“I will measure it as success if in the next two years, one of the primes is no longer in business” were the words, not of a hardened critic of the military industrial complex calling for shuttering one of the largest Pentagon contractors known as “primes.” Rather, the speaker was one of the most powerful officials in the Pentagon — Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll.

“My best guess is that they will start to realize in the coming days, weeks and months, that they are going to have to adapt and change or die,” he added on the TBPN Live podcast last month. “We are not going to come to bail them out again as a nation.”

Driscoll’s comments stem from the new Army Transformation Initiative (ATI), which pledges to fundamentally change how the Army does business. It aims to streamline the Army’s command structure by trimming general officer positions and eliminating 1,000 staff positions at Army headquarters. It also proposes to “Eliminate Waste and Obsolete Programs,” which includes canceling Blackhawk helicopters, Hummers, the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle, and the Gray Eagle drone, and restore the Army’s right to repair its own equipment, instead of paying contractors billions of dollars to do the work.

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