Hegseth Creates a Four-Star Autonomous Warfare Command to Buy Drones Faster

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the Autonomous Warfare Command, or AutoWarCom, during a "State of the Force" address at Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia, on September 30, 2026. He described it as a four-star functional combatant command with "service-like authorities," built to scale autonomous and robotic capabilities across the joint force, and set a target establishment date of October 1, 2027.

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There is no commander yet, and the command does not exist in law. A four-star officer will be named soon, Hegseth said, to "raise the AutoWarCom flag [and] prepare the way." In the meantime, an interim team called Project Agincourt will build the path to it, and the department plans to ask Congress for the legislation the new command needs.

"The pace of war is changing faster than the process to support it," Hegseth told an audience of roughly 600 junior officers and senior enlisted personnel, who the Pentagon said were selected by their units for performance and leadership potential.

A 12th combatant command, and a rare one

If it stands up as planned, AutoWarCom would be the military's 12th combatant command, according to Defense One. New combatant commands are uncommon: the last one was U.S. Space Command in 2019, Reuters noted.

The portfolio would cover drones, artificial intelligence and command-and-control systems. According to a memorandum Hegseth signed the same day, "Project Agincourt: Pathway to the Autonomous Warfare Command," the command would hold its own manpower, budget and acquisition authorities and create dedicated career paths for officers and enlisted personnel.

Creating a combatant command is not something the secretary can do alone. The department will work with Congress to obtain the necessary legislation, and the memo sets the October 1, 2027 target with that caveat. Lawmakers on the Senate Armed Services Committee had already proposed a four-star command for unmanned and autonomous systems during deliberations on the fiscal year 2027 defense policy bill. That measure cleared the committee, but the bill is still pending, and the House would also have to approve it, Air & Space Forces Magazine reported. So the command's survival depends on a legislative process that is still in motion.

The military's existing autonomy work would not disappear. The services are already developing semi-autonomous Collaborative Combat Aircraft to fly alongside crewed fighters, the Air Force is pursuing a lower-cost autonomous reconnaissance drone under its Massed Modular Aircraft program, and the Navy is working toward the MQ-25 unmanned tanker. Hegseth's plan puts a joint command above those efforts rather than replacing them, though how the command would coordinate with the services is not yet spelled out.

Project Agincourt is the interim step

Project Agincourt is named for the 1415 battle, and Hegseth framed it as a proving ground for a different way of buying things. Its mandate is to prototype what he called "warfighting acquisition," a model that puts military operators, engineers and private companies into fast adaptation cycles and moves decisions and dollars closer to combatant commands and frontline units.

Defense Innovation Unit director Owen West and Navy SEAL Senior Chief Max Strasiser will lead it. Hegseth described the pairing as a "CEO, COO partnership": West on strategic risk, resources and scale; Strasiser on operational problem-solving and the realities of employing the systems in combat. Strasiser is described as the first enlisted SEAL to graduate from Navy Test Pilot School.

"This model fuses operators with entrepreneurs in rapid adaptation cycles while distributing decisions and dollars closer to frontline units to combatant commands," Hegseth said. Realistic training exercises, and combat where possible, will be used to test autonomous systems and decide which technologies to scale quickly.

The effort grows out of a reorganization three months earlier. In July 2026, the department consolidated its unmanned and autonomous systems programs under a Direct Reporting Portfolio Manager for Unmanned Systems, or DRPM-UxS, reporting directly to Deputy Defense Secretary Steven Feinberg. That office oversees Joint Interagency Task Force 401, the Defense Innovation Unit and the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group, and it will now lead Project Agincourt as well. The department says its Drone Dominance program has already delivered thousands of robotic systems to the Middle East in support of Operation Epic Fury.

Quality and quantity, and a new career field

Hegseth's stated goal is a "high-low mix": sophisticated high-end weapons alongside large numbers of lower-cost autonomous systems. He compared the high end to lightning and massed drones to the wind and rain of a thunderstorm, then reduced it to a single claim: "Today, we need both quality and quantity."

That framing matches a Pentagon consensus that has hardened over the past two years, driven by the war in Ukraine and by drone and robotic tactics in the Middle East. Expensive, small-batch weapons platforms cannot be replaced fast enough in a sustained fight, the argument goes, so the military needs cheap systems it can lose and replace. Ukraine's experience, Hegseth said, shows the value of a system built to adapt.

"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," he said.

The personnel side is the part that outlasts any single procurement decision. Hegseth said each military department will phase in new military occupational specialty frameworks, or equivalent career fields, to support the shift to autonomy. "We need institutional knowledge and career paths for a new generation of autonomous warfighters," he said. Military occupational specialties are the job classifications that determine what troops are trained to do and how they advance, so adding autonomy-specific fields is a slower, structural change than buying hardware.

The same speech introduced Project Meridian, a study of future warfare commissioned by Pentagon Chief Technology Officer Emil Michael and co-directed by Elon Musk of SpaceXAI, Palmer Luckey of Anduril and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Hegseth said it is meant to look decades ahead at the domains and capabilities the military must master, and that it is not about writing new strategies or policies. The project was given a four-month deadline, Defense One reported.

The autonomous and robotic revolution has enormous implications for equipment, doctrine, organization, and the assumptions that have governed warfare for decades.

That line, delivered at Quantico, is the clearest statement of why the department wants a command rather than another program office. Hegseth's argument is that autonomy touches doctrine, organization and career structures as much as hardware, so it needs a headquarters with budget authority and a seat in the joint command structure.

The wider reform package

AutoWarCom was the lead item in a batch of six initiatives the secretary announced at Quantico. Alongside it, Hegseth said he would cut the number of generals and admirals across the military by 20 percent, deepening a 10 percent reduction he ordered a year earlier. He announced a program called Fortress America to make military installations generate their own power, a competition among states to host a new base for 15,000 to 25,000 troops, five new college corps of cadets, and an Office of Religious Affairs reporting directly to him.

Only the autonomy command carries new acquisition authorities and a new four-star billet, which is why it drew the most attention. The general officer cut and the basing plans are personnel and infrastructure moves; the power program is about resilience at home. Taken together, they describe a department reorganizing around a set of assumptions about what future conflict looks like, with cheaper autonomous systems at the center and the industrial base and basing structure adjusted around them.

The department has stood up task forces and program offices for drones before, including Joint Interagency Task Force 401 and the Drone Dominance program. Those efforts built the fielding pipeline the new command would inherit. A four-star command is a larger administrative bet, because it would make the drone mission a permanent institution with its own budget, instead of a set of offices that report up through the deputy secretary.

Caveats

Most of the announcement is a plan, not a fact on the ground. No commander has been named. The command's structure, its relationship to the services and the way it would divide authority with existing offices are all unresolved. Air & Space Forces Magazine reported that it is not yet clear how the four-star command will work with the autonomy efforts already underway within the different services. Congress has not authorized it, and the funding would have to be worked into a future budget request.

The department has not published a cost estimate for the command, and the memo sets a target date rather than a guaranteed one. Hegseth said the work of creating the command would take place "over the course of several months," which is a schedule, not a delivery date.

The speech landed in a contested political environment. Hegseth used the address to repeat attacks on the press and to quote scripture, and the event drew skepticism from some former Pentagon officials, CNN reported. Reuters called the creation of a new combatant command uncommon, and noted the Pentagon's broader turn away from costly conventional platforms. None of that changes the substance of the autonomy plan, but it does mean the announcement is being read against a wider argument about how fast and how far the department should be remade.

What to watch

Four things will show whether AutoWarCom becomes real. The first is the four-star nomination: a named commander with a confirmed billet would turn a concept into an organization. The second is the fiscal 2027 defense policy bill and the budget request that follows, because the memo says the department must work with Congress and POLITICO reported the command will have to be squeezed into the next budget request. The third is what Project Agincourt actually prototypes in its first year, and whether its "warfighting acquisition" model produces a fielded system or a process document. The fourth is Project Meridian's four-month output, which will be the best early signal of which future-warfare bets the department intends to fund.

Those four items are concrete, and each can be checked. Hegseth said the pace of war is outrunning the process that supports it. The command he announced is an attempt to change the process. As of October 1, it exists only as an announced intention and a signed memo.

Image: U.S. Department of Defense photo (public domain).