Hegseth Orders a Four-Star Drone Command Congress Must Build
The Pentagon’s next four-star general may command no troops at all — just robots. On Wednesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth stood before roughly 600 junior officers and enlisted leaders at Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia, and ordered the creation of the Autonomous Warfare Command — AutoWarCom — a combatant command with its own budget, its own hiring power, and one glaring hole in the plan. He cannot actually create it. Only Congress can.
That tension — between the sweep of the announcement and the thinness of the authority behind it — defined Hegseth's "State of the Force" address. What he actually unveiled: the most ambitious military reorganization in years — a four-star functional combatant command built to scale drones, robotics, and AI across the entire Joint Force, targeting stand-up by October 1, 2027. What he didn’t unveil: a commander. A budget line. A headcount. Per the memo he signed that same day, those belong to Congress.
A command with "service-like authorities"
"Today at my direction, we are announcing the creation of Autonomous Warfare Command — or AutoWarCom — a four-star combatant command with service-like authorities built to scale autonomous and robotic capabilities," Hegseth said at Quantico.
The phrase "service-like authorities" is doing the heavy lifting in that sentence. Normally, only the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, and Space Force can recruit troops, set budgets, and buy weapons — the combatant commands just fight with whatever the services hand them. AutoWarCom would break that mold: its own manpower, its own budget, its own acquisition shop. It would not borrow the robot army from the services. It would own it.
New combatant commands are genuinely rare. The U.S. military currently has 11 of them — geographic giants like Indo-Pacific Command and functional ones like Cyber Command — and the last one created was U.S. Space Command in 2019. We checked: if Congress goes along, AutoWarCom would become the 12th, the first new combatant command in eight years. Unlike the geographic commands, a functional command owns a mission everywhere on the planet. Cyber Command is the closest model — and the precedent Hegseth is clearly hoping to repeat.
The Pentagon has been flexing its acquisition muscles elsewhere too — a federal court recently upheld the Pentagon's blacklisting of AI firm Anthropic, a reminder that the department's fights over AI are being waged in courtrooms as well as briefing rooms.
Hegseth framed the urgency in the starkest terms of his tenure: "The pace of war is changing faster than the process to support it," he said at Quantico. "Cheap compute, superintelligence, and advanced commercial manufacturing have enabled the proliferation of low-cost, high-precision strike." His verdict on what comes next: "the fastest peacetime shift in modern military history."
Project Agincourt: one year to make the case
Here is the part most coverage will skip: AutoWarCom does not exist yet — not really. What exists is a one-year interim effort called Project Agincourt, grown out of an office Hegseth stood up about three months ago — the Direct Reporting Portfolio Manager for Unmanned Systems, or DRPM-UxS, the Pentagon's de facto drone czar. That office reports directly to Deputy Defense Secretary Steven Feinberg and already oversees the Defense Innovation Unit, the counter-drone task force JIATF-401, and the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group.
Agincourt has two jobs. The first is the bureaucratic pathway: the organizational shifts, the legislation, and the career tracks for the people who will fly and fight with unmanned systems. The second is a live prototype of what Hegseth calls "warfighting acquisition" — fusing operators with entrepreneurs in rapid adaptation cycles and pushing "decisions and dollars" down to frontline units and combatant commands, instead of letting them die somewhere in the Pentagon's procurement maze. The memo Hegseth signed Wednesday gives the team about 30 days — roughly to October 30 — to deliver a plan of action and milestones alongside the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
The push mirrors experiments already underway inside the services — including Kevin Mandia's private AI red-team Armadin, whose 26,000 AI agents probe military systems for weaknesses. Agincourt's bet is that the same energy can be aimed at buying and fielding hardware, not just probing software.
The two men running it are an unusual pair. Owen West, the director of the Defense Innovation Unit, is a former Marine and assistant defense secretary who also spent years as a Goldman Sachs trader; he is, in Hegseth's words, the "CEO," focused on "strategic risk, resources, and scale." His deputy — the "COO" — is Navy SEAL Senior Chief Max Strasiser, a test pilot who has built robotic systems in combat, focused on "operational problem-solving and the realities of employment in combat." A four-star commander to eventually lead AutoWarCom itself has not been named; Hegseth said one would be announced soon.
And then there is the name. Agincourt is the 1415 battle where English longbowmen shredded a French army. Hegseth's gloss, reported by DroneXL: the English won with longbows and moved their fletchers — the arrow-makers — up to the front to keep the rate of fire going. In his analogy, the fletchers are engineers and startup founders embedded with operators. Announcing it, Hegseth mimed drawing a bow and arrow, according to Defense One, while screens flanking the flag displayed the new command's seal — a Reaper-style drone inside the letter A. You do not see that in a Pentagon briefing every day.
"Ukraine's lesson is not that one type of drone wins wars, but rather the need for a purpose-built system that maximizes the ability to adapt. We will fuse procurement with operations at scale, and then allow warfighters and engineers and entrepreneurs to learn, adapt, and rapidly iterate on their domain and their mission." — Pete Hegseth, Defense Secretary, speaking at Quantico
Ukraine wrote the playbook — and the warning
The reason this is happening now is visible on any map of eastern Ukraine. What began as a tank-and-artillery war has become a drone war: cheap first-person-view drones and unmanned surface vessels now account for an estimated 70 percent of Russian casualties, with million-dollar vehicles killed by machines costing a few thousand dollars. Hegseth's argument is that the United States cannot keep buying exquisite, expensive platforms while adversaries buy swarms.
America would not be the first to give unmanned warfare its own institutional home. Ukraine stood up its Unmanned Systems Forces as a separate military branch in 2024; Russia followed with its own equivalent in 2025. AutoWarCom would make the United States the third major military to decide that drones are not just another weapon — they are a domain.
The announcement also landed in a week when experts were warning about exactly this kind of unchecked military AI — and our own reporting found that an AI chatbot nearly started a war. Autonomy on the battlefield is no longer a thought experiment. It is a procurement category.
The part Hegseth can't control
Now the awkward part. The memo Hegseth signed directs Pentagon staff to go to Congress for the legislation the command needs — and the speech itself, as DroneXL noted, named no commander, no budget line, and no headcount. New military occupational specialty frameworks are planned in each service to create career paths for what Hegseth called "a new generation of autonomous warfighters" — "We need institutional knowledge and career paths for a new generation of autonomous warfighters," he said at Quantico — but the command itself cannot legally stand up without an act of Congress.
And Congress is not the only skeptic. The Joint Staff recommended against a drone combatant command earlier this year, the Wall Street Journal reported, warning it would misalign authorities — though some combatant commanders have signaled support. So the Pentagon's own uniformed leadership is split, the money has to come from Capitol Hill, and the clock is already running toward October 2027.
Hegseth also used the speech to unveil Project Meridian, a 120-day study of future warfare commissioned by Pentagon technology chief Emil Michael and co-directed by Elon Musk, Anduril founder Palmer Luckey, and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, according to the Journal. Tucked into the same address: a new office of religious affairs and a 20 percent cut to the general and admiral corps.
"Once we apply sustained budget to changed doctrine, we will outperform the world. And by snapping in AI, we will be ahead of the world, because we are the leaders in AI." — Owen West, Defense Innovation Unit director, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal
Our take: the acquisition system has heard this speech before
Strip away the pageantry and AutoWarCom is a bet that the Pentagon's oldest disease — a procurement system that takes a decade to field what a startup builds in a year — can be cured by giving the disease its own four-star headquarters. That is either inspired or delusional, and the honest answer is that nobody knows yet. What we do know is the track record: the Pentagon has botched simpler acquisition reforms than this, usually the moment the "service-like authorities" meet the actual services, whose budgets and turf those authorities threaten.
The tell will not be the speeches. It will be the legislation — whether Congress writes AutoWarCom real money and real hiring power, or a handsome seal and a reporting requirement. The Joint Staff's quiet opposition is the more important signal than the applause at Quantico: the uniformed bureaucracy does not give up authority gracefully, and a functional command with its own checkbook is a direct threat to every service's drone portfolio. If Agincourt's 30-day plan lands with specifics — dollars, billets, programs transferred — this is real. If it lands with adjectives, file it next to the last three acquisition revolutions.
Still: the direction of travel is not in doubt. Ukraine proved that the cost-exchange math of war has flipped, and every serious military on earth is now racing to institutionalize it. Hegseth is right about the pace of war outrunning the process. Whether a new command fixes the process — or just adds a four-star layer to it — is the question Congress now has to answer.
Sources: Reuters, Military Times, Breaking Defense, DefenseScoop, Defense One, DroneXL, The Wall Street Journal, The War Zone.
By Daniel Rao, TechPulse USA
Daniel Rao covers defense technology and AI policy for TechPulse USA.
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