The following is the transcript of the interview with Army Secretary Dan Driscoll that aired on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan” on Nov. 16, 2025.
MARGARET BRENNAN: We want to turn now to some of the challenges faced by the U.S. military, and we’re joined by the Secretary of the Army, Dan Driscoll. Good morning, thank you for being here.
SECRETARY OF THE UNITED STATES ARMY DAN DRISCOLL: Thank you so much for having me.
MARGERET BRENNAN: A lot to get to with you. Just quickly on news of day, the president did say he “sort of” made up his mind on Venezuela. I know this is the Marines, this is the Navy that are deployed. But does the Venezuelan army pose any kind of threat to the U.S. if action is taken?
SEC. DRISCOLL: I think that the President and Secretary of War have spent a lot of time thinking about what is the best thing they can do for the American people, and I can speak from the Army’s perspective, which is, we have a lot of training in that part of the world. We’re reactivating our jungle school in Panama, we would be ready to act on whatever the president and Sec. War needed.
MARGARET BRENNAN: But no orders beyond these exercises at this point?
SEC. DRISCOLL: I- we don’t talk about those kinds of things, but we would be ready if asked.
MARGARET BRENNAN: I do want to ask you about what has been happening with this shutdown. The government’s now funded through January 30, you did get from Congress full year funding for veterans affairs and military construction, a few other measures in this short term bill. But we have seen the shutdown hit military bases and hit military families. Costly. $400 million or more in emergency loans from USAA. How do you insulate the force so that the next shutdown doesn’t hit these families the way it did this time.
SEC. DRISCOLL: I think the shutdown is indicative of one of the bigger problems that we have a nation have had. And so if you look back for the last 30 or 40 years, one of the reasons we’ve had such bad outcomes, when we spend the American taxpayers hard earned dollars, and we go buy things that our soldiers will need to fight, when we build things where our soldiers and their families will live, we are such a bad customer, because when you’re on the other side of the deal with us and you have to deal with shutdowns. I mean, this shutdown will take months and months for us to get back and going on these projects. And this is part of the calcification of our system that under President Trump, we are uniquely able to try to go after a lot of these things and actually get our army and their families living in better areas, and get our soldiers ready for the modern fight. And the shutdown does not help.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Let me ask you about the modern fight. Tom Cotton, who is the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told our Olivia Gazis here at CBS that the threat to military sites and large civilian gatherings “is severe and growing.” He cited gaps in law enforcement authorities, some of them lapsed during the shutdown, I understand, and he’s talking about trying to close enforcement gaps when it comes to drones. What authorizations do you need?
SEC. DRISCOLL: So under Secretary of War Hegseth, the United States Army has been put in charge of the counter drone threat for the Pentagon, and then we are working hand in fist- or hand in glove with the broader law enforcement agencies. We just last week had a meeting right outside the White House where what we are trying to do, because this problem is different from nearly anything we’ve faced in a long time. It is a flying IED. And so this IED–
MARGARET BRENNAN: IED, the explosive–
SEC. DRISCOLL: IED, improvised explosive device. They’re cheap. You can 3D print them at home, and they cross borders incredibly quickly. And so what you basically need is a digital layer to exchange information and exchange sensing and allow the closest person on the ground, or the closest effector on the ground, to be able to take out a drone. And Senator Cotton is right. I mean, this is the threat of humanity’s lifetime. What’s occurring in Ukraine, what’s happening in Russia, if you look at the speed and scale of the devastation that can come from drones, we as a federal government have got to lead on it. But I’m really optimistic. This is actually something we are doing right. We are partnering with both federal law enforcement, in a couple of weeks, we’re having the Sheriff’s Association come. We were just at the NYPD. We’re including all of the different law enforcement agencies, thinking about the borders and the ports and the upcoming NFL games and Olympics and World Cup. Like this is something we as a nation can lead on. And so under President Trump’s leadership, we are moving fast at this problem.
MARGARET BRENNAN: And this is about radar jamming of drones to take them out, not exploding them.
SEC. DRISCOLL: So the problem with the drone fight is you need all sorts of layered defense. One solution does not work. If you just try to jam them- if you look at what’s happening in Ukraine, people have started to hard wire drones, and so you can’t do RF jamming on a hard wire drone. And so there are things like net guns that are coming back, we’re using all sorts of solutions and tools, and it makes it even more complicated. When you’re by an airport and you’re doing it in your own homeland, you just have different authorities. And so a lot of this is a human problem of communication, command and control and having a layered set of solutions that you can use for any given problem.
MARGARET BRENNAN: So you’re talking about here at the homeland, things like the U.S. hosting the Olympics, the World Cup, even just the Super Bowl, games that are coming up. Should there be restrictions in this country on who is able to own and operate drones?
SEC. DRISCOLL: I’m pretty optimistic that we will be able to figure out a solution where we will know what is in the sky at every moment across our country, all at once. And so if you think of the President’s–
MARGARET BRENNAN: We’re not there yet.
SEC. DRISCOLL: We’re not there yet, but under the President’s Golden Dome, I would think about this like a golden mini dome, where, if you took one of the sites for the World Cup, we are heavily focused on being able to see everything in the area, have all of the interceptors we will need, have all of the training for all of the different forces that will have to be able to act. And so to your specific question, I think we are trying to design a system so that Americans are able to fly drones, so that commercial companies, like Amazon- like the future of delivery, in a lot of ways, is commercial drones. And so we will just have to de-conflict the skies, working with the FAA. But this is a big topic. I check in with Secretary of War Hegseth on this almost weekly.
MARGARET BRENNAN: So when we last saw the President of Ukraine, Zelenskyy, at the White House, he brought up to President Trump, on camera, we’ve got great drones we want to sell to the United States or provide to the United States. You referred to Ukraine as the “only Silicon Valley of warfare” right now. What do you mean by that? Are they really ahead of the United States on innovation?
SEC. DRISCOLL: I think if you look at what’s happening, Operation Spider’s Web in Russia, the Ukrainians used probably a couple hundred thousand dollars worth of drones and took out almost $10 billion worth of equipment in Russia. And Russia’s in that fight. And so I think what is amazing about our country is we are able to recognize where we need to innovate quickly. And what we’re doing for drones, completely differently, I think, than we have done as an army in probably 50 or 60 years, is we are welcoming in American industry. So we just did an AI war game where we invited 15 of the top CEOs in the nation. They were worth probably $18 trillion in enterprise value. And we said, howdy, can you please help us? What do you have in your tech innovation pipeline to help us with data in contested environments? How do we do logistics 6,000 miles away if we’re facing an enemy who’s trying to contest us? And we are working with them, no joke, daily, to basically take their innovation and apply it to this problem.
MARGARET BRENNAN: But what I heard you saying there is, you look at the battlefield in Ukraine as kind of like a test lab for where warfare is going. Can you convince some of your fellow Republicans that there is value in that fight, in terms of, you know, those who are so isolationist they don’t want to be involved in Ukraine, even financially?
SEC. DRISCOLL: Well, I don’t think I’ve talked to a single person who has said we shouldn’t be learning from what’s occurring in Ukraine. All of our equipment, all of the exquisite features we will need, are definitionally going to come- the data set that the Ukrainians are getting for their generative AI models of when they have drones and they’re flying and they’re learning and they’re doing counter drone and they’re taking all of this information from their sensors and trying to figure out what’s going on. There’s not a single person I know that doesn’t think that is an incredible treasure trove of information for future warfare. I think a lot of the questions are, how do we actually execute on the President’s agenda of peace in that part of the world. Where- I have not been to the White House, where it has not come up that we just want peace so that the American industrial base can thrive everywhere, and we have to focus on that part of the world unnecessarily right now.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, you’re at the Department of War.
SEC. DRISCOLL: Yes.
MARGARET BRENNAN: So you announced that the army wants to buy a million drones over the next two to three years. Navy, Marines, Air Force, they will obviously be very involved in any war in the Pacific, but you’ve got to defend those American bases.
SEC. DRISCOLL: Yes.
MARGARET BRENNAN: So how do you think of the threat from China there? Because I’ve read that you think they’re ahead of America.
SEC. DRISCOLL: So we’re working on something with Congress called SkyFoundry. And basically the idea is to, again, do it right from the beginning. What the army has historically gotten wrong in the last couple of decades is, we’re either all in or all out, meaning we either use our organic industrial base and we make the drones ourselves, or we say, this is too complicated for us, we’re going to have private industry do it. We are not doing that with drones. Because if you look at- Ukraine is manufacturing four million a year, China, I think, is at 12 to 14 million drones a year.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Wow.
SEC. DRISCOLL: And we as a nation will have to have our private sector able to help us. And so what we are going to do is, we are going to invest in things like sensors and brushless motors and circuit boards and a lot of the components that are really hard for the private sector to get right now. The United States Army is going to build those on our bases and empower the private sector to purchase from us. And so we will make drones, our private partners will make drones, and we will catch up and surpass the Chinese incredibly quickly.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Secretary, thank you for your time. And I do want to make the point that you are taking questions, and that is unusual these days, since the Pentagon has restricted access to reporters. And we think it’s important here that the American people hear about their own security as well as the military’s three million or more employees. So thank you. We’ll be right back.