Six months into the job, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll is transforming the Army while tackling decades-old processes and systems he believes have stymied the service’s progress and hampered soldiers’ ability to fight and win.

“I think the decision-making apparatus in the Pentagon for probably the last 30 or 40 years has optimized for a lot of things that don’t actually have to do with soldiers and their families,” Driscoll said in late August. “It has calcified and broken.”

The Army Transformation Initiative, a sweeping effort announced on May 1, is a key step to fixing that, Driscoll said. Another element is Driscoll’s pledge to be “the soldier’s secretary.”

“What I think it means to be the soldier’s secretary is trying to optimize every single decision that comes in for the actual soldiers whose lives it will impact the most,” Driscoll said.

Most often, those soldiers are privates through staff sergeants, lieutenants and captains, he said. “I think a lot of times when you’re sitting up in the Pentagon, you forget what it actually means to make a decision and whose life is going to be the one whipsawed by the good or the bad of the decision,” Driscoll said.

Service Pedigree

A native of Boone, North Carolina, Driscoll is a third-generation soldier—his grandfather was a decoder during World War II, and his father was an infantryman in Vietnam. He was commissioned as an armor officer in 2007 through Officer Candidate School and served in the Army for four years. He led a cavalry platoon in the 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum, New York, and deployed to Iraq in 2009.

After leaving the Army, Driscoll attended Yale Law School and has held leadership roles in investment banking, private equity and business operations.

He was sworn in on Feb. 25 as the 26th secretary of the Army, a role he did not envision when he served in uniform. “I don’t know as a lieutenant that I even knew there was a secretary of the Army,” Driscoll said. “I certainly couldn’t tell you who it was.”

Being tapped to serve as the Army’s top civilian leader was a “complete surprise,” Driscoll said, but it’s also personal. Driscoll and his family live on an installation among soldiers, his children play with military kids, and he’s brought onto his staff former teammates he served and deployed with, he said. It’s been “a reunion of sorts … from a cherished moment of my life,” Driscoll said.

His Army experience also carries over into the job, Driscoll said. “If we’ve had any success in the first six months, which I’m optimistic we have, I think a lot of it is from the shared experiences,” he said.

Soldier Involvement

Settling into the job, Driscoll has tried to adopt a model where he’s spending at least half of his time visiting soldiers, “because you actually hear what’s going on,” he said.

Under the Army Transformation Initiative, the service aims to merge headquarters, restructure formations, eliminate staff positions, pursue capabilities such as counter-drone systems and long-range missiles, and divest outdated equipment. “We believe it’s important and going to kind of fundamentally alter how the Army operates going forward,” he said.

But for it to work, the Army needs soldiers’ buy-in, feedback and contributions, he said. “What we try to do is, every single time we get on the ground, ask, ‘Are you actually feeling the difference of things like transformation in contact?’ and trying to empower soldiers to test new things for us, tell us what they’re learning, tell us what they need us to buy, tell us how we should train differently,” Driscoll said.

Transformation in contact is an Army initiative to put new and emerging technologies into soldiers’ hands for testing and feedback. Initially conducted with three infantry brigade combat teams, the initiative has expanded to other formations and into the Army National Guard and U.S. Army Reserve.

“It’s been amazing to get out and go see soldiers and talk to them about where we as an Army are failing and trying to make as much forward progress on that as we possibly can,” Driscoll said.

Streamlining the System

As the Army pushes ahead with the Army Transformation Initiative, Driscoll and Army senior leaders acknowledge there are “broken processes” that must be fixed. “If you look at some of our bigger projects that we’ve taken on in the last decade or two, most of the outputs, whether it’s the Booker tank or the Robotic Combat Vehicle, they often end up in these places that no one intended them to be in the beginning, and nowhere along the path can you figure out where it went wrong,” Driscoll said.

In June, the Army canceled the M10 Booker program. Designed to provide infantry brigades with more firepower, the vehicle was heavier than planned and couldn’t be airdropped or transported by C-130 Hercules aircraft, among other concerns. “It’s basically these broken processes that are a bit less sexy than creating a new fighter jet or a new nuclear submarine, but what we’ve tried to focus on is where we can change processes and systems to get better outcomes,” Driscoll said.

The Army Transformation Initiative is the Army’s first big attempt at overcoming some of those challenges, he said.

There are four main lines of effort. First, it cuts $48 billion in future spending. Second, it enables the Army to “spend it on things that we actually think we need for the modern fight,” he said.

Third, the Army is a “very bad customer to ourselves oftentimes,” he said. “We had given away our right to repair our own equipment, and so you would find these exquisite platforms sitting on the sidelines for 10 or 12 months at a time, and we could literally 3D-print the part for $30 … but we had just contractually given away our right to do it, which is insane.”

Fourth, the Army Transformation Initiative targets the “administrative bloat” in the Army, Driscoll said. “The number of soldiers whose lives we kill building PowerPoints, sitting in buildings and just passing paper back and forth was sinful, and so we tried to push them back to the field,” he said.

Counter-drone Approach

In the coming months, the Army plans to unveil its “next iteration of change” through the Army Transformation Initiative, Driscoll said.

One key effort is a “very deliberate approach” to counter-drone systems, he said. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Aug. 28 announced he has directed Driscoll to formally establish a joint, interagency task force to counter hostile unmanned aircraft systems.

“If you think of warfare and the inflection point we’re at, just the way people fight and the way

humans inflict harm on each other is going to be fundamentally different now with the spread of these very cheap drones, and the ability for nearly anyone to 3D-print them in their garage and to put an explosive on it,” Driscoll said.

In standing up this new task force, “we the Army are really excited to lead that for the Pentagon, and we hope for the rest of the federal government,” he said.

A second key initiative is reforming the Army’s program executive offices, or PEOs, which are responsible for acquisition, development and implementation of weapons systems and other programs. “Basically, we have these people and siloed organizations that help us buy things, and they’re perhaps the worst part of our calcified culture,” Driscoll said. “They’re too risk-averse, they overspend, and it’s not that any individual is doing something wrong. We’ve just let the system run afoul, so we’re blowing all of those up in the next 60 days and rebuilding them.”

Of the dozen or so PEOs across the Army, Driscoll expects to collapse “a third or more” and reorganize them to mimic some best-in-class private companies.

“If you think of how SpaceX solves its problems, it puts its engineers with its manufacturers, and kind of very famously, Tesla does the same thing, and in many other companies, too,” he said. “We are doing that same model for the Army, so the people that buy our things will live with our soldiers and get their feedback in a lot closer real time.”

Too often, the Army has given soldiers equipment without knowing how to use it, Driscoll said. “We take these very linear, waterfall approaches to things, and that, combined with our extremely slow speed, makes it so nearly everything we’ve been doing recently has failed,” he said. “So, what we’re hoping to do is kind of blow all of that up.”

ISV Initiative

The Army tested this new model for the Infantry Squad Vehicle, which was provided to the initial three transforming-in-contact brigades for testing, Driscoll said. The program was so successful the Army is fielding the Infantry Squad Vehicle to its infantry brigade combat teams and converting them into mobile brigade combat teams. “We took a whole new approach … [and] we’re basically taking that success and rolling it out across the Army,” Driscoll said.

Army leaders are pleased with the trajectory of the service’s transformation, Driscoll said. “We’re really optimistic that we’ve kind of gotten the flywheel spinning, and that we will start to be able to make some very structural, long-lasting changes that will make soldiers’ lives better,” he said.

Driscoll acknowledged that he is spearheading some “very big changes” across the Army. But he is confident in soldiers’ ingenuity. 

“When you’re in the field with the American soldier and they’re testing things, counter-drone technology, drones, it’s incredible how smart and innovative and creative they are,” he said.

He’s also seeing a lot of the same enthusiasm in industry, he said.

In his travels, Driscoll said, he often asks soldiers for their feedback. During a recent trip to Michigan for an exercise where soldiers were given new equipment to learn and test for two weeks, Driscoll asked a group of soldiers if the new equipment was distracting from their training. “All of their eyes lit up, and they basically said, ‘No, this is the coolest thing we’ve ever gotten to do, because we actually get to help the Army figure out what to buy, and it’s really fun to learn a new thing and see if it works in our scenarios,’ ” Driscoll said.

Real-World Situations

Not only was this hands-on approach providing soldiers with deeper and richer experiences, it likely also is preparing them for real-world operations, he said, invoking a 1980s fictional fix-anything TV series character. “I actually think it’s helping to flex their muscles on being creative, being adaptable, being a MacGyver in the field, and figuring out what the mission is and what they need to do to get there with whatever’s getting to them,” Driscoll said.

Looking ahead, Driscoll said he and Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George will reinforce the need for systematic change from the Pentagon all the way down to formations around the world. Army senior leaders want to empower commanders and soldiers to take risks, experiment and find ways to solve tough problems, Driscoll said.

“We don’t have the answers,” he said. “We need all of them, at every single level, from basic training all the way up to the war colleges and the active brigades deployed around the world, to be helping us figure out these problems.”

Modern warfare will require an array of solutions, Driscoll said. “We need [soldiers] to be agile and flexible and creative and risk-taking, so that when we go to conflict with a peer in real time, we can come up with solutions to help us win the fight, like the Army has done for the last 250 years,” Driscoll said. “What we know is what worked in the past will not work in the future, and we need them to help us get there.”