Interestingly, the U.S. Army, rather than the Air Force, is leading the charge to counter drone threats for the Pentagon.

"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," said Driscoll, alluding to China's current dominance in drone manufacturing and technology. "The United States Army is going to build those on our bases and empower the private sector to purchase from us. We will make drones. Our private partners will make drones. And we will catch up and surpass the Chinese incredibly quickly."

Thanks to CBS' transcript of Sunday's Face the Nation interview, we have been been able to compile selected quotes from Driscoll regarding drones ... 

"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."

"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. We're not there yet, but under the President's Golden Dome—I would think about this like a golden mini dome—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."

"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 the Ukrainians are getting for their generative AI models of when they have drones—they're flying, 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."

"We're working on something with Congress called SkyFoundry. And basically the idea is to 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 Ukraine is manufacturing four million a year, China, I think, is at 12 to 14 million drones a year. We, as a nation, will have to have our private sector able to help us."

Watch the Interview