Pod Insights Summation with Auren Hoffman US Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll - modernizing military tech & fixing procurement About this episode Dan Driscoll is the current Secretary of the U. S. Army, overseeing a military branch with approximately one million soldiers, 250,000 civilians, and an annual budget of $185 billion. In this episode of World of DaaS, Dan and Auren discuss: The Army Transformation InitiativeRapid defense innovation with Silicon ValleyModernizing obsolete military equipmentFixing Pentagon procurement Looking for more tech, data and venture capital intel? Head to worldofdaas.com for our podcast, newslette...
Transcript 0:02 Speaker 00 Hello, fellow data nerds. Welcome to World of DAS. I'm your host, Orin Hoffman, CEO of Incubate and GP of Flex Capital. Discover more episodes, get weekly data as a service news, original content, articles on data and more at worldofdaas.com. That's world of DAS, D-A-A-S, dot com. Hello, data nerds. My guest today is Dan Driscoll. He is the 26th Secretary of the US Army. He was appointed by President Trump and confirmed by the Senate on February 25th. Dan is actually a longtime friend of mine. We previously worked together at Flex Capital. He actually even helped me with the idea to launch this podcast four years ago. Dan, welcome to World of DAS. Thank you. At the time we were talking about it, I never thought I'd get to be on here.
0:48 Speaker 00 Yes. Hopefully you'll be a regular guest. This is amazing. You're now the Secretary of the Army, which is amazing. I think most people who are listening to this podcast might not totally understand like the size and the scope of the US Army. Can you give us just a sense of that? Yeah, just for context, we're about a million soldiers, about 250,000 civilians, a budget of about 185 billion. We have 180-plus bases around the world. Those are just the top-level numbers. So besides like Walmart? Walmart and Amazon. Walmart and Amazon are the two employers that have employed more people than the Army in the US? Yeah. Okay, wow. That's just incredible scale.
1:29 Speaker 00 The Army is unique in that we own housing, we own hospitals, we own trash delivery, we own food. We are a state in some ways, but then we also provide all of the things. Every day that I'm in the Army, I learn something new that we have. That's incredible. Now, we're going to talk about the Army Transformation Initiative that you and General George recently announced. Can you just give Is like the high level outline for us? So basically what occurred is, and we were talking with the administration about should it sit up at the presidential level or sit down in secretary or at defense level. But a top down approach to give air cover to do four core things. So there were four buckets of action.
2:09 Speaker 00 Bucket one was stop buying obsolete equipment that many or most times we, the army and the soldiers had not wanted. But the way that the decision making process works in the government, it kept getting jammed on us for a year after year after year. And I can give some examples. The second bucket was to actually recycle those dollars into buying the things that we want and need on the modern battlefield. So what's going on in Ukraine is an inflection point in world history on how humans battle each other on land and in the air. And we need to go buy those tools. Bucket three was a set of actions that were necessary to help us as an army take better care of ourselves. So an example of one is, and Senator Elizabeth Warren has been talking about this for a long time.
2:53 Speaker 00 We would contract away our right to prepare our own equipment. And so what that would practically mean is we would have these exquisite pieces of equipment sitting on the sidelines for nine to 12 months at a time. Where we had the ability to 3D print a $2 to $20 part, but we had signed away that right. And so it is mandating us to no longer make those dumb decisions. And then bucket four is a lot of people talk about the bureaucratic bloat. And the army had suffered from that over 30 or 40 years where we just kept sucking up too many talented individuals into our own headquarters. And so what General George and I talk about a lot is returning as many soldiers to wearing helmets and being out in the formations. And stop pushing around useless paper.
3:35 Speaker 00 And so it is a set of reorganizations to make the army leaner and more efficient. Each one of these, I think is very interesting. The first one is this obsolete equipment. I think all of us have heard this for years that there's all this obsolete equipment that the Congress or an individual congressperson, or maybe even a donor of an individual congressperson has kind of pushed on it. Why are we going to stop it now? I think people have been talking about this for at least 30 years. Why now are we going to stop this thing? I think there are a couple of ingredients. The first bucket of ingredient is, and I mean this very sincerely, President Trump and Secretary of Defense Hackett have an incredibly high tolerance for
4:16 Speaker 00 the pain associated with doing what they believe and we believe is the right thing for soldiers. And that top cover is necessary. It is just a required ingredient. In the past, maybe the president buckled under pressure from a congressperson called up the president. The president said, okay, we'll let you have this thing. And so if the president is steadfast, it's less likely to get rolled back or something. That's exactly right. The next bucket, I think, of requirements is General George and I, so you have a civilian leader and a soldier leader in the army. I think we are both in uniquely different parts of our careers. So he's had an amazing 35 year run in the army. Started off as an enlisted person and is now out of those million people at the very top. So he's ready to do his best and then put up his spurs when he's done.
5:01 Speaker 00 I, at the ripe old age of 39, and still on the front end of this thing. And so if we both go down in flames by trying to do the right thing, I think our risk tolerances are probably a little bit higher than most. So if you're both 52, this wouldn't happen. Essentially, you're both on the barbells where you can like take risks. I think that's right. And then the third one is perhaps the most crucial. There is now an existential risk that I think we are credible when we go talk to these senators and congressmen and lobbyists. And we say, look, basically, if we send America's men and women to battle today, we all can acknowledge that we are not ready for the current fight. Our tanks will come out over the berms and they will die. They will be immediately put out of the fight.
5:44 Speaker 00 And so there's enough of an existential risk that we can say, you get the choice and it's binary. We either make these changes in the first six months of a conflict when we're losing soldiers or we make it now. And I think there's a very credible belief in that. That risk that actually allows for this change. I appreciate it. I think what most Americans knew for many, many years was that, okay, we're wasting all this money on things we don't need. What I don't think I appreciated until very recently is that we're also putting soldiers' lives at risk because of that. And that is a much higher bar that we should deal with. It's even more dramatic because the more we on the front end are risking their lives, the more likely we actually pay that risk in a bad outcome, meaning our enemies are watching
6:28 Speaker 00 us and that they perceive that we have weaker soldiers, we are more likely to send them into conflict. So the stronger we are as a nation, the less likely we actually have to get into the game, which is just a very different way of thinking about this. It kind of amplifies the bad outcomes. I think some of these programs people have been talking about, but give us a sense. I mean, people were talking about like these Humvees that we don't need, these tanks we don't need. Give us a sense of some of these programs that are out there. It's not as binary as it seems before I say this. So it is not to say that the Humvee that we used for 40 years does not serve a purpose, or the robotic combat vehicle that we created, that's $3 million, isn't exquisite, or the Apache attack helicopter that is manned
7:09 Speaker 00 has no role in the future fight. I think it's much more what we're saying is we are over indexed and over invested on those types of resources. And so using our limited resources and our fixed dollars going forward, we have to then over correct in our purchasing to create a balance. And so essentially, it's some of the things we just described. So Humvees are not very good at going off road. They're not that quick. They don't give you a lot of visibility. And with the world of drones. You can't really see what's going on. Correct. You have these like little peep holes. And General George said this in a recent interview. It's similar to when Iraq and Afghanistan, when soldiers were deploying to Iraq, you would wear this big kit. You have plates everywhere.
7:50 Speaker 00 It was heavy. You were buckling up for an IED to hit you or a mortar to fall. When we went to Afghanistan, the problem is the terrain is incredibly hilly and you got to move quickly to get out of these valleys. And so they would switch to these plate carriers. It's a kind of similar model that, at least for the Humvee, we need a much lighter, faster, more tactical infantry squad vehicle. It's our current thinking, but we're testing a lot of other things, too. For Apaches, if you think of the classic attack helicopter with these badass pilots flying it in, it's not They won't have a purpose in future battles, but instead we need them balanced out with drones on all sides. We probably need to be able to prevent swarm drones from getting at the Apache.
8:31 Speaker 00 You'll want unmanned versions of helicopters that are able to perhaps transport the helicopter close to the fight and then put humans on. And so essentially what we're starting to think about for all of our platforms is this idea that it needs to be software first. And then the software manifests itself in the world as its actual physical presentation will be the tank or the helicopter. But it's got to be software. There are situations right now where it's very hard for soldiers to communicate with other soldiers. Sometimes they actually have to use their personal phones to communicate with people who are not that far away. Other Americans that are not that far away, just the coordination. Can you kind of walk us through the coordination problem and what we could do about it?
9:14 Speaker 00 This is where I am actually most optimistic that a lot of the commercial offerings are going to help us catch up really quickly. We talk about it as being able to communicate over the horizon. And I think right now we're a half step back from where we should be. What we need to fight on a modern battlefield is we need our people to be able to communicate with each other near instantaneously. We need our things to be synced in and able to communicate with those people. And we need our sensors and we have a ton of exquisite sensors, but they're currently stoked, piped off in a lot of instances. We need all of that data to be able to flow back and forth, creating this data layer that allows for just amazing things. And so currently there's not a ton of use. That's the advantage the US has. We got to lean into that.
9:58 Speaker 00 Almost no other military knows how to do combined arms. This is kind of like the core advantage that we have. Fundamentally, the way it will play out is targeting. We have a limited number of munitions that we can use. You want to use them as effectively as possible. It is a very good use case for generative AI with a human in the loop. But basically, once you have this data layer, what we can probably do is go out to the open AIs of the world and grab their models and start to use them for a lot of offensive capabilities. That right now, we're just not ready to do. In some ways, there's a way that we have to get into the mindset of the soldier, especially the senior soldiers in the army, where I think the mindset before was just don't do anything wrong. At least my read on the military is that a general is going to get in a lot more trouble
10:43 Speaker 00 if one of their soldiers buys $1,000 of unauthorized alcohol than if they waste like a billion dollars. How accurate is that? I think I would have had a similar perspective coming in. I think what has changed a little bit is, and I'll say the other side of the coin. So I think the civilian and the political leaders have in a lot of ways deeply and meaningfully harmed the army for a very long time. They have taken a decision-making process and they have contorted it in on nearly everything. Where the analogy I give is there's this concept of the Calabrese paradox that this professor at Yale Law School, Guido Calabrese, would describe this thing to his students where he had basically said, hey, there's this new technology that moves humans through space and time really quickly
11:26 Speaker 00 to make their lives better, but you'll have to pay this technology god 10,000 human lives every year in order to have it. Would you do it? And the students are like, no, no, never. And he's like, well, that's the vehicle. Basically, what we have with cars is we set the speed limit between 55 and 70 miles an hour to optimize for time, but we know that there's a trade off of human life in there. What the Pentagon has done is in some ways it started to drive one mile an hour for the last 20 years. And then, once you layered in all of these parochial outcomes, you basically have the civilians and the political leaders putting the army leaders in a place where every decision they made, they were terrified that one of the 435 individual congressmen might be annoyed, or one of the 100 senators, or all of these other things that kept them from doing the right thing.
12:11 Speaker 00 So that's one side of the coin. The other side of the coin that I think is fair critique of soldiers, and General George and I talk about this a lot with our leadership teams, is I think the system has optimized the last 20 to 30 years in picking generals for generals who stay in the middle of the herd and who are the least friction causing. They can't be incompetent because obviously those people get weeded out. So they can't be incompetent. They have to be competent. But they can't be too risk taking either. And it rewards performance. And so it has become a very performative relationship between soldiers and their civilian counterparts. And one of the things we're desperately trying to reset is at every meeting we have, if you see something that we can do better or we are doing wrong, you have to tell us
12:54 Speaker 00 because otherwise you have to own the bad outcomes. And so the good thing about the military is because of the hierarchy and the command and control structure, you can actually push changes down incredibly effectively for good or bad, but we think that this is considered to be good. The third thing you mentioned where we should have the right to like repair our own equipment. I assume it's even like to be able to see and manipulate our own data. That just seems so obvious. Why did we give up that right? How do we get to where we are today? I think it's a mixture of incompetence in some areas. I think it is a fair critique to say that the government just in its hiring and its staffing doesn't optimize for the front edge of technologies.
13:37 Speaker 00 I don't think it was malicious per se, but I think that just in some ways people didn't understand what was happening and then it was too late. I think you had these very effective profit seeking primes on the other side who learned that all they had to do was on their own end be performative and contracting to get through the phase where they get picked. And then all of a sudden they could do these things on the back end to actually really make up their margin. And there was no appetite to hold them accountable for that. And then I think the third thing is I don't think people appreciated the significance of this. And so we had seven senators over to General Georgians a couple of weeks ago and we're at the dinner and everybody's telling their favorite broken procurement story. I stopped everyone else. Senators, respectfully, I don't think you realize
14:22 Speaker 00 these aren't like one off cute stories of government incompetence. These are trailing indicators of a fatally flawed, broken system. The whole thing is hollowed out. You should be terrified that these stories are existing at such scale. Because what it means is we don't. Have a functioning system in some ways. It's one thing if we gotta go repair the vehicle and we need to put the bolt on. And instead of the $20 bolt, we have to pay $2,000 for the bolt. That's annoying and we have to pay a lot of money and it's terrible. But it's another thing that we can't get the bolt for like five days now. And all of a sudden, we're putting soldiers at risk or not be able to accomplish the mission.
15:03 Speaker 00 Cause it takes a long time to transfer that bolt over, whereas we could just actually produce that bolt for ourself in 20 minutes. That's a whole other problem. It's not five days, it's nine months to 15 months is how long we're waiting for bolts sometimes. For five million dollar pieces of equipment. Okay, that's insane. It's sitting in like something on the side and there's a mission to be accomplished that we can't do because we're waiting for this. And we have the 3D printer within 100 yards of the equipment to fix it. And then to the software where people have realized they can milk the government is, and it's our own fault too. That is unfair of me to say.
15:44 Speaker 00 The system has led to these outcomes where you have proprietary software developed for us, the United States Army. That then we have to maintain, which is always worse than its consumer counterpart. And then it can't communicate, nor does the software developer want it to communicate with anything else. And so as an example, where we're starting to do some of these things right. If you look at our recruiting command, I was so proud of them last week and General George was too. We had our own proprietary software for recruiting soldiers. That's just a classic sales funnel. Simple CRM. Simple CRM. So what did they do? The Army Recruiting Command, a couple of years ago, switched over to a little tiny company you might have heard Salesforce. And then what they said is, well, wait a second, Salesforce actually has its own process.
16:27 Speaker 00 Rather than having our own version of this thing developed for us. Why don't we just switch around our process and use Salesforce as 90% out of the box solution? And so they've now got nearly all of our recruiting on Salesforce. And what we're working on now is taking that digital record that's being created on the front end. Using it through basic training and then maybe having that be the record that's a soldier's record their entire time in. And the outcomes have been amazing. The prices are a lot cheaper. I mean, it is as good of a win as you could ever imagine. That's really great to hear. My experience with Defense Department in the past in trying to sell software and stuff is like, hey, we like your software. Now we want you to completely redo it in this weird format. We want you to make it 10 times worse. We want you to charge us four
17:12 Speaker 00 times as much for it. It just seems like everything was out of whack. We're going to take this standardized thing. We're going to do the process. We'll pay you the standardized rate that you charge every other company for it. Maybe we have to customize like a slight thing here and there. Most of our bots are customized or Salesforce incidents here and there, but we basically will keep everything as easy as possible to get implemented. And we're a great customer. We pay on time. We have great credit. I think with Microsoft, we're their largest user of a lot of their systems because we bring 1.25 million people when we come. There's some credibility that comes with, in my opinion, the greatest army in the history of the world choosing your product. And so we have done a very poor job of going
17:54 Speaker 00 out and finding the right partners for us and then figuring out what is the best way to use their commercially available off the shelf solution and just tweak it a little bit. But we're getting better. On the fourth thing that you mentioned, is it just, we're going to take 1,000 people out of the Pentagon and put them into more forward thing. We'll put them at Fort Bragg. We'll move them over to Germany or whatever? Or is there something more about attacking the bureaucracy? One of the things we remarked on in our letter to the force, Secretary of Defense has assigned the directive to us. And then we had a letter to the force go out and we said, hey, you should know, this is the first turn of the ship. We are going to continue to do this as long as we are here and this will be iterative and we're going to learn. We're going to get some
18:37 Speaker 00 right and some wrong. I think this fourth bucket is probably the place where we took the biggest baby step. And what we are trying to signal to the force and signal to everyone around us is it is a needs of the army enterprise going forward. And so there are a lot of places, if you look at just the number of humans that help us buy things, new things, old things, repair things, we have 35,000 human beings involved in our procurement apparatus. That is a preposterous number. You have 35,000 people that buy stuff from pens to shells to whatever? And they talk to customers and they help us do slight bit of innovation, let's say. But I mean, I would say, General George, I don't know what the right number is. Ten thousand is probably closer to.
19:23 Speaker 00 How's it work? There's a someone who specifically does procurement, but then there is the ultimate buyer, who is the one consuming that. Like, I would assume that they're the ultimate decision maker. I need these types of shelves because these are the things that I need. I've got a budget. Or how's that work? It is hard to describe in particular detail. So I'll start with how it came to be, and then that can explain what it is. What originally happened is the army had, I think it was 11 or 13 lines on the dollars that came to us from Congress. So it said, "Go buy tanks" was a line. "Go buy ammunition" was a line. And we would use that pot of money to go buy tanks or ammunition.
20:04 Speaker 00 We now have 1,400 lines that say, "Go buy this specific thing at this specific quantity." And so now we have 1,400 people coming up with the rules about purchasing and tracking that the dollars are going in the right place. And these are for some good reasons. Congress is worried. It's their job to balance out and service the check and the balance on, are we using the dollar the way that we said we would? That is a very healthy idea. And so over time, again, it's probably transitioned to this very risk averse model that now that we have 1,200 lines, we have all of these human beings, you've clogged them with humans in all instances. And then what happens is everything goes slower. So the solution, when you need something to go faster, is throw more human beings at it.
20:47 Speaker 00 And then when we throw human beings at it, we never get rid of human beings. The closest thing I could analogize it to is like, take a dartboard, put honey on it, and then throw Cheerios. And none of the Cheerios are ever falling off. So the dartboard is just covered in Cheerios at this point. And you can't even see what's going on. It's just complete and utter chaos. You've got someone who oversees recruitment, and they've got goals, which is, okay, I gotta recruit a certain number of amazing soldiers, of different types of soldiers, and I've got a budget, and I've got to, so I gotta get them in at the right budget, and they've gotta have a certain standard, and all the goals that you would think. And then do they ultimately get to select the software, or is there some other procurement? Procurement person who's selecting the software.
21:29 Speaker 00 It is much more the latter. It's much more of the procurement person. And over time, it's gotten better. We'll talk to the recruiter and hear what they want. But then what the Army has done, and we have to own it and get better at it, is we think of every possible thing we might need and we add that to the list. What we end up doing is we wanted to create these light tanks, these bookers. This is one of the things that is our classic example under General George and I where we're just calling it a sunk cost. We, the Army, got it wrong, but it started off with this very noble intent. We wanted to be able to airdrop light tanks in and use them in places you couldn't use heavy tanks. So we started, a decade went by, we added an insane number of requirements to this thing that just piled and piled and piled. The tank got heavier and heavier and heavier and bigger and bigger and bigger.
22:12 Speaker 00 And then it landed in this place where it was neither a full tank nor the light tank you wanted. It was in the valley of useless. And then what would have happened, I hypothesize, under previous approaches is they would have said, well, we have 80 of them. Now we've got to get to 600 of them. We might as well keep buying them. We've already gone through the expense to build it. And what we've said is, no, no, no, no, that's classic sunk cost fallacy. Those dollars don't matter. That's right. It's a sunk cost. We made a mistake. We're going to own up to the mistake. We'll raise our hand. Now, saying I made a mistake, even if it wasn't you personally who made the mistake, but just owning up to a mistake is usually not the way to survive in Washington. You guys are actually doing that. There's going to be arrows coming at you, I presume.
22:54 Speaker 00 They're coming. Since we announced it, a lot of arrows have come, but it's hard to overstate the value of President Trump's risk tolerance for doing what he thinks is the right thing for the military. Secretary of Defense Hekseth, Steve Feinberg, who works in the Pentagon, he loves when people talk about sunk cost fallacy. He said, that's exactly how we should be taught. Of course, you have a guy who ran like one of the best private equity firms. Now is the number two guy at the Pentagon. Like, who else would you want figuring all this stuff out? He's made plenty of bad investments of his life. The way you become a great investor is you get out of those bad investments quickly. Yes. And so the culture, I need to give as much credit as humanly possible, up, sideways and down.
23:36 Speaker 00 There is a moment all around that is providing a ton of Momentum to these generational changes. One of the things that's somewhat unique to the military is usually these generals who are having these very important commands, they rotate, they're there for maximum of three years. So they're getting in, sometimes they're doing something they've never done before. So it takes them a little bit of time to learn it. Then at some point, they already know what their next job is. So they're rotating out. That's hard to like actually transform things and do things, but it is also a feature and a bug of the army. It's good to get people moving through and changing. How do you think about that personnel side of it?
24:16 Speaker 00 High level, and I mean this very sincerely, and it sounds so sycophantic. It's like hard to believe I'm being sincere. After getting out of the army in the last 16 years, going to an Ivy League law school, working in fancy firms and seeing them and investment banks and being in venture capital and talented founders and seeing private equity and consultants everywhere. I thought I had seen a talented group of people. By the way, you worked with me. So you clearly didn't always work with talented people. You worked with some very untalented people as well. That's right back at me. The American soldier is remarkable. Their dedication to mission, their ability to innovate, how much they pride themselves in their job. They do not stop until the mission is complete and completed well.
25:00 Speaker 00 The model of service and how they've decided to live their life puts them, I would say in the top, all of them, 5% of people I have ever worked with. And then there's one soldier in particular, I won't say her name. She's transitioning on. I've only gotten to work with her for a couple of weeks. I said this at her goodbye party. She's the single most talented person I have ever worked with in any context. It is absolutely incredible, the ingredients that we have. So now to your original question. I was a little more worried about the bug portion of this, that we have this expertise that's at with somebody. They would rotate out and it would be gone. And so one of my original hypotheses I came in with is we need to expand this. We need to have soldiers stay in their position for five or 10 years and get a program or get an innovation through its lifecycle.
25:45 Speaker 00 I actually think it's a feature now that I've seen it because I think soldiers are so Uniquely well suited at what we call the right seat, left seat ride. So when you fall in on a unit in theater, you will be in the right seat while they're showing you around. And then at some point you switch seats and you will be driving and they will be watching to make sure you understand everything. And then they will go out. And so the entire enterprise is built on this idea that basically you can fall in on any unit and know where everything is. And so they approach all problems like that. And I actually think there's a ton of value. That's such an important feature if it works. And in my experience, the army has some of the most talented people in the world. But I do think sometimes that talent is overlooked. It's underused.
26:29 Speaker 00 It's not nurtured in the right way. How can we get a higher ROI from our best soldiers? I think what is occurring right now, my hypothesis is General George and I think of the army as two distinct use cases. Use case one is a very large enterprise business that is responsible for moving people, large things, small things and medium things around the country and the world. Just a massive logistics business, essentially. Massive logistics, feeding them, putting them in housing. The other is a well-oiled killing machine that we will send where we need it to go on behalf of the American people. And it will complete its mission as effectively and violently and lethally as possible. They're kind of two very discrete things. And so I think the way that we think about it is
27:14 Speaker 00 we can optimize for very different people in each of those roles. And we have gotten better as an army of saying, man, if you are an incredible badass developer, you can live in both worlds. If you are an incredible logistician, you can live in both worlds. If you're an incredible infantryman, we probably want you focused on the killing machine portion of the army. And so slotting people, I think historically, we might not have done a great job. But then now, once we give them the tools that are being used, particularly in the army as a business side, I think we'll start to get a lot of visibility into the effectiveness. So now that we have Salesforce with our recruiters, I think it will be a quick dashboard will say, who's the really effective recruiter? Do they love this job and this role?
27:56 Speaker 00 And can we empower them by maybe extending the amount of time they're with this unit? Can we make them a leader of recruiting in a way that we wouldn't have necessarily been able to track that talent in the past? And so I am hopeful that as we continue to roll out the best practices in software from other portions of the economy, it will. Start to empower soldiers to be even better at scale. When I meet super talented people that left the army, it's usually one of two reasons, and I don't know that there's anything you can do about the first reason. So the first reason is I'm traveling too much and I can't be with my family. And in some ways, that is kind of the job and maybe you can't do that much about that first reason. But the second reason that I hear all the time is it's just the bureaucracy.
28:37 Speaker 00 There's too much bureaucracy. I wasn't able to get the stuff done. I had to spend too much time pushing paper. To me, that's the number one. It's not the pay. It's obviously not the mission. They believe in the mission. This is something they really care deeply about. This fourth thing that you're working on, what else can we do to, because the bureaucracy makes us lose great people. At some point, they just don't want to deal with it anymore. The first part is, I say this to a lot of soldiers. It's perfectly okay, and I'm one of the ones that served for three and a half years and got out. That is a perfectly okay path. General George took the path where he had served incredibly for 35 years and is making an incredible difference in the formation. We do want to retain the best and most talented people in the army that we possibly can.
29:20 Speaker 00 To the bureaucratic function portion, I think this is where if you look at things like generative AI, what the army does incredibly well is it creates manuals, and this is back to the left seat, right seat rod. It takes nearly every task we do and puts them step by step by step by step by step, all the way down so that the next person coming in can fall in on a moment's notice. As I understand, and you would understand much better than I, that it's perfectly suited for generative AI. If we can train models on a lot of the things that we do to help soldiers with their traveler, their health needs, or maintaining their requirements to be ready to end deployable, that just eats up so much of soldiers' time because A, the tasks are mundane and they have built and increased over time.
30:05 Speaker 00 But B, the software systems we have them on are outdated and the NIPR net, which is a conversation for another day, which is our unclassed network that mimics like the regular internet, but it's slower and worse in every single way. And I would argue doesn't even provide all that much security, makes their life miserable. And so I'm hopeful we can relieve a lot. Of the burden on that front to get soldiers back to the comment of wearing helmets and doing the jobs they signed up for. When you watch a soldier do the thing they signed up for, they're beaming, getting out to be in a gun range or do whatever it is. If it's offensive cyber, when you talk to our offensive cyber soldiers, they love their job because it's really one of the few jobs in the world where our government says, get in the game, go do your best to help
30:46 Speaker 00 us. To the other side of it, where we have to move families into stress, I think Congress and Senate have done a very good job of highlighting and soldiers do too with social media, the places we are failing and how we feed them and how we move them. And we will continue to need to improve that probably throughout time. But this is a life of service and that is a good fit for some family models. It's less of a good fit for others because it is incredibly taxing, incredibly demanding. There's almost no other job in the world where our air and missile defense soldiers right now are on a one to 1.2 ratio, meaning they deploy for a year and then they're back for 14 months and they deploy for a year. If it's just not for the right family, I mean, that's just a tough one to want to opt into.
31:29 Speaker 00 One of the things that the Army traditionally has been very good at is writing down the rules, writing down the order of operations. This is very good for LMS. This is very good for technology. It's very good for AI. Most companies are terrible at that. They don't have all those things, but because the Army has to put an able bodied 18 year old doing something that they have so many manuals, so many types of things. This actually could become a huge strength. In some ways, that might have been seen as somewhat bureaucratic before, but it really could enable the Army to take on the new world. One of the ways we're thinking about this, Warren, is if you take how we repair our vehicles, step by step by step instructions, to your point, so that new soldiers can fall in or reasonably
32:14 Speaker 00 new soldiers can fall in and be effective at their job. If you take those written instructions, and then we were out visiting Meta and spending time with Boz, one of the co-founders, and he was showing us these glasses that they had worked on and invested $20 billion. One of our ideas, I don't know if it was us or them, so I don't need to take credit as the Army. If we have our mechanics wear these goggles while they are doing the repairs, it would be a game changer. Again, with the structure of the Army, on a Friday, we could say it's a good idea. On a Monday, we could have close to 1 million soldiers executing on this. Idea and started to collect this data for That's so cool. And one thing for Salesforce, a big company like that to sell into the army,
32:56 Speaker 00 but it is hard for startups to engage with the military, though easier than it was 10 years ago. Certainly easier today. And there's definitely some things that make it easier. But what else can we do to get startups more engaged? Or should they just wait? Should you just wait till I have a couple hundred million in revenue? And then engage with the military? I'd say they need to hold us accountable. General George and I are synced on this. He is an incredible CTO, Dr. Alex Miller. And what we are trying to do is it is not enough that we are getting the air cover, canceling the programs. If we are not recycling those dollars and doing that second core function, which is going to require small and medium businesses around the country, both venture backed and not.
33:38 Speaker 00 If we're not getting in the N of innovation into the hands of our soldiers to figure out what's right and what works for them, we are failing. And so sincerely to anybody listening, what I need you to do is tag the army. We watch that stuff, tag SEC Army. If you were stuck in our procurement process or out testing our innovation, tell us. You just mentioned you watch on X. You guys have like a system to watch, oh, some startups are complaining. This is not just public affairs, but it bubbles up to some other place in the army that sees this report or something? We got invited onto a podcast three days ago from some Silicon Valley guys. I can't even remember, maybe they didn't invite us, but they tagged us and they said, hey, Army, we hear you're doing good things in innovation.
34:23 Speaker 00 And so I think that was on a Tuesday night, we saw it. By Thursday morning, General George and I were on the podcast trying to tell the story. Cause we want to change the culture. And then the other one is we went and saw Applied Intuition, which is basically builds the autonomous software for a lot of non Tesla vehicles in the United States. And we were there and we said, have you ever done this on military vehicle? And they said, no. And we said, why not? They said, ah, it takes years and years and years and the process is terrible. And so we just told the team and General George said, well, hey, get them a Humvee and an infantry squad vehicle in the next week. And maybe it took eight days, nine days, but we had it there. And they said, what do you want us to do? And we said, take 10 days and just do whatever you can to it. Send us a video. 10 days went by, they had fully automated. These two things. Oh, this is so cool.
35:08 Speaker 00 They had tied it into their drone network that they already had existing. They had taken the screen in this infantry squad vehicle and uploaded our manual. So that when something went wrong, it could do the diagnostic from the drive by wire. It could show how to repair it. They could fly out the part on the drone and some of this is performative. It's only been 10 days. It was mind blowing. What we did is we sent a carrier the next day to pick these two vehicles up. We drove it to our largest testing area in continental United States. And it's in the hands of soldiers from start to finish six weeks. Soldiers just sent us a video of how they're starting to figure out how to use these things. The soldiers I knew, if they heard about this, literally their head would just explode. They couldn't believe that this could.
35:51 Speaker 00 It's one thing if people were shooting at them, they could maybe believe it. The government would move fast, but this is not an area where anyone's being shot at. This is something where we're trying to move for the future. And traditionally, the government's been good at, okay, if people are getting killed, we need to make changes fast, which is great, but we're not always good. And this is amazing that you guys are doing that. Back to that comment of we're either going to do an hour in the first six months of a conflict. When we talked to Feinberg, what we're trying to do is we have this Flora aircraft. So it's our future aircraft tilt rotary. And you see it and you're like, oh, this is awesome. It goes faster, it goes farther. They showed it to me and I was like, oh, well, when was the test flight? 2018. We're in 2025, seven years ago, we discovered the thing we wanted and needed and haven't been actioning on it.
36:35 Speaker 00 And so when you talk to Feinberg, you say to Feinberg, he was like, all right, what we're going to do is bring in the CEO. So I brought in the CEO last week with General George. We said, go make a plan. They were originally going to start manufacturing it, I think in 2030. We said, how can you start in the next couple of months? And then how can you finish it in 18 months? Get us our first batches. And then what we said we would do is again, try to take a wartime mentality. We're going to send soldiers down to your manufacturing facility. And they are going to live with you to unblock things that pop up in real time. Cause we are going to get these new aircraft manufactured as fast as humanly possible and show ourselves how to do it. And then we're going to be ready that if and when we actually go to war,
37:17 Speaker 00 we have a manual for how do we parachute into American industry to get the best innovations, get the. Manufacture and get them in the hands of our soldiers. You mentioned Steve Feinberg. We have Emile Michael who will be coming into the Defense Department soon is also a past World of the Desk guest. Very, very technical guy. Was one of the early guys at Uber. There's a whole set of really talented people, both in the Defense Department and in the Army. How do you take advantage of all these talented people? Cause the Army is like on its own, but you're also part of the Defense Department. I don't know how all the lines move and stuff like that. I think General George and I, for context, I see him nearly every night. We have a porch beer or a barbecue, sit out by his fire.
38:00 Speaker 00 We have just tried to actually spend a lot of time together to think. You guys are on the same base there? Yeah, I'd probably throw a football twice and hit his house. Or at least somebody talented could throw a football twice and hit his house. So I think the way we're thinking about it is, and this has been one of the reasons respectfully, we haven't spent a ton of time with the chattering class. It has instead been, let's just go do stuff. So instead of talking about it, instead of going to a think tank and highlighting our early thoughts and that we're baking them and we're getting feedback. Let's just go do, and then as we're doing, what I think we've seen so far, and I'm called 75 days in today.
38:40 Speaker 00 Is people that want to help and have a lot to add, want to get in the game. So hands are going up from all over the Pentagon and the administration. And the private sector saying, tag me in coach. And so our approach so far has been, we are just going to start running as fast as we possibly can. And then people who can catch up to us and get beside us and want to grab and start to help owning some portion of it, we're going to get them as much as they can possibly take. Let's say there's data nerds as listeners, they want to help out or they're patriots, they want to help out. Either they want to help out full time or maybe they want to help out part time. Is there a way to do that? Better way to get them involved somehow. We're actually just about to swear in our first direct commission technology founders.
39:23 Speaker 00 And some of these are very big names and founders of very big companies, multi billionaires. I don't think you can announce them yet, but I know some of these folks. It's very exciting. We're going to put them in as a lieutenant colonel and we're going to just get them in the game. And the goal here is to slowly start to flex the muscle. And so they will be part time. What we're hoping they can do is in addition to learning from our soldiers and teaching them, go back out to industry and open up gateways so that we can train more of our soldiers. So we can set up six and 12 month experiences where soldiers are embedding in the Microsofts and the Open AIs and the Googles and the small, medium and large businesses on the West Coast and the East Coast and the middle of the country to give our soldiers the experiences to bring back into the formation.
40:04 Speaker 00 But then from an actual joining full time side, I think if there is a talented person and they are interested in joining, if they shoot us a note, it will get to me, I would guess, especially if they reference your name. We will make sure that they land in a place where they're helping the United States Army and the American government. There are so many people who just want to help, which I love. You meet people and they're just like, I want to help, but they don't know how. Maybe they didn't go through the traditional channels and stuff like that. They're patriots. They've got a specific skill and it'd be great if just our government can just use whatever they do. Maybe they're great at medicine or they're great at whatever. It'd be great if they could somehow take advantage of this. We have so many talented people in this country that they want to give back.
40:45 Speaker 00 The lowest hanging fruit, in my opinion, is partnering with small, medium and large enterprises. Oftentimes that tech business, oftentimes venture backed and just bringing them in to help us solve a problem. And then being a good enough, efficient enough customer that we can reward them for the value that they're adding. Cause back to your very original question, we spend $185 billion every year. We have the money and we have the needs. It's purely this sinful inefficiency on our end that we are desperately trying to fix. You're coming in from industry, but you've never been dealing with things in the billions or the tens of billions. How do you? You get your head around these numbers.
41:29 Speaker 00 I can remember I was talking to one senator in particular, and she was pointing out the obvious fact of being a then 38, now 39 year old. And just the size and the scale of this. And I said, Senator, respectfully, I don't think there's really almost anyone on the planet who has experience with something that is this size. The team has been remarkable. Inside the Secretary of the Army, we have some just incredibly talented human beings that were already going when I fell in. So the systems and the processes were already there. I did not have to start this from scratch. General George, he'd wrote a law, this plan before you arrived. Obviously, you helped make it better and stuff, but you had the benefit of having this incredible guy there. As you mentioned, if he was 52, maybe he wouldn't be willing to do some of these things.
42:13 Speaker 00 Absolutely. So the plan has come from bottom up from soldiers, soldiers in basic training is a couple of weeks in. Have given feedback to General George and us that has changed the plan very sincerely, all the way up through the ranks of the Army. And then the previous people serving as civilians, nearly everyone who joins the Pentagon is doing it, or many of them, or most of them, for the right reason. They are honorable, they are patriots, and they had helped create this plan too. And Congress members had written white papers on this. Senators had written white papers. It wasn't that this idea is all that revolutionary. This is bipartisan. There's nothing partisan about this. This is like a 90%ed agreement in America that we need to do this stuff. We just need to get it done.
42:58 Speaker 00 That's the thing, is it just required the actual top cover and leadership for President Trump and Secretary Hagseth to say, go and say, hey, we will take the body blows for you. And just move out on behalf of the American soldier. Our last question, we ask all of our guests, what conventional wisdom or advice do you think is generally bad advice? I think the idea of optimizing or trying to achieve balance is just horseshit. I was reflecting on this past year, and so since July, I probably spent eight and a half of nine months in a hotel room. I have not been around my wife and kids who I adore and love. I've been with my wife since we were in high school. I know your wife had. Your kids, they're wonderful people. Yes. It's not that I don't miss them, but I am achieving nothing like balance right now in any aspect of life.
43:43 Speaker 00 But it's just the absolute most fulfilling thing I've ever been given the honor and opportunity to do. And as I was reflecting back in time, I think there have been seasons of life of more rest. And there have been seasons of life of more and better parenting and better spousing. But there have also been seasons of just suffering and it's balanced out with hopefully some fulfillment and what the suffering is for. But I think it is just an absolute sin to tell people to try to achieve this balance. Cause I think it's a recipe for a very boring, unfulfilling life, at least for me. Well, also I think it's impossible. What does really balance mean? It's like you can't ever get it all balanced. You're always going to have plates spinning.
44:23 Speaker 00 We always have complications and other types of things. It's very weird advice. I a hundred percent agree with you. It's another thing to say be eight and a half months in a hotel room, which is also on the extreme on the other side, which sometimes you have to do to get like really important things done. The thing I think is tough to process. And as I've gotten a bit older and I've tried to talk to our nine year old, seven year old about this. Time is very binary. How you choose to use a minute, an hour or a day definitionally means you're not choosing to use it for something else. And that is okay. Don't worry about that. Just be confident in your decisions. And don't be self-conscious that you may choose to be excellent in one thing, and that may come at the cost of another. And it doesn't have to be fixed for your entire life.
45:05 Speaker 00 And by the way, there's no way to optimize that perfectly. So some people are like, oh, I gotta optimize it. They'll like review their calendar. I gotta move an hour here and plus one hour here, minus three hours there. It's impossible. You have to be okay with this. It's not going to be perfect. It's not going to be optimized and that's okay. One of the most amazing things about being back in the United States Army or around it 15, 16 years after leaving it is this is not an organization that aspires for balance. That never comes up in a single conversation. They pride themselves on excellence and lethality and getting the job done. I was telling a friend recently, they were like, how's the job going? And I was like, I've never done a thing where it's like being on a treadmill.
45:47 Speaker 00 And I can turn the treadmill up as fast as I can possibly go and cause as much externalities around me work wise. And they can keep up. I cannot break them. The treadmill can Go to Infinity because they're just that talented. That's amazing. All right. This is great. Thank you, Dan Driscoll, for joining us, World of DAS. I'm a huge fan of yours. It's so great that you're on it. I also follow you on X at SecArmy. I definitely encourage our listeners to engage you there. This has been a ton of fun. Well, thank you for having me, Orin. It's awesome to be here and I look forward to the next one.
46:21 Speaker 00 Thanks for listening. If you haven't already done so, please subscribe to World of DAS wherever you consume your podcasts, YouTube, Apple, Spotify, and more. And please help us get discovered by leaving a review. And check out worldofdaas.com. That's worldofdas, D-A-A-S, dot com. And of course, connect with me on Twitter, at Auren. That's A-U-R-E-N. Would absolutely love to hear from you.
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