Hegseth and the Army on AI, Autonomy, and the Budget: AUSA 2026 Transcript

This is a transcript of a ten-minute clip from the Project Agincourt panel on autonomous warfare. It took place on October 14, 2026, at the Association of the United States Army (AUSA) Annual Meeting in Washington. Forbes Breaking News posted the clip. Every timestamp below links to that moment in the video.

The panel (listed by Defense News) was:

Pete Hegseth, Secretary of War
Adam Telle, Acting Secretary of the Army
Hung Cao, Acting Secretary of the Navy
Troy Meink, Secretary of the Air Force
Derrick Anderson, Assistant Secretary of War for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict (SO/LIC)
Owen West, moderator and leader of Project Agincourt

Only Hegseth and Telle speak at length in this clip.

How this transcript was made: it starts from YouTube’s automatic captions. I removed filler words (“uh,” “um”) and repeated words, and I fixed terms the captions got wrong. My guesses are in [square brackets]. The clip is one wide shot of the stage with no name captions, so I matched each speaker change to the video frames and the context. The moderator’s questions are summarized in my own words, not quoted. Watch the video for the exact wording.

Some terms you will hear:

Reconciliation: a way for Congress to pass a budget bill with a simple majority in the Senate, so it cannot be blocked by a filibuster.

CR (continuing resolution): a stopgap law that keeps the government funded at last year’s levels when Congress has not passed a new budget. The military cannot start new programs under one.

O&M (operations and maintenance): the part of the defense budget that pays to train, fuel, and repair the force.

Primes: the big defense contractors that win the main contracts.

AutoWarCom: the Autonomous Warfare Command Hegseth announced on September 30, 2026. It is a planned joint command for drones, robots, and other autonomous systems.

FASCOM: the Army’s new Futures and Autonomous Systems Command, its piece of the AutoWarCom effort.

The budget question

0:00 Owen West (moderator), summarized: Before turning to the service secretaries, West asks about the budget. Under Eisenhower, defense took 10 to 12 percent of GDP. Under Reagan, about 6.2 percent. About five years ago it fell to roughly 3 percent, and the cost of servicing the national debt is about to jump. He asks how important the one-time 1.5 times boost is, and what happens if the reconciliation bill fails.

Hegseth: “That’s just an objective truth”

0:51 Pete Hegseth: Absolutely critical. Especially when you look at the deferred maintenance and the CRs that the services have had to endure for years and years and years, and the chronic underfunding that’s existed. Add that to the bureaucracy, which adds more to personnel costs, and exquisite systems, which crowds out O&M and certainly doesn’t leave any opening for new innovations and new investments or new entrants. And so it becomes the existing primes and the service obligations and then personnel and healthcare, and pretty soon you’ve got the entirety of the budget.

1:20 So a one-time generational investment gives us a chance to reflect the President’s priorities. And this is all President Trump saying, “We need to ensure we fully rebuild this, given the threats of today.” We’re in a different moment. 1:32 We’ve got a near-peer adversary who’s building a military, the most historic military buildup potentially in world history. That’s not hyperbole. That’s just an objective truth. You add it with the step changes in autonomy, in robotics, in space, and AI. Whoever’s ahead now is going to get much further ahead. Whoever’s behind now is going to fall even further behind. And so investments now are going to matter, and they’re going to ripple not just for years but for decades across our joint force.

2:03 The President recognizes all of this and said, “Hey, we’d love to do it through the regular budget process, but if we cannot, then we’ll do it through reconciliation.” And we will ensure, whether it’s 350 as a minimum of a reconciliation bill or more, that we meet the President’s expectation.

2:17 Take autonomy, for example. There’s about $50 billion in autonomous and robotic systems in the reconciliation bill that would go into [DAWG], into [Project Agincourt], and into AutoWarCom. When you think about the fact that the [Biden] administration invested, I think, 200 million max, we supercharged it with 1.2 billion initially in the One Big Beautiful Bill, and now 50 billion. I mean, scaling that quickly requires the architecture of an AutoWarCom and the services flowing in the same direction. 2:44 That’s how you get from a thousand drones to a hundred thousand to a million, to scale and attritable, you know, Group 1 through 4, in a way that now we’re changing the cost paradigm for our adversaries and on the battlefield. And they’re the ones having to understand how to deal defensively with our capabilities, and we’re already seeing that in some places.

Attritable: cheap enough that losing some in combat is expected and acceptable. Group 1 through 4 are the military’s size classes for drones, from small hand-launched ones up to large aircraft.

3:04 So it’s a critical investment. It’s our number one priority. The Chairman and I spoke about it this morning. We’re lockstep on that with the White House, and we will ensure, regardless of what happens in the midterms, we’re running fast immediately with the committees to ensure that that reconciliation bill, at a minimum of 350, potentially more, ultimately fills up what this department needs in order for the President to ensure that we reestablish deterrence and rebuild the military around the world. So it couldn’t be more important.

The question for the Army

3:34 Owen West (moderator), summarized: West says he hopes Congress comes through. He suggests about 4 percent of GDP would be a modest price given the threats. Then he turns to Telle and stays on the budget. 3:58 He reads from Telle’s predecessor, who wrote that the military needs both cheap, high-volume equipment and expensive “exquisite” programs, but the Army has struggled to pay for both. He asks how that changes, and what else the Army has done to commercialize and modernize. (The audio is hard to follow here. It is not fully clear whether this first comment is West’s or the tail end of Hegseth’s answer.)

Telle: “the magic in the middle”

4:27 Adam Telle, Acting Secretary of the Army: Absolutely, and thanks for the question. I would say that what we’ve done as an Army is to be ready. 4:36 I think about How the Army Fights, which General [LaNeve] unveiled yesterday. This is a very fundamental framework that organizes the Army and explains to every one of our 1.2 million soldiers and civilians how they fit into the modern Army. And as warfare evolves and we bring on these capabilities, more drones, more autonomous ground systems, autonomous fires, autonomous lift, all the things that we’re working on today, it gives us a place and a framework where our commanders at each echelon know exactly what their role and responsibility is. That’s a foundational document. And General [LaNeve], it cost approximately zero dollars to the taxpayer for him to deliver that kind of leadership, so that when we do get these resources from the Congress, we have the ability to optimize their use in the Army.

5:29 Just yesterday, just last night, in response to Secretary Hegseth’s establishment of Autonomous Warfare Command, we announced Futures and Autonomous Systems Command within the Army. This is our way to make sure that we take all of the great work that’s been happening with the resources that we have today, and we centralize it. We are going to keep it distributed to our units. We’re pushing autonomy down into our units. But when it comes to making sure that the left hand in the Army knows what the right hand of the Army is doing, this happens at FASCOM. And then FASCOM feeds up into AutoWarCom.

6:04 And we work across the services. There’s commonality, there’s best practices, there’s scale. Think about the buying power of the Army, the buying power of SO/LIC, the buying power that Hung has in the Navy, the buying power that Troy has in the Air Force. Our ability to…

6:19 Another panelist: You didn’t mention the Marine Corps.

Telle: Well, Hung owns the Marine Corps. Sorry.

Another panelist: Buying power. Keep hitting you on it.

6:28 Telle: What it does is it allows us to look across and make our demand signal even bigger, which helps the nation scale, which helps our industrial base partners scale. But not just that, it allows us to share best practices.

6:40 I think about the investment we’re making as an Army right now, and it doesn’t garner as many headlines as some of the things we’re doing, but we’re making a huge bet on next-generation command and control. 6:50 I call this the magic in the middle. When you think about the Army, what we deliver to the joint force is scale and mass. We have 1.2 million soldiers and civilians, like I mentioned. They have dozens of pieces of kit each. You start doing the math, and it’s really the command and control in the middle that enables all those things to go off like a symphony is being conducted. 7:14 And Hung and Troy and I have already started talking, and Derek as well, about how do we take each of the services’ command and control capability and merge them into a joint command and control that rolls up to AutoWarCom, and more importantly, our theater commanders who are taking on the fight every day.

Command and control: the systems and people that pass orders and information so many units can act together.

7:30 And I’ll just end with this, Owen. One of the things I said on Monday, and I think it really fits the conversation we’re having right now: we go to a conference like AUSA, and people are thinking about, well, what is the next big acquisition program for the Army? Is it a helicopter, or is it a new tank, or is it a new missile system? And I think for all of us across the services and the Department of War, the real acquisition that’s underway right now is a new, frictionless symbiosis between ourselves and our partners in industry. 8:05 Because, as Secretary Hegseth mentioned, our greatest strategic advantage in America, in addition to our deep capital markets, which you mentioned, Owen, is the ingenuity that our system of government has allowed to take place within the American heart. That’s our biggest strategic advantage. That’s something that no one else has.

And the pace of change has accelerated so much that it’s on us to go to industry and say, “Hey, tell us what you’re doing now. You’ve already solved the problem. You’ve already spent the R&D. Let us adapt what we need to what you’re already doing. Let’s use your assembly lines. Let’s use your know-how.” And let’s be flexible enough to change. 8:42 What Secretary Hegseth said at the outset: it takes real determination and a clear-eyed perspective to take what is in many ways the world’s most effective bureaucracy, but its largest and most complex, full-of-friction bureaucracy, and make it march and change to the modern realities that we face. And we’re all working on that together.

9:06 The last thing I’ll mention, one of the things we’ve done to meet the Autonomous Warfare Command vision that Secretary Hegseth has laid out, and this is just a small example of how Derek and I are working together. 9:21 We have an MOS in the Army called 390 Alpha. It’s a robotics expert, and these folks lived in [USASOC], in the Army’s portion of Derek’s portfolio. Historically, those types of MOSs might live with the special forces and never be proliferated throughout the Army. 9:44 And I would just say that Derek has leaned in, the team has leaned in, to make sure that that 390 Alpha MOS warrant officer can keep the specialty and the skills over the duration and teach our soldiers how to do robotics. Our partnership to grow that MOS is something that could have never happened under any other administration.

MOS (Military Occupational Specialty): the Army’s code for a soldier’s job. USASOC is U.S. Army Special Operations Command. Derek is Derrick Anderson, the SO/LIC official on the panel.

Sources

Written on October 15, 2026