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Daniel Driscoll: “Our current software procurement model is just pathetic.”

Featuring: Daniel Driscoll, Republican | United States Secretary of the Army | National

Breaking Calcified Bureaucracy with Daniel P. Driscoll, Secretary of the U.S. Army | The Agile CEO

Published September 16, 2025 | Video Starts at 30:56

The quantitative measures I think actually are reasonably easier to come by. I think if you looked at how quickly are we procuring things like software, Our current software procurement model is just pathetic. It is. We basically require all of these custom solutions to exist on our nipper net that I was describing earlier. And the problem is, by the time you customize it for us, it's already outdated. (30:56–31:01)

CLAIM

Asserts that the current software procurement model is inadequate.

This is an excerpt from a raw transcript. The assertions have not been audited or verified. Tap the video to view the source footage and understand the context.

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Daniel Driscoll

“Army Transformation Initiative... cut $48 billion of future spending.”
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“We have 104,000 humvees.”
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“We have 45,000 JLTVs, these very big vehicles that are good on highway and awful on off road.”
Breaking Calcified Bureaucracy with Daniel P. Driscoll, Secretary of the U.S. Army | The Agile CEO | Uploaded September 16, 2025 | 07:00-07:08
“We have 250,000 civilians. I think we have in the army, we have 35,000 that help us buy and repair our stuff.”
Breaking Calcified Bureaucracy with Daniel P. Driscoll, Secretary of the U.S. Army | The Agile CEO | Uploaded September 16, 2025 | 09:50-09:58
“The new rotary air asset that we want to build. We first flew in 2018. It has been seven years since we have done something with it.”
Breaking Calcified Bureaucracy with Daniel P. Driscoll, Secretary of the U.S. Army | The Agile CEO | Uploaded September 16, 2025 | 11:35-11:45
“The procurement process essentially snakes through 16 or 18 different stops, and any one of those can kick it back to the beginning.”
Breaking Calcified Bureaucracy with Daniel P. Driscoll, Secretary of the U.S. Army | The Agile CEO | Uploaded September 16, 2025 | 15:31-15:34
“Right now we would struggle in under a year to [acquire drones].”
Breaking Calcified Bureaucracy with Daniel P. Driscoll, Secretary of the U.S. Army | The Agile CEO | Uploaded September 16, 2025 | 31:52-31:54
“Technology has completely changed how humans will inflict violence on each other.”
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“Nation states are no longer necessary to be able to create these tools of war and chaos.”
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“We have a pacing threat that we are saying is China.”
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“We're probably a decade or more behind [China] in many areas.”
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“1.2 million people. About $200 billion.”
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“The federal government is bad, the Pentagon is worse, and the army is the very worst at being able to change our minds and act on it.”
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“If you look at the generals first, who gets to become a general is often the person who has stayed in the middle of the system.”
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“The army is more risk averse than the Pentagon, which is more risk averse than the federal government, which is more risk averse than the…”
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“We got [a Humvee and an infantry squad vehicle] to [Applied Intuition] within seven days.”
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“We bought 30 of them. They were called the Booker tank.”
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“Originally they told us it would be 40 months until we could fly a prototype [of the new helicopter].”
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“We basically got all of the CEOs of these massive companies on board and said, you have 12 months, we want to sit in one and fly one.”
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“The exquisite stuff is taking so long. It's spitting out so ineffectively, inefficiently and so expensive that it's binarily broken.”
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“The average American soldier is infinitely better at just getting a task, understanding a problem, and getting to a solution quicker or more…”
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“The civilians have been a little bit more cautious because they've probably seen this tape run a few times.”
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“The batch of people we're having the hardest time with right now are the politicians.”
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“We kicked off a partnership with one of the big AI companies to try to fix our procurement contracting.”
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“We can cut our contracting down by 50%, make it a lot faster, a lot more effective and efficient.”
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“Five days later we're able to share back with this company how our soldiers were actually using what they were building.”
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“If you want to push change down through the system, you can actually do it remarkably fast for a 950,000 person organization.”
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“We are pushing down through the chain of command through these exercises called tech transformation and contact.”
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“The system is basically set up not to do [promotions and bonuses] at scale quite yet.”
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“We haven't proven yet that any of these approaches is creating disproportionate results.”
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“By the time you customize [software] for us, it's already outdated.”
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“We have to pay people to own [software] for us.”
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“I think we have numbed [soldiers] to this idea that when they log into their government issued laptop, it's going to break half the time.”
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“They have to fill out these physical forms, that they have to lay out every single weapon and count the serial numbers.”
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“One of the reasons a lot of people get out of the army is it's just really hard to live in a bureaucracy.”
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“In 18 to 24 months, we are being held accountable at every base we go to.”
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“Some of the things those people who were in for five weeks were teaching to the drill sergeants who were sharing it with their leadership…”
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“We are going to try to process the ties... from all of those 450,000 active duty soldiers and 950,000 total soldiers.”
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“One of the more important things a nation state can do is provide security for its people.”
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“The Army Transformation Initiative that we did, I think we started pushing on that six weeks after I got here.”
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“It was not my idea. I couldn't in six weeks have even begun to come up with something as substantive for the army as what I think ATI will…”
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“We talked that basically we thought the window for change was like 9 to 12 months.”
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“By acting so quickly, we built up some momentum that has helped us go do newer and different and harder problems.”
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