This translation was generated using AI and edited lightly. Read the original in French here.
In 2025, in his speech at Quantico, the Secretary of War sought to restore the warrior ethos and free military leaders from a bureaucratic culture and an aversion to risk. The form sometimes reduced this ambition to caricature, and his first speech was remembered above all for its references to weight, fitness, masculine standards, and even beards. One year later, Pete Hegseth is pursuing exactly the same project, but has broadened it with a more substantive message: having focused on transforming the warrior, he now wants to transform the way the United States prepares to achieve military dominance in the event of conflict. A new warfighting model that brings the entire defense ecosystem—including the civil-military and industrial dimensions—into a framework centered on the warrior ethos and underpinned by technological advances.
The speech deserves particular attention because it is not a programmatic improvisation. Delivered over nearly an hour to 600 junior officers and noncommissioned officers, it brings together, under a single architecture, reforms launched since Donald Trump returned to power—industrial reconstruction and radical reform of the acquisition process—and announces new areas of effort (robotics, national resilience, transformation of the way leaders are selected, and the restoration of what he explicitly describes as military distinctiveness) that, if implemented, would indeed be revolutionary.
Hegseth retains his priorities—warrior ethos and rebuilding the military instrument—and translates them into six concrete initiatives.
This coherence is first apparent in what the administration now calls the Arsenal of Democracy, the contemporary heir to the Arsenal of Freedom, which transformed the entire industrial and logistical chain to support the United States’ entry into the war, even before Pearl Harbor. Its logic rests on two parallel transformations. The first is to rebuild the American production base and restore strategic industrial depth: munitions, shipyards, propulsion systems, surge capacity, secure supply chains, critical minerals, and semiconductors. The second is to systematically remove every obstacle that prevents this industrial capacity from being converted into military power.
This is the logic behind the transformation launched in late 2025 of the Defense Acquisition System into the Warfighting Acquisition System and the abandonment of JCIDS, the former joint requirements-development process. Hegseth denounced a system in which “process, not outcomes” had become the priority, and a JCIDS process that could take more than 300 days to validate a simple requirements document. His argument was straightforward: the Pentagon’s main vulnerability is sometimes no longer a lack of technology, but the time required to adopt it.
1. Quantico 2026 takes this logic all the way to force and institutional design through six lines of effort.
The first announcement is by far the most spectacular and consequential: the creation of an Autonomous Warfare Command, AUTOWARCOM, a new COCOM in its own right, commanded by a four-star officer and endowed with authorities intended to mainstream robotics and autonomous systems throughout the Joint Force, paving the way for the emergence of fully automated units. Hegseth himself acknowledges that the United States should have considered creating such a command ten years ago. The diagnosis is significant: America has not lacked technological innovation, but it has been too slow to translate innovation into military organization.
AUTOWARCOM is therefore not simply a “drone command.” Hegseth is simultaneously announcing new professional specialties across the services in order to build skills, career paths, and institutional memory around autonomous warfare. Autonomy is now to become a military capability in its own right, with its own doctrine, specialists, professional pathways, and organizational structure. This is precisely the point at which a technology becomes truly revolutionary: when it no longer merely supplements an existing force, but begins to transform its structure, operating concepts, and very conception of warfare.
Project Agincourt constitutes the hinge between these elements. Its name is not accidental: it refers to the 1415 British victory over the French, in which agile archers defeated heavily armored soldiers. Under leadership combining strategic thinking with the realities of combat, the project is intended to prepare AUTOWARCOM while experimenting with a new model of warfighting acquisition. The explicit lesson drawn from Ukraine is not that one particular drone wins wars, but that the United States needs to build a system capable of continuous adaptation. Hegseth wants to bring “decisions and dollars” closer to the front and further integrate operators, engineers, entrepreneurs, and acquisition professionals.
This is where what may be the real new American Revolution in Military Affairs begins to emerge. The RMA of the 1990s was built around precision, stealth, ISR, networks, and information superiority. The emerging RMA combines AI, autonomy, robotics, software, open architectures, mass, and distributed production—but above all, speed of adaptation. The pace at which the entire industry-to-military continuum learns and changes becomes the primary criterion of military superiority.
The second initiative, Project Meridian, adds a prospective dimension. Led by the Pentagon’s CTO, Elon Musk, Palmer Luckey, and Newt Gingrich are tasked, alongside experts from industry, academia, and the strategic community, with identifying the “domains we must conquer” and the capabilities the United States must master for the decades ahead. Hegseth has given them 120 days—a deliberate attempt to avoid studies whose conclusions are obsolete by the time they reach their intended audience: “another endless Pentagon study that is outdated before it is finished.” Meridian thus extends the fight against bureaucratic time into the realm of strategic foresight itself.
The third initiative is Fortress America. It directly links military transformation to American reindustrialization. Major bases will have to be capable of generating their own power independently of the civilian grid; critical supply chains must be brought back home or secured; and stocks of munitions, fuel, medicines, and other resources must be sufficient to sustain combat even if global flows are disrupted. The homeland can no longer be assumed to be a sanctuary: cyberattacks, sabotage, drones, space, and the electromagnetic spectrum are now part of the military equation.
This project embodies the Trump administration’s ambition to rebuild the entire industrial production chain on American soil: from access to raw materials and rare earths to manufacturing capacity, production processes and systems, and, above all, the rebuilding of a skilled workforce. This determination to reduce vulnerabilities created by external dependencies does not, however, mean autarky. Washington is fully aware of its own vulnerabilities and of the need to leverage allies, whether to secure access to critical resources—in the logic of Pax Silica—or to expand industrial capacity, particularly in shipbuilding, where partnerships with South Korea and Japan are becoming increasingly important.
The fourth initiative, the Next Great American Base, translates this conception both symbolically and physically: a new installation designed to accommodate 15,000 to 25,000 service members, largely energy-independent, protected, and conceived as a genuine power-projection platform. States will compete to host it, with an instruction that perfectly matches Donald Trump’s operating style: cut the red tape and accelerate execution.
The final two initiatives bring us back to the warrior ethos, but in a much broader sense than the one that dominated the 2025 speech. America’s Corps of Cadets is intended to broaden the pool of future officers drawn from institutions that Hegseth considers more committed to patriotic values, service, and military tradition. At the same time, he challenges the model of civilian leadership education provided by parts of the American higher-education system, particularly the expensive Ivy League universities, which, in his view, have prioritized DEI policies, gender studies, and certain critical—“woke”—readings of American history at the expense of transmitting a shared national culture, a sense of service, and the virtues of command.
The reactions of several major universities to antisemitic mobilizations since 2023 have reinforced this view and are fueling a much broader debate in the United States about the failure of university leadership, the erosion of civic culture, and the ability of these institutions to educate elites committed to the liberal principles they claim to defend.
The creation of an Office of Religious Affairs, reporting directly to the Secretary, is part of the same logic. It is intended to give chaplains greater influence, resources, and access to decision-making. Beyond its political dimension, the initiative reflects a longstanding American tradition in which religion—or, more broadly, a form of civil religion combining references to God, patriotism, and national destiny—continues to occupy an important place in the collective imagination.
For Hegseth, the primary objective is to restore a moral and spiritual dimension to the warrior ethos: military personnel accept a distinctive condition of service, absences, risks, and potentially the ultimate sacrifice. This commitment cannot rest solely on discipline or technology; it also requires giving meaning to the service and sacrifice undertaken in the name of the nation, with the support of divine power.
These measures are certainly more ideological than the capability reforms. But they illuminate the coherence of Hegseth’s thinking: military power does not rest solely on weapons, but on an identity and esprit de corps—what we in France defend through the notion of singularité militaire—as well as character, discipline, a sense of duty, and, for him, faith.
The soldier of the future must therefore combine two dimensions that appear, at first glance, contradictory: a highly traditional conception of the warrior and a radically modern mastery of warfare, in which AI and robotics will play a major role, raising deeply troubling ethical questions. The coherence of the Trump-Hegseth vision lies precisely in this combination of cultural restoration and technological rupture in the service of a highly disruptive conception of warfare.
2. Behind the six initiatives, the same adversary ultimately reappears: bureaucracy.
AUTOWARCOM is intended to prevent institutional fragmentation; Agincourt to shorten acquisition and experimentation cycles; Meridian to avoid endless studies; Fortress America to reduce dependencies; the new base to circumvent red tape; and Religious Affairs to eliminate “staff filters.” Hegseth seeks to centralize political direction while delegating more authority for execution.
It is undoubtedly in this context that the reduction in the number of general officers must also be understood. Hegseth has set a target of cutting the number of general and flag officers by 20 percent by January 1, 2027, while several senior officials have been dismissed since 2025. Critics describe this as a political purge; the Secretary presents it instead as the streamlining of an excessively cumbersome structure. The real question is now whether the reduction is primarily intended to eliminate bureaucratic layers that stand in the way of his reforms, or whether it also seeks to remove voices capable of resisting him. At this stage, both interpretations remain possible, and Congress is demanding greater transparency.
There is another paradox. At the very moment Hegseth is describing this transformation, the report submitted to Congress on implementation of the National Defense Strategy highlights progress in munitions production, bureaucratic streamlining, and military posture, while remaining relatively discreet about some of the negative consequences of the war against Iran: depletion of stockpiles, pressure on missile-defense capabilities, force availability, and the opportunity costs for other theaters. Senators from both parties had already criticized the Pentagon in September for failing to provide adequate answers on these issues.
The reform undoubtedly responds to vulnerabilities that are no longer theoretical. What remains to be seen is whether it will produce tangible effects beyond executive orders, directives, and institutional announcements attached to a $1.5 trillion FY2027 budget. The first signals are nevertheless visible: even a cursory look at defense startups and dual-use companies, many of which initially focused on commercial markets, shows that the American defense industrial base is already changing, broadening, and bringing new actors into an ecosystem long dominated by the major primes.
The institutional system, market size, and political-military culture are obviously different in France. The question is therefore not whether to reproduce each of these initiatives, but whether to draw lessons from them in order to accelerate the transformations made necessary by the rapidly deteriorating security environment.
The American experience raises three questions that are directly relevant to France:
- Can our industry produce and regenerate at the pace required by a prolonged war?
- Can our acquisition procedures keep up with the speed at which technologies and the battlefield are evolving?
- And are our military organizations prepared to change doctrine, command structures, and career paths as rapidly as they introduce drones and artificial intelligence?
This may be the central lesson of Quantico: the next military revolution will not be won through technology and budgets alone, but through the ability of the defense industrial base, institutions, and armed forces to adapt at the pace of change in the nature of warfare.