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. An armed MQ-9 Reaper, t...