Like: Who? And: Why? Among others.

SECRETARY OF DEFENSE PETE HEGSETH went to Quantico last week to deliver what he called his “State of the Force” address. There was plenty of the rhetoric we have come to expect from him, including attacks on the Pentagon bureaucracy and an announcement that the department will cut general and flag officer billets by 20 percent.

But Hegseth also announced six initiatives that he says will shape the American military for years to come: a new Autonomous Warfare Command; a study of the future of warfare called “Project Meridian”; a resilience project called “FORTRESS America”; a competition to build the “Next Great American Base”; an expansion of the number of military colleges into “America’s Corps of Cadets”; and an Office of Religious Affairs reporting directly to the secretary.

Some of these initiatives address shortcomings in our military and could make the force better. Others strike me as solutions in search of problems. And even the promising ones raise questions about organization, cost, implementation, and unintended consequences.

I have questions. Lots of questions. Before committing people and resources to a plan, military leaders often ask: what, who, when, where, how, and why? Hegseth announced six new projects. I’ll limit myself to one question about each.

1. AUTOWARCOM: What problem does another four-star command solve?

Of the initiatives Hegseth announced, one—his proposed Autonomous Warfare Command, AUTOWARCOM—may address the military’s most obvious need.

Anyone watching Ukraine or Iran understands how dramatically drones and autonomous systems are changing warfare. Inexpensive systems can destroy tanks, conduct reconnaissance, attack headquarters, deliver supplies, strike ships, and hunt individual soldiers. Artificial intelligence processes battlefield data and connects sensors to shooters with increasing ease. The United States executes these tasks well, but we must adapt faster.

Hegseth wants AUTOWARCOM to become a four-star functional combatant command by October 2027, with “service-like authorities” to scale autonomous and robotic capabilities across the joint force (a little like saying you want your quarterback to have “general manager–like authorities”). An interim effort within this initiative, Project Agincourt, is intended to pair operators with engineers and entrepreneurs, shorten acquisition cycles, and move decisions and money closer to those experimenting with these systems.

There is much to like in all this. One of the Pentagon’s perennial problems is the time between identifying a battlefield requirement and putting a capability into troops’ hands. Ukraine has shown that innovation cycles for drones and counter-drone systems can be measured in weeks or months rather than years.

But creating a headquarters does not create a capability. The services already organize, train, and equip forces, and each is pursuing autonomous systems. The Defense Innovation Unit exists to accelerate commercial technology. Special Operations Command has unique acquisition authorities. Combatant commanders generate operational requirements.

So what authority is missing that requires a four-star headquarters?

Hegseth is planning to cut general and flag officer billets aggressively, with his ostensible goal being to purge the forces of “beardos,” “weirdos,” and “wimps.” If part of his argument for those cuts is that the military has accumulated too many headquarters and layers of command, then creating another four-star command ought to clear a high bar. Yes, autonomy needs to become ubiquitous across the military. But we should make sure AUTOWARCOM accelerates that transformation within each service rather than creating another stovepipe around it.

2. Project Meridian: Who should be thinking about the next war?

Project Meridian is a 120-day effort to examine future warfare and identify technologies and capabilities the United States will need. It will consider artificial intelligence, robotics, directed energy, biotechnology, autonomy, and operations in new domains.

The basic idea makes sense. The Pentagon should constantly challenge its assumptions about the future—especially when those assumptions could lead the services to recruit, equip, and train forces unprepared for the next war. And Hegseth is right that many of the people best suited to think clearly and creatively about next-generation warfare do not work in the Department of Defense.

But the people he chose don’t seem to be the best suited to the task, either. Pentagon technology chief Emil Michael will oversee the effort, with Elon Musk, Palmer Luckey, and Newt Gingrich as codirectors.

Musk’s SpaceX has transformed access to space and become an important Defense Department contractor—but that means that Musk isn’t exactly a disinterested outsider. He has a personal financial stake in how the Defense Department decides to use (or not use) space-based technology—and he has a history of conflicting interests, not to mention a poor understanding of government policy and a discomfortingly close relationship with America’s adversaries. Luckey founded Anduril, an innovative defense-technology company—but he also shares many of Musk’s conflicts of interest. Gingrich has written many books about war, but all are fictional. He is 83 years old, not an expert in military affairs or technology, and recently suggested a thermonuclear attack on the United Arab Emirates.

Technological imagination is not the same as understanding war.

Where are combat commanders who have watched sophisticated plans collide with the enemy? Where are intelligence professionals studying our foes like China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea? Where are the logisticians who know a brilliant weapon is useless if we cannot sustain it thousands of miles from home? Where are the professional historians, wargamers, allies, and—perhaps most importantly—the young soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, and guardians who are already experimenting with these technologies today?

War is not merely a technological competition. It is a contest between adaptive human beings. Project Meridian will be most useful if technological imagination is balanced by operational experience and an understanding of the human dimension of warfare.

3. FORTRESS America: When did resilience become a new idea?

FORTRESS America—that’s a backronym of “Federal Operations for Resilience, Troop Resources, Energy, Supply, and Survivability”—might be the easiest of Hegseth’s initiatives to support. It calls for major U.S. military installations to generate independent power and seeks more resilient domestic supply chains for critical materials, munitions, fuel, medicine, and other necessities.

That is sensible planning. American installations are not sanctuaries simply because they are inside the United States. An adversary does not have to bomb a base if a cyberattack can shut down the electricity and information needed to operate it.

But this isn’t a new idea. The military has pursued energy resilience for years. Fort Irwin, for example, has invested in solar generation, battery storage, and microgrid technology to reduce dependence on the commercial grid.

Hegseth is sensible here to employ renewable energy for something other than a political debate. For a military commander, solar and geothermal energy, batteries, and microgrids are about combat readiness. A base that can produce and store its own power is harder for an enemy to shut down.

FORTRESS America has a sound objective, but it should build on years of existing work rather than treating installation resilience as a newly discovered requirement.

4. The Next Great American Base: Where do the troops need to be?

This is the initiative I have the hardest time understanding.

Hegseth wants governors to compete to host the “Next Great American Base,” a new installation on hundreds of thousands of acres supporting 15,000 to 25,000 service members, with independent power, autonomous systems, and advanced air defenses.

That sounds impressive. It also sounds extraordinarily expensive and redundant.

The United States already has major installations supporting forces of that size, and many desperately need modernization. Aging barracks, inadequate family housing, old motor pools, stressed utilities, insufficient maintenance facilities, and overused training ranges are hardly unknown to anyone who has commanded troops. Before buying hundreds of thousands of additional acres and constructing another military city, why not invest in the installations we already own?

We did something instructive in Europe beginning in the early 2000s. Decades earlier, at the end of World War II, American forces in Germany occupied scores of former German Army posts. After the Cold War, many of those facilities became superfluous. We developed a plan to consolidate those scattered facilities over six years into fewer, more capable hubs as we downsized the force. Grafenwoehr was once the scourge of the U.S. Army; it’s now the most modern base in the force. It cost significant money up front for headquarters, housing, schools, training facilities, and infrastructure, but consolidation ultimately reduced the number of installations we maintained while improving quality.

There is some irony in having spent billions creating those facilities in Germany a decade ago while the current administration is now considering reductions in the American forces that use them.

If there is a strategic requirement for a new American installation, Hegseth should make the case. He should explain what cannot be accomplished at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Alaska, Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state, Joint Base Langley-Eustis in Virginia, or our other major installations. And, contrary to what he implied in his speech, he should explain why such a new base is in the interests of the Department of Defense and the United States, not just the state that would host it.

5. America’s Corps of Cadets: How will this improve the officers we already produce?

Hegseth’s stated “America’s Corps of Cadets” expands this program from the nation’s senior military colleges to other institutions of higher education, starting with Louisiana State, Liberty, Tuskegee, Mississippi State, and Hillsdale. Make of this list of colleges what you will.

There is nothing wrong with wanting better officers. But the United States already has four service academies (five with the Merchant Marine), six senior military colleges, hundreds of ROTC programs, and officer candidate schools. Army Cadet Command exists to recruit, educate, develop, and inspire JROTC and ROTC cadets to commission as officers in the Army. These commissioning sources also give the military something important: officers from different regions, economic circumstances, educational backgrounds, and ways of thinking.

So how will this new program improve on what already exists? We’ll need hard metrics to find out. The Defense Department must establish standards for success among this new “Corps of Cadets” and then measure their performance over time. If these programs produce better officers, then, sure, expand what works to other campuses. But, judging by Hegseth’s pick of inaugural partner schools, I feel it necessary to mention that officer education should never become an effort to boost certain colleges based on their political or cultural outlook. The military does not need conservative officers or liberal officers. It needs officers of character who think critically, question assumptions, obey lawful orders, reject unlawful ones, and lead Americans whose beliefs may differ from their own.

6. Office of Religious Affairs: Why does this require another Pentagon office?

Hegseth’s final initiative establishes an Office of Religious Affairs reporting directly to the secretary. Its stated purposes include strengthening spiritual readiness, protecting the free exercise of religion, identifying unmet requirements, and supporting the service chaplaincies. The Pentagon also says the office will not favor a particular faith or compel religious participation. I’m skeptical.

Any commander who has served in peacetime or combat understands the importance of chaplains. They counsel troops and commanders during some of the worst moments of their lives. They sit with grieving families, listen to people who will talk to no one else, and share the dangers of combat while protecting every service member’s right to practice their faith—or no faith at all.

Hegseth has openly addressed his religious faith, and he has every right to do so. But the secretary of defense is responsible for Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists, and every other American in uniform. I’m concerned that an Office of Religious Affairs might evolve into an Office of Religion. The military’s obligation is not to encourage a specific religion. It is to protect the free exercise of religion.

Hegseth’s memo creating the new office doesn’t even hint at why it might be necessary. Instead, it amalgamates a series of responsibilities and mandates from across the military into a single office in the Pentagon (this must not be the kind of bloated bureaucracy Hegseth so often decries!) under the direct supervision of the secretary of defense. It’s hard to see how the intent is anything other than to make the military a more religious organization—and that may be the effect as well.

THE AMERICAN MILITARY MUST CHANGE. The battlefield is evolving rapidly, and autonomous systems, artificial intelligence, installation resilience, vulnerable supply chains, officer development, and the well-being of troops all deserve serious attention. Several of Hegseth’s initiatives recognize legitimate issues that are worth the secretary’s time and attention. Some of them even contain the kernels of helpful reforms.

But announcements are the easy part of military transformation. Implementation is where good ideas either become capabilities, disappear into bureaucracy, or become yet more problems.

Before creating a headquarters, the Department of Defense should identify the authority it needs and the functions it serves. Before assembling a panel to predict future war, the military should identify those who know something about the past and present of war. Before announcing a resilience program, the Pentagon should determine what already works and expand it. Before building another base without a clear strategic requirement, Congress should insist we fix the quality-of-life issues on bases that already exist. Before changing officer development, Secretary Hegseth should explain what is missing in the current programs and how the change will produce better officers. And before creating a new religious bureaucracy, he should give at least one example of what the existing chaplain system cannot do.

Most of all, Hegseth owes the American public a clear accounting of how his new projects will make the country safer—not from ideas the secretary doesn’t like, or from people he finds substandard, or from cultural currents he doesn’t partake in, but from America’s foreign enemies.