“I will measure it as success if in the next two years, one of the primes is no longer in business” were the words, not of a hardened critic of the military industrial complex calling for shuttering one of the largest Pentagon contractors known as “primes.” Rather, the speaker was one of the most powerful officials in the Pentagon — Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll.
“My best guess is that they will start to realize in the coming days, weeks and months, that they are going to have to adapt and change or die,” he added on the TBPN Live podcast last month. “We are not going to come to bail them out again as a nation.”
Driscoll’s comments stem from the new Army Transformation Initiative (ATI), which pledges to fundamentally change how the Army does business. It aims to streamline the Army’s command structure by trimming general officer positions and eliminating 1,000 staff positions at Army headquarters. It also proposes to “Eliminate Waste and Obsolete Programs,” which includes canceling Blackhawk helicopters, Hummers, the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle, and the Gray Eagle drone, and restore the Army’s right to repair its own equipment, instead of paying contractors billions of dollars to do the work.
Last week, Driscoll, along with Army Chief of Staff, Gen. Randy George, confronted what could be one of their biggest impediments to fully enacting the ATI: Congress. Even before the hearings took place, Driscoll told Punchbowl News last Monday that he was already getting pushback from both parties — a sign that he “made the right decision,” as Congress has regularly forced the Army to buy things soldiers say they don’t need.
“Our responsibility is the soldier and the American taxpayer,” Driscoll told Punchbowl, “and even kind of beyond that, we have taken — and I can say this with a straight face — zero parochial interests into account.” Driscoll, specifically, railed against Pentagon contractors lobbying Congress for weapons the Pentagon doesn’t want. “If they’re going to continue to spend dollars there … in the medium term, they will lose their businesses … and they may go out of business,” Driscoll added.
At the hearings, Driscoll continued this assault on the way the military industrial complex has been doing business. In his opening remarks to the House Armed Service Committee (HASC) on Wednesday last week Driscoll lamented that, “Lobbyists and bureaucrats have overtaken the army's ability to prioritize soldiers and war fighting,” and later added, “Let's do what's right for soldiers. We don't need to buy these assets, and resources are limited. Let's stop."
Yet, at both the HASC and Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) hearings later that same day, the parochial interests that push members of Congress to support programs the Pentagon doesn’t want were on full display. For example, Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) offered a vehement critique of the Army’s planned force reduction at the Electronic Proving Ground at Fort Huachuca in his home state. At the HASC hearing Rep. Rob Wittman (R-Va.) expressed concerns about Army Training and Doctrine Command, which is in his district, being combined with Army Futures Command to reduce bureaucratic bloat. Rep. Morgan Luttrell (R-Texas) angrily denounced the Army’s new plan to decommission a battalion based in his district. “You've come into my house, where I was born and raised in this county,” he complained, “and you're taking something away from me and I want to know why.”
The pushback is somewhat understandable, as what Driscoll and George are attempting with ATI will unquestionably cost jobs in some of these members’ districts and states, and could cost legacy contractors tens of billions of dollars. The watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense tracks “backdoor earmarks” where Congress adds billions of dollars to programs that the Pentagon didn’t ask for. According to TCS, this amounted to $15 billion in fiscal year 2025, alone. Most of this money went to projects that the Pentagon did not include in its budget request, which TCS refers to as “Zero to Hero” increases.
Another enormous cost to contractors from ATI would be its goal of returning “right to repair” to the Army, which has padded profits for contractors while reducing military readiness. As Driscoll explained in an interview with War on the Rocks, “we’ve given away our right to repair our own equipment some of the time, which basically what that means for soldiers is we will have exquisite pieces of equipment sitting on the sidelines for 8 to 12 months when we know how to 3D print a part that can be $2 to $20. That is a sin, and we’ve done it to ourselves.”
That “sin” costs billions every year. As a Project On Government Oversight fact sheet on right to repair pointed out, “The DOD spends tens of billions of dollars annually to maintain military vehicles and equipment,” making this a taxpayer funded cash cow for Pentagon contractors that have maintained exclusive rights to do that work. That is precisely why their lobbyists have crushed all previous right-to-repair efforts in Congress. Just last year, for example, contractors penned a letter opposing an NDAA amendment that would have granted right to repair, and subsequently rejoiced when it was stripped from the defense policy bill.
As that incident demonstrates, it would be challenging to overstate the political influence of the Pentagon contractors that Driscoll and George are now explicitly challenging. In 2024, Pentagon contractors spent nearly $150 million on lobbying and employed 950 lobbyists — nearly two-thirds of whom had previously served in Congress or the executive branch, according to OpenSecrets. Many of those lobbyists had previously worked for the very members of Congress that Driscoll and George were testifying before, and Pentagon contractors have been some of their top campaign contributors.
All of this makes Driscoll and George’s attempts to challenge the primes’ power in the Army remarkable. The last time senior Pentagon officials were uttering existential threats to Pentagon contractors was more than 30 years ago at what came to be known as “The Last Supper.” That’s when then-Secretary of Defense William Perry invited the heads of the top Pentagon contractors to a dinner where he reportedly warned, “We expect defense companies to go out of business. We’ll stand by and watch it happen.” What followed was a wave of mergers and acquisitions in the defense industry that resulted in the primes — Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, RTX (formerly Raytheon), and Northrop Grumman — that have dominated the defense industrial base ever since.
To be sure, Driscoll is a veteran not just of the Army, but the venture capital (VC) world, and some might argue that he’s just pushing the Army’s money away from the primes and towards VC-backed defense tech firms like Anduril, whose senior director Michael Obadal might soon be confirmed as the undersecretary of the Army. Anduril has already secured more than $1 billion in Pentagon contracts and is poised to secure billions more if a number of ATI initiatives — including purchasing enormous quantities of drones and counter-drone technology — come to fruition. Financial markets, at least, are betting big on this possibility. Just last week, Fortune reported that, “With [a] massive funding round and $31 billion valuation, Anduril is nearing the size of defense industry giants it wants to displace.”
Unfortunately, the Army has still not presented Congress with a detailed budget for the next fiscal year, so it remains to be seen whether Driscoll and George’s shake-up is just shifting cash from the old guard to the budding defense tech titans, or if it will actually save taxpayers money. At the very least, however, the two men are doing what few military leaders have done before: they’re waging war on the military-industrial complex. For the sake of both the soldiers and taxpayers alike, we should hope that they succeed.
