WASHINGTON — The three-star commander of the Pentagon’s ambitious drone development task force said today that he does not know whether the Defense Autonomous Working Group (DAWG) will receive the nearly $54 billion the Trump administration has requested from Congress, and warned the program could falter without at least some funding.
“We’re at a point where there is a potential for us to get, uh, some money out of the FY27 budget, the president’s budget, that will go directly to DAWG,” Lt. Gen. Steven Marks told the NDIA Emerging Technologies Conference. “I don’t know if we’re going to get the full ask of $53.6 billion, but my greatest concern is, if we don’t get something, then the momentum that we have created since DAWG has been stood up, over a year ago, will be waning.”
“And it truly concerns me, because I have looked over and seen what they’re doing in Ukraine,” he said. “I see what’s going on with Operation … Epic Fury” in the Middle East.
The administration requested $54.6 billion for DAWG in FY27, but $53.6 billion of that amount was routed through the budget reconciliation process alongside funding for other top Trump priorities like the Golden Dome missile defense system, rather than in the normal base budget request.
If reconciliation fails to pass in Congress — as now seems increasingly likely — DAWG could be left with only $1 billion requested through the base budget. That figure is four times the $226 million DAWG received for FY26, representing dramatic growth by the standards of most Pentagon programs, but it amounts to less than 2 percent of the expansive original plan.
“I see what’s going on, and, truthfully, the world has woken up. They can’t keep up with our exquisite capability, and they know that,” Marks said of U.S. adversaries. “[But] they can take a $100,000 drone and conduct an attack against a $2 billion vessel. … We are on the losing end of that cost imposition curve.”
DAWG is a Trump administration initiative that essentially absorbed the Biden-era Replicator initiative, which was designed to acquire thousands of low-cost “attritable” drones, particularly for use in the Pacific. In its latest iteration, the department has sought to supercharge development investments across an array of platforms and collaborative autonomy efforts.
Marks declined to describe the specific DAWG programs at stake. “Unfortunately, all of our systems are classified, and so I will not be talking in detail about those,” he told the conference.
However, the general seemed particularly concerned about the impact of budget cuts on his efforts to impose common standards, control interfaces, and training across the current array of unmanned systems — the topic he was addressing just before transitioning to his budget concerns.
“Recently, I was in Alabama at Camp Clark, outside of Birmingham, at 20th Special Forces Group,” said Marks, who also serves as vice-commander of Special Operations Command. “What I heard … is we have six to eight systems that we’re operating and we’re conducting this [exercise] with. We need to identify and pick one or two and standardize it across the entire formation, because each one of the systems, as I mentioned before, requires a different skill set. … So standardizing the systems is critical to the future of autonomous warfare.”
