Secretary Hegseth and DOW Leaders Speak at AUSA 2026

At the Association of the United States Army annual meeting in Washington on October 14, 2026, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth joined Acting Secretary of the Army Adam Telle, Acting Secretary of the Navy Hung Cao, Secretary of the Air Force Troy Meink, and Assistant Secretary of War for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict Derek Anderson for a panel on Project Agincourt and the future of autonomous warfare. Owen West, chief executive of Project Agincourt, moderated.

Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Sean Parnell opened by describing the department’s movement away from decade-long acquisition cycles. He said Project Agincourt pushes dollars, decisions, and development to the tactical edge, pairing front-line operators with commercial builders, and that the panel marked the first time all of these leaders had appeared together on one stage.

Secretary Hegseth framed the effort around the Arsenal of Freedom, a push to rebuild the defense industrial base at a scale not seen since World War II. He said the Pentagon bureaucracy has spent twenty years resisting new entrants and that success will be measured by expanding the prime contractor base from roughly five firms to ten or fifteen. He described a sequence that began with drone dominance and an executive order, followed by one billion dollars placed directly in operators’ hands, then a direct reporting program manager, the  Army’s JIATF 401, the Defense Autonomous War Group, and finally Project Agincourt. He said the department had no one-way attack program when the current team arrived and expects to field hundreds of thousands of systems this year, with millions to follow. On structure, he defended standing up a four-star combatant command even while cutting general officer ranks, arguing that rank should sit where it drives change. He gave the command a deadline of October 1, 2027, and said he expects it sooner.

The budget was the panel’s most pointed exchange. Hegseth called a one-time reconciliation investment critical, citing deferred maintenance, continuing resolutions, and chronic underfunding. He said roughly fifty billion dollars for autonomous and robotic systems sits in the reconciliation bill and that the administration seeks a minimum of 350 billion, with a stated goal of funding a 1.5 trillion dollar vision. He warned that whoever leads in autonomy now will widen the gap.

Telle described the Army’s framework for how it fights, unveiled the previous day by General LaNeve, and announced Futures and Autonomous Systems Command, or FASCOM, stood up in response to Hegseth’s directive. He called next-generation command and control the magic in the middle, stating that the Army’s real acquisition underway is a frictionless symbiosis with industry. He also pointed to the 390 Alpha robotics warrant officer specialty as a shared Army and SO/LIC effort. On the drone marketplace, he said it cuts out the bureaucratic middleman, connects soldiers directly with builders through reviews, has already processed 800 million dollars in purchases, and is expanding to partner militaries. He added that a booking-style tool now opens test ranges to industry.

Cao cited the Corsair used to recover two Apache pilots near the Strait of Hormuz and unmanned underwater vehicles used to clear mines there. He said the Teddy Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group deployed on October 8 with a medium unmanned surface vessel, a first for a carrier strike group, and noted that unmanned ships are faster to build because they carry no life support requirements.

Meink said Air Force leadership has long been dominated by combat pilots and called that a strength, while acknowledging the push for adaptability, scalability, and affordability. He said autonomous systems can field combat power at five to ten times lower cost, that autonomous fighters are now in experimental operations units at Creech Air Force Base two years after first flight, and that autonomous strike and bomber contracts were awarded with operational prototypes expected by 2028 and large-scale production in 2029. On space, he said sensing and targeting are approaching a point where signature and speed determine whether a platform can hide, and that survivability against that environment is the central problem.

Anderson traced the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group’s origins to three task forces, Able, Baker, and Charlie, each addressing a different problem set. He described an accelerator day in which problem sets went to industry with thirty-day white paper deadlines and a contract was awarded the same day, compressing an eighteen to twenty-four month process into two months. He said the DAWG will transfer into a task force for autonomous warfare in SOCOM to support the new command without a pause, and that theater edge innovation labs will give operators places to iterate forward.

Hegseth closed on the golden rule, doing unto a formation what you would want done for your own son or daughter, and tied recruiting gains and raised standards to that foundation. He said the command’s value will be measured where it meets the service member, and that the coming months on Capitol Hill will determine whether the vision is funded.