On Face the Nation, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll outlined an ambitious million-drone plan, a new component-focused industrial base, and a nationwide counter-UAS “digital layer” with big implications for unmanned systems manufacturers.

Army Secretary Dan Driscoll used a Sunday appearance on CBS’ Face the Nation to lay out, in unusually concrete terms, how the service is thinking about drones, counter-UAS, and the unmanned industrial base—and how it expects U.S. industry to respond.

Speaking with host Margaret Brennan on Nov. 16, Driscoll confirmed the Army’s previously announced plan to buy one million drones over the next two to three years, described small unmanned aircraft as “a flying IED,” and framed drones as “the threat of humanity’s lifetime” that will require a layered, digitally networked response across the federal government and civil law enforcement.

“So under Secretary of War Hegseth, the United States Army has been put in charge of the counter drone threat for the Pentagon,” Driscoll said, adding that the service is “working hand in fist- or hand in glove with the broader law enforcement agencies.”

He said the Army and its partners had “just last week had a meeting right outside the White House” to work through a problem that is “different from nearly anything we’ve faced in a long time.”

“It is a flying IED,” he said. “They’re cheap. You can 3D print them at home, and they cross borders incredibly quickly.”

From that premise, Driscoll argued, the United States needs “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.”

Layered defense, joint architecture

Driscoll endorsed Senate Intelligence Committee chair Tom Cotton’s warning that the threat to military sites and large civilian gatherings is “severe and growing,” and broadened it into a national-level challenge.

“Senator Cotton is right. I mean, this is the threat of humanity’s lifetime,” he said. “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.”

He stressed that there is no single technical fix.

“The problem with the drone fight is you need all sorts of layered defense. One solution does not work,” Driscoll said. “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…”

Operating at home, he added, complicates the ruleset:

“…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.”

Driscoll said the Army is trying to knit together that “digital layer” across federal and local partners.

“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,” he said. “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.”

Total airspace awareness and the “golden mini dome”

Pressed by Brennan on whether there should be limits on who can own and operate drones in the United States, particularly with upcoming Olympics, World Cup and NFL events, Driscoll signaled that the Army expects drones to remain integral to commercial activity, but under tighter airspace awareness.

“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,” he said.

He framed event-level protection as a localized extension of the President’s broader missile-defense vision:

“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,” he said.

At the same time, he emphasized preserving civil and commercial drone use:

“I think we are trying to design a system so that Americans are able to fly drones, so that commercial companies, like Amazon- the future of delivery, in a lot of ways, is commercial drones,” Driscoll said. “And so we will just have to de-conflict the skies, working with the FAA.”

Ukraine as laboratory: data as “treasure trove” for future warfare

Brennan noted that Driscoll has referred to Ukraine as the “only Silicon Valley of warfare” right now, asking whether Ukrainian forces are ahead of the United States on innovation. Driscoll pointed to the economics and data coming out of the conflict.

“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,” he said.

He argued that the U.S. can respond quickly if it harnesses its own industrial and technology base.

“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,” Driscoll said.

“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, can you please help us? What do you have in your tech innovation pipeline to help us with data in contested environments?

Later in the interview, he underscored the value of Ukrainian data for AI-enabled warfare:

“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,” he said. “There’s not a single person I know that doesn’t think that is an incredible treasure trove of information for future warfare.”

A million drones and SkyFoundry: rebuilding the small-UAS base

On the U.S. side, Brennan reminded viewers that “you announced that the army wants to buy a million drones over the next two to three years,” particularly with an eye toward base defense in any Pacific conflict. Driscoll simply answered:

“Yes.”

He then described SkyFoundry, a new initiative the Army is developing with Congress to avoid repeating past boom-and-bust cycles in its industrial base.

“We’re working on something with Congress called SkyFoundry. And basically the idea is to, again, do it right from the beginning,” he said. “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.”

Pointing again to Ukraine and China, he framed the problem as one of scale.

“Ukraine is manufacturing four million a year, China, I think, is at 12 to 14 million drones a year,” Driscoll said. “And we as a nation will have to have our private sector able to help us.”

Rather than compete with industry, he said, the Army intends to underwrite hard-to-source components and let private companies build on top.

“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,” he said. “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.”

Implications for the drone and C-UAS industry

For unmanned systems manufacturers and C-UAS vendors, Driscoll’s comments outline a few clear markers:

• Mass, attritable drones: A target of a million drones over two to three years suggests sustained demand for low-cost, high-rate systems and swarming architectures, not just exquisite platforms.
• Components as a focus area: By investing in “sensors and brushless motors and circuit boards,” the Army is signaling room for trusted suppliers who can plug into a partly government-backed component ecosystem.
• Layered, interoperable C-UAS: Driscoll’s “digital layer” vision and his emphasis that “one solution does not work” point toward architectures where detection, tracking, jamming, kinetic intercept and specialty effectors like “net guns” are all orchestrated through common command-and-control.
• AI-ready data: His description of Ukrainian battlefield data as an “incredible treasure trove of information for future warfare” highlights the value of platforms and payloads that can capture and export rich telemetry for training generative AI and autonomy.

Driscoll closed the interview by stressing that drones and counter-drones are now central to how the Army thinks about modern conflict and about its engagement with industry.