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Ukraine’s Faster Military Innovation Was “Humiliating” to Watch, Ex-US Army Secretary Says
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Former US Army Secretary Dan Driscoll described Ukraine’s rapid wartime adaptation as “humiliating” for the United States, Rolling Stone reported on October 4.
He argued that Ukrainian forces developed more effective weapons despite operating with a far smaller budget.
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Driscoll, who resigned as Army secretary in August, focused much of his tenure on modernizing US forces for battlefields increasingly shaped by drones, electronic warfare, and rapidly changing technology, Rolling Stone wrote.
“In some ways, it was humiliating seeing how quickly a nation could change when it needed to,” Driscoll told Rolling Stone. “When you would see what Ukraine’s budget was and how small it was relative to ours and how, despite that, they had better weapons of war, it was a wake-up call.”
Rolling Stone noted that Ukraine’s development of cheap, mass-produced drones demonstrated how quickly the modern battlefield was changing after two decades in which the US military largely focused on counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Driscoll argued that the US military’s procurement system was too slow to keep pace with those changes.
“When you’re an American soldier, you would get to work every day, and you basically step back like 20 or 30 years with tech,” he stated.
In May 2025, Driscoll created the 600-soldier Unmanned Assault Battalion, an experimental “drones first” unit based in Italy that operated its own drone laboratories, tested electronic warfare tactics, and worked with Ukrainian advisers, Rolling Stone reported.
The initiative formed part of a broader effort to adapt lessons from Ukraine to the US military. The Eastern Flank Deterrence Initiative combined drones, interceptors, Patriot systems, and satellite intelligence in an AI-enabled network, while Ukrainian drone pilots later trained alongside American and NATO troops during multinational exercises in Germany.
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