Former Army Secretary Driscoll Praises Ukraine's Military Innovation at Kyiv Forum

Dan Driscoll stood before an audience of Ukrainian, European, and American defense officials at the Yalta European Strategy forum in Kyiv, wearing a tie embroidered with traditional Ukrainian patterns, and delivered a blunt assessment: the world's most powerful militaries have fallen dangerously behind. Speaking publicly for the first time since his departure from the Trump administration, the former Army secretary warned that warfare itself had reached an inflection point, and that established military powers had failed to match the speed and innovation Ukraine had demonstrated across nearly three years of war.

Driscoll's 18 months leading the Army had been consumed by a single conviction—that the United States needed to learn from what was happening on Ukrainian battlefields and move faster. He had pushed for procurement reforms, which the Army began rolling out in January, designed to compress the time between identifying a need and getting new weapons to soldiers. Now, speaking alongside Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO who runs Perennial Autonomy, a defense firm deeply embedded in Ukraine's war effort, Driscoll made the case that Ukraine possessed military technology the U.S. did not yet have.

The centerpiece of his argument was DELTA, a Ukrainian software platform that aggregates battlefield data from radars, sensors, and soldiers into a unified picture. Driscoll said flatly that it surpassed anything the American military currently possessed. The platform represented exactly the kind of scrappy, iterative problem-solving that he believed the U.S. needed to internalize—the willingness to build fast, test quickly, and improve continuously rather than waiting for perfect solutions. As Ukraine expanded its processing power and artificial intelligence capabilities, Driscoll suggested, it had a genuine opportunity not just to survive but to outpace Russian forces through sheer innovation.

The urgency of that message had been underscored by recent events. When the U.S. faced a sudden need for drone defenses—prompted by the escalating conflict with Iran—the Pentagon did not turn to its largest defense contractors. Instead, Driscoll called Schmidt. Perennial Autonomy supplied 13,000 Merops interceptor drones and 10,000 Bumblebee reconnaissance and strike drones, both weapons systems already proven in Ukrainian combat. The speed of that transaction illustrated Driscoll's point: the private sector and smaller, nimble firms could move faster than traditional military procurement.

Yet the forum also exposed a troubling contradiction in American policy. When moderator Fareed Zakaria noted that the U.S. planned to purchase roughly 300,000 drones in the coming year, former CIA Director David Petraeus interjected from the audience that Ukraine's production capacity was closer to 10 million drones annually—a gap so vast it suggested a fundamental mismatch in how the two countries understood modern warfare. The U.S. had begun to turn away from the very people and processes dedicated to learning from Ukraine. In August, the Army had shuttered a unit tasked with studying lessons from Ukrainian drone warfare. Two of its most prominent backers, both senior Army leaders, had been fired or forced into early retirement.

Driscoll himself had departed the administration on August 31 following disagreements with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over the removal of senior officers and the Army's modernization strategy. The White House offered no public explanation. An Iraq War veteran and former venture capitalist, Driscoll had come to the job as a longtime friend of Vice President JD Vance, whom he had known since Yale Law School. He had also participated in the administration's negotiations aimed at ending the war itself. His departure suggested that the administration's commitment to learning from Ukraine, at least within the formal military structure, was weakening.

At the forum, Driscoll defended the administration's support for Ukraine while acknowledging it had fallen short of Kyiv's hopes. He described the relationship as "unflinching in the desire for you to be successful," even if not always as robust as Ukraine wanted. But he had concluded that his own contribution would be greater working outside government. "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 said. The statement carried an implicit acknowledgment: the structures and politics of official Washington were moving too slowly for the moment the world was in.