FAT CHANCE

Pentagon Insiders Call BS on Hegseth’s Big Project

The “Secretary of War” may be putting the cart before the horse.

Military experts are skeptical that Pete Hegseth’s new robot-powered defense initiative will actually materialize anytime soon.

Hegseth, 46, announced the creation of the Autonomous Warfare Command, also known as “AUTOWARCOM,” during his “State of the Force” address at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia last month.

The new military combatant command (COCOM) is supposed to tackle the rapid adoption and acquisition of autonomous and robotic assets for the joint force at large.

“The autonomous and robotic revolution has enormous implications for equipment, doctrine, organization, and the assumptions that have governed warfare for decades,” the self-styled “Secretary of War” said during his speech last month.

Hegseth gave the Defense Department a full year to boot up the new COCOM from the ground up, but experts say it may be difficult given there’s no existing force structure.

“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,” retired two-star general John G. Ferrari told the U.S. military-focused outlet Defense One.

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Ferrari, a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, was referring to an Oct. 14 panel in which Hegseth and other top Pentagon officials discussed the budding four-star initiative.

“But they’ve now set the direction and the intent,” he explained. “And they’re going to give it to a commander and say, ‘Now go build it.’”

Without going into too much detail, Hegseth said at the panel that AUTOWARCOM would become the Defense Department’s primary purchaser of autonomous technology.

“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,” the former Fox & Friends Weekend host said, according to Defense One. “We understand how to do it better with each iteration.”

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However, establishing a four-star COCOM that is focused primarily on acquisitions is a head-scratching decision, 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,” he told Defense One. “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.”

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Cancian argued that a structure more like the three-star Missile Defense Agency, which has its own significant budget, is a better model for what Hegseth wants to build 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,” Cancian 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.”

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The Pentagon requested $54 billion from Congress earlier this year to fund the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group, which Hegseth said would help launch AUTOWARCOM.

But rather than including it in the existing $1 trillion defense budget, the Trump administration elected to request that sum, along with several other military priorities, in a separate reconciliation bill that faces a tough path to passage.

“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,” a Pentagon official told Defense One.

With next week’s midterm elections likely to shift congressional chamber majorities to Democratic control, an extra funding package for the military on top of the already massive budget request is far from 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.”

“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,” he added.

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Asked by Defense One whether the Pentagon had a backup plan if the reconciliation bill fails to pass, a Defense Department official reiterated that it is seeking $54 billion through reconciliation.

A Pentagon spokesperson told the Daily Beast: “The unmanned systems expansion is fully aligned with Congressional priorities and funded through appropriations under the Working Families Tax Cut legislation (OBBB). DRPM-UxS acts as the single joint authority to synchronize requirements, eliminate duplicate programs, and maximize the efficiency of every taxpayer dollar.”

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