# Hegseth Orders Four-Star Drone Command, Congress Has To Build It > Source: > Published: 2026-10-02 00:51:00+00:00 Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the creation of a four-star Autonomous Warfare Command on September 30, 2026, telling 600 O-3 officers and E-6 noncommissioned officers at Marine Corps Base Quantico that it will scale drones, robotics and AI across the entire military. He calls it AutoWarCom. It is to be a functional combatant command with service-like authorities, its own budget and manpower, and new military career fields for the people who fly and fight with unmanned systems. It was the first of six announcements in the speech, and the only one built around hardware. The target date is October 1, 2027. Until then an interim effort called Project Agincourt, run out of the Pentagon’s unmanned systems office, is supposed to build the path to it. The memo Hegseth signed the same day sets that date and directs his staff to go to Congress for the legislation the command needs. The speech named no commander, no budget line and no headcount. ## Project Agincourt Turns the Drone Czar’s Office Into the Command’s Builder The [Project Agincourt memo](https://media.defense.gov/2026/Sep/30/2004009304/-1/-1/1/PROJECT-AGINCOURT-PATHWAY-TO-THE-AUTONOMOUS-WARFARE-COMMAND.PDF) directs the Direct Reporting Portfolio Manager for Unmanned Systems, or DRPM-UxS, to lead the effort, and gives it 30 days to submit a plan of action and milestones with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. That puts the first deadline at roughly October 30. DRPM-UxS is the office DroneXL covered in July as the [Pentagon’s drone czar memo](https://dronexl.co/2026/07/01/pentagon-drone-czar-drpm-uxs-diu/), created June 29 with milestone decision authority over nearly every unmanned program in the department and a direct line to Deputy Secretary Steve Feinberg. It already owns the Defense Innovation Unit, the counter-drone task force [JIATF-401](https://dronexl.co/2026/02/25/jiatf-401-counter-uas-marketplace-live/) and the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group. Agincourt adds two missions on top of that portfolio. The first is the pathway: organizational shifts, the legislation, and career tracks for officers and enlisted. The second is a prototype of what Hegseth calls warfighting acquisition. The memo says the output it wants is not a particular drone but a repeatable procurement system that keeps adapting in combat on the right side of the cost exchange. Decisions and dollars move to combatant commands and frontline units, and systems get tested in exercises and, where possible, in combat. The name is a 1415 reference. Hegseth’s version has the English winning with longbows and moving their fletchers, the arrow makers, up to the front to keep the rate of fire going. The fletchers in this analogy are engineers and startup founders embedded with operators. ## West And Strasiser Run It As CEO And COO, And DIU Loses Its Director Hegseth named Owen West, director of the Defense Innovation Unit since March 2, chief executive of DRPM-UxS for the next year, with Navy SEAL Senior Chief Max Strasiser as chief operating officer. West gets strategic risk, resources and scale. Strasiser gets operational problem solving and combat employment. West is a former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict and a former Goldman Sachs partner who ran its gas and power trading. He deployed twice to Iraq as a Marine on leave from the bank. Before DIU he was the department’s senior advisor on the Drone Dominance Program. Strasiser is described by the department as the first enlisted SEAL to graduate from Navy Test Pilot School. DIU moved the next morning. On October 1 it named Travis Metz, its deputy director and chief operating officer and the program manager for Drone Dominance, as acting director, saying in a post on X that West **“steps aside to kickstart Project Agincourt.”** Metz came to DIU from the Secretary of War’s office, where he worked on Drone Dominance, after a career running venture and private equity funds. [Inside Defense](https://insidedefense.com/insider/diu-taps-drone-dominance-chief-metz-acting-director-following-west-dprm-uxs-move) first reported the handover. ## Drone Dominance Is The Template, And It Has A Year Of Results To Judge Hegseth told the Quantico audience that Agincourt applies the Drone Dominance playbook to DIU and that the DRPM team has shipped thousands of autonomous systems to the Middle East and elsewhere for Operation Epic Fury. The “thousands” figure is the department’s own, repeated in its [release](https://www.war.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/4615424/secretary-hegseth-announces-six-major-initiatives-at-quantico-speech/), with no breakdown published. The playbook is the one DroneXL has tracked since the [March Gauntlet I results](https://dronexl.co/2026/03/06/drone-dominance-program-gauntlet-1-winners/): a $1.1 billion, four-phase buy of one-way attack drones in which military operators fly and score vendors’ aircraft, and orders follow the leaderboard. Gauntlet I produced orders for about 30,000 drones. By August 25, the winners had delivered 13,440 of the 22,320 the first tranche required, about 60 percent. Gauntlet II at Fort Carson in August ended with [Neros taking a $100 million order plus 800 drones its rivals failed to deliver](https://dronexl.co/2026/09/30/neros-gauntlet-ii-100-million-order-800-bonus-drones/), and the department opened a [$450 million Phase 3 round with a 400-drone entry requirement](https://dronexl.co/2026/09/29/pentagon-drone-dominance-phase-3-400-drone-deadline/) the day before Hegseth spoke. That program bans motors and batteries from China starting in Phase II. Whatever AutoWarCom buys will inherit that rule, and the suppliers who can meet it. Hegseth framed the whole command around cost. For 40 years, he said, the United States bought quality over quantity. **“The pace of war is changing faster than the process to support it,”** he said, before laying out a high-low mix in which exquisite weapons are the lightning and massed attritable drones are the wind and rain of the same storm. The full speech is on [Rev](https://www.rev.com/transcripts/state-of-the-force-address). ## Project Meridian Puts Anduril’s Founder On The Pentagon’s Futures Panel Hegseth also commissioned Project Meridian, a 120-day future-warfare study co-directed by Elon Musk, Palmer Luckey and Newt Gingrich under Chief Technology Officer Emil Michael, ending in a public report with a classified annex. The three sat in the audience and met Hegseth in a secure facility right after the speech. Luckey founded Anduril, which sells drones, counter-drone systems and autonomy software to the department whose future requirements he is now helping to write. The department’s release describes the panel as “the nation’s premier private-sector innovators” and says nothing about recusals or conflict rules. Meridian’s scope runs, in the department’s words, from the subterranean to the cislunar. ## The Order Arrives Without A Commander, A Budget Or A Headcount Hegseth said a four-star commander will soon be named to raise the AutoWarCom flag, and named nobody. The memo sets no dollar figure, no personnel number and no headquarters, and it conditions the whole structure on legislation that DRPM-UxS is told to go and secure from Congress. Congress got there first, on paper. The Senate Armed Services Committee’s FY27 defense bill, approved 18-9 in June, creates a four-star Robotic and Autonomous Systems Combatant Command with test and evaluation powers and limited acquisition authority, as [Breaking Defense](https://breakingdefense.com/2026/06/sascs-1-14t-defense-policy-bill-creates-combatant-command-for-drones/) reported. That bill has not passed, and the Senate’s limited acquisition authority is narrower than the service-like authority Hegseth described. Reconciling the two is the legislative work the memo assigns to DRPM-UxS, and it is why Hegseth spent part of the speech on Goldwater-Nichols, SOCOM and Space Force, three reorganizations the building fought before it executed them. The money is already asked for. As DroneXL [reported in July](https://dronexl.co/2026/07/01/pentagon-drone-czar-drpm-uxs-diu/), the FY27 request seeks $75 billion across drones and counter-drone work, most of it routed through the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group that now sits under DRPM-UxS, and Hegseth used the speech to press Congress for a separate $350 billion reconciliation package. Whether AutoWarCom absorbs any of that, or gets a line of its own, is not in any document released this week. ## DroneXL’s Take Standing up a four-star command for drones is the right call, and I’d rather see the Pentagon over-rotate toward it than keep running autonomy as a side project inside three services that each want their own program. The idea is not what I’m skeptical of. The clock is. “Fastest peacetime shift in modern military history” is Hegseth’s line, and the record he’s pointing to is one year of Drone Dominance. That year is real: orders for 30,000 drones from Gauntlet I, a $100 million order to Neros out of Gauntlet II, a Phase 3 round that demands 400 drones just to enter. It also includes a Gauntlet I tranche that was 60 percent delivered by late August and the 800 bonus aircraft Neros picked up because other winners could not deliver what they’d been awarded. My read is that the delivery gap, not the org chart, decides whether AutoWarCom means anything by October 2027. A combatant command with its own acquisition authority can write checks faster. It cannot make a startup with a China-free supply chain deliver the airframes it was awarded if the motors aren’t there. Watch two dates. The 30-day plan due around October 30 will show whether the services are handing over force structure or just liaison officers. Meridian’s 120-day report, due around the end of January, will show whether a panel led by a drone vendor recommends buying more drones. If both land on schedule, Hegseth’s timeline is credible. If the first one slips, the 2027 flag-raising is a ceremony, and the real command will be whatever DRPM-UxS has become by then. Sources: [Department of War](https://www.war.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/4615424/secretary-hegseth-announces-six-major-initiatives-at-quantico-speech/), [Project Agincourt memorandum](https://media.defense.gov/2026/Sep/30/2004009304/-1/-1/1/PROJECT-AGINCOURT-PATHWAY-TO-THE-AUTONOMOUS-WARFARE-COMMAND.PDF), [Military Times](https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2026/09/30/hegseth-announces-new-four-star-command-for-autonomous-warfare/), [Inside Defense](https://insidedefense.com/insider/diu-taps-drone-dominance-chief-metz-acting-director-following-west-dprm-uxs-move) *DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. [Read our editorial standards](https://dronexl.co/editorial-standards/).*