The Pentagon is reorganizing its autonomy effort ahead of a proposed command with service-like authority over autonomous and robotic capabilities across the joint force.
At the Association of the United States Army’s annual meeting on Oct. 14, officials said the Defense Autonomous Working Group, or DAWG, is being absorbed into a new Task Force Autonomous Warfare inside U.S. Special Operations Command. The change was reported by Breaking Defense.
The task force is intended to support Project Agincourt, an umbrella unmanned-technology initiative, and eventually a proposed Autonomous Warfare Command, or AUTOWARCOM. Congress would have to approve AUTOWARCOM; the report does not indicate that lawmakers have authorized it.
DAWG was established as a follow-on to the Biden-era Replicator initiative, which focused on increasing production of drones and counter-drone technology. It was placed under SOCOM in 2025 to work across capability portfolios. The new structure keeps that effort within SOCOM while officials pursue a broader institutional arrangement.
Derrick Anderson, the assistant secretary of defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict, described the SOCOM organization as smaller and able to iterate quickly. He said the task force would help prevent a pause in autonomy development, but officials did not provide details about specific robotic platforms, autonomy levels, sensor architectures, control software or operational deployments.
The Pentagon has also shifted its Direct Reporting Portfolio Manager for autonomy into Project Agincourt. Owen West, who leads that project, moderated the AUSA autonomy panel, according to Breaking Defense.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth used the event to argue for faster integration between acquisition officials and warfighters. He highlighted autonomy, robotics, super intelligence and space systems, but the event produced few concrete program details about how human operators would control or authorize autonomous systems.
The Pentagon has laid out plans to spend nearly $55 billion on DAWG. The status of that plan remains uncertain: lawmakers had not approved a fiscal 2027 defense spending bill or acted on the administration’s separate reconciliation request at the time of the report. Hegseth characterized the proposed investment as a one-time, generational effort, but the source provides no enacted funding total or evidence that the requested capabilities have entered operational service.
For robotics developers and military planners, the immediate change is organizational rather than technical. The task force may provide a continuing management vehicle for autonomy programs, while the authority, budget and scope of the proposed AUTOWARCOM remain subject to congressional action.