The move is the latest push by the department to tap into capabilities and know-how from Silicon Valley and the commercial sector.

The new corps “brings top tech talent into the Army Reserve to bridge the commercial-military tech gap” and is “designed to fuse cutting-edge tech expertise with military innovation,” the Army stated in a press release.

On Friday, the service is set to swear-in Meta’s chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth, OpenAI’s chief product officer Kevin Weil, Palantir’s CTO Shyam Sankar and Bob McGrew, an advisor at Thinking Machines Lab who was previously OpenAI’s chief research officer.

Meta, which owns Facebook, recently announced a new partnership with defense tech company Anduril to develop extended reality (XR) products for soldiers.

OpenAI is the maker of the wildly popular generative AI tool ChatGPT. The Army and the Defense Department writ large are pursuing new genAI tools to boost productivity and efficiency.

Palantir is a major provider of software tools for the DOD — including the Maven Smart System — and is also developing hardware, such as the Army’s AI-enabled TITAN vehicle.

“Det. 201 is an effort to recruit senior tech executives to serve part-time in the Army Reserve as senior advisors. In this role they will work on targeted projects to help guide rapid and scalable tech solutions to complex problems. By bringing private-sector know-how into uniform, Det. 201 is supercharging efforts like the Army Transformation Initiative, which aims to make the force leaner, smarter, and more lethal,” the service stated in Friday’s press release.

The swearing-in of the four new officers “is just the start of a bigger mission to inspire more tech pros to serve without leaving their careers, showing the next generation how to make a difference in uniform,” per the release.

The Army didn’t provide additional details about how large the detachment will grow to or how fast the service will expand it by bringing in new personnel from the tech sector.

Friday’s announcement comes in the midst of a new Army Transformation Initiative that was launched in recent weeks — which is being spearheaded by Secretary Daniel Driscoll and Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George — that calls for eliminating systems that are deemed obsolete for soldiers on the battlefield in the future and procuring “dual-use” capabilities. Driscoll has advocated for buying more commercial off-the-shelf tech, among other reforms.

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While largely expressing support for the initiative, lawmakers said they need more info.

“Unfortunately, we still have not received any real information on the Army’s budget request, nor have we received any detailed information on the Army’s Transformation Initiative, or ATI, the secretary and the chief announced over a month ago,” Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said. “I believe I speak for most of the members of this committee when I say that we share the goal of developing a more modern, agile and well-equipped Army.”

At the end of April, the service announced what it dubbed Army Transformation Initiative, seeking to shrink its headquarters elements, become leaner, cut programs that aren’t efficient and change how it spends, following a directive from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth for sweeping changes to the service.

Rogers told Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George and Secretary of the Army Daniel Driscoll at Wednesday’s HASC hearing that the committee wants to see the service’s “homework” given the significance of what leaders are trying to do.

“We need to see your homework. An overhaul this significant should be based on a thorough assessment of requirements. And it should include a detailed blueprint of the specific changes being proposed and how the Army plans to implement them. We need to see those assessments and blueprints,” he said. “We also need you to provide us a timeline for implementing ATI. These details will help Congress understand, evaluate, and ultimately fund, your transformation efforts.”

That concern was shared by other top members of the committee as well.

“I want to applaud both of you publicly for diving into that very difficult subject. It needs to be done. Now, the chairman is right, the details need to be worked out, but there is no question that the nature of warfare is changing dramatically. How do we adjust our force to meet those challenges?” Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., the panel’s ranking member, said. “Your efforts in that are broadly supported by this committee. Devil’s in the details, but you’re headed in the right direction and we look forward to working with you to make some of those changes.”

Others expressed dismay regarding how the Army has presented the reform effort and requested more details from leadership.

“Like many of my colleagues, I am frustrated by how the Army has decided to roll out this Army Transformation Initiative. It doesn’t matter which side of the aisle that we’re on here, we all want to make sure that the Army is lethal, it is ready to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow,” Rep. Eric Sorensen, D-Ill., said. “However, you chose to give us a plan with few details, with no budgeting and a failure to answer a lot of our questions. Now we’re hearing about how this plan will be implemented from my own constituents, not from leadership. The Army and Congress have always had a better relationship than that.”

When service leaders announced their intentions for reforms, they stated that they were aimed at better posturing the service to deter China in the Pacific theater. But some on the Hill want them to be more forthcoming.

“The Army Transformation Initiative has generated more questions than answers in the department’s attempt to deliver critical warfighting capabilities, optimize our force structure and eliminate waste and obsolete programs,” Rep. Derek Tran, D-Calif., said. “In particular, I am concerned with how the ATI positions the Army to better counter a near-peer adversary like the People’s Republic of China. China’s ability to rapidly field new capabilities can be attributed to its centralized political and military decision-making, state-directed industrial base, incremental fielding of new systems and their blatant theft of foreign intellectual property, all with little to no public oversight.”

When asked for a timeline for details of what the service is proposing, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll told the committee that the transformation will be an iterative process and that there won’t be a single date for everything in the initial batch of transformation.

“We will be hopefully doing what the best companies in America do and learning as we go,” Driscoll said, noting some efforts are in progress. He promised to share details as soon as “reasonable drafts” are in place.

He said many of the cuts to obsolete programs will be reflected in the forthcoming fiscal 2026 budget.

“We’re obviously continuing with FY25 [spending] because that’s what we were directed to do with our budget,” George said, adding that they’re canceling Humvees and haven’t asked to purchase new ones.

HASC members said they wanted to ensure that the Army was making transformation choices based on real policy decisions that will help the service counter battlefield threats more effectively rather than being purely rooted in budgetary constraints.

“If budget is driving policy, you’re going to have a problem by this committee. If policy is being driven first and budget is a consequence, then we’re going to be open ears,” Rogers said. “But you can’t just try to make your policy or your construct fit a number that’s arbitrary. We need you to let us know what you need and then let us worry about funding it, because that’s what we’re here for. Just know that there’s other people that see this same way you do, which is why we need a budget so we can talk about these things. But I can’t overstate, we are not going to be hostile to dramatic changes if it’s being driven by the need for change and not just to meet some budget number that somebody’s handed to you.”

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For starters, leaders believe it is a validation of some of the radical change the service is seeking in how to procure and manage capabilities differently in the future.

“Yesterday was a really good example of just how quickly technology is changing the battlefield. We’ve seen this over the last couple of years that everybody talks about [Program Objective Memorandum] cycles and everybody talks about program of record. I think that’s just old thinking,” Gen. Randy George, chief of staff of the Army, said Monday during the Exchange, an AI conference hosted by the Special Competitive Studies Project.

POM cycles refer to the five-year planning process for programs and capabilities in the Pentagon.

George noted that technology is changing too rapidly on the modern battlefield to be wedded to these large procurement programs that historically have taken years to develop and once fielded, can be largely obsolete.

He wants to shrink the timeline it takes to develop systems and get them in the hands of soldiers, especially given much of these capabilities, such as drones, communications gear and electronic warfare tools, are increasingly available on the commercial market.

“What we got to do is make sure that we’re aligned and that’s what we’re trying to do, changing the processes up here to make sure that we’re getting them the equipment, the war-winning capabilities that they know they need,” he said. “We’re going to have to be more agile. Drones are going to constantly change. We’re going to be trying to play the cat-and-mouse game with counter-UAS, so we’re going to have to work through that to make sure that we’re buying systems. We’re going to need a lot more agility in how we buy things.”

The Army has been experimenting with this approach through what it calls transforming-in-contact, which aims to speed up how the service buys technologies and designs its forces by injecting emerging capabilities into units and letting them experiment with them during exercises and deployments.

George said one of the Army’s units that just went to the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Johnson, Louisiana — which provides the most realistic combat scenarios the Army can create for units to train where forces simulate a battle campaign against an active enemy — had close to 400 drones in it. That is substantially higher than the number of drones other formations have had recently, with 3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division possessing over 200 during a January rotation in Europe, previously the most to date.

The Army doesn’t want to field the same systems like that for years because the technology changes so rapidly.

“We’re constantly updating those. I think that that’s how we have to be focused moving forward,” George said.

He also noted that Ukraine’s drone attack over the weekend flips the cost curve. Kyiv used relatively cheap systems to destroy millions to billions of dollars worth of Russian combat power.

“Look at how cheap those systems were compared to what they took out. We have to be thinking about that [with] everything we’re doing,” George said.

The attack, furthermore, exemplified how transparent battlefields are becoming, meaning there is nowhere to hide.

“We talk a lot about you can’t really hide anymore on the modern battlefield. You’re going to have to be dispersed, lower signature, all of those things, which we talk a lot about with our troops and with our commanders,” George said.

Moreover, the attack was videoed and viewed around the world hours later. The increasingly open-source nature of information about military activities around the world has implications for how the Army will operate in the future.

“We all knew about that within a matter of minutes. Everything was out there on open source,” George said.

The high-profile Ukrainian assault against Russian bombers came as the U.S. Army is in the midst of a major transformation effort. At the end of April, the service announced what it dubbed Army Transformation Initiative, where it seeks to shrink its headquarters elements, become leaner and change how it spends.

As part of that effort, Secretary Dan Driscoll said his service pitched itself to President Donald Trump and Pentagon leadership as the “innovation engine” for the Department of Defense by plucking the best ideas and technologies from the commercial sector and testing them out in the Army.

“We fundamentally believe the Army should be the innovation engine of the Pentagon … but we have to earn that right,” Driscoll said alongside George at Monday’s AI conference. “We basically said, hey, we will earn the right to do this by — we’ll cut ourselves. For ATI, the other thing … is it’s $3 billion dollars of cuts, and that’s a lot of money that people want to go to other programs. We’ve made the cuts, we’re recycling it to buy the things we want and need. We’re going to continue to run that engine and innovate.”

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The traditional acquisition system can take years from initial requirements to fielding meaning that by the time units received it, the capability could be outdated or didn’t work as intended.

“The American politicians over 30 years have harmed the American soldier, not necessarily intentionally in all instances, but they have let rational decision-making decay. They have a lot of calcified bureaucracy get in the way of doing what’s right,” Secretary Daniel Driscoll told reporters Thursday at the Pentagon. “We are changing that. From this moment forward, we are going to make every decision, and the only thing we are going to weigh is this good for the American soldier, does this make them more lethal, when we send them around the world to fight and kill on our behalf, does this increase the odds of them succeeding at that mission and coming home to their community safely?”

This comes on the heels of a memo signed Wednesday by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth charging Driscoll to transform the Army by making it leaner through combining and slashing certain headquarters elements and changing how the service purchases capabilities, all in the name of prioritizing homeland defense and deterring China in the Indo-Pacific.

Driscoll noted that the Army going forward will eliminate obsolete equipment that continued to show up in motor pools despite soldiers wanting to get rid of them.

“All of these parochial interests and all of these lobbyists that crawl around this building and crawl around Congress, they have succeeded for far too long. The first thing is, we are going to start to cut the things we don’t want or need,” he said.

Gen. Randy George, chief of staff, noted how the Army last year canceled the RQ-7 Shadow drone program, a capability he said wasn’t very good when he was a brigade commander in Afghanistan in 2009.

“We just have to stop spending our money on things that we know are not going to make us more lethal,” George said.

Key to that effort is modular and open systems, something George has been pushing for the last year-plus. Officials didn’t outline any specific metrics they’d use to evaluate whether a program wasn’t meeting lethality standards, but they stressed they want to rely on commercially available, dual-use systems to get out of the game of custom-built systems as much as they can.

A prime example is the GM Defense-designed Infantry Squad Vehicle, an expeditionary vehicle based off a Chevy Colorado, with a special off-road kit that enhances capability across complex terrain.

“It’s already got consumer buy-in, it’s got a consumer demand signal that the company can build out manufacturing. It can model out what it needs. In the years where the United States Army has funding constraints or when it gets caught up in Congress, they’re not relying on us to keep their lights on,” Driscoll said. “That is the perfect kind of model for most. And much of our equipment should be these dual-use purposed vehicles and assets so that we’re capable of being a better partner. The things we’re going to try to avoid is being the sole customer of a business, because it’s not fair to us and it’s not fair to the business.”

George said officials want systems that can be easily modified and upgraded. The ISV provides a template to mount different sensors and systems that aren’t produced by GM Defense, a key aspect going forward for modularity.

He said any vehicle, for example, will need an active protection system, but some companies will be better at building them than others. The platform builder doesn’t have to be the one to develop the active protection system as well.

“We should be looking at acquisition in terms of what we can adopt. You have a program manager that says, ‘okay, I can adopt this technology because it’s out there and it’s dual use,’” George said. “There’s others that you could modify. ISV is an example. It’s dual use, but you can modify it.”

Driscoll pointed to the startup and venture capital world, which has in the last few years come booming into the defense sector. Many top officials in the Trump administration have private equity and venture capital backgrounds, so it’s no surprise the military would be looking to prioritize those types of avenues.

Notably, Secretary Hegseth early in his tenure signed a memo directing components to leverage the software acquisition pathway. In his memo last night, he directed the Army to expanded use of other transaction agreements. The Army has typically been the service with the most OTA use in the past.

“Startups in the venture capital community have solved this for a very long time. You create a minimum viable product, you get it into the hand of your customers, and you get market feedback, and you tweak and pivot,” Driscoll said. “We, the Army, can and should, and we are doing that now too, to hold ourselves accountable and tighten the feedback loop in our manufacturing process.”

He cited an example from an unmanned company that makes autonomous software for commercial cars, or what Driscoll called the “brains” of commercial vehicles. While that company had never worked with the military before, the Army provided them with an ISV and Humvee and gave them 10 days to see what they could do.

According to Driscoll, the technology allowed the vehicles to be controlled autonomously and synchronize with drones, among other things. The Army sent those vehicles to soldiers to play with in the field to figure out what worked and what didn’t.

While Driscoll said he’s not sure if the Army will work with that company again, he cited that as a key example of how the service wants to operate in the future.

“This would have taken five-to-eight years in any other instance. And we’ve done it in under three weeks so far,” he said.

George also noted that much of this modularity begins with the network. In order to be able to share information and move data rapidly, there needs to be a robust communications backbone.

Much of these lessons have been and will continue to be learned through the service’s transforming-in-contact effort, which aims to speed up how the Army buys capabilities and designs its forces by injecting emerging capabilities into units and letting them experiment with them during exercises and deployments.

“The drones that we had for the second brigade were different than the first, so on and so forth,” George said of transforming-in-contact. “It’s the bottom-up feedback. That’s what we need to continue to do for everything we have.”

Editor’s Note: This story was updated May 5 with clarifying information from GM Defense, the contractor for the Infantry Squad Vehicle.

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In an April 30 memo to the secretary of the Army, Hegseth ordered a vast set of alterations to the service aimed at building a leaner and more lethal force that prioritizes defending the homeland and deterring China in the Indo-Pacific.

The administration has made homeland defense — to include securing the southern border and building the “Golden Dome” missile defense system — as well as deterring China, top priorities. The latter includes shifting resources to the Pacific at the potential expense of other theaters, according to press reports. 

Some of the changes pushed by Hegseth in his directive — such as consolidated budget lines in unmanned systems, counter-drone systems and electronic warfare, force structure changes and expanded use of other transaction agreements — are already being pursued.

The memo, however, directs much deeper change to include consolidating certain headquarters elements and changes to how the Army contracts, some of which were reported earlier this week by Breaking Defense.

“[T]he Army must prioritize investments in accordance with the Administration’s strategy, ensuring existing resources are prioritized to improve long-range precision fires, air and missile defense including through the Golden Dome for America, cyber, electronic warfare, and counter-space capabilities,” Hegseth wrote. “I am directing the Secretary of the Army to implement a comprehensive transformation strategy, streamline its force structure, eliminate wasteful spending, reform the acquisition process, modernize inefficient defense contracts, and overcome parochial interests to rebuild our Army, restore the warrior ethos, and reestablish deterrence.”

Among some of the biggest changes, the memo directs the secretary of the Army to downsize or close redundant headquarters. That includes merging Army Futures Command — responsible for developing requirements and experimentation for future capabilities — and Training and Doctrine Command, both four-star organizations, and merging four-star headquarters Forces Command with Army North and Army South into a single headquarters focused on homeland defense.

It also calls for restructuring the Army’s sustainment organizations to realign elements within the four-star Army Materiel Command including the integration of Joint Munitions Command and Army Sustainment Command to optimize operational efficiency.

Other force structure changes Hegseth called for include merging headquarters of organizations to generate combat power capable of synchronizing kinetic and non-kinetic effects, spaced-based capabilities and unmanned systems, reducing and restructuring manned attack helicopter formations, and augmenting the force with drone swarms and divesting of “outdated” formations, such as select armor and aviation units across the total Army, though those select units were not named in the directive.

Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George told reporters later Thursday that the Army is converting some armor brigade combat teams in the National Guard to mobile brigade combat teams, which he said will make them much more nimble for the missions that they need to do, whether it’s stateside or abroad.

Some initiatives require fielding certain capabilities or meeting other objectives by a set time — mostly either by 2026 or 2027 — such as achieving “electromagnetic and air-littoral dominance by 2027.”

The Army must field unmanned systems and ground- and air-launched effects in every division and extend advanced manufacturing such as 3D printing to operational units by 2026. The service must also improve counter-drone systems and integrate capabilities into platoons by 2026 and companies by 2027, and enable AI-driven command and control at theater, corps and division headquarters by 2027, according to Hegseth.

On the procurement side, the memo directs ending procurement of obsolete systems as well as canceling or scaling back ineffective or redundant programs such as manned aircraft, excess ground and outdated drones, eliminating “wasteful” contracts and “excess” travel funding and expanding multi-year procurement agreements when it’s cost-effective.

“What we’ve learned in the last couple of years in the conflict in Ukraine is that the old way of doing war will no longer suffice,” Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll said Thursday morning in an appearance on Fox and Friends alongside George.

“Under the leadership for President Trump and Secretary of Defense Hegseth, they basically have empowered the United States Army to go make the hard decisions and the hard changes to reallocate our dollars to best position our soldiers to be the most lethal that they can be,” Driscoll said. “These are hard decisions. These are legacy systems that have been around for a long time. There’s a lot of momentum. There’s a lot of lobbyists around them. but with the leadership of those gentlemen and our chain of command, we have been empowered to go do what’s right.”

George noted that there isn’t necessarily a problem with innovation as soldiers have been innovating the last few years, particularly under one of his keystone efforts dubbed transforming-in-contact since early 2024. The initiative aims to speed up how the Army buys capabilities and designs its forces by injecting emerging capabilities into units and letting them experiment with them during exercises and deployments.

Three brigades transformed into either mobile or light brigade combat teams over the last year as part of transformating-in-contact 1.0. Now, the service is pushing the initiative to the next level and focusing on armor formations and divisions as a whole, to include enabling units, National Guard units and multi-domain task forces, as well as technologies such as autonomy.

“We don’t have a challenge with the innovation. The innovation’s happening down with our soldiers. We’re changing formations right now,” George said alongside Driscoll. “We had an exercise [where] we had more than 200 drones in a brigade combat team. We’re watching what’s happening. We know we need to change and … we just can’t go fast enough, we got to speed that change.”

George was referencing the last transforming-in-contact brigade, 3^rd Brigade, 10^th Mountain Division’s culminating exercise in January where they used more drones than had ever previously been used.

Regarding the change to formations, the Army’s number two officer last week said the service is planning to approve force design updates on what those mobile and light brigades will look like going forward based on the transforming-in-contact effort. Those changes are expected to be made soon and released in October.

Officials have stressed more experimentation is to come as they don’t necessarily know the right mix of certain capabilities such as drones at echelon. More experimentation is needed to better understand what forces might need in the future.

This story has been updated with comments from Chief of Staff Randy George regarding armored units being converted.

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In that role, Obadal would be the Army’s chief management officer, helping oversee a budget of more than $185 billion and the manning, training and equipping of the force.

Obadal, a retired Army colonel, is currently a senior director at defense technology company Anduril, according to his LinkedIn profile. The firm has been racking up major contract awards from the Defense Department and working on key Army modernization initiatives, such as drones, IVAS and more.

Before joining Anduril, Obadal — a Virginia Military Institute graduate — served for more than 27 years in the Army, including as an attack helicopter officer and a unit and task force leader for Army Special Operations Command and Joint Special Operations Command, according to his bio on the Special Operations Warrior Foundation website.

If confirmed, Obadal would work under Daniel Driscoll, the new secretary of the Army, who’s looking to shake up the service’s acquisition enterprise.

“[W]e must reinvigorate our industrial base and revolutionize our procurement processes. We are not ready for large-scale conflict with a peer adversary. But we must be. Together, we will forge stronger partnerships with the defense industry to ensure you have the firepower to dominate our enemies. No contract, company, or bureaucratic obstacle will stand in the way of this goal. The status quo is unacceptable. When our nation calls, we will not send you into a fair fight — we will ensure you have overwhelming superiority,” Driscoll wrote in a message to the force after being sworn in last month.

Modernization initiatives currently in the works for the Army include artificial intelligence tools, next-generation network capabilities, robotic combat vehicles and optionally manned fighting vehicles, air defense systems, directed energy weapons, new aircraft and drones, information technology, hypersonic missiles and hypervelocity projectiles, and augmented reality goggles, among others.

DefenseScoop reached out to Anduril spokespeople seeking comment from Obadal and more information about his role at the company.

Obadal’s nomination was submitted to the Senate along with a slew of other nominations for senior positions in the Trump administration and at the Pentagon, including Hung Cao to be undersecretary of the Navy; Daniel Zimmerman to be assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs; Sean O’Keefe to be deputy undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness; Michael Cadenazzi to be assistant secretary of defense for industrial base policy; and Richard Anderson to be assistant secretary of the Air Force for manpower and reserve affairs.

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The final vote tally was 66-28 to confirm.

President Donald Trump in December picked Driscoll to be Army secretary, the service’s top civilian post, stating he would act as a “disruptor and change agent” at the Pentagon and be “a fearless and relentless fighter for America’s Soldiers and the America First agenda.” He was officially nominated Jan. 20 after Trump was inaugurated for his second term.

Driscoll, an Army veteran who deployed with the 10th Mountain Division in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom, previously worked in venture capital and private equity and was a senior adviser to JD Vance before he became vice president.

During his confirmation process, Driscoll told lawmakers on the Senate Armed Services Committee that the department should purchase more commercial off-the-shelf technologies, including drones.

“Wherever possible, and as required by Federal Acquisition Regulations, the Army should purchase non-development and COTS solutions to meet requirements. Some capabilities require the Army to undertake independent development, but many of the Army’s most pressing needs: small-unmanned aerial systems, counter-unmanned aerial systems, electronic warfare systems, and communications gear have already been developed,” he wrote in his responses to senators’ advance policy questions.

He warned that the service’s “technological edge is shrinking,” noting that the organization needs to speed up its modernization efforts and better prepare its forces for the advances in “autonomous warfare” and drone operations that have been observed during the Ukraine-Russia war.

Modernization initiatives currently in the works for the Army include artificial intelligence tools, next-generation network capabilities, robotic combat vehicles and optionally manned fighting vehicles, air defense systems, directed energy weapons, new aircraft and drones, information technology, hypersonic missiles and hypervelocity projectiles, and augmented reality goggles, among others.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is waiting for other nominees to be confirmed and fill top posts at the Pentagon, which is now under the leadership of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. That includes Trump’s picks for deputy secretary of defense; Navy secretary; Air Force secretary; undersecretaries overseeing acquisition and sustainment, research and engineering, policy, and intelligence and security; assistant secretary for special operations and low-intensity conflict and other key jobs.

Trump is also expected to soon put forth additional nominations. Last week, he fired Gen. Charles “CQ” Brown as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and removed Adm. Lisa Franchetti as chief of naval operations, along with several other senior officials. After firing Brown, Trump said he intends to nominate retired Lt. Gen. Dan Caine to serve as Brown’s replacement, although that nomination hasn’t been officially submitted to Congress. The administration hasn’t announced a nominee to replace Franchetti.

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The commander-in-chief has said he expects Driscoll to be a “disruptor and change agent” at the Pentagon as secretary of the Army.

In a list of advance policy questions from senators ahead of his confirmation hearing Thursday, the nominee was asked if he believes the Army should exploit commercial off-the-shelf solutions to meet its requirements.

“Wherever possible, and as required by Federal Acquisition Regulations, the Army should purchase non-development and COTS solutions to meet requirements. Some capabilities require the Army to undertake independent development, but many of the Army’s most pressing needs: small-unmanned aerial systems, counter-unmanned aerial systems, electronic warfare systems, and communications gear have already been developed,” Driscoll wrote in his responses.

He noted that he’s worried about the ability of the U.S. industrial base to provide sufficient military stocks to fully support American warfighters.

“Additionally, our technological edge is shrinking. The Army needs to accelerate its modernization and better prepare our forces for the advances in drone and autonomous warfare the world has witnessed in Ukraine,” he wrote.

Driscoll suggested that the service’s test-and-evaluation requirements for non-developmental items would depend on the operational need and the urgency of the capabilities.

“Some commercial products and non-development items should move immediately into the field without testing or with minimal testing because the Army currently has no existing capability. In other situations, the Army can thoroughly test non-developmental and commercial items because the operational need is less dire,” he told lawmakers.

He noted that if confirmed, he will evaluate the service’s ability to test and evaluate software and other tools that require “rapid transition.”

Driscoll, an Army veteran, was recently a senior adviser to JD Vance, who’s now serving as Trump’s vice president. He also worked in venture capital and private equity.

“As a former Soldier, Investor, and Political Advisor, Dan brings a powerful combination of experiences to serve as a disruptor and change agent. Dan graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill in three years to join the fight with the U.S. Army. After completing U.S. Army Ranger school, Dan deployed with the 10th Mountain Division as a Cavalry Scout Platoon Leader in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post in December. “Dan will be a fearless and relentless fighter for America’s Soldiers and the America First agenda.”

A full Senate confirmation vote for Driscoll hasn’t been scheduled, but he’s expected to get the thumbs up from lawmakers.

Meanwhile, Trump has nominated John Phelan, a businessman and co-founder of MSD Capital, to be secretary of the Navy and Troy Meink, a senior leader at the National Reconnaissance Office to serve as secretary of the Air Force. Their confirmation hearings haven’t been scheduled.

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Driscoll has been serving as a senior adviser to JD Vance, Trump’s running mate and soon-to-be vice president.

“As a former Soldier, Investor, and Political Advisor, Dan brings a powerful combination of experiences to serve as a disruptor and change agent. Dan graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill in three years to join the fight with the U.S. Army. After completing U.S. Army Ranger school, Dan deployed with the 10th Mountain Division as a Cavalry Scout Platoon Leader in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom,” Trump said in a post on his Truth Social account. “Dan will be a fearless and relentless fighter for America’s Soldiers and the America First agenda.”

Like Vance, Driscoll is a Yale Law School graduate. He also worked in venture capital and private equity, Trump noted.

If his nomination is confirmed, Driscoll would lead the Army as the service is pursuing sweeping modernization initiatives across the force, including for long-range fires like hypersonic weapons; the network via C2 Fix and C2 Next; robotic combat vehicles; new aircraft and drones under its future vertical lift portfolio; and IT transformation, among others.

Driscoll is Trump’s second pick to serve as a service secretary during his second term. His selection comes about a week after the president-elect tapped John Phelan to be secretary of the Navy.

In a Nov. 26 statement, Trump said Phelan, a businessman and co-founder of MSD Capital, will be “a steadfast leader in advancing my America First vision” and “put the business of the U.S. Navy above all else.”

Unlike Driscoll, Phelan has never served in the military.

If his nomination is confirmed, Phelan would take the helm of the Department of the Navy as the sea services are pursuing new drones and a “hybrid fleet” of manned and unmanned systems, as well as sea- and air-launched hypersonic missiles, among other modernization efforts.

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