The Pentagon will create a 12th combatant command — the Autonomous Warfare Command, or AUTOWARCOM — to lead the development and deployment of robotic weapons across the joint force, and it is slated to stand up by Oct. 1, 2027, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Wednesday.
What AUTOWARCOM will be and when it arrives
Hegseth described AUTOWARCOM as “a new four-star combatant command with service-like authorities built to scale autonomous and robotic capabilities across the joint force.” A memo released after his speech set the stand-up date as Oct. 1, 2027. The announcement positions AUTOWARCOM as the military’s 12th combatant command and assigns it responsibility for accelerating the fielding of unmanned offensive and defensive systems.
Project Agincourt, the portfolio office, and “warfighting acquisition”
The speech tied AUTOWARCOM’s planning to a recently created, three-month-old direct reporting portfolio manager for unmanned offensive and defensive systems. Hegseth said that that office’s “culminating mission” will “take place over the course of months, clearing the path for Autonomous Warfare Command.”
In the near term, the portfolio office will prototype what Hegseth called “warfighting acquisition,” an approach he said would “fuse operators with entrepreneurs in rapid adaptation cycles while distributing decisions and dollars closer to frontline units, to combatant commands.” He named Owen West — identified in the speech as the person who currently runs the Defense Innovation Unit — and a Navy senior chief petty officer who is both a SEAL and a test pilot to lead the office going forward. Hegseth also said the office will be renamed “Project Agincourt.”
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End the scrambleProject Meridian and outside leadership
To “creatively look to the future,” Hegseth announced a committee called Project Meridian with a four-month deadline to identify domains and capabilities the U.S. “must conquer and capabilities we must master.” He said the committee will be led by Elon Musk and Palmer Luckey and by Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House. The announcement included an explicit timeline for the committee’s work: four months.
“FORTRESS America”: bases, power, and stockpiles
Hegseth framed a suite of domestic resiliency measures under the label “FORTRESS America.” He said the military will pursue efforts so that “every U.S. military base will eventually generate its own electrical power,” though he gave no timeline or cost estimate. The secretary also said the military will increase stockpiles of munitions and critical supply-chain materials and will “stockpile medicine and blood” as “a national insurance policy for the American homeland.”
As part of that push he announced a plan to build a new base “in the state that makes the best pitch for it.” A DOD statement described the planned base as intended to “serve as a foundational hub for integrated defense operations, distributed command-and-control, and resilient cyber and technological capabilities.” Hegseth said the base would cover “hundreds of thousands of acres,” house 15,000 to 25,000 troops, and feature “timeless classical architecture” to comply with an August executive order.
Office of Religious Affairs and the secretary’s rhetoric
Among other organizational moves, Hegseth announced a planned Office of Religious Affairs (ORA) that will report to him personally. Quoting a DOD statement, he said ORA “will ensure religious affairs are no longer dispersed across distant bureaucratic layers, giving senior leaders a dedicated capability to protect free exercise, remove policy barriers, identify unmet requirements, and secure the support needed for the Service chaplaincies to succeed.”
The speech included a pattern of religious language: Hegseth quoted the Bible several times, called children “precious souls made in the image and likeness of God,” and said “America's military must understand the difference” between God and evil. He also repeatedly criticized the press during the address, using terms such as “hyperventilating” and “delusional,” and said “partisan activism that intentionally smears the troops” amounts to “treason, actually.” The speech offered no evidence cited to support the claim that media coverage was smearing troops, and Hegseth told the assembled troops that “it's your movements and bases that they reveal to the enemy.”
What this means for technologists, procurement leaders, and chaplains
- Technologists and security teams: AUTOWARCOM’s mandate to “scale autonomous and robotic capabilities across the joint force” and the portfolio office’s role prototyping “warfighting acquisition” signal accelerated operational testing and integration of unmanned systems into combatant-command missions; those teams will be central to rapid adaptation cycles described by Hegseth.
- Procurement leaders and service manpower planners: The Army, Navy and Air Force Departments were told to create “new MOS frameworks” to support a shift to autonomy, indicating new job classifications and career paths will be developed to institutionalize autonomous roles — changes that will affect budgets, training pipelines, and personnel authorities.
- Service chaplains and religious affairs leaders: The Office of Religious Affairs will report directly to the defense secretary and is charged with protecting free exercise and removing policy barriers for chaplaincies, concentrating religious-affairs authority at the top of the department.
Hegseth’s speech layered organizational restructuring, industrial and base resiliency goals, and explicitly religious language atop a compressed timeline for new bodies such as AUTOWARCOM and Project Meridian. The facts released with the speech set a 2027 deadline for the new combatant command, a four-month window for Project Meridian, and detailed scale targets for the proposed new base — but left timelines and cost estimates for power self-sufficiency and stockpiling unspecified. Those specifics mark clear near-term milestones and equally clear operational and budgetary questions for the Pentagon to answer next.
