Pentagon’s Project Agincourt writes to industry as it builds a four-star Autonomous Warfare Command

The Pentagon team charged with building a new Autonomous Warfare Command has gone public with its plans. In an open letter to industry partners and the joint force this week, the leaders of Project Agincourt set out how the command is meant to develop, the War Department said on October 23.

The letter follows a memo that Secretary of War Pete Hegseth signed on September 30, 2026, creating Project Agincourt as a short-term effort to lay the groundwork for the command.

What the command would be

According to the department’s account of the memo, the Autonomous Warfare Command would be a four-star functional combatant command leading the joint force in unmanned and autonomous warfare. It would hold its own manpower, budget and acquisition authorities and create dedicated career paths for officers and enlisted personnel. Its tasks would include defining joint requirements, supplying service-provided forces to the regional combatant commands and testing equipment and force designs against realistic opposition.

The target date for establishing the command is October 1, 2027, and the memo describes that goal as dependent on legislation from Congress. Project Agincourt is led by the Direct Reporting Portfolio Manager for Unmanned Systems, headed by chief executive Owen West. It has two jobs: to chart the path to the command, and to continue its existing mission while prototyping a new acquisition model for unmanned and autonomous systems.

Hegseth: services are on board

Speaking on a panel at the Association of the United States Army meeting in Washington on October 14, Hegseth called the project “the end state of something we focused on since Day 1” and said the services “are not fighting us on that concept; they believe in it,” according to a Pentagon News report. He said $1 billion in drone-dominance funding had gone directly to operators in the field, and that hundreds of thousands of one-way attack systems would be fielded this year, rising to millions in coming years.

The service chiefs described their own steps. The acting Secretary of the U.S. Army, Adam Telle, said the U.S. Army had announced a Futures and Autonomous Systems Command the day before, to centralise its autonomy work and feed into the new joint command. Acting Secretary of the U.S. Navy Hung Cao said the Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group, which deployed on October 8, is the first carrier strike group to go to sea with a large uncrewed surface vessel. Secretary of the U.S. Air Force Troy Meink said fielding combat power with autonomous systems could be five to ten times cheaper, while manned aircraft would remain central.

What happens next

The memo gave the Agincourt team 30 days, working with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to submit a plan of action and milestones for Hegseth’s approval. That deadline falls around the end of October. The project is also meant to recommend a rebalanced joint-force investment allocation and a repeatable procurement system that pushes decisions and funding towards operational units.

Uncrewed systems are changing navies in Europe too. Earlier on Geopolitiki: Swedish Navy to field four Saildrone uncrewed surface vessels for Baltic surveillance via NORDEFCO.