a trailing indicator that I have

failed if we are not tweaking these things as we're learning. Yeah. So basically, the memo doesn't snap the chuck. This is a living, breathing effort document as it goes forward and that you are not just being rigid about your previous decisions as you have more and more conversations about this

I hope so. And we think that this is very specifically, I think we believe when we do the math, it's $48 billion over five years

And being recycled into the things we believe that we need, that recycling should be occurring constantly

And even new things that we think we should spend on, I hope we are finding out that they're not

And we're not falling to our own sunk cost fallacies, and we're able to recycle those

And so the request of everyone on our team and every senator and congressman we talk to, a good, healthy engine of decision making and a good democracy has tension to it

And there should be some tugs and pulls. That should land us in a better spot. And so I don't think we are naive enough to believe that we are 100 percent right on everything

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When we come back, the conclusion of our conversation with Secretary of the Army, Daniel Driscoll

You've said industry needs to move faster, but the Army itself has a long track record on requirements churn and delay

and we talked a little bit about this earlier on in the interview, but what are you doing to bring more discipline to your side of the relationship

when it comes to requirements? How are you really looking at addressing some of the things that the Army gets stuck on

What are some of the kind of tangible things you're trying to put in place to ensure that we don't get stuck in requirements

And also making sure you get over that valley of death between requirements

and actually getting something you want and need. So qualitatively, and I have said this to every company, we've had to deliver the news that we're not going to continue to purchase some other things

We own it as an army. We have been a bad customer to them

I think we oftentimes are inward looking and we say, woe is us. Industry's not delivering what we ask

But I don't think that's a fair telling of the story. We have created the behaviors we don't like and we have to own that

And so the first thing we're trying to do is own it. The second thing is fix it

And so rather than just continue to talk about where things could be better, theoretically, what General George and I are trying to do is take specific projects like Flora as an example

We had a call, I want to say 10 days ago, 14 days ago, with the CEOs of 14 of the largest suppliers

So it's a lot of the big companies in America. Their CEOs were on the call

I led with, hey, we've created bad behavior. We want this Flora

We want the first prototype and not the 36 months you think you can do it

We want it in 12 months. We, the United States of America, can show that we can build things again

We first flew an example of this in 2018. We can do this

But I know that we are the ones putting up a bunch of impediments, and what we want to do with them is we want to risk some of our own cash

And so we will be a better customer when we are putting in some of the dollars up front because then it makes us better

And I think that that is incredibly important. I think the next thing is our requirement lists on the front end

or we just require too many things. 90% in one year is better than 100% in 12

And so we are going to have to cut some of those and just accept that exquisite is not sufficient anymore

We need some speed. And then the very last one is on kind of our testing

and the way that we actually validate that what they made is something we are willing to pay for

and reward them for is insane oftentimes. And so what we told them is very specifically

if at any of those buckets you need us to do a thing, Send it to us

We gave them our personal emails in an email. We've probably had three of them take us up on it

And I think we're at about 100% batting average for getting waivers and looking at things and saying we can cut there

If it saves you six months and it added us 0.01% of value, let's make the cut

If we need to add it later to a different version, we can do it. But what we are trying to do is be collaborative

And the very last one is Deputy Secretary of Defense Feinberg and I have talked about this with Chief a lot

one of the things that made American, the manufacturing base scale so quickly in our

world wars, in my opinion, is we actually put soldiers on the manufacturing floor. So they

were there when something went wrong and they needed their federal government to step up and help fix it, whether it was go get aluminum supply or waive regulation for speed. We actually had

people there. And so one of the things we've talked about is taking kind of a pre-wartime footing

with our manufacturing and our industrial base and starting to embed soldiers with them who can

report directly up to the Pentagon, and we can tag in whatever resources are necessary

Okay. Senator Wicker said last week that he saw a lack of logistics investment in your

transformation plan, given the Army's role in the Pacific and the important role that logistics and

sustainment will play there So how is the Army looking at logistics and ensuring it has the right investments in place going forward I know for instance there was a program cancellation in the memo related to the maneuver support vessel light That obviously something that wasn working out but there a lack of clarity

on how you fill that role, moving equipment around theaters. So can you talk a little bit

about what you're looking at there? I think when we think of the United States Army, we think about it as like two very discrete functions. Function one, and I'll say them in

the reverse order I normally do. Function one is a very lethal killing machine that sits on behalf

of the American public for use by the president and secretary of defense to keep us safe. Function

two is a large enterprise business that moves people and things around the country and the world

Logistics obviously spans both of those functions. One of the places we think we can capture the most

low-hanging fruit to massively move forward how we do our logistics, particularly with contested

logistics and the tyranny of distance and Indopaycom is occurring in the commercial sector

And so if you look at these big, massive companies like Google, I mean, they are putting billions

and billions into drone delivery and all of these different things. And so what we're hoping to do

is, and we're in the early stages of, is figuring out partnerships with them so that we can have

those types of drone deliveries on our bases. We can have them coming from the PX to the soldier's

home. We can have them going from the PX to the field. We can have them in the field testing

exercises where we layer in some contestation to the exercises. There seems to be a big demand

from a lot of these companies because they're going to get some learnings in this. They just can't replicate anywhere else. And so kind of very broadly to Senator Wicker's remarks, I agree

I don't think this first iteration of the Army Transformation Initiative was this focus on

logistics, but I wholeheartedly agree, and I think General George would too, that that is one of the

biggest problems of our time. But I am most optimistic that the lessons in the consumer

segment and sector are going to transfer there the fastest. Okay. Shifting gears, there's been a backlash over the deployment of National Guard troops to

support ICE and border security operations. So in your view, what role should the Guard be playing

these kinds of missions. And you testified last week that the Guard would be working it within

its legal bounds. But I don't think that fully satisfied lawmakers with concerns about this

So if you could just elaborate a little bit on your views on this

Yeah, I think the president is absolutely right. He ran on a commitment and a mandate to the

American people that he would keep their streets and their cities and their communities safe. I think the National Guard is an amazing asset that we as a nation have had for a very long time

and it is purpose-built for all sorts of different functions. And the function that the President and Secretary of Defense are using them in in California

is a perfectly good function. I think the Guard are trained in this

They have a lot of experience. I think protecting federal personnel and property is a good use case of our Guard

and I'm incredibly proud of them. The Army is celebrating its 250th birthday this year

and there's a lot going on this month to honor that milestone. However, there's a great deal of controversy surrounding the cost and the effort

that's going into the military parade that's happening. Lawmakers, I think, pushed back last week over the cost of the parade

and how that money could be spent elsewhere, like caring for veterans or military families

So what's the strategic value of putting tanks on Constitution Avenue? And you spoke about this being a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity

So can you elaborate a little bit on why do you feel that this is that time

This is honestly one. In the 110 days here, I have friends who vehemently disagree with me

And so I'm actually kind of flummoxed that so many people are taking the opposite side of this one

I guess to the first point, this happened 100 and what would it be, 160 years before President Trump was born

And so calling it a birthday celebration from him, I just like it doesn't match my experience in the building

It doesn't match anything I've heard from the White House. It just doesn't seem accurate

And I think it's interesting that, like, I fundamentally think our soldiers and our veterans and our communities deserve this

I think that they have sacrificed for this nation. The Army is older than our country, and it's an amazing time to tell the story of all of the things they've done throughout time

whether it's wildfires in California, flooding in North Carolina. I talked to a colonel this morning who's on the International Space Station

The Army just has had this incredible role in addition to providing security to the American people

And so just on that basis, I think it's an incredible opportunity. But then very specifically for recruiting, I think that there is a sense of pride and patriotism that has been rebuilding since President Trump came back into office

And I think this is an incredible time for America's youth to get to see their Army in all her majesty

And I think my guess is, and there will be quantitative data around this, so I will come back to you and tell you whether I was right or wrong

I think our recruitment centers are going to be busting at the seams in the months following this

And I think even more importantly, because we're on a recruiting tear right now, I'm hoping young people who are four years away from joining and five years away from joining and maybe early in their career but thinking about switching

I hope they catch a taste for what it's like to serve in the United States Army and just be a part of a group that is so driven by excellence, so driven by patriotism, and so driven by this idea that they're caring for their fellow community members, that when I testified on it, I actually believe it would be the wrong decision not to invest against this moment so that America could get a better glimpse of its army

Final question. What should Americans expect from their army three years from now? How will it look different than today

I hope when they see soldiers, I hope their soldiers are empowered with tools like an iPhone and a Tesla

and I don't mean those literally, but I hope their next tanks are software coming out into the world

being embodied by this hardware where the software on the tank or the software on the future wheeled vehicle

and the software on the rotary wing aircraft is all updatable and near real time

and we can sub in and out based off the threats what they need. I hope they have devices that are syncing with each other across space and time and syncing with their sensors and syncing with their things and so that they're able to do things like counter drone protection

And I hope kind of more broadly, I hope that they see an Army that is well trained and well manned like it is today

And I hope that they see an Army that cares about them and is contributing to their communities

And then I guess what I hope is that they see an army that is ready for the next 247 years to get to 500 to stand by the nation and be there for them with whatever they need of us

All right. Well, thank you so much for joining us here and happy birthday to the army

Thank you. Thanks for having me. Well, that's all we have time for in this episode. Thanks for joining us and we'll see you next week