The Man Who Tried to Save the Pentagon

**Julia Ioffe** (0:01)
He's really vain and thin-skinned and vindictive, unlike anybody else in Washington, especially in this administration. And he didn't like the flattering coverage that Dan Driscoll was getting, and he just didn't want any attention for anybody else.

**Peter Hamby** (0:17)
Welcome to The Powers That Be Daily, Puck's podcast focused on the intersection of Wall Street, Washington, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood, and the players who run it all. I'm Peter Hamby. It's Thursday, September 3rd. Today, I'm joined by Julia Ioffe, who takes us behind the scenes of a major shakeup at the very top of the Pentagon, where Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Army Secretary Dan Driscoll have been feuding for more than a year over the military's future. Driscoll, a close friend of Vice President JD Vance, resigned this week, at admission that he could no longer work alongside Hegseth. And now, with Donald Trump's backing, it doesn't look like Hegseth is going anywhere anytime soon.
We'll discuss all that and much more on today's episode of The Powers That Be.
Happy Thursday, everybody, and welcome to The Powers That Be. I'm joined today by my colleague Julia Ioffe, who has been way, way, way ahead of the curve on reporting the tensions inside the Pentagon between Defense Secretary, War Secretary, Pete Hegseth, and Army Secretary, Dan Driscoll, a bestie of JD Vance, who submitted his resignation to President Trump this week over an escalating feud with Hegseth, who was trying to exert one-man control of the entire body of the US Department of Defense. Anyway, Julia is going to help unpack why this happened, the backstory, what's next, et cetera. Julia, credit to you, of course. I've been reading your pieces since, geez, late last year on these tensions. Let's step back for our audience here. Where did Dan Driscoll come from, and why was there such friction between him and Pete Hegseth from the outset?

**Julia Ioffe** (2:16)
So Dan Driscoll comes from North Carolina, from the mountainous kind of western side of the state. He served in the army, in the mountain division, famous division of the army. One of those many millennial men who went to war after 9-11 when the US was fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. That puts him in a class with JD Vance, with Pete Hegseth, with a lot of other millennial men who joined up during the global war on terror, the GWOT.
He unsuccessfully ran for Congress from North Carolina, lost to Madison Cawthorn eventually. Remember Madison Cawthorn?

**Peter Hamby** (2:57)
North Carolina 11th, that's right.

**Julia Ioffe** (2:59)
Yeah.
But more importantly, he went to Yale Law School with JD Vance and Usha Vance and became a very close friend of theirs. And in 2024, after doing some time in private equity and the private sector, he got a call from his buddy JD and was asked to come join the Trump Vance campaign in 2024 And he went on the road with them and was rewarded after a successful campaign with the post of army secretary, the highest civilian post of the army, which is the largest of the service branches of the US armed forces.

**Peter Hamby** (3:40)
And sorry to end up, Julia, what does this army secretary actually do?

**Julia Ioffe** (3:44)
So it's a good question. The army secretary is the highest civilian in the army. And then there's also the army chief of staff, who is the highest ranking military officer. That is the person in charge of the troops. The army secretary manages the resources, make sure it's being, you know, it's keeping up to date with what modern war requires of it, make sure the army is getting its resources, you know, sexy bureaucratic stuff like that.

**Peter Hamby** (4:12)
Got it. So speaking of sexy bureaucratic stuff, I read in the last few days after this vaccination, Driscoll had been trying to introduce some new technologies to the Pentagon, maybe some new contracts, modernize the armed forces. What did he come in trying to do before getting into necessarily why him and Pete Hegseth had such clashing personalities?

**Julia Ioffe** (4:35)
Well, when Dan Driscoll came in, he wanted to hypermodernize the military. He talked a big game about wanting to get rid of the primes, which are the five big manufacturers in the defense industrial complex. That's Lockheed, Boeing, Raytheon, big companies like that who do most of the defense tech. He wanted to get them out of defense procurement, of Pentagon procurement, and get in all of these young startups that are sprouting up like mushrooms after the rain around the beltway here, who are peddling all kinds of autonomous vehicles, sea drones, drone drones.
To incorporate a lot of the lessons that the military is learning from Ukraine about how war is being waged in the 21st century, which is very different than the wars that were waged in Iraq and Afghanistan. In doing so, Dan Driscoll actually dovetailed perfectly with the person he inherited, the chief of staff of the army at the time, General Randy George, the highest ranking military officer in the army, who had been working on this modernization drive of his own for a couple of years before Driscoll came in and was focusing again on drones, on autonomous vehicles, on robots, things that would do a lot of the fighting, keep actual people out of harm's way.