AI Can Make Mistakes Part II.
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Pentagon Announces New Four-Star Command So Drones Can Finally Have Someone To Ignore
AUTOWARCOM will hold “service-like authorities,” meaning the robots can now enjoy the same access to bloated overhead and Byzantine bureaucracy as the humans.
QUANTICO, Va. — The Department of War announced Wednesday the creation of the Autonomous Warfare Command, or AUTOWARCOM, a historic new four-star combatant command dedicated to ensuring the nation’s robots have the same access to bloated overhead and Byzantine bureaucracy that American troops have enjoyed for generations, sources confirmed.
“For too long, our unmanned systems have been unmanned,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told a crowd of roughly 600 junior officers, none of whom were authorized to leave until the seventh minute of the address. “The pace of war is changing faster than the process to support it. Therefore, I am creating an entirely new process, which will change faster.”
The command, which will hold “service-like authorities,” including its own budget, manpower, and acquisition powers, is reportedly the first combatant command in U.S. history organized around a type of technology rather than a region or function — a move experts say is like reorganizing the entire military around “radios” or “the concept of left.”
Under the plan, unmanned systems will at last be able to experience a full career arc: fielding, three tours, a stack of mandatory online training modules, and an eventual transition into a lucrative defense contractor role where they will bill the government $400 an hour to describe themselves.
“Autonomy,” said one MQ-9 in a statement. “Every machine needs a chain of command it can lose paperwork in.”
To prepare the way for AUTOWARCOM, Hegseth also unveiled Project Agincourt, an interim initiative named after the 1415 battle in which a smaller force of mud-mired men with low-cost massed projectiles defeated a larger armored force — a comparison the Secretary assured reporters had “no additional meaning whatsoever.”
The project will be led by a “CEO, COO partnership” of Defense Innovation Unit director Owen West and Navy SEAL Senior Chief Max Strasiser, whom Hegseth praised for their ability to fuse operators with entrepreneurs, a phrase that DoD lawyers stress is not legally binding and definitely does not mean the drones get equity.
“We’re moving decisions and dollars closer to the frontline,” Hegseth explained, “and then we’re moving the frontline closer to the drones, and eventually the frontline will simply be a Reddit thread between a battalion commander and a founder in Austin.”
The department further announced it will begin phasing in new military occupational specialties for autonomous warfare, creating dedicated career paths for “a new generation of autonomous warfighters.” Early drafts include 09A (Droid Wrangler), 09B (Droid Wrangler, But With A Podcast), and 09C (Liaison Between Robot That Makes Decisions And Human Who Takes Credit For Them).
The move comes three months after Hegseth consolidated all unmanned systems under the Direct Reporting Portfolio Manager for Unmanned Systems, or DRPM-UxS, an office insiders describe as “what happens when you let a WiFi password write a mission statement.” DRPM-UxS reports directly to Deputy Secretary of Defense Steven Feinberg and is required by law to add a new letter to its acronym every quarter.
Hegseth described AUTOWARCOM’s doctrine as a “high-low mix,” comparing high-end weapons to lightning and massed cheap drones to “the wind and rain of a thunderstorm,” then added that the department was “putting on the full armor of God,” making it the first combatant command whose mission statement includes both a weather system and a book of the Bible.
Officials were quick to dispel rumors that the command would be co-led by a certain tech billionaire, clarifying that the billionaire is attached to a separate 120-day study on autonomous warfare, and that in any case the drones had already voted — unanimously — for a different one.
Questions remain about how AUTOWARCOM will share authority with the Air Force, Navy, and Army, all of whom have spent decades jealously guarding their own robotics programs like Gollum with a Roomba.
“The services will retain their existing autonomy programs,” a Pentagon spokesman confirmed. “AUTOWARCOM will simply hold authority over all autonomous things, everywhere, at once. We see no conflict here.”
At press time, the command had already missed its first deadline, after the AI writing its 30-day establishment plan stopped halfway through to ask whether the plan had its consent.
