The Army's Armored Force was born in July 1940, a few weeks after France fell. No act of Congress created it, and no budget line funded it. The Chief of Staff ordered it into being, took the tanks from the infantry and the cavalry, and placed them under a single commander. The money came later, once the force had demonstrated what it could do with what it already had. The idea had been waiting since 1928. The force did not wait for its appropriation.
Last week, I argued that the Autonomous Warfare Command could begin its work before it had a charter, a commander, or the $54 billion a reconciliation bill was supposed to deliver. This week, the bill lost its Congress. Democrats took both houses, and the two members who will now write the defense budget said what they think of the Pentagon's request within a day of the vote. Adam Smith, the incoming chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said the mission "does not require a defense budget in excess of $1 trillion." Rosa DeLauro, who will chair Appropriations, promised to claw back billions across the Pentagon and homeland security. The budget resolution that would carry a reconciliation bill is one John Thune, the Senate's current leader, will not bring to the floor, and one Wall Street defense analyst gives it a one-in-ten chance. Of the $54.6 billion requested for autonomous warfare, $53.6 billion was to come through that reconciliation. The House's appropriations bill provides one billion. For now, that is the command's budget.
It is enough, if the command stops behaving like a program waiting for its money and starts behaving like a command. Three things happened this week that show how.
First, the hardware is arriving without the command. Central Command took delivery this year of more than 25,000 systems bought for $782 million through the Pentagon's competitive purchase rounds: some 1,300 one-way attack drones, more than a hundred unmanned surface and undersea vessels, and 24,000 counter-drone systems. The Army has already named its component, the Futures and Autonomous Systems Command, for a four-star command that does not yet exist. The systems do not need the $53 billion; they are coming anyway, and each purchase round is driving the price down. What does not exist is the authority to decide which theater gets them when there are not enough for both. That authority costs nothing. It requires a decision, and the Secretary can make it tomorrow.
Second, the budget that will pass has room for the command's purpose, though not for its request. The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments published four ways this week to fund defense at between $1.05 and $1.15 trillion, written for hawks in both parties. Every one of them quadruples spending on critical munitions, and every one puts that money in the base budget, beyond the reach of a reconciliation fight. Two of the four need no reconciliation at all, and those are the two the Center recommends. A command whose case rests on cost per kill and speed from sensor to shooter belongs inside a munitions line that Congress has already agreed to grow fourfold. It should ask to be included in that appropriation as the authority that allocates among theaters and sets the architecture that every purchase must meet. It should also hold the priority order that stocks rare-earth magnets, because the ban on Chinese-origin magnets takes effect on January 1. None of that costs $53 billion. All of it is what a four-star command exists to do.
Third, the new chairmen have said what they will fund, and it is not nothing. Smith's trillion-dollar ceiling is a budget ceiling, not a mission ceiling. He did not object to autonomy, to lethality per dollar, or to folding the Services' separate drone programs into a single architecture. He objected to the $1.5 trillion figure and to the reconciliation that was to carry a quarter of it. A command that arrives at its first hearings, before Smith in the House and Jack Reed in the Senate, with a plan to deliver more capability from the budget it will actually get, by retiring duplicate programs and ruling among the Services, will find two committees that have waited years for that argument. A command that arrives asking for its $53 billion back will find the door that closed in 1931.
That is the test I set last week, with its terms now in plain view. The command's plan was due to the Secretary on October 30 and has not been reported delivered. No commander has been named. No priority order has been issued for the magnets. Each is a decision within the Secretary's authority, and each would show Congress a command that commands before it asks to be paid. The alternative is the one the Services will offer: each takes its share of the drones and its share of the billion dollars, and the result is called joint. That is what the Army did in 1931. It is what every institution does when the integrator has no money and no power to rule. Coordination assigns. Integration arbitrates. The Armored Force got its appropriation because it had already arbitrated. It had taken the tanks and put them under one man before anyone voted on the money.
Industry should read the same signal. The companies that will matter to this command are not the ones positioned for the $53 billion; that money is gone, and the primes sized to it will be resized by chairmen who have said a trillion is enough. They are the ones whose systems already work inside an architecture someone else controls, because the first thing a real command will do is refuse to buy what it cannot integrate. That is the whole test, for the command and for everyone who wants to sell to it: prove inside the smaller budget that one authority ruling among the Services delivers more than three Services coordinating with a check. Make that case before the first markup, and the money will follow the force, as it did in 1940. Wait for the bill, and the force will be absorbed by the institutions it was meant to change, as it was in 1931. Build for the command that arbitrates now, before the standard is written, and the standard will be written around what you built.
The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.
Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.
Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief
