Now for the main event…

Last month, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth summoned two men into his office at the Pentagon: Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll and General Randy George, the Army chief of staff. After a tumultuous nine months of axing generals and admirals from across the armed forces, Hegseth had yet another burning personnel decision that he wanted the men to implement: Push out General James Mingus, the current vice chief of the army, and replace him with Hegseth’s own trusted advisor, Lt. Gen. Christopher LaNeve.

Maybe this was an inevitable part of the Trump Pentagon purge. During the Commander-in-Chief Inaugural Ball, the president had hailed LaNeve as straight from “central casting,” adding, “If I’m doing a movie, I pick him to play my lead.” For his part, Mingus was widely respected, had more stars than LaNeve, and had been in the job for less than two years. But he was tainted in the eyes of the administration for having served under former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley as the J3 (director of operations for the Joint Chiefs). Worse, he was seen as one of Milley’s protégés.

A MESSAGE FROM INSTAGRAM

Last year, Instagram launched Teen Accounts, which default teens into automatic protections. Now, a stricter “Limited Content” setting is available for parents who prefer extra controls. 

Instagram will continue adding new safeguards, giving parents more peace of mind.

Learn more.

George didn’t like the idea of ending Mingus’s career prematurely, and pushed back. At that point, according to two Pentagon sources with knowledge of the meeting, Hegseth made one thing clear to the men sitting in front of him: If they didn’t comply, he could easily exact revenge—but only on one of them. He could certainly fire George, he said, but he couldn’t touch Driscoll. Left unsaid was the reason: Driscoll, as everyone knows, is close personal friends with J.D. Vance. On October 20, Congress received LaNeve’s nomination for the role.

The episode underscored the tension between Hegseth and Driscoll, which has become one of the worst-kept secrets in Washington. As much as Hegseth has demanded absolute loyalty—he is said to spend unusual amounts of time on social media, trawling for evidence of its absence—Driscoll is the one person at the Pentagon whom he can’t threaten to fire, as he regularly does with others in the building.

And if you don’t know that Driscoll is Vance’s close personal friend, Driscoll will be happy to tell you. Several sources told me that Driscoll tends to slide this fact into conversations early. One senior Pentagon source told me that Driscoll “humbly jokes that there’s one reason he’s secretary of the Army, and that’s because he’s best friends with J.D. Vance. He’s very matter-of-fact about it.”

When Driscoll was asked on former Navy SEAL Shawn Ryan’s popular manosphere podcast how he got his current job, he responded by telling two stories. First, he recalled how he’d met Vance. Driscoll, a simple, outdoorsy kid from the mountains of North Carolina, fresh out of the Army and a tour in Iraq, showed up at Yale to start law school. A second-year law student named J.D., who had also served in Iraq, took him and a few other vets out for pizza. Over some pies, Vance gave them advice that was as much about himself as the new guys. “I know a lot of you guys are going to be self-conscious, you’ve been out of school for a while,” Driscoll recounted the future vice president telling them. “You’re going to feel like you’re less than and not smart enough to keep up. But if you can just give it a couple months, you’ll get your bearings and you’ll figure it out, and you’ll find out that you belong here.”

Fast forward—past law school, a stint in venture capital, and an unsuccessful run for Congress (he lost in a primary to Madison Cawthorn)—to July 2024 and Driscoll’s rendezvous with destiny. This was the second story. Driscoll was having dinner in Zurich while on vacation with his wife, Cassie, his high-school sweetheart and a plastic surgeon—when his phone rang. It was J.D., breaking the news that he’d been tapped to be the Republican vice presidential nominee. The next morning, Driscoll was on a plane to Chicago, and, after a pit stop at an outlet mall to buy himself a suit, headed to Milwaukee to help his law school buddy campaign for the White House. The rest, as he described it, was a yearlong “adventure.”

Driscoll isn’t shy about telling this story, which is why it has made the rounds in Washington, including the part about Driscoll and Cassie being high-school sweethearts, and the part about him being a simple, outdoorsy kid from the mountains of North Carolina, and the part about picking up J.D.’s fateful call and joining him on the campaign trail and then in the administration. But all of Washington knows something else about Driscoll, too: that Hegseth hates him—in part because he’s protected by his relationship with Vance, and because the talk of the town is that Driscoll will be the next SecDef, just as soon as Hegseth is out.

That is not a coincidence. Driscoll is very ambitious, and he knows how to work the system. He’s known as a “soldier-secretary” and “a cross between a Baptist preacher and a jihadist,” both monikers he invented—and pushed—himself. “Part of his strategy to rise is to generate this narrative,” a former senior defense official noted. “He’s very accessible. He talks to reporters. He’s constantly texting with members of Congress on both sides of the aisle. These are very important constituencies, and he knows that they’re human beings, and if you can get them to like you, that’s half the battle.”

The widespread assumption that Driscoll is positioning himself for Hegseth’s job has naturally created tensions with his combative, polarizing boss. “Whenever there’s an article that Hegseth is going to be fired, the next sentence is that Driscoll could replace him,” a former defense official told me. A second former senior defense official pointed out that, when Hegseth’s confirmation was on the rocks earlier this year, the consensus was that Driscoll would be the replacement. “So Hegseth is always looking over his shoulder at Dan, and not in a good way,” the first official said. “Because he thinks that Dan is gunning for his job—and he is.”

In response to a request for comment, the Pentagon press shop sent a statement that they attributed to Driscoll. “There has been no stronger partner for the Army than Secretary Hegseth,” it said. “Secretary Hegseth and I are 100 percent aligned on transforming the Army, reforming the archaic acquisition process, and putting Soldiers first. This is false reporting that could not be further from the truth.” A statement attributed to Hegseth read: “This story is completely false. The President and I have put together a cohesive team that is focused on protecting the homeland, deterring adversaries, and ushering in a new era of Peace Through Strength. I’m grateful that Army Secretary Driscoll is part of our team.”

Unlike Hegseth, people on both sides of the aisle actually like Driscoll and see him as a serious, thoughtful, competent person. Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security advisor, reached out to Dems across Washington ahead of Driscoll’s confirmation hearings to vouch for the guy. (Both Sullivan and his wife, Maggie Goodlander, now a congresswoman from New Hampshire, are Yale Law alums. Driscoll and Goodlander have a close friend in common.)

It also helps that Driscoll looks likeable. His face is boyish and innocent, with ruddy cheeks and what always seems like a smile. He has a bright-eyed earnestness that makes whatever he’s saying sound not just reasonable, but downright wonderful. “What’s so cool about the National Guard is you can be deployed abroad for the security of your country,” he told Ryan about the Guard’s now indefinite deployment to D.C., “but you can be used to help improve and secure your own community.” It was as if Mister Rogers were a Yale-trained Republican politician who was totally fine with using U.S. troops to police his fellow Americans.

A MESSAGE FROM INSTAGRAM

Instagram Teen Accounts default teens into automatic protections for who can contact them and the content they can see.

Nearly 95% of parents say Teen Accounts help them safeguard their teens online. And we’ll continue adding new protections, giving parents more peace of mind.

Explore our ongoing work to keep teens safe online.

This aw-shucks affability has also helped him separate himself from Hegseth, whose aggressive culture war crusade in the Pentagon has alienated a huge swath of both the command and the policy folks. People from both camps told me that they suspect that Driscoll isn’t a fan of Hegseth’s purge of the military, either. “He’s not into firing people because of some big concept,” the second former senior defense official told me.

On the other hand, there’s no evidence that Driscoll has actually done anything to protect commanders from being forced into early retirement because the SecDef perceives them as being disloyal—or, even worse, a D.E.I. hire. In fact, Driscoll has had to take a scalp for MAGA himself. He was the one who rescinded West Point’s job offer to Jen Easterly, a West Point alum and retired Army lieutenant colonel, and head of CISA under Biden, after Laura Loomer singled her out as having supposedly censored right-wingers.

Still, the nice guy persona has its downsides, especially if your foil also happens to be your (very paranoid) boss. “He’s not stupid,” said the first former defense official about Driscoll. “He knows he can’t have his boss mad at him. Driscoll is in this position where he might like to save some of these generals whose careers are being ended, but he can’t cross Hegseth openly.” Or, as someone who knows him put it, “I think Dan is fundamentally a decent person, but he’s not someone who’s going to light himself on fire in the current context.”

Instead, Driscoll has cleverly found a rare bipartisan issue to make his own: reforming the slow and ossified system through which the American military purchases its equipment. “It’s one of the few areas where there’s a very strong bipartisan consensus that we’re not doing it right,” said Jerry McGinn, the director of the Center for the Industrial Base at C.S.I.S., a national-security think tank, pointing to a Senate hearing on the issue that brought rare agreement between Elizabeth Warren and Tim Scott. In Washington terms, railing about the need to fix Pentagon acquisitions is a bit like pushing tax reform: Most everyone wants to do it, but for whatever reason, no one’s figured out how to get it done. “Good luck to him for trying,” a third former senior defense official quipped, not insincerely.

Given his background, Driscoll has decided that he will modernize the Army by bringing Silicon Valley—as well as some V.C.-inflected thinking—to the Pentagon. (The first to do that was Barack Obama, who launched the Pentagon’s DIUx, or Defense Innovation Unit, in Mountain View.) Famously, of course, about three-quarters of V.C.-backed firms fail—not necessarily a great stat if you’re gambling with taxpayer money. But Driscoll has said his measure of success would be one of the five defense behemoths, or “primes”—Boeing, Lockheed, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman—going out of business in the next two years.

Driscoll has surprised doubters by moving quickly and innovatively. He has started talks with the private sector, including private equity firms, to reinvigorate America’s defense industrial base by building defense manufacturing facilities on all the fallow land that the Army owns. He’s working to put small nuclear reactors on Army installations to make them energy independent. He’s made a deal for the Army to buy a million drones while embracing a “two-to” approach: Two producers compete to bring their drones to production, thus encouraging competition, efficiency, and savings throughout the system—at least in theory. And, given his origins in the North Carolina mountains, he has inked a partnership between U.S. Ski & Snowboard and his former unit, the 10th Mountain Division. He’s also created “portfolio acquisition executives”—civilians who, in McGinn’s words, “are closer to the actual war fighter but have a broader portfolio. They can make trades, see what’s working, what isn’t.”

There are still lots of ifs—like if Congress will allow programs they specifically funded to be swapped for others they haven’t. But to see so much movement in such a reform-resistant field, well, for its grizzled experts and veterans, “it’s all pretty exciting,” McGinn confessed.

Which is why, last Friday, it was Hegseth who delivered an hourlong, jargon-packed speech about how he was taking a lot of these move-fast-and-break-shit reforms department-wide—perhaps a bid for some of the love that D.C. defense dorks seem to have for Driscoll, the nice guy he can’t remove. “I think this is something that isn’t partisan and it’s popular, and because of that, Hegseth jumped on it,” said the second former senior defense official. “I mean, Hegseth has to do more than just fire Black people and women. He’s going to run out of them.” (“Having known Secretary Hegseth for well over a decade, I can attest that he has been a leader at the forefront of acquisition reform for 10-plus years, and those in the Pentagon see him as a leader on this issue as well,” chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said in a statement. “Anyone who suggests he is not an authority on acquisition reform simply isn’t paying enough attention.”)

It’s worth noting that, as both Driscoll’s fans and detractors point out, not all of these apparently revolutionary ideas are his own. Many were actually nurtured by General George over the years, and workshopped with Driscoll when he was living in Fort Myer by himself and going over to the Georges’ for dinner. Afterward, Driscoll and George would have long talks over bourbon and beer on the general’s porch. According to a person familiar with the situation, George is happy to have such a well-connected, politically savvy supporter finally pushing his ideas from the drawing board to reality, just as Driscoll doesn’t mind Hegseth taking the ideas and trying to implement them across the entire American military. They see it as a natural and symbiotic process, and people are happy that Hegseth has put his personal political capital behind it. “It’s one thing to change the Army,” said a senior defense official. “It’s another thing to change the whole department.”

In his speech on Friday, Hegseth started by reading what he later revealed was, verbatim, a speech that Donald Rumsfeld gave on revolutionizing Pentagon acquisitions in 2001. Hegseth’s point, of course, was that the disruptive Trump administration would be successful where Rumsfeld and the Bush administration had failed. But for people who have spent decades in the field, including those who have tried every which way to reform the Byzantine process, the analogy didn’t quite land. “Rumsfeld had a bunch of experience,” said one such veteran of these acquisition reform wars. “He was a sharp-elbowed operator, and he was really smart. And he couldn’t get it done. Now you have this idiot, who doesn’t know shit about Washington, and doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing. How do you think that’s going to end?”

There’s a quiet hope that Driscoll might be better suited to the task. Which is also why he’s been at pains to show that he respects Hegseth and his authority, and is willing to give him as much credit as he wants to take. Because as much as Washington likes speculating that Driscoll will be the next SecDef, Hegseth would first have to vacate the spot. And it’s very clear that Hegseth isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. After all, his top cover is even better than Driscoll’s.

That’s all for me, friends. I’ll see you back here next week. Until then, good night. Tomorrow will be worse.

Julia

Need help? Review our FAQ page or contact us for assistance. For brand partnerships, email ads@puck.news.

You received this email because you signed up to receive emails from Puck, or as part of your Puck account associated with {{customer.email}}. To stop receiving this newsletter and/or manage all your email preferences, click here.

Puck is published by Heat Media LLC. 107 Greenwich St., New York, NY 10006