Senator questions Pentagon’s plan to revise autonomous weapons policy

Sen. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., is pressing the Pentagon to disclose how it’s confronting potentially serious operational risks to U.S. military personnel as insiders hustle to fulfill the Trump administration’s new 90-day mandate to rewrite the policy for deploying and safeguarding autonomous weapon systems in warfare.

In a new letter to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, exclusively obtained by DefenseScoop, Gallego asked about specific measures being taken to mitigate possible unintended harm to Americans and allies that could accompany any swift revisions to Department of Defense Directive 3000.09.

He wrote in the letter that the plan to reform the military’s autonomous weapons policy in a “compressed” timeframe raises “serious questions about whether sufficient analysis of how prospective changes may aggravate risks to U.S. servicemembers and U.S. power projection has been conducted.”

Broadly, lethal autonomous weapons systems refer to a special class of weapons that use sensors and algorithms to independently search for, identify and destroy targets without manual human control.

Their development and possible military deployments raise serious ethical, legal and operational concerns associated with life-and-death decisions, accountability and compliance with the international laws of war.

In 2012, then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Ash Carter issued the first U.S. policy to govern and regulate the use of autonomy in weapons systems under 3000.09. The terms were updated several times over the years since then, including a recent revision in 2023 under the Biden administration.

Outlining some exceptions, the policy broadly assigns certain senior defense officials with responsibilities around overseeing the development, procurement, testing, fielding and ultimate use of autonomous weapons. DOD has been largely unforthcoming about applications of 3000.09 or specific weapons in the context of the review process it sets.

President Donald Trump signed National Security Presidential Memorandum 11, titled “Artificial Intelligence in the National Security Enterprise,” on June 5. The directive mandates the U.S. military and intelligence community to accelerate AI adoption, reversing multiple Biden-era oversight requirements. Notably, NSPM-11 requires the Pentagon to update 3000.09 — within 90 days — and institute annual reviews “to account for the rapidly evolving capabilities of AI systems.”

“Since January 2023, Directive 3000.09 has served as the core Pentagon policy document guiding rigorous procedures that ensure autonomous and semi-autonomous weapon systems function as expected and intended, are geographically delimited in use, allow for termination, and are suitably robust to adversarial manipulation,” Gallego wrote in the letter to Hegseth. “Any update that significantly reduces safeguards and disrupts rigorous reviews risks friendly fire and civilian harm incidents affecting U.S. servicemembers, partner or allied militaries, or host nation civilians. That any such incident could result in U.S. access, basing, or overflight rights being restricted or revoked heightens the risk incidents are deliberately triggered by foreign adversarial manipulation of hastily fielded systems.”

The Marine Corps combat veteran posed more than half-a-dozen questions for the defense secretary to respond to by June 26, “given the gravity of risk.” His letter is dated June 12.

Gallego asked whether DOD’s nascent Defense Autonomous Warfare Group (DAWG) has “dedicated personnel for civilian harm mitigation and response analysis in the development, testing, and fielding of autonomous and semi-autonomous weapon systems.” 

Among other inquiries, the senator also requested more information about how the department’s updated version of 3000.09 will ensure intentional protections to prevent the risks he warned could accompany the adoption of autonomous and semi-autonomous weapons, or using targeting recommendations produced by AI-enabled decision support systems.

DOD’s Chief Technology Officer Emil Michael and DAWG Director Lt. Gen. Stephen Marks were included as copied recipients of the letter.