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Daniel Driscoll: “We have to pay people to own [software] for us.”

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 31:13

And the problem is, by the time you customize it for us, it's already outdated. It can't get kind of regular commercial updates. We have to pay people to own [software] for us. It can't talk to a lot of the other software things we buy. And so I think on that stuff, it will actually be easier to quantitatively say, how fast are we buying software? (31:13)

CLAIM

Asserts that the military pays external parties to manage software.

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.”
Breaking Calcified Bureaucracy with Daniel P. Driscoll, Secretary of the U.S. Army | The Agile CEO | Uploaded September 16, 2025 | 03:57-04:04
“We have 104,000 humvees.”
Breaking Calcified Bureaucracy with Daniel P. Driscoll, Secretary of the U.S. Army | The Agile CEO | Uploaded September 16, 2025 | 06:50-06:53
“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.”
Breaking Calcified Bureaucracy with Daniel P. Driscoll, Secretary of the U.S. Army | The Agile CEO | Uploaded September 16, 2025 | 01:35-01:41
“Nation states are no longer necessary to be able to create these tools of war and chaos.”
Breaking Calcified Bureaucracy with Daniel P. Driscoll, Secretary of the U.S. Army | The Agile CEO | Uploaded September 16, 2025 | 02:10-02:16
“We have a pacing threat that we are saying is China.”
Breaking Calcified Bureaucracy with Daniel P. Driscoll, Secretary of the U.S. Army | The Agile CEO | Uploaded September 16, 2025 | 02:43-02:48
“We're probably a decade or more behind [China] in many areas.”
Breaking Calcified Bureaucracy with Daniel P. Driscoll, Secretary of the U.S. Army | The Agile CEO | Uploaded September 16, 2025 | 03:15-03:18
“1.2 million people. About $200 billion.”
Breaking Calcified Bureaucracy with Daniel P. Driscoll, Secretary of the U.S. Army | The Agile CEO | Uploaded September 16, 2025 | 07:42-07:46
“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.”
Breaking Calcified Bureaucracy with Daniel P. Driscoll, Secretary of the U.S. Army | The Agile CEO | Uploaded September 16, 2025 | 07:48-07:55
“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.”
Breaking Calcified Bureaucracy with Daniel P. Driscoll, Secretary of the U.S. Army | The Agile CEO | Uploaded September 16, 2025 | 08:42-08:50
“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…”
Breaking Calcified Bureaucracy with Daniel P. Driscoll, Secretary of the U.S. Army | The Agile CEO | Uploaded September 16, 2025 | 11:08-11:17
“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.”
Breaking Calcified Bureaucracy with Daniel P. Driscoll, Secretary of the U.S. Army | The Agile CEO | Uploaded September 16, 2025 | 16:21-16:24
“Originally they told us it would be 40 months until we could fly a prototype [of the new helicopter].”
Breaking Calcified Bureaucracy with Daniel P. Driscoll, Secretary of the U.S. Army | The Agile CEO | Uploaded September 16, 2025 | 17:34-17:38
“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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“Our current software procurement model is just pathetic.”
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“By the time you customize [software] for us, it's already outdated.”
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“The speed with which we can acquire drones on the battlefield in Ukraine, you have to be able to get, acquire and update them every two…”
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“Right now we have [vehicles] sitting out of order for 12 to 15 months sometimes.”
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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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