Daniel P. Driscoll

And that's powerful, and that's amazing, and that's sacred.

For something, an institution like the United States Army, I think what we are trying to do is, and Secretary Hegseth does this really well, model what right looks like, model empowering the good leaders to make the hard decisions for their soldiers, model no doublespeak, model this idea that

I blame the primes and I blame the legislators and I blame all sorts of the civilians, but the military leadership, the soldiers, the generals also own a portion of the blame because for many years they were performative.

To your point, the best way to get promoted oftentimes was to not say the hard thing and to not risk that promotion because the farther you got up in the system, the more it was kind of

based off how good your relationship was with the board picking the next one.

And so you just weren't incentivized to create strife.

And so I think what we are trying to do is model this idea that you need to be willing to go in there.

And nearly every single day I talk to General George,

this might be our last week together, but let's just run at the problem as fast as we can.

And if we get yelled at by senators publicly in our hearings, if congressmen call and threaten us, that's okay.

That's the system working well.

We just need to be willing to get fired and move on and hand the baton to the next leader.

Yes, for sure.

And so we are actively working at, because everything I just described is an individual human issue, the systems are also what are going to lead to the good or bad outcomes that we want.

And so systematically, we're going after our acquisitions.

Systematically, we're going after our training.

Systematically, we're also going after how we promote people.

And we're trying to get rid of things that I think we believe and the secretary believes were put into place to be more performative.

And instead, what we're trying to do is

reward those leaders who have measurably made the hard decisions and who may be a little bit rougher on the edge and have a little bit of a complicated history, have gone too far in some instances in an attempt to do the right thing and no longer reward the ones systematically who have just stayed plain vanilla and have managed to rise because they just stay right in the mean.