Soldiers on the ground are best suited to ensure that the Army is transforming into the most efficient, lethal force possible, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll said during a recent episode of the From the Green Notebook podcast.

“Instead of saying, ‘Hey, I need to change to move the ship,’ or ‘Gen. [Randy] George needs to move the ship,’ ” Driscoll said, referring to the Army chief of staff, “we need to … just provide air cover down so that the soldiers can move the ship.”

Fighting in Ukraine has shown that warfare has changed, Driscoll said. “In a lot of ways, the average soldier, if we just give them a credit card and say, ‘Innovate to save your life and the life of your buddy if we ever deploy,’ … I think they would be superb at it,” he said. “We just need to get out of their way.”

About 15 years after he served as an armor officer with the 10th Mountain Division, Driscoll is three months into his time as the 26th Army secretary, a position that has challenged him to remain calm in the face of inefficiencies he refers to during the interview as “irrationality … at scale.” 

Spending time with soldiers and understanding their experiences limits groupthink, Driscoll said, adding that about 90% of the valuable feedback he’s gained about the Army in the past three months has come from having those conversations and “in those moments.”

Driscoll leads an Army that has just celebrated its 250th birthday and is working through a sweeping transformation that includes transforming in contact, which puts new technologies in soldiers’ hands for testing, and the Army Transformation Initiative, a plan announced in May that eliminates obsolete equipment, streamlines the force and pursues capabilities such as drones and long-range fires.

“If everyone in the United States Army doesn’t feel something from it in the next six months, we have failed,” Driscoll said about the Army Transformation Initiative.

“The reason … [the] Army Transformation Initiative came to be is because, for 30 or 40 years, the Pentagon has optimized for … interests that just don't serve soldiers well in the short term,” Driscoll said. “And then as you piled them on over 30 or 40 years, it actually kind of hollowed out the fundamental function that the Army leadership and the Pentagon leadership should be serving for the soldiers.”

That fundamental function, Driscoll said, is to train soldiers “as well as we can, give them the best equipment that we can possibly afford, and when we send them forward to fight and kill on our behalf, increase the odds of them being successful and coming home.”

Soldier feedback is critical, and Army leaders are listening, Driscoll said. Previously, when troops encountered inefficiencies, it was difficult for them to reach leaders in the Pentagon, he said.

He used as an example a raid on an IED factory during his deployment to Iraq. After risking roadside bombs and setting up a cordon around the target, the soldiers were poised to get to work by cutting a lock. But when they called on the radio that they were about to move in, the mission was called off because the rules of engagement no longer allowed them to cut locks. “I remember lying in bed that night enraged,” Driscoll said. “One of us could have died. How could this possibly have come to be?”

“Nobody intends those kinds of outcomes, but the feedback loop from that moment back up to the Pentagon has been broken for a long time,” he said. “When you see those moments, you have to tell us. You have to push it up, … because we need to get better. … If we're going to plan to engage in possible conflict in the next one day to five years with a peer, we have to be our best selves, and we, the leadership team, can no longer allow decisions like that … to occur anymore.”