In 1928, Secretary of War Dwight Davis ordered the Army to assemble an experimental mechanized force of tanks, armored cars, and motorized infantry at Camp Meade, Maryland. It was disbanded within months. A second attempt was dissolved in 1931, when the Army told each of its branches to mechanize itself. The infantry kept the tanks, the cavalry built “combat cars” to work around a law that gave tanks to the infantry, and the United States created its Armored Force in July 1940, weeks after France fell. The Army had the idea twelve years before it had the force.
Owen West and Max Strasiser, who are building the Autonomous Warfare Command, cited the 1928 force in their October 21 open letter as the fragmentation the country must not repeat. They are right, and the week since shows how it happens. The command’s plan of action and milestones was due to the Secretary of War on October 30, and no one has reported that it arrived. The Pentagon is drafting a budget of about $1.1 trillion against a $1.5 trillion request, Politico reports, and the command rests on $54 billion in a reconciliation bill that has not passed and has no backup, according to Defense One. No commander has been named. Davis’s force was not defeated by an adversary. It was absorbed in peacetime, in a budget fight, by the institutions it was meant to change, while no one with the authority to stop it chose to.
Last week, I named three things the plan must settle: the authority to allocate resources among theaters, edge computing, and magnets for drones stocked before the ban. These items remain the test of the plan when it appears. But a command is formed by what it does before its charter is signed, and the Services are already deciding what this one will be. Five things can start this month, and none of them requires an act of Congress or the $54 billion:
Start in the theater. The letter allows different mixes of systems for the Indo-Pacific and for Europe. It does not say who chooses between them when there are not enough for both, which is the only week that matters. The command’s planners should sit with Indo-Pacific Command now and run that choice in an exercise: two theaters, the same systems, the same day, and a ruling the Services agree in advance to treat as binding. I served six commanders at Indo-Pacific Command and one at Special Operations Command. Each could state exactly what the fight required. The process that allocated scarce systems and bought new ones answered late, and more often not at all. A rule practiced before the war is the only kind that survives it.
Start measuring time. The letter grades spending by cost per kill. Add a second number: the time from sensing a target to striking it, and who owns each link in between. The advantage of autonomous warfare is reduced latency. Ukraine’s drones compute on the airframe because they cannot afford the round trip; too many of ours still make it. A force that relies on someone else’s network to communicate, or on a signal an adversary can jam to determine its location, has let another party set its speed. Make latency and assured positioning, navigation and timing a condition of every purchase.
Start with command and control. No technical architecture, interface standard, or acquisition priority list has been published. Write them before the first large buy, as one architecture across every Service and domain, including space. Every system bought before the architecture exists is a problem handed to the warfighter to solve under fire, and it becomes obsolete the day a system that integrates arrives.
Start telling industry what it needs. Industry answers requests for proposals; it does not invest against a need it cannot see. The Defense Innovation Unit and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency identify gaps faster than the system can close them, and drones are the proof. Publish the demand signal: the architecture, the quantities, and the dates. Put supply in it. The command’s motors still turn on Chinese magnets, and Beijing’s pause on licensing lapses on November 10. The Pentagon’s own ban on Chinese-origin magnets begins on January 1. No Defense Production Act priority rating has been reported to carry the command across that gap.
Start with allies where they give an operational advantage. The letter does not mention them. Yet allies are already paying for American weapons: Canada, Germany, and Norway are financing a possible sale of 500 Patriot interceptors for Ukraine, approved October 30. Korean yards overhaul American supply ships, and the second pillar of AUKUS, the Australian, British, and American partnership, carries autonomy as a line of effort. Build and repair the systems where the fight would be, inside the theater, with partners whose industry can surge when ours cannot. That makes the arsenal of freedom an operational fact rather than a slogan.
None of this is money, and all of it is integration. The Services will coordinate the command into existence if it lets them, each taking a share of the systems, the budget, and the mission, and calling the result joint. That is what the Army did in 1931. West and Strasiser are right that the advantage goes to the force that adapts faster than its adversary. But adaptation is a decision made again and again, and a command that cannot rule among the Services will adapt only as fast as the slowest of them. A command earns its four stars by deciding among competing claims and making the decision bind, and this one can start before it has a charter. Coordination assigns. Integration arbitrates.
The Army that told each branch to mechanize itself built its Armored Force after France fell, and still had more than two years before its armor met the enemy. This command will not be given two years.
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