America’s coming revolution in warfare may not mean fighting fewer wars but fighting more of them without putting Americans on the battlefield.
Taking Americans out of the fight
That possibility becomes clearer when Meridian is viewed alongside Hegseth’s other announcement: the creation of a four-star Autonomous Warfare Command, or AUTOWARCOM. The new command is intended to scale robotic and autonomous capabilities across the armed forces. Until it is established, Project Agincourt will experiment with a new acquisition system designed to connect operators and technology companies more directly and accelerate battlefield adaptation. The Army has already begun implementing the shift, creating its own Futures and Autonomous Systems Command and directing autonomous capabilities into aviation, armor, fires, logistics, engineering and reconnaissance.
This is not simply another Pentagon modernization program. It points toward a military in which machines progressively assume tasks that once required putting humans in danger. The Pentagon’s own language is even more revealing. Its Defense Innovation Unit now describes the objective of autonomous warfare as substituting “machines, fires and electrons” for troops in harm’s way while generating unmanned mass. The Pentagon’s Autonomous Warfare program therefore points toward a straightforward military objective: preserve the ability to inflict violence while reducing the number of Americans exposed to it. That is entirely rational from a military perspective. But it carries a political consequence. The fewer Americans a war puts at risk, the easier that war may become for Washington to contemplate.
The disappearing political cost of intervention
American warfare has been moving in this direction for years. The Pentagon’s Replicator initiative, launched in 2023, sought to field thousands of relatively inexpensive autonomous systems across multiple domains. Then-Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks explicitly argued that such systems could counter China’s advantage in military mass while putting fewer American personnel in the line of fire. The Pentagon subsequently selected unmanned aircraft, maritime systems and autonomous software for accelerated production and deployment. Hegseth is taking the next step: turning autonomy from a collection of programs into an institutional principle of American warfare.
His rationale is partly economic. “Cheap compute,” advanced artificial intelligence and commercial manufacturing, he argues, have enabled the proliferation of inexpensive precision strike. The Pentagon can no longer depend exclusively on small numbers of extraordinarily sophisticated and costly weapons. America now needs, in Hegseth’s formulation, both “quality and quantity.” The department is seeking to manufacture hundreds of thousands of inexpensive drones while driving their unit cost downward.
Yet autonomy does something else: it changes the relationship between military power and military presence. For much of the post-1945 period, projecting American power abroad required Americans to be there. Bases, troops, pilots, sailors and logistics networks placed American personnel physically close to the conflicts Washington sought to influence. That generated both military vulnerability and political exposure.
The Middle East illustrates the problem. More than 50,000 U.S. service members were operating across the region this August. Forward deployment gives Washington enormous capacity to respond to crises, reassure allies and deter adversaries, but it also places Americans within range of enemy missiles and drones. US forces in Iraq and Syria, for instance, have repeatedly been attacked by Iran-backed armed groups.
Autonomous warfare cannot eliminate America’s need for overseas bases, allies or troops. But autonomy can alter the ratio between American presence and American firepower. A drone can be lost without an American pilot being killed. An unmanned vessel can enter contested waters without risking a crew. A robot can transport ammunition through a lethal battlefield without exposing soldiers. America could therefore withdraw soldiers without withdrawing its capacity to wage war. And that distinction changes the domestic politics of intervention.
The question of whether casualty-free technologies increase public support for military action remains contested. Experimental research has found that the effect can be smaller than commonly assumed. But the larger political problem has long concerned strategists: technologies that reduce the danger to one’s own forces also remove one of the costs leaders must weigh before employing force.
The drone campaign of the post-9/11 era offered an early glimpse of this model. Washington could conduct strikes far from conventional battlefields without deploying armies resembling those sent to Iraq or Afghanistan. Autonomous warfare could expand that logic from individual counterterrorism strikes to increasingly sophisticated air, maritime and eventually ground operations. The danger is not that machines will inevitably start wars. It is that they may make some wars easier for humans to start.
When withdrawal no longer means peace
This is where America’s future of warfare could become politically transformative. For decades, arguments over US retrenchment have largely assumed that reducing troops abroad means reducing American military involvement. Autonomy increasingly breaks that connection. A future president could remove personnel from a vulnerable base, avoid a large ground deployment and still retain extensive capacity to surveil, blockade, disrupt and strike an adversary from afar. The result could be a new model of American intervention: less visible, less manpower-intensive and politically easier to sustain.
That model would be especially attractive after Iraq and Afghanistan, where prolonged occupations demonstrated the enormous financial and political costs of putting large numbers of Americans on foreign soil. The lesson Washington draws from those wars need not therefore be that intervention itself is too costly. It may instead be that intervention relying heavily on American soldiers is too costly. Project Meridian arrives precisely as technology makes an alternative increasingly imaginable.
This also creates a paradox for advocates of American retrenchment. Future announcements of troop reductions may tell us progressively less about whether Washington is disengaging from a region. And there lies the larger question Meridian should force Washington to confront. The Pentagon is understandably asking how artificial intelligence, robotics and autonomous systems can keep American soldiers alive in the wars of the future. But the political system must ask the inverse question: if America can wage war while risking progressively fewer American lives, what will restrain its decision to wage war at all?
The technological future Hegseth is building may ultimately produce a United States with fewer soldiers on foreign battlefields but more opportunities to use force on them. America could look increasingly disengaged while remaining deeply interventionist; its troops farther from the battlefield, its machines closer to the fight, and the political threshold for war quietly moving downward.
Salman Rafi Sheikh, research analyst of international relations and Pakistan’s foreign and domestic affairs
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