Former Army secretary praises Ukraine in 1st public appearance since resigning
During his 18 months as Army secretary, Dan Driscoll pushed the U.S. military to apply lessons from the war in Ukraine.
September 12, 2026 / 3:24 PM EDT / CBS News
Kyiv - In his first public appearance since leaving the Trump administration, former Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll warned of "an inflection point in warfare," arguing that the world's largest militaries "have not adopted the speed and the innovation that they need."
Wearing a tie embroidered with a traditional Ukrainian pattern, Driscoll spoke alongside Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO who now heads Perennial Autonomy, an American defense firm active in Ukraine. CNN's Fareed Zakaria moderated the discussion on the second day of the Yalta European Strategy forum, an annual conference organized by the Victor Pinchuk Foundation to discuss Ukraine's future in the West's security architecture.
Driscoll and Schmidt praised Kyiv's wartime innovations, in particular "DELTA," a Ukrainian software platform that allows military leaders to see a more complete picture of the battlefield by tying together data from radars, sensors and soldiers. The platform, Driscoll said, surpasses any technology the U.S. military currently possesses.
Driscoll said that as Ukraine obtains more processing power and expands its AI capabilities, it will have "an amazing opportunity for your nation to outrun the Russians, and out-innovate them, and out-partner so that you can crush them."
Driscoll, an Iraq War veteran and former venture capitalist, is a longtime friend of Vice President JD Vance, whom he met at Yale Law School. As Army secretary, he also took part in the administration's efforts to negotiate an end to Russia's war in Ukraine.