We watched Washington invent another four-star command on Wednesday to chase the ghost of modern war.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth took the stage at the Association of the United States Army's annual meeting in Washington alongside service secretaries to outline Project Agincourt, an initiative aimed at accelerating the acquisition of unmanned platforms. The centerpiece of the plan is the forthcoming Autonomous Warfare Command, scheduled to activate by October 1, 2027, which will oversee procurement, training and doctrine for autonomous systems across all branches.
The announcement arrived with precious few details on what the new command will actually look like or how it will operate. Hegseth defended the creation of a four-star combatant command despite ordering cuts to flag officer positions elsewhere in the military, telling the packed ballroom that rank is necessary to drive change quickly. "Let's put rank where we need it to ensure we can drive change quickly," Hegseth said. The Army moved quickly to align with the new directive, renaming its Futures and Concepts Command to the Futures and Autonomy Command as its component under the new structure. The other services have yet to announce their own component commands. The proceedings were repeatedly interrupted by protesters shouting condemnations of U.S. policy in Iran and Gaza, who called the defense secretary a war criminal and a coward before being dragged out by security.
Ottawa watches these Pentagon reorganizations with a familiar nervous twitch — wondering what part of this automated future our smaller forces will be expected to buy off the rack or plug into. We are told that algorithms and unmanned swarms will solve our recruiting shortfalls and our procurement delays in one tidy package. But a four-star command doesn't build itself, and a general's badge doesn't manufacture microchips or clear test ranges.
The Pentagon has two years to build an autonomous command from scratch while the rest of us figure out who pays the bill.