The Pentagon’s effort to launch a new combatant command for autonomous warfare depends on an unusual funding bill whose passage is far from assured. And while Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has given his department a full year to start up U.S. Autonomous Warfare Command, the Pentagon has little of the relevant force structure that earlier functional COCOMs could draw on.
“They have no idea. They don’t know, nor should they. There’s nobody on that stage that actually knows how to build anything like this,” John G. Ferrari, a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and retired two-star general, told Defense One.
Ferrari was referring to an Oct. 14 panel featuring Hegseth, the service secretaries, and the Pentagon’s top special operations civilian.
“But they’ve now set the direction and the intent,” he said. “And they’re going to give it to a commander and say, ‘Now go build it.’ ”
Hegseth sat down to discuss the new command on the final day of the AUSA annual meeting in Washington, D.C., moderated by Owen West, the first CEO of the new Direct Reporting Portfolio Manager for Unmanned Systems. The secretary said AUTOWARCOM would become the Pentagon’s official purchaser of autonomous technology, but offered few other details.
“My vision for AUTOWARCOM, in two years, is that we’re still iterating, we’re still adapting, we’re still learning, and we’re moving faster and faster because we’re doing it,” he said. “We understand how to do it better with each iteration.”
West later ribbed Hegseth, saying that he counted the secretary saying “iteration” and “adaptation” seven times during an answer to one question. Indeed, most of the Pentagon’s messaging about AUTOWARCOM has included what they want to do, and less how they are going to do it.
Needed: force structure
Though U.S. Autonomous Warfare Command would be a functional combatant command like Cyber Command and Special Operations Command before it, in many ways it will be working backwards rather than building upon existing force structure. The plan calls for creating service component commands where there were none; and creating a new autonomous-warfare corps of officers and enlisted service members. Neither Hegseth’s memo directing the creation of the command nor the more recently released “operational roadmap” describe how these specialties will integrate with existing units.
A four-star combatant command whose primary mission is acquisitions doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, according to Mark Cancian, a senior adviser at the Center for Security and International Studies.
“Typically, [COCOMs] operate forces. So having one that just does acquisition requires a wide variety of new authorities on acquisition, which they might be able to get,” Cancian said. “It’s not that it can’t be done, but you know, I think there are structures that would be better for accomplishing what it is they want, which is the more rapid development of drone capabilities.”
Cancian has argued that a model more like the Missile Defense Agency, a three-star command with its own significant budget, is probably better suited to what Hegseth would like to accomplish with AUTOWARCOM.
“The model of, ‘they develop a technology, develop a system, and then hand it off to the services’—that makes a lot of sense,” he said. “It would be a very bad idea to have this command take over drone operations for all the services, because those operations need to be very tightly coordinated, very tightly integrated with the operating forces, and having them work for someone far away, and someone separate and centralized, I think, would be a very bad idea.”
Ferrari said it’s more likely that AUTOWARCOM will have responsibility for some training and doctrine associated with the new systems, rather than the actual use of them.
“The responsibility is going to be to pull all of this stuff together, and take all these disparate organizations that are working on this stuff, focus them with money, and then get the stuff in the hands of warfighters, right?” he said. “Because buying it is the easy part. Using it is the hard part.”
Then there is the matter of what the command’s force structure will look like. The day after Hegseth announced AUTOWARCOM, the Army announced it would bring online its own autonomy command promptly. Days later, the service rebranded its Futures and Concepts Command as Futures and Autonomy Command, creating a fully staffed and funded AUTOWARCOM component command with minimal friction.
The Navy and Air Force, when asked about their plans to set up component commands, referred Defense One to the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
“I think, you know, if they actually did this, they’d create some sort of component command,” Cancian said. “Probably dual-task some existing organization, the way the Army has done.”
The Pentagon is working with the services to “ensure autonomous capabilities are integrated,” a Pentagon official, who was not authorized to speak on the record, told Defense One.
“The Services support AUTOWARCOM and are taking complementary actions to organize and integrate autonomous capabilities within their respective forces, based on their unique operational requirements, force-development responsibilities, and domain expertise,” the official said.
They pointed to the Navy’s new Direct Reporting Portfolio Manager for Robotic and Autonomous Systems and said the Air Force is “actively exploring organizational structure elements to enable rapid implementation and training of unmanned systems.”
The official did not directly answer a question about whether Hegseth was inspired to create AUTOWARCOM by pre-existing Army plans, instead reiterating that the service’s announcement followed the secretary’s.
Who will lead it?
Who will lead the new command? The military already has enlisted drone operators, some junior officers with experience integrating unmanned and autonomous systems into their units, and a handful of senior officers who have been leading larger formations as they have integrated more unmanned capabilities.
“There are a lot of warfighters out there who know what they’re doing,” Ferrari said. ”And it’s unfortunate, because you’ve got a [Chris] Donahue, or Erik Kurilla, or Randy George, right? So there are three people who could have led that thing. Warfighters.”
Those former Army four-stars—the former head of U.S. European and Africa Command, head of U.S. Central Command, and Army chief of staff, respectively—were forced into retirement over the past year or so.
Kurilla and Donahue weren’t selected for follow-on jobs, despite expectations. George was flat-out asked to leave early, opening an opportunity for Hegseth’s senior military aide, Gen. Chris LaNeve, to take over as Army chief.
The department will announce leaders when appropriate, the Pentagon official said. A plan of action and milestones is due at the end of this month.
The funding elephant in the room
Earlier this year, the Defense Department asked for $54 billion to fund the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group, which Hegseth has since said would be used to get the new command off the ground.
But the Trump administration elected to request that sum, along with several other top military priorities, not in the $1 trillion defense budget but in a separate bill to be passed under a process rarely used for Pentagon spending before last year.
“We’re running fast immediately with the committees to ensure that that reconciliation bill, at a minimum of $350 billion, potentially more, ultimately fills up what this department needs,” the Pentagon official said.
But reconciliation bills are a hard sell, even for Republican members of Congress allied with the Trump administration. As the midterm election threatens to shift the balance of power back to Democrats, extra funding on top of the budget request is not even remotely a done deal.
“Either the money shows up by Christmas or it ain’t coming, because when the new Congress gets seated in January, there is no reconciliation anymore,” Ferrari said. “It’s over.”
He said the Pentagon could still stand up the organization, but it won’t have the buying power necessary to meet its mission.
Or, Cancian suggested, they can try to squeeze some acquisition money out of the services.
“And the services are not going to be happy about that,” he said. “You’re already going to have to give a whole bunch of people to this new command. They’ll be levied for joint billets. To say, ‘All right, we want you to give up a thousand people and X billion dollars for this new thing’—it’ll be very difficult to do.”
Asked whether the Pentagon has a back-up plan to fund AUTOWARCOM, the official reiterated that the department is asking for the $54 billion through reconciliation.
Said Ferrari: “If there’s no money, it’s an interesting concept, and we can ponder on this thing over the next two or three years, because it’s not going to go anywhere fast.”
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