The planned Autonomous Warfare Command, slated to launch by next October, will promote “not a particular drone, but the ability to adapt in combat” against “realistic opposition,” according to a Sept. 30 memo from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who added: “We do not have a decade to transition our procurement and doctrine.”

That’s because on today’s battlefields, effective adaptation to “realistic opposition” is something that happens in weeks, not the months and years it typically takes defense contractors to update designs or even issue software patches. Fortunately, the Pentagon isn’t starting from scratch.

Start with the mission, not the robot

Start with asking commanders and operators what they want from autonomy and robots, rather than trying to dazzle them with an experiment or demonstration that isn't relevant to what they need.

One example is Maven Smart System, an AI intelligence platform widely adopted by the U.S. military and NATO forces—and a model for getting emerging technology to the force faster. A noted 2024 report for CNAS wrote, “A clear, urgent, but broad problem definition permitted Maven to more directly meet user needs.”

So what do combatant commanders want now? Here’s Gen. Frank Donovan, commander of U.S. Southern Command, speaking in May at a Defense One event:

“Most of the systems we're looking at are primarily our domain awareness systems, and…We can match the robots to the environment whether it swims, it flies, it has feet, whatever it does.” 

Donovan had just finished leading the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group, the special-operations effort to apply autonomy and robotics to missions. He discovered that robots were needed not just to replace humans in combat but to better understand what was happening in the places where boots weren’t on the ground. 

“Our partners, who have the access and placement where they live, have to work in, in the rough terrain, the jungle, over the horizon, thousands of miles at sea.”

Build communicative autonomy

Donovan said most of his work at the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group was about getting people partners to talk about what information they needed from robotic systems and what information they wanted those systems robots to have. 

“We don't talk about robots. We talk about the data environment, right? With the different data layers that we need at the very forward edge so our [special operations forces] and our conventional force teammates with a…cell phone they can actually plug into that data network, and whatever robot shows up with the capability, they can leverage it instantaneously.”

Autonomous systems will become even more important when network access is blocked by adversary electronic-warfare capabilities, said one former senior defense official who worked to field AI software to U.S. and allied forces. 

“The next step is getting these systems to true autonomy that can handle the operating environment. In any conflict, GPS and comms will be denied and degraded. We see it today in Ukraine and the Middle East, and it's a certainty in any future fight,” they said.

Buy the brains and body separately

Another lesson comes from the auto industry, which has turned to external partners for its autonomy needs. 

By contrast, the former senior official said, “The Department has mostly asked industry to self-organize to deliver autonomy alongside the vehicle.” For example, Pentagon buyers seeking autonomous drones have simply asked manufacturers to build autonomous versions of their remote-controlled aircraft. 

That’s the wrong approach, the former official said. Drone makers “build excellent platforms, but autonomy is its own discipline. Commercial self-driving figured this out years ago: the automakers build great vehicles and partner with autonomy companies for the driver,” they said. “Defense needs the same model.”  

Make it modular

The former official added that Pentagon buyers should specify that the autonomy package should be modular—that is, able to be upgraded as threats change and technology improves. 

That’s true not just for individual weapons, but across the force and indeed across alliances, they said. “Open standards are what make that partnership work at scale.”

This was underscored by a recent NATO experiment in Portugal. In September, the alliance’s Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation, or CMRE, wrapped up its biggest annual exercise: Robotic Experimentation and Prototyping with Maritime Unmanned Systems. This year’s edition featured a demonstration that showed what an Autonomous Warfare Command will look to replicate: robots receiving orders not from humans but from software. 

“For the first time, we had materialized our vision for future operations. We had algorithms looking at what the mission was looking like and automatically giving tasks to drones,” said João Alves, a principal scientist at CMRE.

That wasn’t the result of a new sensor or piece of AI software but rather a policy change: partner militaries agreeing to adopt a standard for the systems that they were buying.

Instill trust

The biggest challenge any military office, command, or unit will face when using autonomous weapons is knowing when to rely on them. 

That’s the big conclusion of a 2017 study of autonomy safety failures involving Patriot missile batteries.The most dramatic case was the 2003 downing of an F-18 by a Patriot in Iraq. 

“The tactical director at the battalion command and control node gave the order, ‘Bring your launchers to ready.’ That directive was tantamount to an order to engage. But that was not what the tactical director intended,” Army engineering psychologist John Hawley wrote in the study.

Even with everything else in place—a specific mission, open standards, and shared data, the right training—the biggest challenge any command or unit faces when employing autonomy is “sustained high reliability in a complex and unpredictable operational setting,” Hawley concludes. 

That same question—does this software program understand what I intend it to do?—has only grown more urgent with each new instance of an AI software agent breaking the law in service of a poorly defined user request.

If AUTOWARCOM is to set a course for the military, its leaders must recognize why previous efforts in autonomy succeeded or failed, and acknowledge that human trust can’t be automated.