Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll says he is locked in a “holy war” on Capitol Hill as he works to convince lawmakers to grant the service more flexible funding authority for electronic warfare, unmanned aerial systems and counter-drone efforts.
The resistance Driscoll has encountered in his first eight months in the job is part of a longstanding tension between the Pentagon and Congress over the trust and oversight of taxpayer dollars.
Unstable leadership cycles and inconsistent funding have pushed contractors into cost-plus arrangements, Driscoll explained, while congressional skepticism has only grown in the wake of failed modernization programs.
“We have 1,400 [to] 1,500 line items of make and model of things we need to buy,” he told a group of reporters last week. “Specifically we have asked to consolidate down in electronic warfare, drone and counter-drone. … This is 1% of our budget and we are in like a holy war over whether we’re going to have the authority for 1% of our budget to have the flexibility to buy different makes and models.”
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The Army first announced it wanted flexible funding in these areas in 2024 during the previous administration in order to keep pace with technology developments that are moving so quickly the service’s traditional acquisition paths would continuously lead to the delivery of outdated equipment.
New electronic warfare capability seen on the battlefield in Ukraine outpaces old technology in a matter of weeks rather than years, for example.
Driscoll acknowledged that the Army has frequently under-delivered or not delivered when it comes to using taxpayer dollars and said he understands Congress wanting extra oversight.
Even so, “the problem is we are requesting more trust from them and more ability move on our own and I think that they are cautious and hesitant to give us that until we start to deliver wins at scale, but we can’t deliver wins at scale until we get this flexibility. So it’s a little bit of a chicken and the egg setup,” Driscoll told Defense News.
“I’m cautiously optimistic that the more people that hear about this, the more people that weight the actual risk of a drone with a munition showing up at a stadium, our border, at a port in our own nation, the more that that starts to outweigh all the other things,” Driscoll said.”I think we’re empowering our decision makers to do what they, deep down, know what’s right.”
The stakes are high, Driscoll said, as the National Defense Authorization Act debate heats up. “We just cannot get after the EW, counter-UAS and UAS threats without this flexibility. We must have it. And so we have made this a hill that we are willing to die on.”
Jen Judson is an award-winning journalist covering land warfare for Defense News. She has also worked for Politico and Inside Defense. She holds a Master of Science degree in journalism from Boston University and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Kenyon College.
