When Lt. Gen. Mac McCurry woke up Tuesday morning, he was the commander of the Army’s Futures and Concepts Command. By the afternoon, the service had announced that his outfit will become the recently announced Futures and Autonomy Command.
FASCOM’s new role inside the Defense Department’s AUTOWARCOM
The Army announced on Oct. 1 that Futures and Autonomy Command, abbreviated as FASCOM, will serve as the Army’s component organization within the Defense Department’s planned Autonomous Warfare Command (AUTOWARCOM). The service said FASCOM will mirror the model used by Army Cyber Command and Army Special Operations Command: it will maintain an Army mission and force structure while also reporting to the joint combatant command.
Command authority and acquisition: a dual-hat arrangement
FASCOM’s commander will also assume a newly created acquisition role. The Army described that officer as becoming the service’s first Portfolio Acquisition Executive for autonomy, with authority over the full procurement effort for autonomous systems. That combination places programmatic and operational lines of effort under a single senior official tasked with aligning force structure, requirements, and buying decisions.
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Gen. Christopher LaNeve, the acting Army chief of staff, said the service is planning force-structure adjustments to match the autonomy effort. “We are incorporating autonomous and unmanned systems at every single echelon, across the formation, with the force structure to match, including introducing UAS and robotics military specialties to integrate these technologies at the point of need,” LaNeve said at the AUSA annual meeting in Washington, D.C.
Doctrine: human judgment remains, but humans will be assisted at scale
The Army’s chief technology officer, Alex Miller, framed the change not as a switch to fully automated kill chains but as an expansion of commanders’ information and decision tools. Autonomous systems, he said, will “compile information and help commanders make decision, but there will be ‘appropriate levels of human judgment’ before weapons are fired.”
Miller pointed to domains where speed and scale challenge unaided human decision-making, citing “things like counter-battery fire, things like air and missile defense, things that happen at a superhuman speed and scale.” He argued for keeping humans “on the loop for decisions” while avoiding limiting commanders to “you know the 20 watts that have up here,” and added an operational aim: “We want to enable them to be a crew chief for superintelligence and autonomy.”
What this means for technologists, procurement leaders, and commanders
- Technologists and program offices: Expect integration work across echelons as the Army introduces UAS and robotics military specialties and fields systems to “compile information” for commanders, with an explicit emphasis on maintaining human decision authority before weapons are fired.
- Procurement leaders and the Portfolio Acquisition Executive: The newly designated acquisition authority will oversee the “full procurement effort for autonomous systems,” concentrating responsibility for buying decisions, standardization, and acquisition timelines in a single office aligned with FASCOM’s operational mission.
- Commanders and force designers: Units and doctrine will adapt to embed autonomy and unmanned systems “at every single echelon,” altering force structure and the types of military specialties that operate these systems “at the point of need.”
There were light moments at AUSA that underscored the cultural side of the change: McCurry noted that the command would “keep the patch,” and joked, “I haven't ruled out Optimus Prime 6 as my future callsign.”
The immediate next public step is scheduled for the final morning of the AUSA annual meeting, when the service secretaries and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth are slated to discuss additional details about AUTOWARCOM during a panel.
