Apr 18, 2026

Key Points

• Army Secretary Dan Driscoll told Congress the U.S. Army is actively learning from Ukrainian Armed Forces innovations and changing based on their battlefield lessons.
• Driscoll confirmed he has personally visited Kyiv and met with Ukrainian military leadership, calling Ukraine’s wartime innovations a fundamental shift in human conflict.

U.S. Army Secretary Dan Driscoll publicly acknowledged before Congress that the American military is actively adopting lessons from the Ukrainian Armed Forces, calling Ukraine’s wartime innovations a fundamental transformation of how humans engage in armed conflict.

Driscoll made the remarks during a congressional hearing, speaking directly to Ukraine’s battlefield performance since Russia’s full-scale invasion began. His comments were unambiguous and on the record — a senior Pentagon civilian openly crediting an allied force with reshaping American military thinking in real time.

“They have fundamentally altered how humans engage in conflict,” Driscoll told lawmakers. “They have done an absolutely amazing job of innovating. And I am publicly on record saying we are learning a lot from them, and we are changing to a lot of the lessons that they have taught us.” The Army Secretary also noted he has personally traveled to Kyiv and spent considerable time with Ukrainian military leadership, underlining that the exchange of knowledge is not happening through secondhand reporting but through direct engagement at the senior level.

Driscoll also reaffirmed the continuity of American support for Ukraine. “The United States Army has stood by and stood with the Ukrainians from the very first day of the war,” he said, positioning the relationship as both a moral commitment and a professional military partnership that has yielded tangible returns for U.S. force development.

The significance of the statement extends well beyond diplomatic courtesy. For a sitting Army Secretary to tell Congress — on the record — that the United States military is actively changing its doctrine and practices based on what a foreign force has demonstrated in combat is an unusually direct admission. It signals that the Department of War views Ukraine not merely as a recipient of American aid, but as a source of validated, combat-proven operational knowledge that the U.S. Army cannot generate in peacetime training environments.

Ukraine’s military has pioneered several areas of warfare that have drawn intense study from Western defense establishments. Chief among them is the mass battlefield employment of unmanned aerial systems — from commercial quadcopters repurposed as reconnaissance and bomb-dropping platforms to purpose-built first-person-view attack drones capable of destroying armored vehicles at a fraction of the cost of traditional munitions. Ukrainian forces have also developed and deployed maritime drones that have successfully struck Russian naval vessels in the Black Sea, and have built real-time sensor-to-shooter networks that compress the kill chain to minutes or seconds. These are not theoretical concepts tested at a proving ground. They are innovations developed under fire, refined through thousands of combat engagements, and validated against a peer-level adversary equipped with modern air defense, electronic warfare, and armor.

The U.S. Army’s own transformation agenda — including the Transforming in Contact initiative being led by units such as the 1st Cavalry Division — explicitly cites the need to integrate drone warfare, electronic warfare, and autonomous systems into armored formations at the unit level. Driscoll’s congressional testimony makes explicit what has been implicit in Army modernization planning: Ukraine’s war is not a regional conflict to be observed from a distance, but a live laboratory whose lessons are actively reshaping American doctrine, training, and procurement priorities.

The Army Secretary’s personal visits to Kyiv and his direct engagement with Ukrainian military commanders indicate the exchange operates at the highest levels of the institution. These are not liaison officer relationships or battlefield observer programs alone — the Army’s senior civilian leadership is personally invested in understanding what Ukraine has learned and translating it into changes for U.S. forces.

Driscoll’s testimony before Congress puts on record what military professionals have discussed in corridors for two years: the war in Ukraine has produced a generation of hard-won tactical and technological knowledge, and the U.S. Army is working to absorb it before the next conflict demands it.

U.S. Army Secretary says Ukraine changed how humans fight wars