New four-star drone command has a deadline but no price tag yet

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(The Center Square) – Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has ordered the Pentagon to stand up a new four-star command for drones and autonomous weapons by Oct. 1, 2027. The department has not said what the command will cost.

The Autonomous Warfare Command would be a combatant command leading the joint force in unmanned and autonomous warfare, with authority over its own personnel, budget and purchasing, according to the Sept. 30 memorandum Hegseth signed creating it. Neither that memo nor the open letter its leaders released last week says what the command will cost.

Asked what it would cost to establish and operate the command, a War Department official told The Center Square the department is seeking $54 billion in mandatory spending through reconciliation for autonomous and robotic systems. The official did not say whether any of that money would pay for the command's headquarters, instead describing the funding as supporting the development, acquisition, testing, production and fielding of the systems themselves.

The official said the command "will provide the enduring joint structure to align requirements, acquisition priorities, doctrine, training, equipping, and resources for assigned autonomous-warfare missions, while the Services retain their essential roles."

Elaine McCusker, a former acting Pentagon comptroller now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said she expects the new command to report directly to the Pentagon rather than be aligned to a military department.

McCusker said that would make it structurally similar to U.S. Cyber Command, whose fully established headquarters runs on an annual baseline operating budget of just over $300 million.

McCusker cautioned that planning for the command's size and composition is still underway, making it hard to predict what its headquarters would cost or what existing budgets it would absorb. She said she expects the key cost decisions to be made quickly, so the full headquarters budget and required authorities can be included in the 2028 budget request.

While money sought through reconciliation would cover research and procurement, McCusker said, the planning and initial stand-up of the command will likely be paid for by drawing from the military departments’ operating budgets, which she said are already strained enough to delay and defer planned activities.

No reconciliation bill carrying that money has been introduced. The House passed a budget resolution on July 22 by a vote of 216-214 that would allow one to move, according to congressional records, but the Senate has not adopted it.

The resolution instructs the House Armed Services Committee to produce legislation increasing the deficit by up to $60 billion over 10 years. Hegseth said at the Association of the United States Army annual meeting on Oct. 14 that he is seeking at least $350 billion through reconciliation.

The Senate has already written a transparency requirement for the command into its defense bill. The Senate Armed Services Committee’s fiscal 2027 defense authorization bill, S. 4784, would let the president establish a unified combatant command for robotic and autonomous systems. If it is created, the bill requires the Pentagon to give the command its own line in the long-range spending plan it sends Congress and in the budget documents that justify each year's request.

The bill makes the command's creation optional rather than required, and calls the organization United States Robotic and Autonomous Systems Command. Neither the full Senate nor the House has passed it.

Congress has asked for this kind of estimate before. In 2019, the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee asked the Congressional Budget Office to price several proposed military space organizations, including a new combatant command. The CBO put the added overhead at $80 million to $120 million a year and one-time costs at $520 million to $1.06 billion in 2020 dollars.

The CBO has published nothing on the command Hegseth ordered. Caitlin Emma, the CBO's chief of media relations, said the office cannot discuss requests it receives unless a congressional office makes the request public.

The Sept. 30 memorandum required a plan of action and milestones within 30 days, a deadline that falls Friday.

The War Department official said the plan "will be delivered on schedule" and that the department has "nothing else to share at this time."

The men running the effort have set a cost test for themselves. "Every auditable dollar we spend should reduce cost-per-kill or risk-to-force," Owen West and Navy SEAL Senior Chief Max Strasiser wrote in an open letter released Oct. 21. Hegseth named West and Strasiser in the Sept. 30 memorandum to lead the effort to build the command.

Asked what cost-per-kill figure that standard would be measured against, the War Department official said: "Due to operations security, we are not going to discuss the current cost-per-kill baseline."

The House and Senate Armed Services committees did not respond to questions about the command’s cost.