Former Army Secretary Dan Driscoll made his first public appearance since leaving the Trump administration at a defense forum in Kyiv, praising Ukraine's battlefield innovations and warning that the world's largest militaries, including America's, are not keeping pace.
Driscoll spoke Saturday at the Yalta European Strategy forum, an annual conference organized by the Victor Pinchuk Foundation to discuss Ukraine's place in Western security. Seated alongside former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, now head of the American defense firm Perennial Autonomy, Driscoll delivered a blunt assessment of where modern warfare is headed, and where the Pentagon is lagging.
The appearance came less than two weeks after Driscoll's resignation was announced on Aug. 31. The White House offered no reason for his departure, though it followed reported friction with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over the removal of senior officers and the Army's modernization push. Driscoll served 18 months as Army secretary, an Iraq War veteran and former venture capitalist who first met Vice President JD Vance at Yale Law School.
He did not dwell on his exit. Instead, he turned the conversation toward what Ukraine's front lines are teaching the rest of the world about the future of combat.
At the center of Driscoll's remarks was Ukraine's "DELTA" battlefield management platform, which he argued surpasses any equivalent technology currently fielded by the U.S. military. He framed Ukraine's wartime tech development as a model the Pentagon should be racing to replicate, CBS News reported.
Driscoll told the Kyiv audience that the world is at "an inflection point in warfare" and that the planet's biggest armed forces "have not adopted the speed and the innovation that they need." He urged Ukraine to press its advantage in artificial intelligence and data processing:
"An amazing opportunity for your nation to outrun the Russians, and out-innovate them, and out-partner so that you can crush them."
He also pushed the United States to absorb what Ukraine has learned under fire. Driscoll said the challenge for the U.S. military is "to internalize these lessons that what you're doing here [in Ukraine] in a very scrappy, fast, iterative nature."
The numbers behind those lessons are stark. CNN's Fareed Zakaria, who moderated the panel, noted that the United States is likely to buy roughly 300,000 drones this year. Ukraine, by contrast, is projected to produce 7 million. Former CIA Director David Petraeus, sitting in the audience, shouted a correction, Ukraine's projection, he said, is closer to 10 million.
That gap, between 300,000 and as many as 10 million, captures the scale of the problem Driscoll was describing. A country fighting for survival on its own soil is outproducing the most expensive military on earth by a factor that would embarrass any procurement office in the Pentagon.
Schmidt's presence on the panel underscored a recurring theme: when the U.S. military needed to move fast, it turned to the private sector rather than its own supply chain. Driscoll recounted a moment during what the forum described as the war with Iran, when he realized the United States lacked adequate defenses against Iranian Shahed drones. He called Schmidt directly.
Schmidt's response, as he told the forum audience, was immediate:
"He literally called me and I said, of course, yes."
Perennial Autonomy supplied 13,000 "Merops" interceptor drones and 10,000 "Bumblebee" reconnaissance and strike drones. Schmidt followed his anecdote with a pointed question about institutional readiness: "The question is, could the government have had a multi-year plan to anticipate this?"
That question hangs over the broader debate about Pentagon procurement. In January, the Army began rolling out reforms aimed at getting new weapons into soldiers' hands faster. But in August, just weeks before Driscoll's departure, the Army phased out a drone battalion specifically tasked with studying lessons from Ukraine's drone warfare.
Two of the most prominent backers of that drone battalion, Gen. Randy George, the former Army Chief of Staff, and Gen. Christopher Donahue, former commander of U.S. Army Europe and Africa, were fired or forced into early retirement earlier this year. Driscoll did not address their departures at the forum.
The sequence raises an obvious question. If the lesson from Ukraine is that drone warfare represents a generational shift in how wars are fought, why did the Army disband the unit studying those lessons, and push out the generals who championed the work? The reported disagreements between Driscoll and Hegseth over officer removals and modernization suggest the answers are tangled in internal Pentagon politics rather than strategic clarity.
Driscoll addressed the U.S.-Ukraine relationship directly, offering a defense of the administration's posture while acknowledging Ukrainian frustrations. His phrasing was careful, diplomatic enough for an audience in a country at war, candid enough to concede the gap between what Kyiv wanted and what Washington delivered:
"I believe the relationship that the U.S. has had with your country throughout this, has remained, not perhaps, as strong as you wanted, but from my position, it's been unflinching in the desire for you to be successful."
He noted that he took part in the administration's efforts to negotiate an end to Russia's war in Ukraine during his time as Army secretary. He did not elaborate on the status or substance of those negotiations.
Driscoll's broader message, that Ukraine's innovations matter and the U.S. should learn from them, carried more weight coming from a man who had just left the building. He was not speaking as a critic lobbing grenades from the outside. He was speaking as someone who spent a year and a half inside the system, saw what worked and what did not, and chose to say so in Kyiv rather than Washington.
The appointment of Adam Telle as acting Army secretary following Driscoll's exit means the Army's modernization agenda now sits in different hands. Whether the procurement reforms Driscoll championed survive his departure remains an open question.
Asked about his decision to leave, Driscoll framed it not as a retreat but as a redeployment. He told the forum that his contribution would be greater from the private sector:
"My highest and best use to make the world a little bit safer at this very scary time was to do it on the outside."
He did not specify what that outside role would look like. He did not address the broader tensions between senior commanders and Hegseth that have marked recent months at the Pentagon. And he did not discuss the firings of George and Donahue, two generals whose work on drone warfare aligned closely with the very agenda Driscoll was promoting from the stage in Kyiv.
What he did do was stand in a country under active bombardment and make the case that its scrappy, fast, battlefield-driven approach to technology is producing results that the richest military in history has not matched. He praised Ukraine's DELTA platform. He cited the drone production gap. He described the moment when the United States had no answer for Iranian Shahed drones and had to call a former tech CEO for help.
The Army's recent policy reversals and leadership upheaval only sharpen the contrast Driscoll drew. Ukraine is building 7 million drones, possibly 10 million, because it has no choice. The U.S. is buying 300,000 because its procurement system moves at peacetime speed even when the world does not.
When the former Army secretary has to fly to Kyiv to make the case for the reforms he tried to push in Washington, the problem is not the messenger. It is the institution that let him walk out the door.
