The US military is organised into large "combatant commands". One for Europe, one for the Pacific, one for space, and a few others. Each is led by a four-star general. They are created very rarely: the last one, devoted to space, dates from 2019.
On 30 September, a new one was announced. Its domain: machines that fight.
What was announced
In a major speech before hundreds of service personnel at the Quantico base in Virginia, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced the creation of the Autonomous Warfare Command, abbreviated to AutoWarCom.
It will cover drones, artificial intelligence and the systems that link them together, for all the US armed forces. It will be led by a four-star general and will have powers close to those of a full armed service: it will be able to develop, buy and deploy its own technologies. It is due to be operational by 1 October 2027.
To justify the choice, Pete Hegseth had a phrase: the pace of war is changing faster than the procedures meant to keep up with it.
Why now
Recent conflicts, starting with the war in Ukraine, have shown the decisive weight of drones. Cheap devices, produced in mass, have upended battlefields until then dominated by tanks and aircraft costing tens of millions.
The Pentagon wants to draw the consequences: moving from a few very expensive weapons to many less costly systems, increasingly autonomous, piloted or assisted by AI.
In his speech, Pete Hegseth presented drone warfare, backed by "SI"-driven targeting, as the greatest revolution on the battlefield for generations. "SI", for superintelligence: the new name imposed on AI by the presidential decree signed the day before. It took less than twenty-four hours for it to enter military vocabulary.
The question that remains open
The announcement does not say the essential thing: how far will these machines be able to decide on their own?
There is an immense difference between a drone that spots a target and waits for a human to approve the strike, and a drone that chooses and strikes without human intervention. The word "autonomous" covers both.
Since 2012, a Pentagon directive, updated in 2023, requires that weapons systems leave service personnel appropriate levels of human judgement over the use of force. Everything depends on what is meant by "appropriate". The AutoWarCom announcement does not specify.
A few days later, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, called for urgent action to ban machines from deciding who lives and who dies. On this point, positions remain very far apart.
What we take away
In two weeks, Washington has renamed AI, handed its policy to the head of intelligence, as we reported with the creation of the Super Intelligence Force, and announced a military command devoted to machines. The direction is clear: AI is now thought of first and foremost as a matter of power.
The war of machines is no longer a science-fiction hypothesis. It is a line in an org chart. What remains to be seen is where, in that org chart, the place of the human will be.