Secretary of War Pete Hegseth speaking at L3Harris in Camden, Arkansas, in February 2026 (file photo). Image: U.S. Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Alexander Kubitza, Department of War / Wikimedia Commons, Public domain, cropped
The US military is getting a new top-level command built around autonomous weapons. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced on Wednesday that an Autonomous Warfare Command will become a four-star combatant command by October 1, 2027, and that Elon Musk, Palmer Luckey and Newt Gingrich will lead a study of how America should fight its next wars.
Hegseth set out the plans in a speech to junior officers and non-commissioned officers at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia, one of six initiatives he unveiled.
A command for robot warfare
The department calls the Autonomous Warfare Command “the fastest peacetime operational shift in modern military history”. Its job is to scale autonomous warfare across all of the US armed forces, and it will sit alongside commands such as Cyber Command and Special Operations Command as a four-star functional combatant command.
It builds on the Pentagon’s Drone Dominance programme, which the department says has already delivered thousands of robotic systems to the Middle East for Operation Epic Fury. The shift will be run under the name Project Agincourt by the office in charge of uncrewed systems, led by Owen West, the director of the Defense Innovation Unit, and Navy SEAL Senior Chief Max Strasiser, the first enlisted SEAL to graduate from Navy Test Pilot School.
The department did not say what role AI will play in choosing or striking targets, or what rules on human control the new command will follow.
Musk, Luckey and Gingrich get 120 days
The second AI-heavy announcement was Project Meridian, a study to identify the technology the military needs “for technological dominance on the next-generation battlefield”. It will be co-directed by Musk, who runs Tesla and SpaceX, Luckey, who co-founded the defence company Anduril, and Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House, with Pentagon chief technology officer Emil Michael helping to run it.
The team has 120 days. It will end with a public, unclassified report and a classified annex. According to Hegseth’s memo launching the project, as reported by The Next Web, artificial intelligence, autonomy, directed energy, robotics and biotechnology are the fields expected to change how wars are fought.
Hegseth told the audience at Quantico what it is for:
Project Meridian, the future of warfare, is not about developing new strategies or new policies. It is to identify the domains that we must conquer, and capabilities we must master.
Pete Hegseth, Secretary of War
Two of the three co-directors run companies that sell to the military. SpaceX builds launch and satellite systems for the Pentagon, and Anduril makes autonomous drones and weapons. The department has not said how any conflicts of interest will be handled.
The rest of the plan
Hegseth’s other four initiatives were FORTRESS America, which aims to give every major base its own power supply and bring supply chains such as semiconductors back to the US; a new off-grid base, with states competing to host it; new Corps of Cadets programmes at five universities; and an Office of Religious Affairs reporting directly to him.
Update: Pentagon officials warn of conflicts of interest
Hegseth’s one-page memo commissioning Project Meridian is now public. It tells chief technology officer Emil Michael to run the study “through a partner organization”, drawing on technologists, business leaders, policymakers and national security experts, and to deliver findings and recommendations by January 28, 2027. The Joint Staff and every service are told to connect their own future-warfare work to it. The memo itself doesn’t name Musk, Luckey or Gingrich, or say how the outside group will be chosen.
That lack of detail is worrying some inside the building. Nine current and former officials told Politico that giving Musk and Luckey, whose companies hold Pentagon contracts worth billions of dollars, preferential access to the military’s planning could steer even more business their way. Wes Bryant, a retired Air Force master sergeant who led the Pentagon’s civilian harm assessments until last year, called it “entirely indicative of the decay and oligarchy that has taken over our government”. The Pentagon still hasn’t said how conflicts of interest will be handled.
The new command is already reshaping the department’s tech offices. Owen West is taking a leave of absence from the Defense Innovation Unit to run the Pentagon’s portfolio office for uncrewed systems as its chief executive, reporting directly to Hegseth while he helps stand up the Autonomous Warfare Command, a source told DefenseScoop. His deputy Travis Metz, a former venture capital investor who led the Drone Dominance programme, becomes acting DIU director.
The Army is following suit. Acting Army Secretary Adam Telle has signed a memo setting up an Army Futures and Autonomous Systems Command, or FASCOM, along with a new acquisition executive for autonomy, Breaking Defense reported on Friday. The memo hasn’t been made public.
Update: MITRE is running Project Meridian, and its members are named
The “partner organization” in Hegseth’s memo is MITRE, the non-profit that runs federally funded research centres. On a page on its website, MITRE says the Department of War has commissioned it to lead Project Meridian as “an independent initiative on the future of warfare”, with outside business leaders, policy experts and technologists meeting regularly to shape its recommendations. It lists Newt Gingrich, Palmer Luckey and Elon Musk as co-directors, plus 17 participants: Safra Catz, Victoria Coleman, John Hering, Peggy Johnson, Kaj Larsen, Joe Lonsdale, Dino Mavrookas, Dan Patt, Chris Power, retired Army general James Rainey, Phil Root, Nadia Schadlow, Rick Smith, Bob Smith, Joshua Steinman, Kevin Weil and Bing West. MITRE says the membership “will continue to evolve”.
Johnson, chief executive of the humanoid robot maker Agility Robotics, is the first member to describe her role. Agility said on Monday that she will take part as an individual consultant to MITRE, “separate from Agility’s commercial operations”, and that the study will look 10 to 20 years ahead. Neither MITRE nor the Pentagon has said how members’ business interests will be handled.
Why it matters
A four-star command is the Pentagon’s way of saying autonomous weapons are no longer an experiment but a core part of how the US fights. It comes days after the US helped strip human control from the UN’s draft rules on AI weapons, and as Ukraine races to put robots on the front line. It also puts Musk back inside the Pentagon, which only last week was cleared to keep Anthropic on its blacklist.
Sources: US Department of War release, The Next Web, Project Meridian memo, Politico, DefenseScoop, Breaking Defense., MITRE, Agility Robotics
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