Driscoll speaks out for first time since ouster by Hegseth as Army secretary
by Mike Glenn · The Washington TimesIn his first interview since his abrupt Aug. 31 ouster from the Pentagon, former Army Secretary Dan Driscoll he agreed with his former boss, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, more than 50% of the time.
Mr. Driscoll told Rolling Stone magazine that the White House and Mr. Hegseth fully backed his modernization plans for cutting out unnecessary layers of bureaucracy in the Army and purging outdated weapons and equipment.
“All I had to do was basically come in and say this is worth the headache,” Mr. Driscoll said to Rolling Stone. “What are the things that we need to start to buy, and what are the things that we need to start to scale?”
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But if Mr. Driscoll and his former boss were in lockstep more than half the time, it follows that they also disagreed often.
“Once he makes a decision, there’s nothing I can do about it,” Mr. Driscoll said. “I don’t have to like it. But I think it’s unfair to describe our relationship so flatly — that every interaction was bad or that we disagreed on everything.”
Mr. Driscoll focused much of his attention on retrofitting an Army that spent the last two decades fighting insurgent forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. Weapons suitable for battling the Taliban needed to be set aside in favor of ordnance capable of taking on near-peer adversaries like Russia and China.
Watching Ukraine rapidly adapt to the kind of drone-focused war they were facing while the U.S. lumbered along was a painful experience, Mr. Driscoll said.
“When you would see what Ukraine’s budget was and how small it was relative to ours, and how, despite that, they had better weapons of war, it was a wake-up call,” he said.
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Gen. Randy George, the former Army Chief of Staff, and Gen. Christopher Donahue, the former commander of U.S. Army Europe-Africa, were two of Mr. Driscoll’s closest partners in retrofitting an Army capable to taking on adversaries like Russia and China.
All three men are now no longer in the Army.
“I was surprised at how talented the generals who were in positions of leadership were when I got there,” Mr. Driscoll said.
The now-retired Gen. George described his dismissal in April. He said Mr. Hegseth called him to say he was out.
“I was right down the hall. It was a 15-second call,” Gen. George said. “I wasn’t his [Hegseth’s] guy. I don’t really know — I was never really given a reason.”
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Lawmakers in an April 26 Defense Appropriations subcommittee hearing had questions about why Gen. George had been forced into early retirement. Mr. Driscoll described him as an “amazing, transformational leader.”
“That being said, the civilian leadership, the design of our system, is that they get to pick the leaders they want, and we execute on those orders,” Mr. Driscoll said at the time.
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