The White House has confirmed that Army Secretary Dan Driscoll is resigning. The move comes after months of friction between him and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Marine veteran and former CIA officer Elliot Ackerman joins with analysis.
Page F1From§Eachthe early evening edition — 1 September 2026
Pentagon funds $11M super-soldier blood cells the same week it ousts its Army secretary and seven officers.
As it ran on the front
Let's run the numbers the way you'd run a household budget, because that's all this is, hon. Eleven million dollars, one contract, University of California San Diego, purpose stated plainly: engineered blood cells to make a soldier's body perform past its normal limit. That's the receipt on one side of the ledger. On the other side, same reporting period: the Secretary of the Army resigns, seven more officers get marked for removal by the Defense Secretary, and nobody in either story disputes the sequence, just the reasons for it.
I'm not going to tell you those two columns don't belong on the same page. I'm going to tell you what they add up to. The department funding an $11 million upgrade to the biology of an individual soldier is the same department that, in the same reporting window, cannot keep its own senior leadership seated. One column is investment. The other column is turnover. When turnover outruns investment at the top of an organization, the standard filing question is simple: what's the institution actually buying stability with, if not its own people.…
…(cont) The gap here isn't hidden, it's just never placed side by side. The $11 million shows up in a technology story. The resignation and the officer removals show up in a Pentagon story. Read separately, they're both routine. Read against each other, the ledger doesn't balance — a department is scaling up what a soldier's body can survive while scaling down who gets to stay in charge of ordering that soldier into the field to test it.
I'd note, too, whose column that gap turns up in. It isn't the soldier's. The soldier doesn't set the research budget and didn't ask to be the pilot program. The gap sits entirely in the department's own personnel ledger, between what it's willing to fund and who it's willing to keep. That's not a scandal, hon. That's just what the two receipts say when you set them next to each other instead of reading them in two different sections of the paper.
“They found eleven million dollars for blood cells that make a soldier tougher in a lab, the same week they walked the Army secretary out the door. That's not innovation, that's rearranging deck chairs while handing out steroids. When the money moves faster than the leadership can survive it, you follow the money, not the press release.”
“This is basic force modernization — enhanced cellular resilience keeps troops safer in the field, that's just smart defense spending, full stop. The Secretary's departure is a completely separate personnel matter, purely coincidental scheduling, I mean it's not like they had to announce both in the same week — okay, they did, but that's still unrelated.”
The receipts
The three-year project will focus on engineering red blood cells that can carry more oxygen, potentially giving military personnel an edge during intense physical activity.
The defense secretary’s cuts, which have hit about 10 percent of the military’s top officers, are dividing the Pentagon, officials said.
The resignation of Army Secretary Dan Driscoll underlines how Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is increasingly imposing his will on the Pentagon after nearly 20 months in the role. Driscoll’s departure, which came sooner than expected, followed months of tensions with Hegseth, who has forced out or stalled the promotions of dozens of…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.