Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced on Sept. 30 the creation of a four-star Autonomous Warfare Command, or “Autowarcom,” to build autonomous and robotic capabilities across the joint force in what he called “the fastest peacetime shift in modern history,” the Pentagon reported. “Today, with … Autowarcom, we institutionalize—and we supercharge—the era of [super intelligence], robotics and autonomous systems, all in order to win,” he told some 600 junior officers and NCOs at Marine Corps Base Quantico. A transition team, “Project Agincourt,” will prepare the command, and each service will create new military specialties for autonomous warfare. A second initiative, “Project Meridian,” teams the Pentagon’s chief technology officer, Emil Michael, with Elon Musk, Palmer Luckey and Newt Gingrich, according to Defense One, to “identify the domains we must conquer, and capabilities we must master … to achieve technological and military dominance on the battlefield for decades to come.” Neither the Pentagon’s account nor press reports of the speech mention human control over the use of lethal force.

The day before, at the UN General Assembly’s high-level meeting on nuclear disarmament, Oman, speaking for the Arab Group, stressed “the need to maintain full human control” over nuclear weapons, and Burkina Faso said, “No decision regarding the use of a nuclear weapon should be made without effective human control.” The same afternoon, six AI companies signed a voluntary pledge to police themselves at the White House.

In Congress, the Human Authority in Lethal Operations (HALO) Act, introduced June 8, would require “a designated commander is identified as accountable under applicable military and international laws for each engagement or class of engagements"of AI-enabled weapons, and would prohibit “removing a human from the chain of decisionmaking for … initiating or terminating nuclear weapons employment.” The bill grew out of the Pentagon’s February fight with Anthropic, which refused to drop its two red lines, “no mass domestic surveillance of Americans, and no fully autonomous weapons,” and was then designated a “supply chain risk to national security” by Hegseth, as EIR reported at the time.