Last week, Secretary Hegseth gave a speech at Quantico to an assembled audience of military members to discuss the state of the military. Looking beyond the inflammatory rhetoric he tends to employ, the substance behind his six new initiatives to increase the warfighting capacity of the military is worth examination.

Let’s start with the creation of a new 4-star-level combatant command, the Autonomous Warfare Command, which is probably the most substantive of the initiatives. On the surface, creating more 4-star generals and commands seems like the wrong way to go, especially given his other announcement to continue the effort started earlier this year to cut general officer billets by 20%. Whether this new command succeeds will depend on which organizations within the Pentagon it subsumes, how it both competes with and interacts with other warfighting commands, and how much authority and money it receives. If the new command is just another layer between the warfighter and the engineer, then this will fail. If it functions as an advocate, interface, and accelerant, then maybe it succeeds.