Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll Talks Military Test Ranges

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio, News.

**Daniel Driscoll** (0:07)
This is a really big deal.
It was a couple of months ago, I was out at one of our test ranges, and what I heard was that industry on average was having to wait between 12 and 18 months sometimes, from the moment they wanted to get on our test range until we could give them access. And fundamentally, the problem with this is, if you think of these innovative companies, if you think of the Primes, everyone needs to be able to test their product, and they need to be able to learn from that. And the innovation loop that comes from actually using your thing in the real world makes all the difference. And so when we slow things down in the innovation loop by 12 or 18 months at a time, that is just bad for soldiers, it's bad for taxpayers, and it's bad for companies. And so what we're announcing today is basically a new front door to access all of the US Armies, or many of the US Army's ranges. We're layering in international partners, we're gonna give concierge access, and we are going to aspire to get these companies onto our range within 30 days every single time.

**Tyler Kendall** (1:05)
So then after they're on that range, I think a lot of these companies are probably wondering how quickly can they get into business with the US Army? If you like what you see, how do those purchases work from there? What sort of timeline are you eyeing for that?

**Daniel Driscoll** (1:18)
So under President Trump, what we've been able to do is, we've been able to reallocate dollars we already had. And so we created almost a $750 million venture-like model that has allowed us to get industry on contract sometimes in under 30 days. That is unbelievable. I mean, I think if you looked historically, the fastest time I had heard anyone ever reference was like nine months, but on average it could be up to two years sometimes. And so our commitment to industry is, we know that they need dollars from the US Army in order to continue their innovation. We know that if we're asking them to come out and spend time with soldiers, get their products in the dirt and the mud and to innovate, we have got to be there for them and the other side with actual hard dollars.

**Tyler Kendall** (1:59)
How are current conflicts highlighting the need for initiatives like this and for the US Army to scale? Is there a new urgency here?

**Daniel Driscoll** (2:08)
I think if you look at what's occurring in Ukraine, they have this existential risk to their nation that allows them to innovate very quickly. You would never want to have that risk as a nation. So what we're trying to do is synthetically create the conditions for innovation that can get as close to matching that environment as possible. So one of the things we're doing here at Camp Grayling in September is we're creating an electronic warfare in a EW environment that is as close to what Ukraine has as we can create. We're inviting in small, medium and large businesses from across our country. We're having soldiers come down. We are trying to empower these incredible American innovators to do what they do best, which is to out-innovate the rest of the world.

**Tyler Kendall** (2:50)
So the Army lives off of annual budgets, right? How do you ensure that you're able to scale and grow initiatives like this in what is, I think it's fair to say, a pretty unpredictable funding cycle? And how much weight, maybe, does that put on the $67 billion supplemental package in terms of what the Army needs to get done?

**Daniel Driscoll** (3:11)
So the quirk of the design of our democratic form of government is our funding is annual. It is oftentimes continuing resolutions, which means we can't do new starts on our spending.
And that is full stop bad for soldiers. That is bad for our national security, and we must as a nation fix it. That being said, what we have tried to do is just accept that that has been the reality. I think 18 of the last 21 years, we've had continuing resolutions. And so what the United States Army has been trying to do under Secretary Hex's leadership is innovate as fast as humanly possible with what we do have. And we feel very good that working with Congress and Senate and consolidating down some of our budget line items, we are getting more flexibility than we have had in the last couple of years, not as much as we had a couple of decades ago. And we are taking that and earning back the trust of Congress to give us even more going forward.