The Pentagon is creating a new military command to develop and deploy autonomous and robotic capabilities across the US armed forces, marking a major shift in America’s approach to warfare.
US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said the new body would be called the “Autonomous Warfare Command” and would be led by a four-star officer.
Creating a new military command is unusual. The last was US Space Command, established in 2019, underscoring the importance Washington is attaching to autonomous systems, artificial intelligence and robotics as the character of warfare changes.
Speaking to hundreds of junior officers and enlisted personnel at Quantico, Virginia, Hegseth argued that military technology was developing faster than the bureaucracy responsible for acquiring and deploying it.
“The pace of war is changing faster than the process to support it,” Hegseth said during a speech entitled the “State of the Force”.
He added: “Cheap compute, superintelligence, and advanced commercial manufacturing have enabled the proliferation of low-cost, high-precision strike.”
The US currently has 11 combatant commands responsible for geographical regions and specific military missions. The new command reflects a broader Pentagon effort to move away from an exclusive reliance on expensive conventional weapons platforms towards larger numbers of relatively cheap, software-driven autonomous systems.
“Today we need both quality and quantity,” Hegseth said.
The shift has been accelerated by Russia’s war in Ukraine, where unmanned systems have become central to reconnaissance, targeting and attack.
Ukraine, facing Russia’s advantages in conventional armour and aircraft, has increasingly relied on relatively inexpensive drones to compensate for shortages of traditional military equipment. The battlefield has consequently evolved from one dominated by tanks and artillery into a contest increasingly shaped by drones and electronic warfare.
Drones are estimated to account for about 70 per cent of Russian casualties, according to figures cited in the discussion around the conflict, although battlefield casualty attribution remains difficult to verify independently.
The Pentagon has already begun adapting. Joint Interagency Task Force 401 was established to focus on countering drones, reflecting the growing importance of unmanned systems on modern battlefields.
The rapid development of military artificial intelligence has also raised concerns about escalation and accountability. Security experts in both the US and China have called for guardrails around the development and deployment of AI-enabled military systems, including technologies that could interact with nuclear weapons.
Washington and Beijing are already competing intensely over artificial intelligence, with both countries seeking advantages in computing power, commercial applications and advanced military systems.
For the Pentagon, the challenge is to combine technological sophistication with scale. The United States has long relied on a vast defence budget to field some of the world’s most advanced — and expensive — weapons systems.
Hegseth’s new command signals a growing recognition that future wars may demand not simply more sophisticated platforms, but potentially thousands of autonomous systems capable of operating at speed and across increasingly complex battlefields.
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