Army Secretary Dan Driscoll has resigned after months of conflict with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the White House confirmed Monday, leaving the Army without Senate-confirmed leadership on either the civilian or the uniformed side.

Driscoll submitted his resignation to President Donald Trump after speaking with him about the state of the service, a U.S. official told CBS News. The Wall Street Journal first reported the departure. He is expected to leave the Pentagon within days.

White House spokesperson Anna Kelly praised his record in a statement, pointing to his work on readiness and on the negotiations between Russia and Ukraine.

Two things drove the decision, Axios reported: a sense that his modernization plans were being blocked, and the disorder created by Hegseth's removal of senior generals. A White House official told Axios that Driscoll had been asked to stay on through the midterms.

The friction was not new. Hegseth fired Gen. Randy George as Army chief of staff in April without giving a reason, ABC News reported. George was a close ally of Driscoll, who told a congressional hearing that he did not know why George had been removed. Tension also built around an Army promotion list. The New York Times reported that Hegseth removed four officers from it after Driscoll had refused to do so.

Driscoll, the youngest Army secretary in the country's history, was a Yale Law School classmate of Vice President JD Vance and remained close to him. CNN reported that Hegseth came to view that relationship as an attempt to work around him. Trump took to calling Driscoll the "drone guy" for his focus on unmanned systems and sent him to Ukraine in November 2025 to help restart talks with Moscow, an assignment far outside the normal duties of a service secretary.

Driscoll and George had pushed the Army Transformation Initiative, which would have merged Futures Command with Training and Doctrine Command and cut older programs including the AH-64D Apache, the M10 Booker and the Gray Eagle drone.

He is the latest senior figure to leave. Navy Secretary John Phelan stepped down earlier this year, with Trump saying at the time that Phelan had clashed with others. Gen. Christopher Donahue, who commanded U.S. Army Europe and Africa, has also departed in the past year.

The Pentagon referred questions about the resignation to the Army, which did not immediately respond, according to Axios.