From war to extreme weather, success usually depends on work that’s already been done

Terry Gerton Let’s talk first about the new four star command that Secretary Hegseth announced in his speech last week, the Autonomous Warfare Command. Creating a command sounds like an organizational decision, but what’s really going on here? What are they really trying to do?

Stephanie Kostro Thanks for asking this question, Terry. This is a fascinating area that we’ve watched develop over time, over the last few years. The importance of autonomy, robotics, you know, robots on the battlefield, anything that can cut the decision-making time is to the warfighter’s advantage, right? And so we’ve been watching this area develop over the past, as I said, years. In fact, the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year ’27, the one that Congress is currently talking about, there is a provision in the SASC pass bill, and I say SASC, that’s the Senate Armed Services Committee, they passed their bill months ago, and in it, they actually had the establishment of a U.S. Robotic and Autonomous Systems Command. So this is one of those areas where the legislative branch and the executive branch is really converging on this idea, the importance of having autonomy. Highlighting it as a four-star command, what they’re trying to accomplish here again is to cut that decision cycle time so that folks in the US military can quickly, quickly move to exactly what they need to be doing on the battlefield and get all that bureaucracy out of the way. That’s really the intent here.

Terry Gerton So what would operate differently under a four-star command that focuses on autonomous systems rather than having them scattered around throughout the services?

Stephanie Kostro That’s a really great question too. And we’ve seen this in other areas like cyber security. There is a U.S. Cyber Command now that is that organizing concept. So the different services, whether it’s Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, Space Force, or the Army, and to be honest, the Coast Guard as well, they can all talk about what they’re doing as those component commands versus, you know, fleeting it up to the actual combatant command. I would remind folks though that, the way that the command structure is developed is through something called the Unified Command Plan, which does belong wholly to the Pentagon. They are the ones who put the UCP together. This is how we got U.S. Northern Command. It’s how we go U.S. Cyber Command. And it is ostensibly how we will get AutoWarCom or the Autonomous Warfare Command. I do think it’s interesting to see, you know, it’s a good question to say, what does a command get you? It gets you that high-level attention. It also gets you monies that are earmarked for that particular thing. I’ll give you an example. If you have a geographic combatant command, we’ll say European Command or Africa Command, there is an executive agent for that command. Those executive agents might be the Army, it might be Air Force. For Indo-Pacific command, it is the Navy. They’re the ones who sort of support that command and they have various service commands that come underneath it. I envision that being something similar here for autonomous warfare command, where they will have a service that is the executive agent for the command, and that they will these component commands under it. What it really gets you is that high level of attention. It might actually get you a more streamlined budgetary function and from our perspective, hopefully a more rapid way to acquire needed capabilities can get them into the field faster.

Terry Gerton Well, let’s talk about that. Assuming that Congress ultimately approves this, what is the practical significance of it for defense contractors? Does it change how companies think about investing, developing and transitioning new technologies?

Stephanie Kostro I do think it will impact how companies think about what the Pentagon needs because, you know, you’ve got contractors who focus on the Air Force, for example, or they focus on the Army, and they know those customers really, really well. This actually creates a place where you can think more strategically about what you’re doing and having the interoperability between an uncrewed autonomous undersea warfare capability versus something that’s in space domain, something that’s in the air domain here, closer to Earth, and something that is a robot on the battlefield and having them talk to each other. So you get out of these stovepipes really and start talking about integration and interoperability in a way that I think might have been missing over the last few years.

Terry Gerton Stephanie Kostro is president of the Professional Services Council. Stephanie, let’s keep with that strategic thinking thread, but shift it to a different sector in terms of disaster response. We just had the first Atlantic hurricane come ashore this past weekend. We’ve had major storms in Hawaii, the West Coast. We had a nor’easter a couple of weeks ago that did significant damage. When a major storm makes landfall, Most people think of FEMA and first responders, but what role do government contractors play in that response period?

Stephanie Kostro This is a great topic, Terry, and thank you so much for raising it. We’re at the tail end of hurricane season, but there is no shortage of natural disasters, right, throughout the country, whether it’s a drought, whether it a hurricane, whether it tornado season, et cetera. And so I think a lot of times people forget that much of the work gets done before landfall. It gets done ahead of time. And it is that piece that I wanna talk about. It’s about disaster response and building in resilience. Building an infrastructure that can withstand heavy winds, for example, or high winds, that can provide logistics capabilities that can get things to the field very, very quickly when they’re needed. You have to think about that before the event happens. And that is a lot of times what happens in contracting. There are contracts in place ahead of time that can be quickly activated ahead of the storm. I will say one of the key elements that we face whenever we have a natural disaster or a natural disaster event, is that we look to the president or the governor’s or particular states to make something called a disaster declaration. And that triggers a whole new set of authorities, it triggers the availability of money. And that usually happens immediately before that the storm hits or right when it does hit.

Terry Gerton When you talk about prior planning, disaster response is typically cross-agency and also intergovernmental. FEMA has worked a lot with regions to do prior planning here. What are contractors looking for in that plan so that they can be prepared and not just responsive, but ready?

Stephanie Kostro I think that’s a great question. One thing that we do advise contractors who are interested in this space, who have capabilities that they can provide to, whether it’s a state government or if it’s to the federal government itself, is to register in SAM, which is that online registry for contractors, and to make sure that they’ve joined something called the Disaster Response Registry. They can do that at any point. We encourage them to do it well before a disaster is even on the horizon, so that when that trigger gets pulled, they can respond very, very quickly. In disaster planning, it’s essential for there to be this engagement, this interaction between the levels of government. And again, I mentioned state and federal, but it could also be municipalities. It could be the city of New York, for example, or the city of Boston. It could in some cases be the city of Pensacola or the town of Pensacola. I’m not entirely sure if it’s a city structure down there, but I would say, you know, really have that engagement in place and really look for who’s going to be the point person once disaster does strike, who’s gonna be the lead? You mentioned inter-agency and I think, or inter-governmental and I that’s critical is that often times we’ll have these teams pop up and the contractors are not entirely sure who they need to talk to. You can find that out ahead of time and that means engaging with your state interlocutors, engaging with you FEMA teams and making sure that you have the responsiveness in place to be able to hit the ground running.

Terry Gerton As agencies are responding in the aftermath of this most recent storm, Stephanie, what will PSC be watching to make sure that this contract structure is working the way that it’s supposed to?

Stephanie Kostro I want to highlight something for you, Terry, that I think has gone unnoticed, but there was a 2018 GAO study, and that’s the Government Accountability Office. They found that 74% of federal contracts awarded in the first 90 days of some recent hurricanes go through competition, right? You have to actually have in your mind what is it you’re going to propose to as a solution. And you may be tailored to, hey, in the event of a hurricane, in the even of a drought, in event of flooding, I’ll go the opposite of drought in that one, and to say, here’s what we have to offer. A lot of thought needs to go into that because it’s going to be a competitive landscape. So be ready to submit a solid response as much as being on someone’s call list. I think those are the two elements that people have to keep in mind.