US Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll

Auren Hoffman (00:00.91) Hello, data nerds. guest today is Dan Driscoll. He is the 26th secretary of the U S 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 DaaS.

Dan (00:22.244) Thank you. At the time we were talking about it, I never thought I'd get to be on here.

Auren Hoffman (00:26.93) Yes. Yes. Yeah, this is great. Hopefully, hopefully you'll be a regular guest. This is amazing. Now, OK, you're 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?

Dan (00:43.472) 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. then those are just the top level numbers.

Auren Hoffman (01:01.432) So besides like Walmart, there any other employer that's Walmart and Amazon are the two employers that employ more people than the army in the US? Okay, wow, okay. That's just like incredible scale.

Dan (01:04.452) Walmart and Amazon.

Dan (01:09.284) Yup, yup.

Dan (01:13.326) Well, and then even then, like, if you think about the Army, the Army is unique in that we own housing, we own hospitals, we own trash delivery, we own food, we own, like, there's just, we are a state in some ways, but then we also provide all of the things. And so just every day that I'm in the Army, I learn something new that we have.

Auren Hoffman (01:19.638) Right.

Auren Hoffman (01:33.004) Wow. Okay. Now 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 us like the high level outline for us?

Dan (01:44.848) So basically what occurred is, and we were talking with the administration about should it sit up at the presidential level or sit down at the secretary or defense level, but a top-down approach to give air cover to do kind of four core things. So there were four buckets of action. Bucket one was stop buying obsolete equipment that most times, or 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 use those, 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 singing, talking about this for long time. 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 two 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. And so it is a set of reorganizations to make the army leaner and more efficient.

Auren Hoffman (03:41.228) Okay. Let's talk about these. Each one of these, think is very interesting. The first one is this obsolete equipment. Now we've, think all of us have heard this for years that, you know, there's this, all this obsolete equipment that the Congress or an individual Congress person, or maybe even in Congress, a donor of an individual Congress person has kind of pushed on it. Why is now, why are we going to stop it now? Like, I think people have been talking about this for at least 30 years. Like why now are we going to stop this thing?

Dan (04:11.524) 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 Hexad have an incredibly high tolerance for 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.

Auren Hoffman (04:32.77) Because obviously, like in the past, maybe the president buckled under pressure from a congressperson called up the president and the president said, okay, well, we'll let you have this thing or and and so if they as long as if the president steadfast, it's less likely to to to to get rolled back or something.

Dan (04:49.476) 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 kind of 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. 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 as a package.

Auren Hoffman (05:26.508) So if you're both like 52, this like wouldn't happen essentially. So it's like you're both on the barbells where it could actually, you can like take risks.

Dan (05:36.494) 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 in the fight. 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 risk that actually allows for this change.

Auren Hoffman (06:17.186) Yeah, what I don't think I appreciated, think what most Americans kind of knew for many, many years was that, we're wasting all this money on things we don't need. And that's like one thing, right? 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, much higher bar that we shouldn't, you know, we should deal with.

Dan (06:41.2) And 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 and a bad outcome, meaning that our enemies are watching us and if 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. And so it kind of amplifies the bad outcome.

Auren Hoffman (07:01.932) Good point. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (07:11.072) Now, I mean, I think some of these programs people have been talking about, give us a sense. I people would talk about like these humvees that we don't need, these tanks we don't need. Give us a sense of some of these kind of programs that are out there.

Dan (07:22.49) So it's not as binary as it seems before I say this. it is not to say that the Humvee that we've used for 40 years does not serve a purpose or the robotic combat vehicle that we created that's $3 million is an exquisite or the Apache attack helicopter that is manned 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

Auren Hoffman (07:25.474) Yeah.

Dan (07:50.672) using our limited resources and our fixed dollars going forward, we have to then over-correct in our purchasing to create a balance. 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 lot of visibility. And with the world of drones and how we think you'll need to...

Auren Hoffman (08:09.582) Because you don't you can't really see what's going on, right? Because you have these like little peepholes right out of it and stuff.

Dan (08:12.304) Correct.

Yeah. And General George said this in a recent interview, it's similar to the difference between Iraq and Afghanistan. When soldiers were deploying to Iraq, you would wear this big kit. You have plates everywhere. It was heavy. You were kind of just like 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. And so 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 bad-ass pilots flying it in, it's not that 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.

you'll want unmanned versions of helicopters that are able to perhaps transport the helicopter close to the fight and then put humans on it. 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 this, as its actual physical presentation will be the tank or the helicopter, but it's got to be software.

Auren Hoffman (09:36.162) And there are there are situations right now where like it's very hard for soldiers to communicate with other soldiers. Sometimes they actually have to use like acts like their personal phones to communicate like with like 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 just like the coordination problem and what we can do about it?

Dan (09:59.33) Yeah, and this is where I am actually most optimistic that a lot of the commercial offerings are going to help us catch up really quickly. So 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 in 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. so currently there's not a ton of use.

Auren Hoffman (10:40.14) And some ways like that's the advantage the US has. Like we got to lean into that because like very few, really almost no other military knows how to do combined arms. know, like, you know, this is like this is kind of like the core advantage that we have. Right. Yeah.

Dan (10:54.02) Fundamentally and it like the way it will play out is targeting like if you think about 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 The Metas 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

Auren Hoffman (11:19.64) Got it. And what in, in, you know, in, in some ways, like there's a, there's a way that we have to get like into the mindset of the soldier, especially like the senior soldiers in the army, where I think the mindset before was just don't do anything wrong. and at least my read on the military is that a general is going to get in a lot more trouble if one of their soldiers buys like a thousand dollars of unauthorized alcohol.

than if they waste like a billion dollars. Like how accurate is that?

Dan (11:51.278) So 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 won't just talk about, 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,

Auren Hoffman (11:54.487) Okay.

Dan (12:18.48) is there's this concept of like 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 can move humans through space and time really quickly and 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, no, never. And he's like, well, that's the vehicle. Like 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 had 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 hundred senators or all of these other things that kept them from doing the right thing.

Auren Hoffman (12:57.102) Mmm.

Dan (13:16.528) 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 and picking generals for generals who stay in the middle of the herd and who are the least friction causing. And so it's created a very

Auren Hoffman (13:34.806) Yeah, 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, right?

Dan (13:43.566) 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 because otherwise you have to own the bad outcomes. 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, we think that this is considerably good.

Auren Hoffman (14:15.234) Now the third thing you mentioned where like we should have the right to like repair our own equipment to go into, you know, I assume it's even like to be able to see and manipulate our own data, like all those things. Like that just seems so obvious. Like why did we give up that right? Or how do we get to where we are today?

Dan (14:34.692) 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. And so I think that, 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 that 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. so,

We had seven senators over to General George's a couple of weeks ago and we're at the dinner and everybody's telling their favorite broken procurement story. And I stopped everyone else. Senators, respectfully, I don't think you realize these aren't like one-off, cute stories of government incompetence. These are trailing indicators of a fatally flawed, broken system. Like the whole thing is hollowed out. Like 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.

Auren Hoffman (16:00.0) Yeah, because again, it's like if you have to, it's one thing if like, okay, we got to go repair the vehicle and we need to put the bolt on and instead of the $20 bolt, have to pay, you know, $2,000 for the bolt. And that's, 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. Right. And, and all of a sudden we're putting soldiers at risk or not be able to accomplish the mission.

because 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.

Dan (16:37.412) But it's not five days, it's nine months to 15 months is how long. We're waiting for bolts sometimes for $5 million pieces of equipment. this is like, and then to...

Auren Hoffman (16:43.839) jeez. my gosh. Okay, that's insane.

Yeah. So they're literally, it's just like sitting in like some thing on the side and like, and like, there's a mission to be accomplished that we can't do because we're waiting for this.

Dan (17:00.458) And we have the 3D printer within a hundred 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. So that is unfair of me to say. 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.

Auren Hoffman (17:02.668) Right. OK, this is crazy. OK, yeah, yeah.

Dan (17:26.384) And then it can't communicate, 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 in general, George was too. We had our own proprietary software for recruiting soldiers. That's just a classic sales funnel. I mean, it's no more than getting them to, yeah, simple CRM. So what did they do? The army recruiting command under the, like a couple of years ago, switched over to a little tiny company you might've heard.

Auren Hoffman (17:44.556) Yeah, right. Simple CRM.

Dan (17:55.626) of Salesforce. And then what they said is, well, wait a second, Salesforce actually has its own process. Rather than having our own version of this thing developed for us, why don't we just switch around our process and use Salesforce is 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 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.

Auren Hoffman (18:31.662) That's great. But that's really great to hear my experience with like defense department in the past in, in, in trying to sell software and stuff as well. 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 times as much for it. and like every, just seems like everything was out of whack. Like this is like, okay, we're going to, we're going to take this like 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 people have to customize their Salesforce instance, you know, at some point here and there, but we basically will keep everything like as, as easy as possible to get implemented.

Dan (19:16.784) And we're a great customer and we pay on time. 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. so it's like, it costs like companies. then like, I think there's some, there's some credibility that comes with the grant, in my opinion, the greatest army in the history of the world, choosing your product. And so we have done a very poor job.

Auren Hoffman (19:19.693) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (19:29.122) Right. Right. Who wouldn't want that as a customer? Yeah. Yeah.

Dan (19:44.47) of going 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.

Auren Hoffman (19:54.284) Now on the fourth thing that you mentioned, is it just like, okay, we're going to take a thousand people out of the Pentagon and put them into, you know, more forward thing. We'll put them at Fort Bragg. We're going to put them in, or we'll move them over to Germany or whatever. Or is there something like more about attacking the bureaucracy?

Dan (20:15.664) So one of the things we remarked on in our letter to the force, so Secretary of Defense Hexess signed 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 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 at needs of the army enterprise going forward. And so there are a lot of places, like 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 and purchasing apparatus. That is a preposterous number. I don't know what the...

Auren Hoffman (21:07.598) She has 35,000 people that buy stuff from pens to shells to whatever.

Dan (21:14.478) And they talk to customers and they help us do a slight bit of innovation, let's say. But I mean, I would say General George and I don't know what the right number is. 10,000 is probably closer to any.

Auren Hoffman (21:19.736) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (21:25.39) What has it worked like, like there's someone who specifically does procurement. Um, but then there is the ultimate buyer who like is the one consuming that. Like I would assume that they're the ultimate decision maker, right? Or like, okay, I need, I, I've got the, need these types of shelves because these are the things that I need and I'm willing, I've got a budget or how does, how does that work?

Dan (21:48.688) It's, 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. So basically what, 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 lot. Go buy ammunition was a lot. And we would use that pot of money to go buy tanks or ammunition. We now have like 1400 lines that say.

Auren Hoffman (22:14.925) Yeah.

wow, okay.

Dan (22:18.542) go by this specific thing at this specific quantity. And so now we have 1400 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. Like 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? And that is a very healthy idea. so, but over time, again, it's probably a transition to this very risk averse model.

that now that we have 1200 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. And then when we throw human beings at it, we never get rid of human beings. And so it has just become like a stick, a, because the 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.

Auren Hoffman (23:04.386) Yeah.

Dan (23:18.424) and you can't even see what's going on. So it's just like complete and utter chaos.

Auren Hoffman (23:22.286) And what, like, so you've got someone who like overseas, let's go back to the recruiting analogy. So someone who oversees recruitment and they've got goals, which is, I got to recruit a certain number of amazing soldiers of different types of soldiers. And I've got a budget and I've got to start to get them in at the right budget. And they've got to 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 person who's like selecting the software? OK. OK.

Dan (23:52.464) No, no, it is much more of the latter. And it is, 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. And so what we end up doing is like 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 were, just calling the sunk cost. We, the army got it wrong.

Auren Hoffman (24:00.951) Okay.

Auren Hoffman (24:10.19) Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Dan (24:22.02) 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. And then it landed in this place where it was neither a full tank nor the light tank you wanted of just, was in the valley of useless. And then what would have happened, I hypothesized under previous approaches.

Auren Hoffman (24:36.898) Right, of course.

Dan (24:49.932) 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 cost fallacy. Like those dollars don't matter. Yes. Yep.

Auren Hoffman (24:53.101) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (25:00.046) Yep, 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, this is seeing and 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 like there's going to be arrows coming at you, I presume. Right. OK.

Dan (25:22.692) They're coming. Since we announced it, a lot of errors have come. again, 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 Hegsteth, Steve Feinberg, who works in the Pentagon, he loves when people talk about sunk cost fallacy. mean, he says that's exactly how we should be talking.

Auren Hoffman (25:33.581) Yes.

Auren Hoffman (25:41.228) Yep. Yep.

Auren Hoffman (25:47.02) Right, right. Of course you have a guy who ran like one of the best private equity firms, like now is the number two guy at the Pentagon. Like who else would you want? Like figuring all this stuff out, right? Like he, he's obviously knows, okay, I made a bad investment. He's made plenty of bad investments in his life. The way you become a great investor is you get out of those bad investments quickly.

Dan (25:54.798) Yes, exactly.

Dan (26:05.774) Yes. And so the culture, I need to give as much credit as humanly possible up, sideways and down. There is a moment all around that is providing a ton of momentum to these generational changes.

Auren Hoffman (26:12.161) Yep.

Auren Hoffman (26:20.608) Okay, this is really helpful. Now, one of the things that in that somewhat unique to the military is usually these generals who are having these like very important commands, they rotate. Usually they rotate like maximum like they're there for maximum of three years, right? 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're already like in their head already have their head out. Like 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, it's like, it's a feature and a bug of the army, right? cause there's, it's good to get people moving through and changing. Like, how do you think about that personnel side of

Dan (27:07.694) I thought, so I guess high level and then specific to your question, high level, and I mean this very sincerely, and it sounds so sycophantic. It's like hard to believe I'm being sincere. Having, 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 in investment banks and being in venture capital and talent founders and seeing private equity and consultants everywhere. Like I thought I had seen a talented group of people.

Auren Hoffman (27:37.038) 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.

Dan (27:37.136) That's right back at me, but like the American soldier is remarkable. I mean, just very sincerely, like their dedication to mission, their ability to innovate, how much they pride themselves in their job. Like they do not stop until the mission is completed and completed well. with,

Just the model of service and how they've decided to live their life puts them, now that I am heading into 40, 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, but 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. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (28:28.77) Holy mackerel, wow, okay.

Dan (28:30.832) And it is absolutely incredible the ingredients that we have. So now to your original question. I think I was a little more worried about the bug portion of this, that we'd have this expertise that's out 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 life cycle. 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 that is built on this idea that basically you can fall in on any unit and know where everything is. And so,

Auren Hoffman (29:16.021) Yep. Yep.

Dan (29:26.052) They approach all problems like that. And I actually think there's a ton of value.

Auren Hoffman (29:27.406) Yeah, in some ways that's that's such an important feature if it works. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, now, now, like, I mean, you mentioned, mean, my experience, my much more limited experience, the army is that it has some of the most talented people in the world. But I do think sometimes that talent is overlooked. It's underused. It's not it's not nurtured in the right way. Like, how can we get a higher ROI from our best soldiers?

Dan (29:31.758) Yes, yes.

Dan (29:58.574) That's a great question. I think that...

I think what is occurring right now, my hypothesis is when we bring in these tools that are being used by, so I guess to pause, General George and I think of the Army as two distinct buckets or 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. Massive logistics, feeding them, putting them in housing.

Auren Hoffman (30:27.426) Just a massive logistics business, essentially. Yeah.

Dan (30:32.804) The other is that like 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 discreet things. And so I think the way that like we think about it is 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 like an incredible, bad-ass developer,

Like you can live in both worlds. If you were 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, 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. We'll say who's the really effective

recruiter, do they love this job and this role? And can we empower them by maybe extending the amount of time there 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 and software from other portions of the economy, it will start to empower soldiers to be even better at scale.

Auren Hoffman (31:56.152) 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, like 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 a bureaucracy. There's too much bureaucracy. I wasn't able to get this stuff done. I had to spend too much time pushing paper.

That, that to me, that's like the number one, it's not the pay. It's obviously not the mission. They believe in the mission. It's just like something they really care deeply about. and so this fourth thing that you're working on, like what else can we do to, cause cause we're also, you know, part of the bureaucracy does it makes us lose great people. cause at some point they just don't want to deal with it anymore.

Dan (32:47.012) I guess I'd say the first part is, and I say this to a lot of soldiers, it's perfectly okay. And I'm one of the ones that served for three and half years and got out. Like that is a perfectly okay path. It's also 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.

to the bureaucratic function portion. I think this is where, 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.

Auren Hoffman (33:38.114) Yes.

Dan (33:43.492) Like 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 an increase over time. But B, the software systems we have them on are outdated and the NIPR net, which is the conversation for another day, which is our unclassed network that

mimics like the regular internet, 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 common of wearing helmets and doing the jobs they signed up for that. Like when you watch a soldier do the thing they signed up for, I mean, they're beaming. mean, 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, I mean, they love their job because it's

Auren Hoffman (34:33.24) Yeah.

Dan (34:41.316) really one of the few jobs in the world where our government says, get in the game, go do your best to help us. And then on the army, to the other side of it, where we have to move families and the 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 kind of probably to your point.

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. that's just, if it's just not for the right family, I mean, that's just a tough one to want to opt into.

Auren Hoffman (35:32.75) That's tough. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (35:38.99) You just said something that made me think, which I hadn't thought about before. One of the things that the army traditionally has been very good at is writing down the rules, writing down the order of operations, right? Like this is very good for elements. 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, 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.

Dan (36:21.776) Well, and one of the ways we're thinking about this horn is like, 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 new soldiers can fall in and be effective at their job. If you take those written instructions and then we were out visiting Metta 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 was, and 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're 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 one up to close to 1 million soldiers executing on this idea and starting to collect this data.

Auren Hoffman (36:54.38) Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'd a game changer. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Auren Hoffman (37:12.46) Yeah, yeah, that's so cool. Now it is hard for you one thing for Salesforce, big company like that to sell into the army, but it is hard for startups to engage with the military, though easier than it was 10 years ago. It's certainly easier today. And there's definitely some things that make it easier. But what else can we do to get, you know, startups more engaged? Or should they just wait? Should you just wait till I have a couple hundred million revenue and then and then engage with the military?

Dan (37:42.34) I'd say they need to hold us accountable. So General George and I are synced on this. We have an incredible, 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.

If we're not getting in the end of innovation into the hands of our soldiers to figure out what's right and what works for them, we are failing. so sincerely to anybody listening, what I need you to do is tag the army. watch that stuff, tag SecArmy. If you are stuck in our procurement process or out testing our innovation, tell us, because what we are trying to do as an example. Yep.

Auren Hoffman (38:31.562) So, like you just, Virginia, you watch like on X, like you guys have like a system to watch like, some startups are complaining about the art and you have, it somehow bubbles up to this, not just public affairs, but it bubbles up to some other place in the army that, that like sees this report or something.

Dan (38:40.302) Yeah. Yes.

Dan (38:50.114) So we got invited onto a podcast, three days ago from, from, from some Silicon Valley guys that said, I can't even remember it. Maybe they didn't invite us, but they tagged us and they said, Hey, army, we're here. You're doing good things and innovation. 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 because we want to change the culture. And then the other one is, we went and saw applied intuition.

Auren Hoffman (39:05.506) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (39:11.128) That's so cool. Okay.

Yep.

Dan (39:18.704) 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 like a military vehicle? And they said, no. And said, why not? said, ah, it takes years and years and years and the process is terrible. And so we just told the team and General Turin 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 want us to do? And we said, take 10 days and just do whatever you can to it and send us a video.

10 days went by, they had fully automated these two things. 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. And it was mind blowing. I mean, just, and so...

Auren Hoffman (39:50.744) No, this is so cool.

Auren Hoffman (39:56.8) wow.

Auren Hoffman (40:06.191) my gosh.

Auren Hoffman (40:12.086) Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's so cool. Okay.

Dan (40:17.048) 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 were starting to figure out how to use these things.

Auren Hoffman (40:31.778) Literally, like if I was like, think like the soldiers I knew, if they heard about this, literally their head would just explode. Like right now, like they couldn't believe that it's good. I mean, it is one thing if people were shooting at them, they can maybe believe it. Like the government would move fast, but this is not an area where anyone's being shot at, right? It's a, this is something where we're trying to, you know, move for the future. and traditionally the government's been, has been good at, know, okay, if people are getting killed and we need to make changes fast, which is great, but.

but we're not always good. So this is amazing that you guys are doing that.

Dan (41:04.816) Well, and this is back to that comment of we're either going to do an hour in the first six months of a conflict. When we talk to Feinberg, what we're trying to do is we have this Flora aircraft. So it's our future aircraft, rotary tilt, tilt rotary. And like you see it you're like, Oh, this is awesome. It goes faster. It goes farther. And they show it to me and I was like, Oh, well, when was the first, when was the test flight? 2018. We're in 2025, seven years ago.

Auren Hoffman (41:09.731) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (41:31.191) Yeah.

Dan (41:31.352) We discovered the thing we wanted and needed and haven't been actioning on it. And so when you talk to Feinberg, Deputy Secretary of 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, we have a manual for how do we parachute into American industry to get the best innovations, get the manufactured and get them in the hands of our soldiers.

Auren Hoffman (42:25.518) You mentioned Steve Feinberg with Emil Michael, who's to be coming into the Defense Department soon, who's also a past World of Dast guest and very, very technical guy, was one of the early guys at Uber. There's a whole like there's a whole set of really talented people that are both in the Defense Department and in the Army. Mike, how how how do you like take advantage of all these talented people like you're

you're because the army is like on its own, but you're also part of the Defense Department. Like, I don't know how all the lines move and stuff like that.

Dan (43:04.464) I guess I'd say first TB.

Auren Hoffman (43:06.69) And do you like go to like the, there's obviously there's like people like Michael Kratz, he was at the white house who were super smart and like, are you like, how do do you take advantage of all this like talent that's there?

Dan (43:16.58) I think General George and I, our take has been, and so for context, I see him nearly every night. We have a porch beer or a barbecue, sit out by its fire. We have just tried to actually spend a lot of time together to think.

Auren Hoffman (43:29.336) Cause you're like the houses, you guys are on the same base there. Okay. That's cool.

Dan (43:32.464) Yeah. Yup. So I could probably throw a football twice and hit his house. Or at least somebody talented could throw a football twice and hit his house. Well, and 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 like the, with the shattering class is has instead been, let's just go do stuff. So instead of talking about it,

Auren Hoffman (43:36.352) Okay.

Dan (43:59.15) 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, let's call it 75 days in today, 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're just going to start running as fast as we possibly can.

Auren Hoffman (44:18.253) Yeah.

Dan (44:28.92) and that people who can kind of 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.

Auren Hoffman (44:37.198) Let's say there's, you know, we have these like kind of data nerds as listeners, they want to help out or their patriots, they want to help out, either they want to help out full time or maybe they want to help out part time. Like is there a way to do that or is there a way to get them involved somehow?

Dan (44:51.118) Yeah. So we're actually just about to, swear in our first, direct commission technology founders. And some of these are very big names and founders in very big companies, multi billionaires. Yep. And we're just, we're going to put them into the Lieutenant Colonel and we're going to just get them in the game. And so, and the goal here is to slowly start to flex the muscle. And, and so they will be part time.

Auren Hoffman (45:02.146) Yep. Yeah, I know. I don't think you can answer me, but I know some of these folks. It's very exciting. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, I love that.

Dan (45:19.108) 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 more or less small, medium and large businesses on the West Coast and East Coast in the middle of the country to give our soldiers the experiences to bring back into the formation. But then from like 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, would guess, especially if they reference your name. And we will make sure that they land in a place where they're helping the United States Army and the American government.

Auren Hoffman (45:57.748) You

Auren Hoffman (46:03.692) Yeah, that'd be like, there are so many people who just want to help, which I love. Like you meet people and they're just like, I want to help. But they're like, they don't know how they, you may, they, maybe they didn't like go through the traditional channels and stuff like that. They're Patriots. They've got a specific skill. And it'd be great if like just our government can just use whatever they do, whatever, maybe there's a great, they're great at medicine or they're great at whatever. It'd great if like we could somehow take advantage of this. Like, you know, we have so many talented people in this country that they want to give back.

Dan (46:33.412) Well, I think that the nearest step is, I guess said the lowest said differently, 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.

Auren Hoffman (46:46.636) Yes.

Dan (47:01.284) We spend $185 billion every year. We have the money and we have the needs. It's purely this like sinful inefficiency on our end that we are desperately trying to fix.

Auren Hoffman (47:04.462) It's insane. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (47:15.372) And I mean, you're you're you're how do you even like you're you're you're you're coming in, you're coming in from industry, but you know, you've never been dealing with things in the billions or the tens of billions. Like, how do you get your head around like these numbers?

Dan (47:30.896) I can remember I was talking to one Senator in particular and she was pointing out that the obvious fact of being a then 38, now 39 year old, and just the size and the scale of this, said, Senator, respectfully, I don't think there's really almost anyone on the planet who has experience with something that is this size. And so it's honestly, the team has been remarkable. Inside the Secretary of the Army, we have some just incredibly talented human beings that

Auren Hoffman (47:47.52) Right, good boy, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Dan (48:00.376) 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. So it was not a lot of my experience that was necessary to.

Auren Hoffman (48:03.244) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (48:09.026) Well, you had the benefit also like General George, like he had he had wrote a lot of this plan before you arrived. Right. I mean, and obviously you helped to make it better and stuff. I mean, you had the benefit of like having this like incredible guy there. It's just like, as you mentioned, if he was 52, maybe he wouldn't be willing to do some of these things.

Dan (48:24.208) I mean, absolutely. So, I mean, the plan has come from bottom up from soldiers from basic, soldiers in basic training 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 are, I mean, nearly everyone who joins the Pentagon is doing it, or many of them, or most of them, for the right reason. They are

Auren Hoffman (48:38.477) Yep.

Auren Hoffman (48:51.918) Of course. Yeah.

Dan (48:52.856) honorable, they are patriots, and they had helped create this plan too. Congress members had written white papers on this. Senators had written white papers. It wasn't that this idea is like all that revolutionary. Yes.

Auren Hoffman (49:03.918) Right. But this is like bipartisan, like there's no there's nothing partisan about this. I mean, it's like, yeah, this is like a 90 percent in agreement in America that we need to do this stuff. We just need to get it done. Yeah. Yeah.

Dan (49:14.316) And a lot of it's, that's the thing is it just required like the actual top cover and leadership for president Trump and secretary Hegseth to say go and say, Hey, we will take the body blows for you and just move out on behalf of the American soldier.

Auren Hoffman (49:29.206) Our last question we ask all of our guests, what conventional wisdom or advice do you think is generally bad advice?

Dan (49:35.384) I think the idea of optimizing for, I was thinking about this before getting on. 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 don't know how many months we are. Let's call it nine months. 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 have been.

Auren Hoffman (50:00.834) Yes, I know your wife and your kids. They're wonderful people. Yes, yes. Yeah.

Dan (50:05.088) And it's not that I don't miss them, but I am achieving nothing like balance right now in any aspect of life. 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 kind of suffering. And it's balanced out with hopefully

Auren Hoffman (50:23.821) Yep.

Dan (50:33.632) 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 because I think it's a recipe for a very boring, unfulfilling life, at least for me.

Auren Hoffman (50:45.41) Well, also, I think it's impossible because what does really balance mean? It's like, you can't ever get it all balanced, right? It's just like, you're always going to have plates spinning. Like we always have complications and, and, and other types of things. So balance really just means just doing in some ways it's like, okay, you're well, it's like, it's very, it's very weird advice. I a hundred percent agree with you. Now, you know, it's, it's another thing to say.

Dan (51:08.304) And why did I think that?

Auren Hoffman (51:11.852) be eight and a half months in a hotel room, which is also kind of on the extreme on the other side, which sometimes you have to do to get like really important things done.

Dan (51:19.118) Well, and I guess like 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, 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. But just like, don't worry about that. Just be confident in your decisions and don't be self-conscious that like, you may choose to be excellent in one thing and that may come at the cost of another. And that doesn't have to be fixed for your entire life.

Auren Hoffman (51:28.952) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (51:34.552) Correct.

Auren Hoffman (51:40.567) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (51:48.334) And by the way, there's no way to optimize that perfectly. So some people are like, Oh, I've got to optimize it. They'll like review their calendar. got to like, I got to move an hour here and an hour, like plus one hour here, minus three hours there. Like it's impossible to do, right? You have to be okay with, um, things that are just not, this is not going to be perfect. It's not going to be optimized and that's okay.

Dan (52:11.344) Yeah. And that, guess, as like perhaps one of my concluding remarks, one of the most amazing things about being back in the United States Army or around it, 15, 16 years after leaving it is that 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. And so 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.

Auren Hoffman (52:26.316) Yes.

Auren Hoffman (52:32.12) Yeah.

Dan (52:40.514) 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.

Auren Hoffman (52:51.116) Yeah.

That's amazing. All right. This is great. Thank you, Dan Driscoll for joining us. World of DaaS. I'm a huge fan of yours. It's so great that you're on it. I also follow you on X at sec army. I definitely encourage our listeners to engage you there. This has been a ton of fun.

Dan (53:10.276) Well, thank you for having me, Auren. It's awesome to be here, and I look forward to the next one.