Transcript: Dan Driscoll – U.S. Secretary of the Army on Shawn Ryan Show (SRS #239)

It goes to ATF.

And so what ends up happening is every four or eight years, ATF will start to do a lot of things like they will make it harder for Americans to act on their Second Amendment rights and actually purchase guns. They will make it so that if a gun owner or a gun store skips one line on a form where obviously the intent was there not to defraud, they will bring down these incredibly catastrophic consequences.

And so ATF rightfully has taken a lot of heat over the years for those kinds of actions. And so what we are trying to do with ATF under President Trump and with the Attorney General is return it to its roots of doing what it does best, which is going after violent crime in this nation.

President Trump is incredibly focused, if you look at what’s happening in D.C. and I assume we’ll talk about the National Guard there. But ATF agents are playing an incredible role in getting guns from violent criminals off the streets, but empowering gun owners to be able to purchase guns under their Second Amendment who aren’t violent criminals.

And so one of the things we’re talking about with ATF is doing a complete rebrand and a complete shift and taking it from Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and it’s got a silent need for explosives, and move it over to something like being the Bureau of Violent Crimes, which is exactly what it’s actually good at and what most Americans want it to be doing.

The Gun Rights Debate and Mass Violence

SHAWN RYAN: Man, that’s good to hear. And you know, I know we’re not here to really focus on ATF. We’re focused on Secretary of the army stuff. But just, you know, I mean, the gun rights debate has always been there. It’ll probably always be there until, you know, unless the Second Amendment completely goes away, then it’ll take years.

But, you know, we do see, you know, and there’s a lot of confusion on different firearms and especially those that are firearms enthusiasts with bump stocks. And a lot of people are pissed off about tax stamps and stuff. But, you know, I can understand the debate, you know, on gun rights. I mean, we see. I mean, was it last week or the week before the Catholic Church got shot up? Bunch of little kids got killed? I mean, Uvalde in Texas. I mean, the list just goes on and on. Vegas, you know.

And so, I mean, in your opinion, what is the answer here? I mean, we hear people get freaked out about red flag laws who are firearms enthusiasts and exercise the Second Amendment, and people get fired up about Red Flag laws that don’t think we should have any guns or, you know, only bolt actions or whatever.

So, you know, with all the school shootings and mass shootings going on and you know, the threat of jihadists, you know, being inside the country and setting up cells, I mean, what’s the answer here, in your opinion? What is the answer?

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: I think it’s a, as you acknowledge, Shawn, it’s such an incredibly complicated topic that if you look, I think at soldier suicide, one of the leading indicators is when that moment, the soldier’s having that dark moment, they have access to a firearm. Even if we have instances where many times we had just asked the soldier that morning, “How are they doing?” And they were fine, but you have this quick dip into a bad moment, you have access to a firearm and you take your life in this incredibly tragic way.

I don’t know though, that it’s the firearm’s fault. One of the things the army has been trying to do is should we put weapons where we store the rest of our weapons and just have them need to get access to that the next morning and so try to spread out that moment of self violence, self harm or community harm from the access to the firearm.

But the problem is that doesn’t scale for the average American citizen because our Second Amendment, and this is where I think we as a nation have a hard time sometime acknowledging the plain English and the plain language. We come up with this Orwellian doublespeak and we try to talk ourselves into saying it doesn’t say that Americans have the right to bear arms, they do. Everyone can read that and get to the logical outcome that that is one of our core rights as a nation. And there are many benefits from that.

And so I think until we’re willing to just have the hard conversation on the merits, we’re just going to keep playing on the margins and using ATF to regulate against a right that is obviously there.

Mental Health and Veterans’ Rights

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, it scares the hell out of me. I mean, when we do, when we’re talking about mental health, because that’s what it all spirals around, right, is the mental health issue. And a lot of veterans that have been diagnosed with traumatic brain injuries, depression.

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: PTSD.

SHAWN RYAN: And I think there’s a big fear that because I don’t, I’m definitely a firearms enthusiast. I also see kids being killed all the time, you know, in schools. In fact, I just yanked my kid out of school because I wasn’t impressed with the security there.

And you know, schools aren’t, schools and venues aren’t rising up to, you know, it’s like, dude, just pay the money, man. Just pay the money. Get the security, get the window film, get the blast proof doors, get the camera systems, you know, and.

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: So many of these, every.

SHAWN RYAN: Single time, it’s reactive, you know what I mean? And so, you know, what I’m getting at is, you know, I think there’s a lot of fear of people that have, you know, what would be considered a mental health issue, you know, and if those red flag laws go into place, then, I mean, do we all lose our ability to, I mean, you trusted us to go to war for the country and use a firearm there.

And you know, now there’s a fear that, man, I just fought for this country. I have, you know, some wounds that are invisible, you know, and I don’t want to be penalized for my service. And, but on the other hand, you have crazy people out there, you know what I mean, that are, that don’t have a record. They go buy a gun and they shoot a place up.

National Guard Deployment in Urban Areas

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: So I think one of the problems is, and it’s inherent in our system of government and it does some good things. I think it prevents us in any given political cycle from veering too far off the straight and narrow of what our amazing nation has done for 249 years, which is generally speaking doing an amazing job of protecting the safety of our citizens at large.

But when we have these swings with something like gun regulation, I think a lot of second amendment people who are very passionate about that right are right to be worried that when the political spectrum swings the other way, it could be used to decay and attack their right to have a gun. And so I think this is one of those topics that much of my role as secretary has been just very complex issues that the only reason it’s getting to you is there’s no clear right answer. And this seems to be one of those same issues.

Because if I think about it again from a soldier’s perspective, one of the parts of this role I never expected is, and I just hadn’t thought about it, we have 450,000 active duty soldiers, about 950,000 total and 250,000 civilians. So 1.2 million total people. And what we do is, or what I do, I write a letter to the mother and the father and the spouse and the children of any soldier that dies, including when they kill themselves and commit suicide.

And it is devastating. I mean, it is just one of the most heart wrenching, miserable parts of this job. And all you wish is that you can end it. And so we’ve started doing a deep dive of how can we actually impact soldier suicide. And what you learn is we’ve invested a ton of resources into it. We have really smart, passionate, caring people working on it.

You have, I think, from your experience, Shawn, you care about your battle buddy deeply. You care about them when you’re in uniform. You care about them when you’re out of uniform. And yet with all of those positive forces going to this problem, we just haven’t been able to solve it.

And so when people come back and they say, “Hey, maybe the solution is to lock up soldiers’ firearms,” you just end up thinking, I hear that you are looking at the ultimate tool that created the negative impact on their lives at the end. But I just think the problem is so much more complex. And to your point, these are the people we trust to go out on behalf of our nation with our most ferocious weapons and defend us. That just doesn’t seem like the right answer, but there’s not really a better one.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. I’m going to throw something on your radar, if you don’t mind.

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: Yeah, please.

SHAWN RYAN: Kathryn Boyle, she’s a partner.

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: That’s incredible.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. At Andreessen Horowitz. And she just put a company. I believe the name of the company is called Sharp. And they’re, I believe they’re new. I just dug into this last night a little bit. But basically, this is a for profit company, an organization that is sending coaches into law enforcement, firefighters, first responders, military personnel.

And I think they started, you know, they started with one little facility. Now they’re in 50 states. But basically what they do is that they’ll take a guy like me or a veteran police officer, veteran firefighter, veteran first responder. And they won’t insert coaches into these organizations to talk about, you know, what it’s like to pull through, you know, what it’s like on the other side, you know, the dark moments that you have.

And I think that’s, you know, first I was like, “Oh, you know, it’s for profit,” but I mean, the non profit sector is so, you know, it’s…

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: It’s the only worse the federal bureaucracy is the nonprofit sector in our country.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. And so I just. The company’s called Sharp. It might be something you want to…

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: Yeah, we’ll take a look for sure.

Urban Crime and National Guard Response

SHAWN RYAN: But anyway, so on the topic of violent crime, before we get into your backstory, I mean, we are seeing National Guard, Army National Guard get activated into different cities, L.A., D.C. Let’s talk about going to Chicago. There’s talk about coming here to Nashville, Memphis, I mean, and that is, you know, I got a couple of thoughts on this one.

You know, it’s kind of like the gun rights. It’s tricky, you know. And I mean, Chicago, I think that’s still the leading murder capital of the country.

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: I think so.

SHAWN RYAN: And Memphis is, you know, a close second. Nashville’s got a lot of violent crime. We all know about what goes on in LA. We all know about what goes on in D.C. and, you know, but I think the fear is, you know, ever since COVID it’s been everybody’s got fear of, you know, government overreach, and rightly so.

So, I mean, is this skirting the line of martial law? And the caveat to that is, you know, I think about, I just think, what would I think, you know, if I was in Chicago or St. Louis or D.C. or, you know, Memphis, and I have kids. I don’t want my kids getting shot at, you know, and I’m tired of seeing, you know, our youth, anybody just get killed, you know what I mean? From the violent crimes out there.

And so, one, I’m worried about martial law, government overreach. On the other hand, if I put myself in that situation and I live in Chicago and I’m like, I don’t really want to go through National Guard checkpoints, and I don’t want to see National Guard everywhere. I want to believe. But it’s not that way.

And so maybe if I lived there, I would, you know, I would be more open to it. Like, “Well, we’ve got to clean this up one way or another.” You know, and so I’m just, you know, I’m curious, but the same token, I mean, they keep voting for the same type of people that are not going to clean this up. And so do they want it cleaned up? You know what I mean? So I’m just curious, you know, what are your thoughts on that?

Government’s Primary Role in Public Safety

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: I think just to narrow in on D.C. I worked on President Trump for much of the campaign season with the vice president and ended up getting to talk to and be part of a lot of conversations with voters. And if you talk to, in my opinion, the average American voter, the types of crime and the decay that we have allowed in our big cities is offensive as a nation.

What a government’s primary role is for its people, in my opinion, is to provide security and safety. That’s from international threats and that’s from within our border. And I think what you’ve seen President Trump do is rightly and righteously react to the voter sentiment and the mandate he was given to stop the violent criminals coming over our border in record numbers.

This is not political rhetoric that just if you actually look at the quantitative data of the number of humans that illegally came over our borders in the four years before, it was insanity. It’s like we think back to this time of Ellis Island and this influx of new Americans coming, and we as a nation had consented to that. We in the previous four years hadn’t consented to this. And you had this insane number of human beings from just the inaction of the federal government leading to all these downstream bad effects in communities.

And so if you look at D.C. one of my experience so far has been, and we mentioned it earlier at breakfast, but when I got this Secretary of the Army role and then the acting Director of ATF, if you had told me on my bingo card that I would have had a spot where we would be working on the same mission together, I would have told you you were crazy.

But it’s been amazing to see the National Guard soldiers work with our ATF agents and the rest of their law enforcement brethren providing a service in D.C. that the community loves. I think if you look at the feedback, and I encourage reporters anytime I talk to them, just go talk to average members of the D.C. community. And I think they love it.

These National Guard members go to the same churches as them, their kids are in the same school. They are many and most times from this exact same community. And what’s so cool about the National Guard is you can be deployed abroad for the security of your country, but you can also be used to improve and help secure your own community.

And I think what President Trump is doing in D.C. our nation’s capital and the most amazing country that has existed in the history of the world, to repair it and beautify it and make it something we can all be proud of, where you can walk your kids down the street and not be afraid of a violent crime happening to you, is such an obvious outcome to me that the slippery slope conversation of militarizing DC and whether it’s martial law, I think if you actually talk to people, it’s nothing like that.

Media Coverage and the Army Parade

And when we had 15, 18, 20 reporters and I was talking to them a couple of weeks ago, and one of the places I struggle the most with the press in our country is, and I understand why the incentive structure is this way. But they’re incentivized to get clicks. They’re incentivized. That’s how they get their ad dollars. And so the entire system has been set up to tell a story, create a headline, to get a person to click on it so you get rewarded. It’s classically Pavlovian behavior.

And so if you think of the army parade, the army parade was to celebrate 250 years of our United States Army. We are older than the United States of America itself. I tell soldiers often they and the people that came before them and the ones that are coming after actually built and are sustaining this great nation.

I don’t know if you remember the headlines, but so many people wrote about this militarized parade that it was going to go down D.C. with these tanks and it was going to destroy the city and destroy the roads. And I mean, I can’t tell you, I would guess there were thousands of articles written about this in the months leading up. This was President Trump’s big act to do something despicable is what a lot of people wrote.

The parade happened and nearly, I think it ended up having more views than the Super Bowl this past year. Yeah, I think it had 148 million views. And as far as I know, we had $800 worth of total damage where one tank nicked one curb and almost everyone I know that watched it said, “Man, that was good, wholesome television.” And our recruiting numbers, the number of people wanting to join skyrocketed that day, that week and the month that followed.

So from my perspective, it was everything we and the President said it was going to be. And then when I was sitting with these reporters, I asked them, I thought many of them wrote the story on the front end about how bad it could be. But did any of them write a follow up story to say actually it was exactly what they said it was going to be?

And the slippery slope argument that they continue to make to sell headlines doesn’t tend to ever actually happen. And so for the average American, we keep telling these boogeyman stories about what the President is trying to do to secure our communities. And I think it’s really harmful. It’s degrading our belief in the system unnecessarily. And every interaction I have had has been a positive one.

Media Bias and Coverage Disparities

SHAWN RYAN: Well, that’s good to hear. I mean, you know, I mean, the press is just a disaster. They’re on their way out. I mean, you know, the latest debacle is, you know that African American guy that stabbed the Ukrainian in Charlotte.

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: Yeah, yep.

SHAWN RYAN: With three times in the neck. And then nobody covers it. I think Fox News eventually covered it. But then you got Daniel Penny, who stands up for somebody, chokes a bad guy out, winds up dead. And that’s everywhere. That’s everywhere.

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: Yep.

SHAWN RYAN: You know what I mean? So the press is on their way out. I think that’s why podcasts are just booming right now. But back to the National Guard thing. I mean, just for all of us that don’t live in D.C. or LA or are we in Chicago now?

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: We’re not yet. Not yet.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, what does it look like when the National Guard is activated in a city with a tremendous rate of violent crime? I mean, what’s the plan of action? What does it look like for the people that live there?

National Guard Operations in Washington D.C.

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: Yeah. So very specifically, Shawn, what we do is we go to a set of people who have joined, they’ve raised their right hand to defend our country and we say, “You are being activated.” We’re going to give you orders to come do this mission that at the instance of the DC National Guard is right in the strike zone of what they are intended to do and have always been intended to do.

Because the DC is a little bit quirky, there’s no governor over it. So the Secretary of the Army, me, is essentially, from the President through the Secretary of War down to me, has the authority to activate them. We turn them on, we bring them in, we train them on whatever the mission is. And then we look to the local. In this instance, we look to the local law enforcement leaders from the federal agency and we say, “How can we help? Where do you need us? What can we do? What do you need them doing? Where can they be most valuable? Here are the assets we have.”

A lot of them are law enforcement officers. A lot of them have all of these talents. What’s so cool about the National Guard is because they’re full time in other jobs, we can get these really niche experiences to help us. We have engineers, we have computer programmers, we have people who are in law enforcement and we can help bolster whatever the need of the community is.

And so as it’s specifically related to D.C. in the beginning, we put them out on presence patrols and one of the things I think that from my time in Iraq, you heard presence patrol, and it kind of sent shivers up your spine because of the stupid presence patrols that we would do in Iraq, in my opinion, because the mission hadn’t been defined and you would be doing it as more of a check the block exercise.

For this exercise in D.C. that’s not it at all. We have communities and neighborhoods that are suffering terrible, like a scourge of violent crime. And by having our soldiers there, it is making a meaningful impact. So I think last week I heard that carjackings in the city are down 85%. 85% since President Trump did this. And again, to your point, Shawn, no one’s writing about it that I’m seeing, but this is obviously making a difference.

And this is the thing that I think happened in the last election. Americans are just sick of being double speak to. They’re sick of the media contorting the story and telling them things that their own eyes are telling them are lies. And so from everything I have seen from the D.C. National Guard, they are doing noble missions. They almost all are happy to be in their own community. And it is going to make a lasting impact and kind of show our nation that we can recover these cities.

We don’t have to sit back passively anymore and just say the criminals have it. We got to move out to the country to be safe. We can go in there with the might of the federal government, partnered with local law enforcement, and take back these cities under President Trump.

SHAWN RYAN: It sounds great, but what does it look like from the people that live there? You know, when I hear, I mean, I was in Iraq, I spent a long time in the Middle East, you know, and I’ve been a part of presence patrols. And when I hear presence patrol, I think of a convoy of Humvees with 50 cals and twin 240s on the top with, you know, of a turret and up armored.

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: I mean, is that what it looks…

SHAWN RYAN: Like or is it checkpoints or what is…

Community Response and Implementation

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: So specifically what it would look like is you would see soldiers most times from your community who are trying to help secure your community. And the way that I, a trailing indicator to me that they are being valued is the number of selfies that these soldiers are taking is remarkable. Kids are coming up, grandparents are coming up, young and old are wanting to thank them for their service, wanting to thank them for doing this for their community.

When we meet with the DC Leadership, this is kind of one of the quiet secrets of the whole thing. If you actually meet with the police. If you meet with the leadership at kind of nearly all levels, in my experience, one of the first things they say is thank you. Please tell your members, please tell your soldiers thank you. This is really helpful. We’re really happy to have them in the community.

I think if you look at what the D.C. mayor said last week, they’re starting to build a plan around now that they actually have all of these resources and these law enforcement officers, they’re leaning into the idea that they can improve their city. And I think this is exactly what President Trump wanted to do is empower DC and empower our nation’s capital to fix itself with federal resources and build the momentum to go do this throughout the nation.

SHAWN RYAN: What is it? What does it look like?

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: I mean, if you thought of this.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, what does it look like if they get into. I mean, I don’t even know what we would call it here. I was just going to call it a tick, a troop. It’s troops in contact. But I mean, you know, with the MS-13 gangs, the cartels, the Bloods, the Crips, I mean, you know, Hell’s Angels, I don’t know. You know, there’s gang members all over the place, you know, tons of different gangs. I mean, what does it look like if MS-13 pushes back against the National Guard and happens to fire upon them? I mean, do they have ROEs or…

Rules of Engagement and Response Protocols

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: Yeah, I mean, I think they would see the full might and fury of our United States Army. They would see the full might and fury of the most powerful government in the history of the world. And I think the President and Secretary of War have been very clear that they are taking a hard line and that kind of violence is no longer acceptable in our nation.

And so I don’t think we would ever wish that on our soldiers. I think anyone who has deployed on behalf of the nation knows the cost that comes from those moments. I mean, my dad is going on 80, and it never really clicked to me why when I woke him up my entire childhood, I’d kind of poke him and he’d sit up like a mousetrap.

And the day before I deployed, we’re at a Ruby Tuesday’s in Watertown, New York, and we were talking about it. I just asked him if he remembered those moments in Vietnam. And he kind of was dodging the answer. I was like, “Seriously, do you remember them?” And he said, “Oh, every night I have bad drinks on it.” And it was like for 55 years, the man’s been having bad dreams about his time there.

You don’t wish these moments of conflict on somebody. So I don’t want to sound light or callous when I say it, but this mission, to me, unlike a lot of the ones in the early 2000s, is a noble mission. It is purpose built for our National Guard members to provide security to their own communities. And these are heroes who have raised their right hand and said they want to go do this mission.

And so whoever it is that threatens our soldiers, they will see violence, like an act of God coming at them, and they will see support coming from all directions. And I think that they will learn very quickly that the standard of what they are able to do in our nation has changed.

Long-Term Strategy and National Impact

SHAWN RYAN: What is the, I mean, what is the long term plan? I mean, I don’t, you know, I mean, they could move, they could, you know, these cells, these gangs, I mean, they could move to other cities and set up there, you know, where there’s less pushback from the, I mean, what is the long term plan? I mean, we’ve seen a lot of cities that have just kneecapped law enforcement. Seattle, Louisiana, San Francisco, Chicago, New York. I mean, the list goes on and on. And so I mean, is there a plan to, and I don’t even, I don’t know how this works. You know what I mean? That’s a state and local entity, so I don’t know how much control the federal government would have over that. But I mean, what is the long term plan?

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: I think as it relates to DC if you talk to the President or his advisors or the Secretary of War or the Attorney General, Pam Bondi, they are in it until it’s done. And they are not defining that moment of done yet because it’s gotten so bad that I think a lot of the purpose of this is to wake Americans up and make them realize that they have incredible power in how they vote.

I think you made the reference, Shawn. If you look at a lot of these cities, keep voting in the same people. And I think a lot of this is kind of the water getting turned up on the frog. People don’t realize you don’t have to be afraid. You don’t have to accept that when you park your car on the street, it’s going to get broken into. You don’t have to accept that your 12 year old can’t board a bus and go to the local convenience store and go to an arena to watch a sporting event and come back home.

We as a nation can win this war and make ourselves safe again. And so I think the answer for it is it will last as long as it takes under President Trump to return us to a place of less than average violence when compared to peer countries around the world. And we’re not near that yet.

SHAWN RYAN: So it’s essentially kind of leading by example to the local law enforcement through the National Guard.

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: Oh, and law enforcement, love it. When you talk to the local law enforcement, they’ve won the lottery. They have signed up. One of the amazing parts of being at ATF is I get to be around all these law enforcement and they desperately want to clean up their own communities. This is empowering them with all of these new enablers that they just typically don’t have. And so I think it’s less modeling good behavior for them and instead empowering them to do what they are so good at and want to do. But they’ve just been under resourced and underappreciated for so long.

Personal Background

SHAWN RYAN: All right, let’s move on. So let’s get a little bit of a backstory. Where did you grow up?

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: So grew up in the mountains, North Carolina, a place called Boone. Appalachian State’s in my hometown. Went to a public high school up there. So it was about 400 kids a class. Kids would drive from all over the county. There were no private schools. It was an amazing childhood. Most of it spent outdoors, skiing, mountain biking, just playing sports.

Ended up my rising. When I was going into junior year, I ended up meeting this woman, Cassie, who was a rising freshman. I was 18 months older than her and asked her out. She couldn’t date till she was 16. We ended up dating, I think, a couple months before she turned 16. She’s now my wife. We’ve been together for 22, 23 years. So it was just an absolutely amazing childhood. Growing up in the mountains.

SHAWN RYAN: What got your interest in the military?

The Decision to Serve

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: So think about this. This kind of blows my mind when I think back to it. So the summer before, so I was going to UNC Chapel Hill for college, and that the reading, the summer reading book from UNC Chapel Hill was this book “Absolutely American.” So they had all the freshmen reading this book about these three guys who had gone to West Point and then deployed to Iraq.

And my granddad had served in World War II as a decoder. My dad was an infantryman in Vietnam, as I was telling you. And then so I had a ton of family members who had served, and it was always kind of like on the back burner. But I read this book as an 18 year old and just thought, “Man, I cannot miss out on my generation’s war. Like, I do not want to be the kind of person that I’m 40, 50, 60 years old. And they asked the veterans to stand at an event and I stay seated. Like, I need to go be a part of this. If this is what our nation needs, I need to go be a part of it.”

So I read the book, finished it, and just decided to graduate as fast as humanly possible. So took a ton of summer school, got out in three years and went to basic training.

SHAWN RYAN: What year was that?

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: Went to basic in September 2007.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay, so way past 9/11?

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: So you know what you were getting into?

Military Training and Formation

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: Yeah, yeah. So it was right during the surge. And so you were at basic training and everybody was talking about the surge in Iraq and trying to get you through schools. The gaps between schools was nearly nothing because we just needed more soldiers, we needed more second lieutenants.

So went through OCS, did a couple of other schools, ended up at tank school, at our armor school at Fort Knox. And armor’s an odd branch in the Army. You basically pair, like very heavy tankers who are using these exquisite pieces of equipment with scouts, who are kind of the lightest formation we have as an army. So I ended up choosing the scout path, trading with a guy.

Finished armor school, went to Ranger school, which there are two distinct memories from all these army schools stand out to me forever. One is in basic. I can remember it was like a couple of days after starting basic training. And our drill instructor, Drill Instructor Wilburn, had picked somebody to lead our basic training platoon. And I thought I was more talented than that person and I should have been the leader.

So I just, after one of the formations went up and I thought, rationally explained to her why I was a better choice. And as you can expect, Shawn, that went terrible. So I will never forget the humiliation of realizing that that is not what the army is, and it is my job to shut up and do what I am told and not provide other commentary.

And then the other one is Ranger school, where it’s the only time I can truly recall. It was mountain phase. We were walking up a hill. I think I was carrying like a 249, and I slipped and I fell down and I just couldn’t get up. Like, it was. I was exhausted, I was tired, we hadn’t eaten. I had lost 25 pounds at that point. And, like, I was shaking, I was shivering, I was cold, and I was broken.

It just literally is this one moment I’ll never forget. You’re hallucinating. And it was just this thing that growing up in the mountains of North Carolina is like a reasonably comfortable middle class existence. You’re laying there and you’re thinking, “Oh, my God, like, I am past what I am capable of doing.”

And it’s like at that exact moment, guys pull you up, they grab your weapon, they say, “Hey, we’ll carry it for a little while.” We stopped. I can remember a couple of them, like, hugging me to get me to stop shivering. And it’s this moment of vulnerability that, like, at least for me was, like, the start of this moment where I realized, like, these were the types of people that were going to be in my life forever, and these were the types of people that were the best among us.

And it was. My wife will say of these times that had I not joined the army, she wouldn’t have married me. Like, she’s very explicit about that. And it’s not. It’s because she said that. She said it on many. Even before this. Even before this job, because she says it just. It made me a much better version of myself.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, that’s cool.

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: Yeah, that is cool. Yeah. Yeah.

Deployment to Iraq

SHAWN RYAN: So then you deployed to Iraq, what year?

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: So got to 10th Mountain Division after Ranger School, 2nd Brigade. We were there about eight to 10 months. We were originally supposed to go to Afghanistan, got swapped out to go to Iraq. We deployed in kind of the tail end of the surge. So, ’09. It’s like right at the end of the surge, right before the handoff, through kind of the handoff.

And so the way I summarize that time is like, I think when I talk to other buddies who have deployed there at different periods of time, I’d like to think that perhaps we were there at, like, peak stupid, where we would go out on these missions and we would be told the number one thing to optimize for was not getting hurt. Just Americans had no appetite for soldiers getting hurt anymore.

And I can remember talking to my captain and major and colonels and saying, “Well, if that’s the thing we’re optimizing for, just, like, don’t send us out, we might as well just sit here because, like, we. We can’t do our job if that’s what you’re telling us to do.” And so I can hit some of the more insane stories from that time, but it’s like, it just makes me so angry to think back on. You were risking the lives of me and the guys beside me and under me, and for something that just, like, there didn’t seem to be a purpose or a mission at that point.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, for what?

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: For what?

SHAWN RYAN: Did you see any contact activity over there?

The Absurdity of Rules of Engagement

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: So by the time we were there, most of the dumb ones had been killed. So we would have IEDs and mortars, but no sort of, like, direct engagements of any sort of substance. We would do. One of the highlights of stupidity to me was, like, they sent in a camera crew. We were going to go after this IED factory.

And it’s like, you just imagine it to be a certain thing, and you maybe have experienced something similar, but you’re doing a factory raid. And so they took two of the platoons, they’re under me, they’re filming. We’re doing the plan, we’re getting the Humvees, we’re rolling out, we’re doing the cordon. We get to this place where they think they’re making IEDs, we have the bolt cutters ready to go. We call up for the clearance and we’re told that the new rules of engagement that had gone into effect meant we couldn’t cut this lock.

That was a gym lock that was like the size of what my 7 year old puts on her locker at school. And so we end up being told, “You can’t break locks anymore.” We get back in the Humvees, we drive back over these IED laden roads and it was like at that moment I was like, “Never again. Like, I, we, we have got to fix this as a nation. Because how could you possibly have risked all of these limbs and all of these lives and then let like a little tiny gym locker stop you from this mission?”

SHAWN RYAN: That may be the most absurd thing I’ve ever heard.

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: I was, I have. It makes my blood boil.

SHAWN RYAN: There’s a lock here, guys.

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: Let them keep making IEDs.

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: 100%.

SHAWN RYAN: We’re out.

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: Yep. What the. It’s crazy. Wow. Wow. It’s maddening.

SHAWN RYAN: Unbelievable.

Fixing the System from Within

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: Now from this seat, because basically the idea was come back, try to like get some experiences, come back and make a little bit of a difference. And you see how those types of preposterous decisions are output from our training to how we procure things, to how our missions come to be.

No, very few people along the line think that they are leading to that sort of stupid, stupid outcome. But because few people own it and because very few of the decision makers center themselves around. “Well, wait a second. Before I decide this thing, how does it actually impact the O1, the O2, the E4? What are they going to have to do with what I am saying now?”

And that has been one of the things that with General George, we have tried to do with every decision to start to model the behavior of. I don’t actually care how it impacts you and your Pentagon job. I want to, to know how does it impact a soldier in the field who actually has to do the thing or carry the thing or train with the thing that you’re talking about.

SHAWN RYAN: Man, that’s good to hear. That’s great to hear. Hasn’t been like that in a long time. So I don’t know if I’ve ever seen it. But. So that’s, that’s commendable. Thank you for doing that.

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: No, we’ll see if it works. We’re trying our best.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. Well, it sounds like, you know, from our breakfast conversation that a lot of the brute workforce of the military or the army is pretty damn happy that you’re in there.

The Quality of American Soldiers

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: They’re incredible. I think most of these problems are complex and there’s a lot of blame to go around and we can cover that part whenever you want. But the upside is the American soldier, I can say this with a completely straight face and not trying to be sycophantic after getting out, ended up going to fancy law schools and working with fancy law firms and consultants and venture backed companies.

And you meet all of these really talented Americans who are good at their niches. But I would say like having been out for 14, 15 years and coming back and seeing the average American soldier, I would bet on them every single time to solve any problem our nation has. I mean, they are so talented, they are so innovative. Their give a shit is off the charts. I mean, it is just remarkable to me what our American soldiers are capable of doing.

And I think if we can just unlock that talent and let them run at a lot of the problems our nation in our military are facing, we’re just going to see amazing results.

SHAWN RYAN: Nice, nice. Let’s talk about the road to Secretary of the Army. I mean, how did that come about? So.

Post-Army Life and Law School

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: Post army, so we’re in Iraq and I can remember we woke up, we’re about to go out on a mission and I read my email and I had gotten accepted to law school up at Yale in New Haven and I was so excited and I called my then girlfriend Cassie and I said, “Oh, this is awesome. I’m going to New Haven for law school when I get out.” And the first thing out of her mouth was, “Well, I’m not going up there unless we’re married.” So I ended up proposing the first weekend back from Iraq.

And then the next thing I heard is we’re getting in the vehicles, ready to roll out. And my driver, this guy Beau, looks at me and he said, “Hey sir, I’m really excited for you, but could you just please not get us killed today?” And so that brought me back into the moment real quickly.

So get into law school. Ended up going, I guess about a year and a half after getting back from Iraq. The day before school starts, I meet this guy who the Yale Law Veterans Associates association, which was three classes of law school or three years of law school was comprised of like seven total people. And so one of the second years was taking out us first years to kind of give us the lay of the land. And that guy’s name was J.D. Vance.

And so J.D. takes us to pizza and he says, “Hey, I know a lot of you are going to be self conscious. You’ve been out of school for a while, like you’re going to feel like you are less than and not smart enough to keep up. But if you can just give it a couple of months, like you’ll get your bearings and you’ll find out that like you belong here.” And I will just never forget that. That was the first time I met J.D. and he was just an incredible mentor that entire time through.

Transition to Finance and Family Life

So spent a lot of time in law school for meeting a lot of folks, working at law firms, working for judges, ended up not wanting to do the law full time. So went into finance. My wife had then gotten into med school in North Carolina, did finance for a couple of years and then she was pregnant with our now nine year old Daniel Jr. Living in a different city than me. So moved from Charlotte, North Carolina to where she was and full time dad and for about a year completely ran out of money. I think we ran were like negative $25,000 in net worth when my son turned 1.

Ended up meeting a guy who sold his business for a bunch of money and then spent the next kind of five or six years in the private equity venture capital world. Ended up as COO of a couple hundred million dollar VC fund that a friend ran. And that time was amazing because what you realize, and we give Silicon Valley a lot of credit for this, I think probably you’ve experienced this too, Shawn. Most people that start their own business are scrappy and hungry and looking to provide value to their customer. And they speed through innovation and they get there quickly.

Silicon Valley kind of famously with the venture capital dollars could go even faster and even bigger to do that. But essentially the model’s been around since I would guess the beginning of humankind. Which is if you think you have an idea that’s going to be helpful, come up with a minimum viable product, get into the hand of your customers, customer, have them use it and learn from them, do they like it or not? Pivot it and innovate it and make it better and then keep doing that cycle throughout time.

And so those kind of lessons of how these companies were able to innovate and these amazing American success stories happened were incredibly valuable to kind of reshape my brain on how things could occur and when you had a good idea how you could scale it really quickly.

Congressional Run and Family Reset

And so ended up doing that for a couple of years. Quick pause for 10 weeks to run for Congress in the mountains of North Carolina. Absolutely got my ass kicked. I think I outraged the field like 2 or 3, 2 or 3x and just got dominated. Covid hits. My wife ends up switching med schools or, excuse me, switching residency programs to be in North Carolina. We’re down together as a family. And so I think it was like 23, 24 were the first two years in like 16 or 17 years that my wife and I had lived in the same city. It was a remarkable period of reset.

I was helping the VC fund, traveling a bit, getting to be a much more present dad. We had our daughter Lila. Then my wife’s residency was ending, so she was in that for seven years as a plastic surgeon. She was going to do this one year hand surgery fellowship in Los Angeles. We figured we’d test the west coast out, try to do some trips with the kids, go see Washington state and Oregon come. A lot of them experienced that.

We had this one month gap. We were doing that classic vacation of taking the kids to Europe. And right in the middle of the vacation, J.D. called and said he had been picked to be the vice presidential nominee. So we were eating dinner in Zurich on a Monday night, Tuesday morning, I boarded a flight, flew to Chicago, Ubered to an outlet mall, ran outside the Chicago airport, bought a super shitty fitting suit, belt and tie, and Ubered my happy ass up to Milwaukee for the RNC and then started the next year of it adventure. Damn, it was wild. Yeah, it’s been a wild ride. I haven’t been a particularly good or present dad the last year, but it’s been a fun year.

SHAWN RYAN: Is that the same suit?

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: It’s a. Well done. I’m just kidding. We’re actually, we were like. We’re like a month into the campaign and this guy who had worked really closely with the president for a long time, this guy Nick, he comes up and he was like, “Hey man, you might want to buy a new suit.” And I was like, “Why?” He was like, “You look like an intern.” And so ever since now I have. I mean, they’re not good, but they’re better.

SHAWN RYAN: Looks good.

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: I appreciate it. Good.

Secretary of the Army Role

SHAWN RYAN: But. All right, let’s get into Secretary of the Army.

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: So what are we doing? What’s going on there? So a lot of stuff has been a lot of the DEI stuff got cleaned up. It seemed like it was like overnight.

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: It’s been incredible stuff. President Trump, Secretary of War had. Seth. I mean, they have been laser focused on returning our army and our military to a culture of lethality and focus on the shit that matters, which is at least for the United States Army. They are a killing machine that stands by and stands ready to be deployed by our President. And that is his purpose.

And what peace through strength fundamentally means is the more aggressive and the more pre violent they can be, the less likely you actually have to use them to do those acts because our adversaries are so afraid of them. And they have done. The President and Secretary have done a remarkable job of resetting the corporate culture, in my opinion, quickly.

Army Transformation Initiative

And then a lot of the things we in the army have done with their air cover have been a couple months into being here with General Randy George, who’s our Chief of staff. And he’s just awesome. I live a couple houses from him. We spend a ton of time together. But we did something called the Army Transformation Initiative, which was essentially cutting $48 billion of spending on a bunch of stupid shit that we just didn’t need anymore. That for all sorts of reasons we were still buying and reallocating those $48 billion over the next five years to things we actually needed.

So those were like two buckets of things we did. Another bucket was the army has kind of preposterously given away things like its own right to repair our own equipment, which is just sinful. So what that practically means, Shawn, is you’d have these two $3 million pieces of equipment sitting on the sidelines for a year at a time. It was an $8 part that we knew how to 3D print, but we had given away our own right to repair that. And so basically this ATI forces us to take back that right.

And then the other thing that we did kind of in those early months was cut headquarters. So I’m sure you’ve seen this, but we have so many human beings, so many soldiers that sit in the Pentagon and sit in our headquarters formations and just are wasting their life away doing what they didn’t want to sign up to do. And so we’re pushing them back out to the unit. So we cut down some of our four star headquarters. We’ve gotten rid of a bunch of three stars and two stars and are just pushing them back out to the front.

SHAWN RYAN: Good. You know, let’s, let’s start with a $48 billion budget cut. I mean, you know, a lot of people would, would, would say, I can’t believe you’re cutting $48 billion out of a defense budget, you know, for the Army. What, what did that cut?

Budget Reallocation Strategy

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: Well, so specifically what we were doing is cut to reallocate. And so this was not intended to be a money saving exercise per se. We, the United States army, spend $185 billion a year. I mean, it is an enormous amount of money. There’s all sorts of ways, I can tell you about how everything you build on an army base costs 66.5% more than if you build it right on the other side of the fence. There’s all sorts of inefficiencies. So we’re spending that $185 billion pretty poorly most times, but it’s a lot of money.

And so what we did is we looked at things like Humvees. The Humvee has served a purpose. We have over 100,000 of them. And it is pretty effective or reasonably effective at driving down a paved highway and keeping soldiers reasonably safe from risks like IEDs. What it is not good for is a world with drones. And if you look at the inflection point in war that’s occurring in Ukraine right now, the Humvee just doesn’t work for that. And so it does have some use cases, but we’re way over indexed on.

And so, so what we’re doing with some of the cuts from not purchasing any more Humvees is we’re reallocating those dollars toward these ISVs or these infantry squad vehicles, which if you’re kind of picturing it, it’s like a 1950s, 1960s Jeep, but a lot faster. It can go off road and soldiers love it.

Innovation in Military Equipment

And what’s so amazing about it is it’s made by General Motors and Chevy off the Chevy Colorado. And so you’re taking this existing platform that has been millions and millions of miles of consum. We convert it with Hendrix motorsport. So they’re the ones that have all the race car drivers, they take these things. They’re working with Chevy, they’re making these ISVs for us. We’re putting them in the hands of soldiers. They’re cheaper, they’re faster, they have a lower profile. Soldiers love them.

And then what’s amazing about these things, Shawn, is when we need to repair them in the Indo Pacific or in Europe or wherever we are, for 80% of the parts, you can just go to a Chevy store and pick it up. And so instead of relying on these manufacturers, manufacturers who will hold us hostage with these replacement parts that oftentimes we were talking about it at breakfast. There’s parts on some of our equipment that we can’t get till 2027, 2028. And it’s a part we could print for a couple of bucks.

And so what’s amazing about things like the ISV, which is just the hardware side of things, is we are rethinking as an army, not just what is the effectiveness of specifically what we buy, but how can we repair it in places like the Indo Pacific.

SHAWN RYAN: So it’s not. It’s not specific. It’s not specifically a budget cut. It’s reallocation.

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: It’s a reallocation. So we essentially.

SHAWN RYAN: We’re innovating.

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: We’re innovating. We found $48 billion at. To start that we are going to use and are using to buy the tools of future warfare.

SHAWN RYAN: Damn, that’s awesome.

Challenges of Reform

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: Yeah, it’s great to hear. The downside is, Shawn, as you might expect, that because we had $48 billion worth of things people thought we were going to buy, you have a 48 billion reasons why people are now angry with me and angry with General George because we’ve taken those dollars they thought they were going to get that they thought were going to go in their congressional district, their state, to their lobbyists had thought that they had won that battle. And we are going to get handsomely rewarded for their work. And we have stripped it from them. And we are saying, no, no, no. We are going to listen to what soldiers are telling us, which is they love the ISV, and we’re going to reallocate it to things like that.

SHAWN RYAN: Man, you know, that’s. This is great to hear. I mean, I mean, I was using the Humvee back in early 2000s. I mean, it’s fucking obsolete now. Yeah, it is. I mean, there’s all these new things out. 100,000 Humvees.

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: 100,000. I think it’s 104.

SHAWN RYAN: And so when do you. I mean, how do you. How do you get the word from the bottom up of what these guys want? You know, because it’s. I’ve never seen it like. Like that. So how are you reaching them?

Transformation in Contact: Revolutionizing Army Innovation

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: This is full credit to General George and our Vice General Mingus and our Sergeant Major of the Army, Mike Weimer. I mean, these are warriors. They are incredible men who have grown up. A lot of them were in some of our more specialized like Delta units and Ranger battalions, and they have deployed to. And they have seen the failures of the system.

So before I even came in, they started something called Transformation in Contact. So TIC. And the basic premise of this, back to the kind of earlier in the podcast, is to take the lessons learned from Silicon Valley and startups around the country and the world of this idea of minimum viable product.

In our instance, our customers are soldiers and our innovation is oftentimes made by people outside of the Army. And so what they did is they said, “Hey, investors industry.” And this was a small scale experiment to start. “Bring your stuff out to our formations. We’re going to identify a couple of brigades, a couple of battalions throughout the army and they’re going to be our test bed of innovation and they’re going to take your stuff out to the field and they’re going to try it.”

And what ended up happening was soldiers loved it. These new, like these knew that the soldiers we are recruiting can figure this stuff out incredibly quickly. They absolutely love training with it. And we’re putting in a lot of instances, the computer programmers, the developers, the manufacturers at JRTC, at our training sites with our soldiers. And the innovation loop is closing down. And so what’s there, it’s getting tighter. And so what’s happening is that the types of things that are being offered are better. So then that’s good.

The next part of it was how do we actually start to procure that stuff? How do we buy things quickly at smaller scales? So instead of having onesie twosie traffic tryouts in the field, how can we have units starting to buy stuff? We’ve always been able to do it a bit with our Special Forces, our Ranger battalion, they’ve been able to do these things, but our conventional army has not. And they just function differently. And so we wanted to take a lot of that model and apply it to the main army.

Cutting Through Bureaucratic Red Tape

And so for these ISVs, it was a really successful process where we essentially said, “Cut all the bullshit. We’re not going to wind the procurement process through these 16 steps where anyone along the way can say no. And then it starts back over and then, oh, by the way, everyone at each of those 16 steps has for the last 30 or 40 years in the bureaucracy been incentivized to do nothing.”

Basically, the only way you get in trouble as a civilian operating in the Pentagon is to do something that goes wrong. So there’s two ways to avoid that way. One is do things and not have it go wrong. But just as equally effective for your own career is to do nothing. So you’re just incentivized to have this safety culture where you say no, and just try to make it your entire time without doing anything.

And these are not bad people. They’re not unpatriotic. It’s just that’s the incentive structure. And so what we did for the ISV is we said, “We’re going to put together a handpicked set of team. We’re going to grab a contractor, we’re going to grab somebody to write the requirements. We’re going to put like the equivalent of a CEO over this group.” And we’re just going to say, “Figure out how to get this ISV.” And they did, and it worked.

The Applied Intuition Success Story

And as an example of what we’ve done with that ISV, when Chief and I went out to the west coast, we went to a company called Applied Intuition. And Applied Intuition does the back end, like autonomous software for a lot of vehicles that you would see on the road. They’re like the software. Their main competitor would be Tesla from the software side.

And so we saw them and we said, “Have you ever done a Humvee or an ISV? Have you ever tried to make them autonomous?” And they said, “Absolutely not. That would be terrible. There’s too much paperwork. It’s going to take years until we get it. We don’t even know how we would make money with it.”

And we basically said, “Nope, it’s a new day. We’re just going to send you a Humvee and an ISV. We’re going to drop them off.” And they said, “Well, what do you want us to do with it?” We said, “Take 10 days, do anything you want. We don’t care. Just show us what you can do.”

So probably 20 days from the day we visited, they send us a video. They had taken it out to the field. They had made a Humvee and an ISV fully autonomous. They had hooked it in with their drone network. They had uploaded the repair manual for the ISV onto the screen so a soldier could interact with it and learn how to repair a part. Wow.

SHAWN RYAN: They delete.

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: And this is 10 days in from a company that had so immediate. We sent a car carrier, we picked it up, we drove it out. And that thing’s been tested for the last couple of months by soldiers. And we’re just learning and we’re just trying to figure out, is that good, is that effective? Should we partner with Applied Intuition? They’ve been amazing, but we as an army can do this. Our soldiers are amazing, and we just have to get out of their way.

SHAWN RYAN: So did you say that was a Humvee that they did that.

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: They did a Humvee and an ISV. So basically anything drive by wire, they could do.

SHAWN RYAN: So let me just ask you this. I mean I talked about this kind of stuff with Palmer Luckey quite a bit when he was on. But I mean, and he was talking about kind of repurposing all of our military vehicles, air land, I believe, C2, and not actually building all new infrastructure, you know, within the vehicles, but repurposing them and making them autonomous. So if you’re, if you in, in the rest of the army and you make the determination, hey, this, this repurposed Humvee is incredible, we need it. I mean, will we see all 100,000 Humvees get outfitted with that and repurposed?

The Future of Military Innovation

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: Hopefully not just a waste. I hope so. And then, so I guess first to Palmer Luckey, he’s an amazing innovator. He’s the type of person, I think that for decades we as a nation have let that brain and that asset not be part of the DoD. And credit to Anduril, credit to Palantir, credit to a lot of these guys, companies that fought through the last decade to be part of our lives because they showed us what could be.

The army is at a minimum, in a lot of instances 10 or 15 years behind our commercial counterparts. And they have showed us that that doesn’t have to be the case. We’re actually really optimistic. And Palmer’s coming next week or the week after. We have CEOs from, I believe it could be the best collection of CEOs to ever step foot in the Pentagon together, from FedEx and GM and the Googles and the Andurils and all of these different companies want to help the DoD and want to help the Army.

And so we’re actually trying to bring them together and say, “Hey, let’s start a relationship where it might not be today, it might not be tomorrow, but in a year or a decade we want to be getting the best of what you’re all working on, even if it hasn’t gone to the commercials or it been released yet.”

And so it might be ChatGPT6 we, the Army, on behalf of DoD should be testing that and figuring out are there offensive or defensive capabilities, where should we put it in the federal government if there are, and how do we start to apply that like China does so well. And so people like Palmer are exactly what we should be doing and aspiring to include in our decision making process because he is such a successful version of just scrappy entrepreneurship and scrappy innovation and adding a lot of value to his customers. These days, it’s hard to trust what’s.

SHAWN RYAN: Do you see, is there a shift in the primes? We talked about this a little bit at breakfast, but I mean, we see Anduril Palantir. I don’t know if you guys are doing anything with SpaceX or not, but I mean, we see all these new, new innovative companies coming out like the ones that I just listed. Then we see, you know, the dinosaurs that haven’t really innovated much for the past, what, 50, 60 years. Are we seeing a shift? Are these are these new generation defense tech companies going to take over the Primes. I hope they do. I hope they do. I think the Primes have held us hostage for way too long and wasted a lot of money.

The Complex Reality of Defense Contractors

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: So to start my reply, I went on record a couple months ago saying, “Hey, I would define it as success if in the first two years of my time at this job, I put one of the Primes out of business.” So as you might, as you, as you might expect, I then met with every CEO of every prime many, many, many times. And I’ve gotten to hear more of this story. And so what’s so annoying and what’s.

SHAWN RYAN: So.

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: Unsettling about at most things in life? Tying back to your very first question, it’s complicated. So what ended up happening is in the 90s, late 80s, early 90s, the army and the Navy and the Air Force and the Pentagon went to the primes that existed. There might have been, let’s say 50 of them. And we said, “Hey, the world is safer. We’re not going to need as many of you. You all have to consolidate down because we just are not going to our defense industrial bay. We’re not going to be able to support a big enough one.”

So they all kind of spent a couple of years consolidating down. And then what ended up happening is you basically, you learn more about how we spend money and how we show our demand signal. And so you may have Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll saying a thing, but the average tenure of a SEC army I think is 23 months. So I rotate out. The next one comes in, they might have their own priorities. You have the Senate with its priorities, you have Congress, you have all of these bureaucrats.

And so we’re really bad at telling them what we want to buy in a way that they can believe and invest against that demand signal. And so what you end up having is things like Cost plus come to be where almost everybody says that is an offensive model and way to pay a provider of services because they’re obviously incentivized to take longer to make more into their expense base so they can charge you more. Like everyone realizes that.

And I think from the outside, before you take this job, you think, “How is this possibly the case that so many smart people don’t know this thing that I know?” As it turns out, you get in and they all know it too. But it comes to be for a different reason, which is because they can’t trust our demand signal. They basically have to say, “All right, I’m going to work on this thing for you because you can’t do it yourself. But you have to pay me along the way my costs because if you change your mind along the way, then I have to be able to recoup my expenses plus some profits because I have shareholders.”

And so as an example of the types of bad behavior that we incentivize, we basically created many and most, I would say, of the bad outcomes and bad actions that our primes do. And so that does not excuse them. I still think it may be healthy for the system to put one of them out of business, but I’m much more.

Defense Contractor Reform and Equipment Readiness

SHAWN RYAN: Why do you think that? Do you think that sends a signal?

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: I think one of the amazing parts of capitalism is you see this story of Mark Zuckerberg making billions and billions of dollars and you want to go build that. Another amazing part of capitalism is if you don’t build and deliver something your customers want, you become a relic and you go out of business and the system resets and kind of the wave washes over the sand and it starts again.

The problem with our primes is they have integrated themselves so deeply and entrenched themselves in our defense department build cycles that it would be really hard for us to operate without them. And so I actually think it would be healthy for both us and them, for all of us to realize that this isn’t intended to be a permanent relationship. They have to earn their way back in each and every time they build something.

But in order to expect that out of them, that means we, the army, have to change our behavior too, which is a little bit harder. And it’s hard to say. And so I guess back to the original prime question. I think in a perfect world what they’re going to do is… AUSA is one of our annual meetings where I hadn’t been to it, but I’ve heard it was kind of average in the past.

What we are doing at our next one coming up in October is we’re partnering with Y Combinator, which is a little dated, but I mean they are an innovation engine for our nation and we’re going to do a demo day where we invite small startups to come out and we’re inviting venture capitalists, government investors, we’re inviting the prime. So what we’re hoping they’re going to do is see things in partnerships and acquisitions that they can do to spark innovation, to push them forward and push them faster and continue to know that if they don’t deliver on what they are saying, they’re going to… Do they at least have a Secretary of the Army who is very tolerant of the idea of them not existing anymore?

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, man, I love to hear that. I’d love to be there for that.

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: You should come. We can put you on a panel. You can be one of our judges.

SHAWN RYAN: I would love it.

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: All right, we’ll do it. Definitely.

SHAWN RYAN: You know, let’s move into… Is that the part that you showed me?

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: This is the part. This is it.

The $2,000 Part Problem

SHAWN RYAN: I want to bring this up. This is insanity. And I think a lot of people know that this kind of stuff’s going on, but that’s that part. It looks like a $2 part.

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: I think it probably is a $2 part, Shawn, but it’s a $2,000 part. Yes. And it’s even more simple than that. And so this came from yesterday, and we were visiting Fort Campbell and the 101st Airborne, which I got to go out with them and do a workout in the morning, which I can barely stand up and walk around anymore. But then I got to do an air assault out of Chinook, which was just absolutely badass.

And that is… Those are some of the parts of this job that are so amazing. And when I get out with soldiers, it just revives my spirit and my soul. The balance of those visits and what is so fucking infuriating is you hear stories like this all the time.

And so this story, I will try to take us to a positive ending of the story, but we’re going to start pretty dark. So the darkness is… If you think back to what we did with that ATI and the right to repair is essentially, we have stripped away our right to repair a lot of our own equipment.

And so this was a triple seven. So one of our big kind of firing weapons that fires 155s. This was tied into kind of the wheel well and the wheel. The components that keep the wheel on. And this part, if you want… We want to get it from the manufacturer. It’s currently on backorder till mid 2027.

So this $2 part that they’re going to charge us… I don’t know what the exact price is for this one, but for some of these, we can manufacture for $2, and we end up paying 200 or 2,000. But even more sinfully, we can’t actually even get to the part, even though we know we can make the part.

And so of our triple sevens at the 101st Airborne, which is one of our amazing units, I think 80% of them right now are down. 80%. 80%. 80%. And this… they were showing me one of them or few of them are down because of this one part, which we know how to 3D print. I think, Shawn, you probably take this to some of your buddies within two miles of the studio and they can figure out a way to make this for you.

And so the enraging part of this story is we have allowed these soldiers to believe it is the case that for a year, two years, three years at a time, we are not going to have them training and using and being ready to deploy with their equipment that we’re giving them. And it’s okay to let it stand by. So that enrages me. The next part that enrages me is…

SHAWN RYAN: 80% of that specific weapon system is not functioning.

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: Yes. And many of them.

SHAWN RYAN: How long has this stuff been happening?

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: 20, 30, 40 years?

SHAWN RYAN: Who’s responsible for that part?

The Broken Procurement System

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: This is the problem. And so this is where the story gets complicated. So if you were the maker of this part, you actually don’t know when we want these parts. We, the army can’t commit to you most times in multi year contracts. And so because of the way our funding cycle works from Congress, we are basically bound to only commit ourselves to spend money in one given year.

So if you’re the manufacturer of this, things like this, you can’t trust me that in a couple of years you’re going to make any money for the cash that you make for the manufacturing line. You have to keep up and so you have to hedge. And so you have to wait until I put in an actual order and then you have to go spit out some number of those that will allow you to make a profit.

And so what has basically occurred is these companies have been forced by us because of our kind of stupid spending models to essentially hedge their bets. But what that means is when we finally come to them and we say, “Hey, we need a bunch of these, go fast,” they say, “No, no, no, no, no. It’s been a long time since you’ve given us this demand signal. We’re going to have to turn on the engines and get the people retrained and get you the things you want to need. And we need a bundle of a thousand of them until it’s worthwhile for us.”

And so they’ve been losing, we’ve been losing, and most sinfully, the American soldier has been losing because of these models. And so that’s the downside of the story, the upside and why I want people to feel incredibly excited about where their army is and how our soldiers are innovating is… We can 3D print this part really quickly.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, lives have been lost.

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: Yes.

SHAWN RYAN: Because of stuff like this, unequivocally. So how did that happen? I mean, you just discussed it, but at what point in time did the US Military give up the right to repair their own fucking equipment? That is insane. That’s as insane as not being able to cut a bolt lock off an ID.

Taking Back the Right to Repair

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: It’s utter… It’s offensive like there’s no other way. And this is the thing that I think nobody owned that bad decision. And so this is what we’re trying to change fundamentally, is after leaving that unit yesterday, I was talking to the commander and I said, “Hey, as an experience, can you assign each one of those broken pieces of equipment and have an individual soldier own the responsibility of getting it back online? And I will take all of the risk. I don’t care where they build the part, I don’t care how they build the part. Just get it back online and let’s see what happens.”

Because very worst case, in this instance, the wheel falls off when you’re pulling it somewhere. Some sparks may fly. There could be a slightly bad outcome. But this is not a helicopter flying out of the sky. This is a relatively low risk experiment to do. But what we haven’t done is empowered our soldiers to go be the brilliant innovators that they are.

And if you look at modern manufacturing and you look at the ability to 3D print metal parts, what we kicked off about a month ago empowers our general in charge of our material command to basically say, “Okay, I’m going to take on the risk for this. I’m going to scan it really quickly. I’m going to get a digital design file. I’m going to print it, I’m going to get it out to the field, and I’m going to underwrite that risk. Or I’m going to ask my commanders down below me, who have the deeper understanding of the nuances of the situation, to underwrite the risk.”

But we’re no longer going to accept that we can’t repair our own stuff. And if very worst case, we accidentally violate a clause of a contract, who gives a shit? I’ve told everybody, we have a thousand lawyers. We’ll see them in court for 50 years. 50 years doesn’t matter to me. Just go fix our stuff.

And so this is the back to the upside of the story, the soldiers are feeling it, they’re excited, they’re empowered. We’re giving them the start of this equipment to start to manage their own things. And then if you actually think about what warfare will look like in the Indo Pacific, President Trump talks about this. I mean, this is pretty obvious. But China is 60 miles from Taiwan. We’re 6,000 miles. We have to get so much equipment over to ourselves to sustain the joint fight. The way that we’re going to do that is not through the old model of parts and procurement. It is by innovating, using things like 3D printers.

The Contract Trap

SHAWN RYAN: So is this like a law or is this a mindset that we’ve adopted?

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: It’s a contract. So we sign a contract and we gave… So you would be selling the army a thing. You would say, “Hey, I’ll sell you this thing. But as part of this, it’s kind of like a razor blade model. I’ll give you the razor, but I want to sell you the blades.” And so I might mark down the price. And these are all the games that have occurred for 30 years. I’m going to mark down the original price of this thing I’m selling you because I know you’re locked into me to buy all the replacement parts going forward and I can charge you a 20x profit margin on that.

And so the way the whole system has occurred is we, the army since painfully would enter these contracts where we committed to you, our vendor, not to repair our own stuff.

SHAWN RYAN: But hold on, but then you said that… And I understand the distrust, right, I understand the distrust, but then when you ask them to do it, then they don’t, then there’s pushback.

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: Correct. So what we didn’t do many times is we didn’t set up requirements of, “Well, if you’re going to say I have to use you to repair my own part, you can’t charge me more than a certain multiple of the cost to you.” We didn’t tell them you have to keep parts on hand so that you are able to empower us to repair our own equipment at some certain time.

And so what has occurred is you then have all this profit seeking behavior from them, which is rational. But we can’t keep our equipment up. Soldiers suffer and we don’t have a very strong legal mechanism to go after them. And so what we have said is, “Fuck it, we’re just going to do right thing.”

SHAWN RYAN: Good. I mean, sounds like a simple warranty could get you out of that contract. Hey, the wheel doesn’t work anymore.

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: That’s exactly 100%.

SHAWN RYAN: Or we’ll find somebody else that will.

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: Yep. Geez.

Military Leadership and Institutional Reform

SHAWN RYAN: You know, kind of switching gears here a little bit. My attorney, Tim Parlator, we talk a lot about the military and what’s happened over the years. You know, he’s one of heads of deaths guys. But, you know, one thing that Tim brought up to me is how do I put this?

We were basically talking about upper enlisted, upper brass, you know, and that a lot of the experienced guys, the guys that were in it for the right reasons, the people that have been to war and they’re hitting that 05-06 level. You know, guys that have been E9s for a while that are moving up. I mean, we’re seeing a lot of the experience leave. At least we were in the last administration and the previous administration, and, you know, they leave because they get demoralized by the bureaucracy of the military.

And so we’re losing really good guys. Like, I’ll bring up an example. Captain Brown, Brad Gehry, you know, amazing career, you know, and he got out. You know, he retired early for other reasons that happened at buds. But I mean, basically what I’m saying is we seem to be losing all the people that are in it for the right reasons that want to fight for the country that want all the things that you were just talking about see simplistic solutions to a lot of the problems that we’re having, and they’re frustrated and they’re leaving.

And then we have guys, you know, that have never seen combat. And a lot of them, there’s like some kind of underlying jealousy or, you know, it’s almost like they look down that you actually did the job on the ground, you went to war, you have combat experience, and they hold that against you because maybe they’re just not comfortable in their own skin.

And I’ve seen some of that cleaned up. I mean, I just saw Jamie Sands was fired. He was one of the admirals in the SEAL teams, and I’ve worked with him. You know, I mean, it’s created a rot, a rot within our defense capabilities. And so what I want to ask is, I mean, are you seeing that gap start to change where a lot of the upper brass and upper enlisted bureaucrats, the…

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: The rot.

SHAWN RYAN: Are you guys removing them or pushing them back out to the field? Or are we rewarding the guys that have done the right thing and that are in it for the right reasons.

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: So that’s hard. It is hard.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, it’s hard to be. It’s hard whether you’re, you know, a special operator or a conventional guy. I mean it’s very hard to have a leader who’s never done the job like Jamie Smith Sands, who’s, you know what I mean, that it. I mean, I’m going to be honest, that’s why I got out. I did a very short career in the SEAL teams. It was just shy of six years. And that is why Jamie Sands is a major reason why I left and why a lot of people left and continue to leave. And there’s hundreds of Jamie Sands out there. So I mean, I’ll just leave it to you, you know.

New Leadership Approach Under Current Administration

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: Yeah. I think the President and Secretary Hegseth have done an incredible job. The President has done this across the entire federal government. He’s empowered, he’s picked leaders who are unconventional. I mean, I’m a 39 year old Secretary of the army with 1.2 million people and almost $200 billion under me. Secretary Hegseth, I think he would say the same thing. And he’s done a remarkable job of getting embedded in the decision making, of picking our current leaders and our future leaders.

Where I think most secretaries of defense previously might not have been as involved as our Secretary is in those decisions. But he’s not letting it happen passively anymore. He is digging in. And I don’t have as much experience in the other services, but I think he’s done a remarkable job across the entire Pentagon doing this.

I think if I look at our leaders, the ones that come to mind at the very top, I think we have like the person running Europe for us is Chris Donahue. He was a Delta guy for 10, 15 years. If you look at our Superintendent of West Point, Delta guy for 10 or 15 years, our sergeant major of the Army, Delta guy for a long time, I think he was there. Sergeant Major of the Army Weimer for 20 years, 25 years. Our Vice Chief of Staff, General Mingus. I mean we were talking about it at breakfast, but these guys are my heroes.

I mean you look at his hands and they’re burned and his neck are kind of all funky looking because he ran into a fire to save people in his PT clothes. Our General George, who is the Chief of Staff of the army, has deployed many, many times. Purple Hearts, the entire thing.

And so I would say the middle is the harder place to spot. And I live within a couple of houses of most of those men I just referenced. And we have beers on each other’s porches and whiskey and spouses over and kids and grandkids and you get to know the content of the character of those men. And my wife has remarked to me how amazing it is that as just a civilian, my 7 and 9 year old are getting to live with and get to know and learn from like the absolute best our nation has to offer.

And I mean this very sincerely, there are things I can offer to my kids, but those men and women in uniform are modeling behaviors for them that I’m so grateful that they’re getting at these formative years.

Addressing Institutional Problems

That is not to sidestep the issue you’re referencing, which is the rot, which is any given individual, or if you look deep in the system, it does exist. You have a lot of people, particularly in the preceding four years, but probably for the last 30 or 40 years, who have been shipbags. You have people that have avoided taking on the responsibility of their title and the duty that they had to the soldiers beneath them and beside them.

I think if you look at the wars that we face that a lot of us deployed in, yourself included, Sean, I mean, those were not a ton of like profiles encouraged sometimes of the people that would come in, they would mark their territory red, it would be yellow. Six months into the deployment, it would be green. When they left, it would start back to red. And they weren’t, I think, telling their leaders, “Hey, this mission is fucked and you were risking my men and women’s lives and limbs repeatedly with no clear leadership.” And that did exist.

And so I think I am both incredibly grateful and incredibly humbled to get to experience and lead and be in this space with these amazing people, while at the same time under the leadership of Secretary Hegseth, laser focused on any place there is rot. There is no time to let them remain in that job. We have got to either, to your point, kick them back out to the formation, see if they can learn what it’s like to actually lead soldiers and be uncomfortable or kick them out of the army because we don’t have time with the threats worldwide to allow ourselves to continue to be just, in some instances, mediocre.

We have got to be excellent. We’ve got to empower people to go do what soldiers do best. And when you get a good E9, when you get a good sergeant major, you can feel it. I was visiting a unit at, I think it was in Hawaii. We were with the 25th. And this sergeant major, I mean, everywhere we went, he is walking out into the parking lot to pick up trash. He noticed that our security vehicles were blocking traffic. He peels off immediately. He directs traffic for 20 minutes. I mean, he is the definition of a servant leader.

And so we have these amazing gems of leaders, and we just. I owe them, and Secretary Hegseth owes them, and the president has empowered us to act on giving them the best colleagues they can possibly have.

Long-Term Institutional Change

SHAWN RYAN: How do you think you fix this for the long term? Have you thought about that? I mean, because, you know, the administration could totally change and, you know, in three years from today, and everything, you know, goes back to the way it was. So have you thought about how do you fix this for the long term so that, I mean, you can fire everybody, but, you know, the way the system runs, I mean, you get rewarded for things that, you know, the pathway to advancement seems off to me.

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: I think you model the right behavior. And so again, a strength and a weakness of our system, just our political model is you have these pretty big swings right now between political parties which reference the will of the voters. And that’s powerful, and that’s amazing. And that’s sacred for something, an institution like the United States Army.

I think what we are trying to do is, and Secretary Hegseth does this really well, model what right looks like. Model empowering the good leaders to make the hard decisions for their soldiers. Model, no doublespeak. Model this idea that I blame the primes and I blame the legislators, and I blame all sorts of the civilians, but the military leadership, the soldiers, the generals also own a portion of the blame because for many years they were performative.

To your point, the best way to get promoted oftentimes was to not say the hard thing and to not risk that promotion, because the farther you got up in the system, the more it was kind of based off how good your relationship was with the board picking the next one. And so you just weren’t incentivized to create strikes.

And so I think what we are trying to do is model this idea that you need to be willing to go in there and nearly every single day. I talked to General George. “This might be our last week together, but let’s just run at the problem as fast as we can.” And if we get yelled at by senators publicly in our hearings, if congressmen call and threaten us, that’s okay. That’s the system working well. We just need to be willing to get fired and move on and hand the baton to the next leader.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, do you think you could quietly change the incentive structure to advancement so without, you know, going under the radar of the Senate?

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: Yes, for sure. And so we are actively working at it. Because everything I just described as an individual human issue, the systems are also what are going to lead to the good or bad outcomes that we want. And so systematically, we’re going after our acquisition systematically, we’re going after our traffic systematically. We’re also going after how we promote people.

And we’re trying to get rid of things that I think we believe and the Secretary believes were put into place to be more performative. And instead, what we’re trying to do is reward those leaders who have measurably made the hard decisions and who may be a little bit rougher on the edge and have a little bit of a complicated history, have gone too far in some instances in an attempt to do the right thing and no longer reward the one systematically who have just stayed plain vanilla and have managed to rise because they just stay right in the mean.

Recruitment and Retention Success

SHAWN RYAN: Man, you’re making me want to join. How has recruitment been?

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: We’ve been just crushing it. I am so excited every time I see the President to just tell him how. I mean, when I talk to soldiers and we try to be out of the building at least 50% of our time, they can feel a difference under President Trump. They feel like they get to be the warrior class again.

There are two different numbers. We look at basically the recruiting numbers. So the leading indicator of the health of our army from a human perspective is the recruiting numbers. So we hit our 12 month goal 7-8 months into the year. We have probably 30% in our waiting pool for the next year in our depth. We are just on fire.

And then kind of equally or more important to my mind is our retention numbers. And so these are soldiers in our formations who are getting to see what our leadership is like, who are getting to see, are we empowering them to be innovators, who are getting to see, are we preparing them for the next major conflict. And our retention numbers, we hit our 12 month goal six months into the year. And so we are on absolute fire under the President’s leadership with people wanting to serve in the United States Army.

SHAWN RYAN: Again, are you seeing any pushback from the rot from the upper brass that we were calling the rot earlier about how the systems are changing?

The Challenge of Identifying Resistance

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: The problem with that class of person is they are very good at optimizing for the preferences of the day. And so what you don’t spot is, obviously, is you don’t spot them pushing back in a way that you can pinpoint, necessarily, because they optimize for whoever the current leadership is, and that’s what makes them so hard to root out sometimes, is you wouldn’t see an offensive or like a kinetic pushback.

You actually just try to sniff out, “Well, wait a second. When we leave power, are you the type of person that will continue to be a leader of men and women, and will you fight for them when we’re gone?” And so it’s a little bit more tricky to spot. So I think I would say to your answer, I haven’t seen a lot of it, but I haven’t seen a lot of it because they’re good at not showing it. So it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not there.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, early on, there was a lot of rumors that a lot of these guys were kind of convoluting to get Hegseth out of there because of this. I don’t know how true that is. You know, I’ve got a couple degrees of separation from the Pentagon, but, you know, is there. Do you know if there’s any truth to that?

Secretary Hegseth’s Leadership Impact

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: So my interactions have been. And I’ve said this on record, off record, on background, I have. Secretary Hegseth has been, I think, an unconventional pick, deliberately from the president. And I don’t claim to be as nearly as good as the Secretary Hegseth, but unconventional, too.

But from Secretary Hegseth’s interactions with everyone I have seen in the building, he is a warrior leader. And when he gets up in front of soldiers, airmen, Marines, I mean, they are so fired up under his leadership that they. You can. You can feel it. You can sense it. Like, it is just one of these human things where I think you have a, you can’t fake that guy kind of stuff.

SHAWN RYAN: They’re proud to be there.

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: They’re proud to be there. They love him as their leader. They’re proud to serve under him and under the President. And so from my perspective, I haven’t seen it in any meeting. I haven’t heard any soldiers say it. I’ve heard nothing but glowing, rave reviews.

Generation Z in the Military

SHAWN RYAN: That’s good to hear. That’s good to hear. Back to kind of recruiting, you know, we were chatting, you know, breakfast about. I think it was at breakfast about, you know, the older generation always says the younger generation is weaker. It’s, you know, it’s just walk.

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: The uphill to school both ways.

SHAWN RYAN: Exactly. And so what I want to ask you is, and I don’t know how much exposure you have, it sounds like you have a lot of exposure because you’re actually interacting with the soldiers, you know, at all levels, all over the states and even out of the states. And so what I want to ask is more specifically about the general Gen Z generation.

SHAWN RYAN: In the military, you know, the Gen Z gets a lot of. I think they’re a very innovative and are very good at problem solving. From a lot of the things that I’ve seen from Gen Z. I mean, what are your thoughts on that?

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: So I went down to basic training maybe a month and a half ago at this point at Fort Jackson where I had gone and got to go on some rotations and or did some lanes with these men and women who were three to five weeks into their time in the Army. And other than just noticing how old I’ve gotten, when I contrasted myself with their youthfulness, it was remarkable to me some of the things they were teaching their cadre.

And by that what I mean specifically is we had started putting up drones on their lanes to show them what do they look like from the sky, how do they conceal themselves from these drones. And one of the things that was different about basic when I went through than what they are going through is the basic training. Drilling sergeants are actually now leading them. They’re serving as their squad leaders, they’re serving as their platoon leaders and part of the training cycle.

And when I would talk to these drill sergeants, what they would tell me is each iteration of this exercise with these soldiers who had been in two to five weeks, they were actually learning new things that were making them better at the exercise that they were passing on to the next cycle of students. And actually some of these lessons, when we were pinpointing it, were trickling up to the Pentagon.

And so what’s kind of so remarkable about that Gen Z crowd and their kind of tech savviness is we have to have it as a nation back to Ukraine being this kind of the Silicon Valley or the innovation point of war. What’s happening is this mixture of digital tools and hardware tools are both being used to inflict violence on human beings.

And I think we as an army and if you look at my generation, we kind of understand hardware. I have a dash of digital experience. But you talk to these new soldiers coming in and they can pick up an FPV drone and they can figure that thing out in two minutes. And from playing video games growing up, this is kind of what’s wild to me. I’m not a gamer, but will remark that I am just so bad at the controls and getting it to work.

You give it to a 19 year old and they’re able to get it in windows, they’re able to get it to open doors, they’re able to get these drones into places the rest of us can’t, just instinctually. And that may sound trite and that may sound like a minor issue, but when I’ve done raids with the ATF, the way they now do their raids is they knock down the door, they get a stronghold right inside the building, and then they spend like 15 minutes holding that stronghold and sending drones in to check all of these different rooms.

And it’s completely changed their TTPs. And I don’t know that that’s right for the army, but at least we are now getting to mix in this new set of skill set, this new asset that we as an army desperately know we need. And we know that when you look at what conflict looks like around the world right now, it is moving in that direction that we are over indexed on a set of human beings like me that are pretty decent with a rucksack, pretty decent with hardware, but are pretty soft on the digital skills.

And balancing that out with our new recruits is just an amazing asset for our nation.

The Changing Face of Warfare

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, that’s, I love to hear that, you know, and so I want to talk to you about, you know, warfare is changing at a rapid, rapid pace. I don’t even know if I would recognize the battlefield at this point anymore. And I mean all the stuff with drones, the autonomous vehicles. I’ve interviewed Dino Mavrukus, you know, the founder of Saronic.

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: Yep.

SHAWN RYAN: And, and you know, Palmer Palantir, guys. I mean everything has changed so much in the past since I was in 20 years. I mean it, it’s, like I said, it’s almost unrecognizable, especially with the drone stuff. I mean, what is the future of warfare look like?

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: So what it is not is, it is not like if you think of our movies, most elite units from our time in, they’d come in low on Black Hawks, quietly, quickly, they’d get dropped off a click or two from the objective. They would come up on the house, they would come up on the objective, they would room clear it with like a choreography and a violence of action that was just like majestic. They would nearly always accomplish the mission and be gone quickly when you talk to them.

Today that Blackhawk is not getting in on scene. There’s acoustic sensors that hear it miles out when they land. We, the United States army, have owned the night for a very long time. We now have infrared drones that are out there watching everything. Sneaking up on the objective quietly when there’s a drone overhead with ammunition just doesn’t really work anymore.

And so what we are having to do is reinvent ourselves from both that small specific conflict and specific issue to this idea that we haven’t really faced appearance conflict in a very long time as a nation. And going to war in Afghanistan or Iraq looks very different than what a long term contested environment would look like 6,000 miles from our homeland. It just requires a complete rethinking of how we’re going to do it.

And it requires much more dependence, I think, on innovation. So the future fight looks like a lot more huge human and machine and instant connection between our humans and our things and our sensors. And it looks a lot more like layering and generative AI and compute on the edge or on the battlefield that can process through these really complicated questions and problem sets really quickly.

Because if you think about defending against a drone swarm, I mean, the number of decisions that have to be made, you have a finite number of resources, they’re going to come at you from all sorts of directions. They’re going to be working in tandem. And just one human brain is no longer capable of dealing with that problem. And so we are going to have a mix of machine, digital solutions and humans all having to work together in concert.

And just the energy required to make that work is incredible. So you think about how do we actually get all the batteries that are necessary out there, how do we get all the fuel? Like, the requirements are just completely, completely different from what I think you and I saw.

And this is kind of back to that set of CEOs coming to the building in two weeks. What we’re really optimistic that we can do is out innovate our peer threats by bringing to bear the American industry and the American innovation and the American ecosystem of just problem solving. That a place like a China, they have some very talented people, but they’re a lot more homogenous in how they think about problem solving.

And our strength as a nation is that we have all, we empower all sorts of people to solve our problems and that unlocks all of these things that just have historically led us to be dominant. And so we are highly focused on systematizing that innovation.

The Future of Military Manning

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, with all the autonomous vehicles and drones and, you know, all the new software, the Palantir stuff. I mean, I would imagine that that would replace a lot of human beings in the military, you know, and I don’t say that lightly because I wouldn’t want to be replaced if I was in the military. I don’t want to think that a machine or anything can do what I used to do as a seal.

But, you know, now that I’m out and I’m on the flip side, I’m like, “Well, that’s less lives lost. That’s, you know, better families at home,” because you don’t have the family dynamic of a guy that’s deployed all the time and suicide rates and all that kind of stuff. So I. And warfare is obviously just evolving, and it is. It is, in my opinion, making ground guys, air guys. You know, the typical stuff that we’ve seen since World War II. I mean, it’s. I think that there is an element that is rapidly becoming obsolete.

And so what does the future of Manning look like?

The Future of Warfare and Human Soldiers

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: So if you think about the kind of fight in the Indo Pacific and the value of the army in particular could have. I think a lot of people debate theoretically, these kinds of issues and enjoy that much more than I do. I think my perspective is typically, to date, all of human history, the vast majority of it, has unfolded with human beings on land. Sure, humans are at sea sometimes, sometimes in their air, sometimes they’re in space. But to date, there may be an inflection point for that, too. Humans on land is where the story of humanity is unfolding.

And so I think if you think about conflict, if you think about war, I don’t actually think we think that there will be a decrease in the number of humans involved as soldiers. I think those humans will be empowered with all sorts of tools that they just didn’t have before. And I think the requirements of those humans will be different.

Where with the 101st yesterday, one of the things we were talking about is we have this software factory as an army. And I was a little hesitant at first to think, why are soldiers doing software development for us? But a lot of what it is is just empowering and training our soldiers to know what digital tools exist and how can they use those tools to achieve their commander’s intent.

And so if you start to think about it that way, after seeing it, I was like, oh, man, maybe we should be training some number of soldiers per platoon to know what they can do. Because what that fight probably looks like in the future is getting soldiers on to the or near the objective, having them conceal themselves, having them figure out what assets exist in the community or the area where we’re sending them, how do they tie in and bring in those assets, make it part of their toolkit and then how do they fight from there?

And so that to date is a, I mean quantum computing could change this and generative AI models could eventually get to a point they’re as effective as a human brain. But until that day comes, or if it comes, it is going to be an American soldier innovating on the ground with their peers and figuring out how do they do whatever it takes to accomplish the mission. And I would bet on humans in that instance every single time, empowered with these tools.

The Balance Between Digital and Analog Warfare

Because one of the things that is worrisome about the digital environment is if you look at what’s happening with drones, the more tech savvy and the more digital a drone is, the easier it is to jam, the easier it is to take. And we were talking about this at breakfast. It’s actually these wired old school drones that are proving very effective. And then one of the most effective things against that wired drone is a net gun, which just absolutely blows my mind that we are back to net guns, but it actually is working.

And so there’s this balance between and this is kind of similar with the Humvee and the ISV and how we think of the equipment we give our soldiers. We actually need a balance of digital tools and analog tools and up to balance of robots and humans. And it is, there is not going to be a one size fits all solution for warfare, but instead a training and a mentality and a model that you are empowered to go figure out whatever you need, go build it, 3D, print it wherever we send you in the world and go get on the objective and win.

SHAWN RYAN: I would like to go a little farther into drone warfare. I mean we just saw the event, you know, I don’t know, was that six months ago maybe the event in Russia or Operation Spider’s Web?

Operation Spider’s Web: The $40,000 vs $10 Billion Equation

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: That was a couple weeks, a couple months with the army where the Ukrainians used their drones and took out? Yep. So a couple months ago in Russia it was. So essentially, and I think the exact numbers are, Ukraine launched about $40,000 worth of drones into Russia and took out perhaps up to $10 billion worth of equipment. I mean, that should just absolutely and utterly blow people’s minds when they think of the sheer stupid scale that we think Russia created between 3 and 4 million drones last year. China is up in the tens to 14 million drones created last year. I mean, the number of these things that are existing in the world is just utterly staggering.

SHAWN RYAN: How was that all planned for you? Did you have any part in that?

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: So if we did, we wouldn’t talk about it. But I think what is publicly available is the Ukrainians through all sorts of different means. So. And this, you could let it go to your imagination how they did it, but it could be things like balloons, it could be things like driving over the border. It could be things, whatever. The actual way of getting the thing into the country is many, and most countries have pretty big borders.

And you just have to get a drone in, which is not particularly difficult, and get in some number of hundreds of those and then give them an explosive, put them up in the air, have a first place person pilot fly it into a thing like it’s not a particularly technically challenging problem. That led to an amazingly effective hit against Russia. And one of the things we’ve talked about is if Ukraine is the Silicon Valley of war, and that’s where the vast majority of innovation is coming. I mean, Russia is in that fight, so they’re capturing a lot of that innovation, and yet they still lost $10 billion worth of equipment.

America’s Vulnerability to Drone Attacks

SHAWN RYAN: You know, you brought up an interesting point at breakfast when we were talking about this. You had mentioned this is how all of our helicopters, all of our planes, all of our Predator drones and drones, I mean, a lot of our Humvees, probably tanks, everything, ships. Jeremy brought up Pearl Harbor. I mean, this is how we store all of our stuff. So what is our defense if cartels, Russia, China, name adversary, Venezuela, you know, what is our defense if they are to smuggle $40,000 worth of drones over the border and hit some of our strategic bases?

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: So I think the kind of amazing thing about President Trump is he just instinctively knows this stuff. And so when you think about Gold Dome, the way I hear him talk about Golden Dome is we have got to protect the skies of the American homeland. And so one of the ways that my brain has processed that is when you think of drones, it’s kind of like this idea of like a golden mini dome where we need to, on a smaller scale, protect our skies from these threats.

And so the good news is the federal government is all over this. The Secretary of War just signed a couple of weeks ago this GIADF SO Joint Interagency Task Force memo that basically put The Secretary of the Army. So me and the army in charge of counter drone for the Pentagon. And then one of the benefits of being ATF Acting Director at the same time is we’ve talked to, I’ve talked to the Attorney General, we’ve talked to the CIA. We’re basically doing a whole of government sprint to scale our solutions that we have for this problem because we know how serious it is.

And so this is one of the threats that our country faces. But every country faces this threat. I mean this is going to be a threat on borders and arenas and stadiums and ports and just kind of the entire world will face this new form of violence and this new scaled way to inflict harm on fellow human beings all at once. And where I am incredibly optimistic is the President saw this coming and gave the authorities to the Secretary of War and then he’s passed it down to the army. And we are moving out at this problem with lightning speed to scale solutions. Not in the coming years, but we expect to have kind of very public displays of how we are able to defend our nation in the coming 60 or 90 days.

SHAWN RYAN: In 60 to 90 days that will be unveiled.

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: Yes.

The Return to the Department of War

SHAWN RYAN: Amazing, amazing. You know, talking about, I mean, Secretary of War. What, the War Department?

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: Yep.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, what do you think about that?

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: I think it’s awesome. I think this is all. People can view it as a much more nuanced topic or people can view it as something that’s performative or something that is more intended for media spectacle. I don’t think that that is what the President saw in this at all. I don’t think Secretary Hegg saw that at all. I think everything we’ve talked about today, this is just a furtherance of this very deep legitimate belief that we have come off course as a former Department of Defense and instead we need to return to this focused mission of we exist to precipitate and effectuate war on behalf of our nation.

And what that means is that means acting violently against others who threaten our way of life. And that is its purpose. And all of the other shit that we have optimized for over the last decades has made us. It hasn’t just made us less effective in some instances, it’s made us ineffective. And that is no longer sufficient. And so what the President is doing with this renaming I think is very important and exactly what the American people elected him for in November.

Balancing Strength with Diplomacy

SHAWN RYAN: Well, I mean, George Washington originally named it Department of War. Correct. And then at some point along the line it became Department of Defense and then now we’re back to Department of War. And while I do understand everything that you just said and I don’t disagree with it, I do think that there’s another side of this where, you know, sometimes I worry that the US may be coming across a little aggressive. I mean, we saw the stuff with Greenland. Panama definitely don’t disagree with the Panama Canal stuff. But you know, I mean, it’s aggressive. The tariffs, now the Secretary of War, I mean, it did. Do you think that that paints a picture to the rest of the world that we are becoming maybe a little bit too aggressive and there could be some long term problems from that?

Peace Through Strength

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: I think the entire concept of peace through strength, I think this is just something the average human knows is true. They feel it in their bones. They saw it on the schoolyard with the bully. They know that the stronger you are, the safer you can be. And I think we’ve just gotten afraid as a nation of saying that and just being comfortable with the idea.

When another nation faces conflict, the very first country they want on their side is the United States. They may not, they may say they don’t like it, but that is because they haven’t felt an existential threat in a long time.

I am nearly certain that if we someday face a lead up to, or an actual version of something like a World War 3, no one will be complaining that we started to reorient ourselves to be the strongest possible versions of ourself, to be oriented to this posturing of “we are ready to deploy our soldiers to war at a moment’s notice to keep our country safe.”

I am nearly certain in that moment, which is the fundamental purpose of a nation is to protect its people. And reorienting ourselves toward that, reorienting ourselves to this idea that we’re not afraid for some people to say, “I don’t like that,” that’s okay, don’t like it, don’t be a citizen in our nation, don’t come visit, that’s okay.

You can choose a European nation to spend your summer and not come spend your tourist dollar here. I don’t mind. But I think this idea that we should contort ourselves as a nation to a softer version of ourself just so that we don’t offend others with our words or our actions seems both incredibly silly and incredibly short sighted and not the mandate that the President was given in November.

He talked about doing all of these things and Americans showed up in all seven of the battleground states went to President Trump because of exactly this kind of true belief in what America can be and should be.

Adversary Alliances and BRICS

SHAWN RYAN: Do you feel like this has pushed some of our adversaries closer together? I mean, we just saw Putin, Modi, Xi Jinping together. I mean, now, I also want to paint to the audience this isn’t like a brand new alliance that’s happened. I mean, BRICS has been around for a while.

For those that don’t understand what BRICS is, basically it’s an alliance of countries that want to destabilize the US Dollar so that we don’t have the pull that we have right now. And I mean, do you think that some of the things that I just rattled off, maybe one in particular, Secretary of War or Department of War, I mean, do you think that’s pushing these guys to form their alliances quicker and start to come up with plans and how to combat us?

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: I guess the honest answer is maybe. My instinctive answer was going to be no. And the reason I was going to, I’m going to disclaim with the intellectual honesty of these are really complex issues. It could be happening.

The reason I don’t believe it’s true is I think that that kind of friendship or that kind of alignment is so fragile that the odds that a future conflict where it would really matter to us, it would hold, I think is unlikely. I think all of their leaders are smart enough to know that. And so I think most of it is performative.

I think when you look at what North Korea as an example sent to the front line, it seemed more performative. I don’t think the Russians thought these 10,000 North Koreans that seemed to get slaughtered within the first couple of weeks made a meaningful difference.

And I think if you actually look at the outputs of those nations, they are not relying on each other to build up their security. They’re not relying on each other at scale for their economic growth. I think they are cautiously willing to be seen in a photo frame to get together, but it is not much more than that.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay, fair enough. Fair enough.

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: Or I hope that’s true.

China as America’s Greatest Threat

SHAWN RYAN: Who do you think are, I mean, who’s America’s biggest threat right now?

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: China.

SHAWN RYAN: China. I believe that too. Why do you think that?

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: I think you listen to their words as first. I mean, I think they view us as their biggest threat. Their economy has been gangbusters for a couple of decades. Their ability to just manufacture and output things that currently may not be tools of war but could be converted to tools of war at scale is pretty remarkable.

Their innovation, the number of PhDs they are spitting out, the number of patents that they as a nation are being awarded is just unbelievable. And if you look at their focus on the long horizon and their tolerance for short term pain, I think that in some ways can be a weakness of our system is that we can’t focus on the long term all that well. And our system of government forces us to think more short term most times. And that gives a different set of strengths.

But I think if you look at that collective set of characteristics for China, it puts them kind of far and away as our pacing threat. But that being said, I think when I look back to my title 10 authorities to man train and equip the army and get it ready to deploy anywhere in the world on behalf of the President, Secretary of War General George and I are hyper focused on creating an army that not only will dominate the Indo Pacific in a fight with China if we have to, but is ready to go anywhere in the world at a moment’s notice and fight any conflict, regardless of who it is against.

And so that requires us, because if you think of most of human history, I think most people who have thought they could predict the future have turned out wrong. And so we need to develop an army knowing that we may be used anywhere in the world at a moment’s notice, that might not be who we think or where we think we’re going.

China’s Manufacturing Dominance

SHAWN RYAN: Did you just say you think that China is leaps and bounds behind us?

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: No.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay, I thought I heard that.

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: I hope I didn’t.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean they are, they’re very close to us. And on corporate outdoing us on manufacturing our supply chain, the fentanyl precursors, I mean, list goes on, the BRICS, all this stuff, I mean they, this, I hate to say it like this, but it seems like they have us or are close to having us at every angle.

And I talked to a lot of innovators, a lot of tech guys on the show, all of them are saying the same thing. I mean, U.S. shipbuilding capacity is what, 1% of the entire world? China’s at 50%. There’s also the fact that they, maybe some of that’s a little over embellished because their companies depend on that narrative. But I don’t know how many ships are actually war fighting ships. I think a lot of them are just container ships that they could repurpose. But I mean what are your biggest fears with China?

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: Well, so, and just to go back because when this goes live and I listen to myself, if I had said I wasn’t nervous of where China is, I’m going to be in trouble. So I hope that that’s not what came across because China’s incredible.

Their system of government, what I was intending to say gives them strengths in certain things because of what they can focus on long term. But it makes I think a lot of their outcomes more narrowly predictable. Meaning if you look at Deep Seek as an example of something where their generative AI model caught the world on fire when they released it. As far as I last know, much of the work that was done for Deep Seek was piggybacked off the innovation of OpenAI.

And what China is really good at is fast following. It is really good at getting what we, the United States and other nations develop and quickly mimicking and copying it. That is a superpower of theirs. But we, the United States also have strengths that I think when we lean into those strengths and empower them as a department of war, we have incredible outcomes.

But back to the kind of question you were asking. What I am most nervous about with China is their ability to be hyper focused on an outcome and they don’t have to go through the same political cycles we do. Their pain tolerance can be a lot higher than us because they don’t have to suffer the same short term political consequence that I think a lot of our leaders have to suffer through.

And define short term as two or four years, not that short, but much shorter than China’s hundred year horizon. And I worry that they will view us from the lens of the previous four years as not strong enough to hold them back, not having the political will to engage with them and that they have taken all of these technological leaps in the previous decade and then it makes them more aggressive. And I worry that they act in a way that forces us to send our American sons and daughters to go engage directly with them.

China’s Vulnerabilities

SHAWN RYAN: What are some of their weaknesses? We talk a lot about their strengths on the show. I think my audience is very well informed on everything they’re doing and all the strengths and vulnerabilities that we have. But what are some of their vulnerabilities?

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: I think you could just, I don’t know if you saw the parade recently. I think what you get out of totalitarian governments is you get homogeneity is a lot easier to achieve. And homogeneity is a strength for some things. What it is not a strength for, in my opinion, is warfare.

And so when you think of what China is really good at, I don’t think the idea of commander’s intent is something that they have ingrained into their soldiers. I think what that means for the listener who might not have served is the United States army prides itself on this concept of commander’s intent, which is if I work for you and you give me a mission, I want to make sure I know why you want me to do it. I push that down through my guys and we go out and execute.

What that specifically means is there are all sorts of moments on any given mission where it is complicated, it is unpredictable, you don’t know what to do. But with commander intent, I don’t have to wait. I can say, “I think I know what you wanted me to do. I’m going to innovate in this moment. I’m going to make a decision, I’m going to be scrappy and I’m going to go get the job done.”

What other nations do and what China does is they are a lot more myopically focused of “I’ve told you to walk 100 yards to the right, stand there, don’t move until I give you the next order.” And that can work in some moments. It works really well on parade fields. It works really well at personifying this idea of leadership.

But in a moment, and you know this, Shawn, when the bullets start to fly, you need men and women on the ground who feel empowered to go win the fight. And that scrappiness is what the American GI has had for so long. And I don’t think if you look at China’s leadership structure, I think the farther you get out from their core decision making body, the worse the outcomes typically are. And I think they know that.

SHAWN RYAN: So no critical thinking on the ground.

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: Without immediate leadership there, I would guess they would self identify as that being a problem.

Demographic Challenges

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, I think another vulnerability is the population decline that’s going on over there. I mean, they had the one child policy forever and now there’s this massive imbalance from male to female population. And I mean, men with men can’t make babies.

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: Science.

SHAWN RYAN: At least this four years they can. You could google that. They’ll probably give you something different. But I mean but I think that is a weakness of theirs that is not talked about much. Now that being said, I mean when we’re talking about autonomous vehicles and the future of warfare and AI and all of that, I don’t know how much that actually matters. A declining population when they can, I mean I guess they wouldn’t be able to manually manufacture as fast.

The Future of Warfare and Technology

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: Yeah, but I think that the problem with all of this is this is new to humanity kind of stuff. This is the ability to through Neuralink hook your brain up to a computer and what you can do with that and what you can do with the mixture of human machine and what you can do with drones kind of swarming around our ISVs as we go into conflict and just all of these different iterations of once.

If quantum computing comes and the speed of decision making, the ability to process complex information quickly like I think it’s kind of outside of our ability to know what that is going to be. And so I think that there is a real possibility that some of the things China is pretty effective with today when we hit moments of warfare and conflict, we are able to degrade those capabilities quickly and they will have had an over reliance on them in conflict combat where I think their safe self driving capabilities may be amazing in Beijing and they may be effective on the battlefield, but they also might not be.

And I don’t know that they have invested and continue to invest and train these exquisite human beings like we have in our soldiers that at that moment where it kind of all degrades back to just humans on the ground with commander’s intent who’s going to win? I am incredibly optimistic that our soldiers win that fight every single time.

SHAWN RYAN: How would this, I mean how do you envision this would happen if something were to kick off?

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: If World War III were to kick.

SHAWN RYAN: Off or China US war were to kick off. I mean how do you envision that coming to fruition?

Low Earth Orbit and Satellite Warfare

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: So one of the kind of most complicated parts of this is this low earth orbit where most of the satellites are. You could envision a world in a World War 3 scenario where somebody blows something up in the low earth orbit, they create a debris field and it takes out all of the satellites, all of the communication devices, everything in that kind of range, which changes warfare instantly.

SHAWN RYAN: I never thought about that.

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: And that’s where this over reliance on technology. You need to have redundancy at every single step. You need to be able to use cell phone towers, you need to be able to use the old school radios. You need to be able to use hand signals. Because in that moment of excellence, existential fight where everything is on the table, it’s just not going to play out in this very clean way that we’re predicting today.

All we know is we need a depth of solutions and an innovative soldier and empowerment to them to go look at this space in front of them and decide what they need at that exact moment.

The Taiwan Question

SHAWN RYAN: What about Taiwan?

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, would that kick something off? We don’t even recognize Taiwan as a sovereign country. I think there’s only 12. Is there only 12, 12 countries that consider them to be a sovereign country? So, you know, if China were to kinetically take Taiwan, which probably wouldn’t take much. Right. I mean, what. Where do we stand with this?

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: I think that that is one one of these incredibly complicated questions that I am glad I am not the President. I am glad I am not the Secretary of War. I would not envy having to be in that, that room to make that decision.

But what I can tell you is if whatever the President needs the army to do, we would do it well. We would do it effectively. And as long as we are able to continue this momentum of returning our soldiers to this idea that failure is not an option, we don’t fight wars, we’re winning wars. We would do what we needed to do and we would overcome the enemy. In that instance, why would we do it?

SHAWN RYAN: Why do you think Taiwan, such a strategic location.

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: During. I’m going to. This is the first time in our two and a half hours. I’ll give you a weekend. Well, I mean they might, they could have been intellectually weak, but not intentionally weak.

One of the things before I did my Senate hearing that you learn is you basically learn to deflect answers. You learn to basically say, like, “oh, that’s a great question, Senator, let me follow up.” Or like you asked me a thing, the classic politician thing. What I want to be cautious about doing here is getting out in front of the President or Secretary of War on such a current topic. And one of the things you also don’t do is answer hypotheticals. And so I’m going to dodge your hypothetical, but flag that I’m doing it.

And instead I will say, I think when we think about these things broadly, America, for a long time we have been an ally that countries could rely on. They could rely that in their moment of need, no matter what had happened that day before or the couple of years before or how trade talks had gone when they needed us, we show up, we show up in force. We help them win.

And so I think there is a lot of strength to be shown, shown knowing that America stands by and stands ready to support our allies. And if you think and if it is very clear that the Pentagon and the President are picking and have identified China as our pacing threat as a nation, I could absolutely envision a world where that could be over a red line that the President has drawn. But I also want to be unequivocal in saying he has not told me that. And so, so I would stand by and stand ready with the army to do what we needed to do for the fight.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, all said, it’s such a strategic location one, because the chip industry and we rely on those chips too. I think if we didn’t intervene, that would show tremendous weakness in that part of the world. And with everything that BRICS is trying to do, that might amplify it and more. I mean, new sheriff in town, right? China, guess what? You’re on us now.

Military Presence in the Pacific

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: When I was, I was visiting Hawaii and Philippines and Guam and the domino effect concept of, I think when you get out to that part of the world, we are currently doing, in my opinion, a very good job of joint exercises, Talisman Sabre that we did in Australia, firing a Prism missile. And we are pushing forward a lot of our tech innovation. We are getting our soldiers onto the ground in the, the theater to be ready to help for exactly what you’re talking about.

So that most, in nearly every country I have talked to loves it when they have soldiers on the ground. Because what they know is when America puts one of our soldiers on the ground somewhere, if you fuck with that soldier, you are going to have a beast coming behind you. And we have for a long time as a nation held that model. And I have no doubt under President Trump, if somebody harmed one of our soldiers, there would be hell to pay.

Cognitive Warfare and Non-Kinetic Threats

SHAWN RYAN: Might not be able to answer that. This. And if you can’t, that’s fine.

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: This is an exciting setup to a question.

SHAWN RYAN: I understand. No, I mean, I’m just saying that I understand that we can’t lift the veil on all of our plans and that would be detrimental. But kind of what I’m getting at is, is I don’t think that if China were to take Taiwan, which a lot of people, I think, think that it would be kinetic because of all the, you know, the show of force they have there. They’re, they’re, they’re building artificial islands to push the, the boundaries out. And, you know, so it looks like it might be kinetic.

But I think what a lot of people don’t know is that there’s, there’s a, you know, there’s a two party system in Taiwan and one wants Taiwan, they want democracy, they want freedom. And then there’s, and then there’s the other, you know, side that is very pro China one China policy. And so I think that, you know, they’re, I think China’s smart. I think they know that we would probably intervene if they did go kinetic.

I don’t know what recourse we have through with, with, with, with the cognitive warfare that they are applying to the Taiwanese and in spreading propaganda and why, why they need to have the one China policy. And it’s, it’s, it’s, I mean for lack of a better term, it’s mind these people out of thinking that they want freedom. And so if they are successful in that and they take the chip industry and they take Taiwan, you know, through a non kinetic, non kinetic method, I mean, do we have a plan for that? What do we do if that happens?

Building Defense Industrial Resilience

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: So without answering to the particulars, because as you flag, I think that these are things we very rationally and deliberately leave decision making space for the President and Secretary of War on. I can say kind of unequivocally, if you look at what we’re doing with our defense industrial base, we are hyper focused on building resiliency for things like chips.

If you compare and contrast, and these are all public, publicly available information, the number of drones we’re capable of manufacturing today versus the number of drones China is capable of manufacturing today, we are much less than, I’d say in six or 12 months that number is going to be totally different.

I think a lot of the ways that we make the situation you described less relevant to us as a nation, we would still be acutely aware of it and the President would make his decision, we would follow the through, but it would be less impactful to us when we return manufacturing excellence to our nation.

And so one of the things we, the army are doing that will probably the next six weeks at the same conference I was talking about we’re doing is we’re looking at all of the assets we have on our depots and our arsenals and our bases. And we have lots of land. We have land that is already protected. We have land that is ready to have manufacturing facilities put on.

So as an example of a thing we are considering, we’re going to invite a lot of private equity investors and larger companies to come to this event and look at what we have to offer them and look at our needs. And there may be instances where for like data centers, as an example, if you build your data center on our army depot or arsenal or base, you use 90% of it to sell, you give us 10% of it. And we, the army can use that and is kind of this net positive.

We are also looking at chips and we’re looking at brushless motors for drones, and we are looking at all of the things that we as a nation would need to continue to fight and win wars. And we are going to try to be able to manufacture the vast majority of that in our own nation.

Russia-Ukraine War

SHAWN RYAN: How close are we to seeing an end of the Russia, Ukraine war?

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: I think nearly every time I’ve been in the war White House, I have heard the President and his team focused on bringing peace there. I think he rightfully says that war is a tragedy on a global scale. He is working to bring those two parties together to find peace. And I am optimistic that under his leadership, he will be able to do it.

I want to speak stress though, that I think this is back to that media narrative. When people blame him for this. It’s insanity to me that he’s the only leader in the world. I think that would be capable of. If you had told me that the war concluded next week, I would believe it would be true under his leadership, where I think nearly any other individual just couldn’t bring those two parties to the table and get them to come to a place of agreement.

And so I don’t know what it ends up looking like. I don’t think anybody does. But I think if you listen to what is occurring and you listen to how the parties are speaking about it, I think their respect for the president and respect for our country increases the odds of it being done sooner rather than later, which again, this was now, my second politician answer is a little bit mushy and a little bit like of a sidestep. But I think on this one, no one knows is probably the short answer.

Middle East Situation

SHAWN RYAN: That’s kind of what I thought. Last, last subject. Okay, Israel. Okay, what’s going on? What’s going on there? We see the Gaza stuff. They just hit Qatar.

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: You’re hitting all the Hot Topics. Hey, man, just save it. I got it, I got it. I, I think this is another very, very, very.

America’s Divided Views on Israel

SHAWN RYAN: It is very much divided. It’s another one of those things that’s dividing the United States. I mean, on one hand, we have people that say Israel’s our greatest allies ever. The other hand, we have people that don’t understand why they’re an ally. And I understand both sides of this, but I think that the big fear amongst Americans is that we don’t want to go to war for another nation.

And so what is Israel’s plan over there? I mean, they blew up some Catholic churches. We see all the kids in Gaza, we see all the civilians getting killed. I mean, the land there just looks completely decimated. And then they hit Iran or we hit Iran because of them. I mean, what’s going on here?

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: So this next remark is not meant to be tried. I think any of your listeners, I think you’d feel the same. Anyone who’s deployed to a war of any scale, it sucks like war hell. I think the negative externalities, the civilians that die in these instances is just a catastrophic outcome that has existed since the beginning of mankind. When people go to war, and I think if you look at Israel and if you look at what kicked it off, their righteous anger makes all the sense in the world to me.

I cannot imagine living with a neighbor who was inculcated from birth to hate me and want to kill me or wipe out my family and my society. Like that is a starting point. If you just frame it from that and then let the narrative, like let the rest of the situation play out, I think is informative of why they are acting so aggressively like they are to basically finally get rid of this threat to their homeland.

I think it’s perfectly reasonable to say at what cost? Like what is what? When does the cost become too big? And I don’t know that anyone knows what the answer is. I am optimistic that again, with the President, his near daily engagement in this topic, with Witkoff out there all the time, with how much the President has built up the trust of the Israelis that he is willing and able and historically has stood by them. I think he is uniquely well suited to bring peace.

I think fundamentally the problem is I don’t know if Hamas is willing to accept peace, and I don’t know that they could actually control their own people in a way to perpetuate peace. And I think that’s what fundamentally creates the quagmire of what does good enough look like to end the war. I think this, though, to me is much closer to a Pearl Harbor incident for them than it is to an Iraq and Afghanistan for the United States.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, Afghanistan kicked off because of 9/11.

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: A lot more people killed there than October 7th.

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: Yep.

SHAWN RYAN: We didn’t decimate entire cities.

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: Maybe Fallujah.

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: Yep.

SHAWN RYAN: But not like that. I mean, 60,000 several months ago dead.

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: 60,000? Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: That’s a lot of people.

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: It’s a lot of people. And this is where human storytelling. I don’t want to be intellectually fraudulent in my reply, but my understanding from visiting there and from friends who lived there and from people who were in the military there, my understanding of the hatred and the proximity and the closeness and the ability for violence to be inflicted on the Israeli homeland again and again and again is just different from what we faced with the threat in Afghanistan, that the distance of miles made it so that I think we could get to a place we felt comfortable as a nation going pencils down faster.

And we didn’t. And we should have. And I think we look back and many and most people would say we should have set a mission, accomplished it quickly, and gotten back home. And it was kind of abhorrent how we ran the thing, but I think it is fair to say what Israel is facing is different.

Funding Innovation from Garages to Soldiers

SHAWN RYAN: Okay, what should I be asking you that I haven’t asked you?

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: Oh, that’s a fantastic one. I think the other big part of this is how do we fund the types of ideas that come out of garages? I think if we look at the success of Silicon Valley, I think one of the questions, if I were you, I would ask is, how are you going to take the lessons of Silicon Valley from scaling solutions really quickly and get them to soldiers?

Because I think that’s like one other leg of the stool that we’ve talked about how we actually buy. We’ve talked about getting in the hands of soldiers. We’ve talked about the systems for promoting and training our soldiers. I think the last piece of the last big leg is like, how do we actually get dollars? Because people need dollars. They have to go buy stuff. They have to feed their families. They have to live long enough to get their idea from their head to the chalkboard to the manufacturing floor, to the soldier, back to manufacturing floor to scale. And so that’s another kind of hard problem to solve.

Silicon Valley’s Defense Tech Revolution

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, I think we’re off to a great start. Through my interviews with all these founders of defense tech companies, I mean, these guys are gung ho and in the last administration and in Trump’s first administration, I mean, we saw Google, Microsoft, Apple kind of turn their backs on American defense.

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: And now, fast forward like eight years, nine years, whatever. Now it seems that the culture has completely changed in Silicon Valley. And then we see El Segundo rising up. And so, I mean, these guys are hungry, they’re innovating, they want to make America and the world a better place. They’re strengthening our defense tech. And so, I mean, from an outsider looking in, it seems like we’re off to a great start.

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: I love it. That makes me more optimistic. What we’re trying to do as an army is cradle to grave funding. And so we spend so much money and one of the things we’ve done so pathetically is we do like a performative funding cycle where we’ll do something like an X Prize and then nothing ever comes of it.

When you actually see what it takes for these companies to survive and thrive, it requires consistent mentorship, consistent communication. And every company that’s scaling faces this moment, or the vast majority of them of kind of an existential threat and can they get to the other side of that thing? And I think what the venture world has done so well for a lot of companies in other sectors is they’ve given them those tools to succeed.

I think for defense companies, again, other than Palantir and Androll from a while ago, it was really, really hard and they had to survive some pretty bad ecosystem environments. And what I’m hopeful for is that both they will start to pull others up. The primes will start to look around and say the best way to innovate is to partner. And then we, with our big purse strength will say we’re going to bring in experts who can help you grow.

We’re going to deploy our dollars, we’re going to model monitor to you from formation through your seed funding, through Series A, all the way up through that scaling. Because this may seem esoteric, I think, to some listeners, but fundamentally this is how we will do it and this is how we will create the pathway to success for the decades to come.

Because all back to everything we talked about with what future war is going to look like. It is not just going to be big beefy Ranger soldiers kicking down doors, but it is going to be computer developers who are up all night in their garage innovating on the next thing to give to those soldiers to take out to the fight. And we as a nation have got to figure out how to do both.

Government Stakes in Defense Companies

SHAWN RYAN: Did I read something the other day? I think I read something the other day that said that USG is going to be investing in some of these defense tech companies. I mean, what do you think about that? Is that good for us or is that bad for us?

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: I think what you’re referencing is that we might take a stake in some of the primes. I don’t know the particulars of because I saw the same thing. I think these are complicated questions and complicated problems. Meaning if we took a stake in a prime as an example, I think we then may be incentivized as a government to reward that prime longer than we otherwise would have. It would be a stickier relationship with that prime, which could be valuable for that prime and could block out other innovators.

And so you could both convince me that that’s a good idea and we should have a 10% stake of all the primes because of the bad acting and the number of dollars we put into their R and D and this idea that the American taxpayer deserves a return on all of those DOD dollars. You could just as equally convince me that once we’ve done that, we are going to act in ways that continue to perpetuate inefficiencies in the system, block out the small and growing companies and will lead to worse outcomes for soldiers.

And so I don’t know that we are moving down actively a path of doing that, but I think either direction we could make work.

SHAWN RYAN: Makes sense. Makes sense. I haven’t thought too much about it yet, but yeah, I saw that and it caught my attention. So we haven’t taken a 10% stake in any.

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: As far as I know. As of this moment, I haven’t know.

SHAWN RYAN: Perfect. Well, Secretary, I appreciate you coming and it was an honor to interview.

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: I am grateful for you having me. Thank you. Cheers.

SHAWN RYAN: More some guns. Let’s do it.

DANIEL P. DRISCOLL: All right.

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