Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth stood before officers and enlisted troops at Marine Corps Base Quantico on Sept. 30 and said the department that runs the largest military on earth cannot be trusted to predict its own future. “There are obvious biases and risks to asking ourselves to both ask the questions and answer them,” he said, then handed one of the most consequential planning exercises in the building to three men who have never worn the uniform of the service they now advise.
The exercise is Project Meridian, announced during Hegseth’s “State of the Force” address. It will be co-led by Elon Musk, Anduril founder Palmer Luckey, and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, under the direction of Emil Michael, the Pentagon’s chief technology officer. The team has 120 days to deliver conclusions and actionable development plans, due in late January.
The mandate Hegseth laid out is deliberately expansive: “discovering, developing, and fielding the weapons and systems that our children and our grandchildren will need in their lifetimes, without any creative limitations or restrictions, on any future battlefield, from under the Earth to beyond the moon.” He called the project “futuristic on purpose” and said it was not meant to produce new strategies or policies.
The roster raises a question the Pentagon has not answered. Musk’s SpaceX and Luckey’s Anduril both hold multibillion-dollar defense contracts, including a $4.16 billion Space Force satellite award and a $2.29 billion military satellite communications contract given to SpaceX in May. Two men with direct financial stakes in Pentagon contracting now sit inside a process meant to shape what the department buys next.
Luckey’s company is built almost entirely on selling to that department. He founded Anduril in 2017 after selling his virtual-reality company Oculus to Facebook for roughly $2 billion in 2014, and it has since become one of the most valuable defense startups in the country on the strength of autonomous drones, sentry towers and software the military buys in volume. Musk’s SpaceX is already woven into the force’s daily operations, from launching satellites to the Starlink terminals that have carried battlefield communications.
Gingrich brings a different credential: no commercial stake, but decades in national security policy dating to his time as Speaker of the House in the 1990s. Michael, the former Uber chief business officer who will coordinate the effort, was confirmed by the Senate in 2025 to steer the department’s technology investments.
Meridian was one of six initiatives Hegseth unveiled Wednesday. Alongside it came a new four-star Autonomous Warfare Command intended to scale robotic and autonomous capabilities across the joint force, plus a 20 percent cut to general and flag officer positions. “We should have been thinking about Autonomous Warfare Command ten years ago,” he said, casting Meridian as the horizon scan meant to prevent the next such lag.
Behind the exercise is a strategic anxiety that the wars being watched are not the wars the Pentagon planned for. The conflict in Ukraine has shown how cheap drones, commercial satellite imagery and off-the-shelf software can reshape a battlefield faster than a procurement cycle can react, and Meridian is the department’s attempt to formalize that lesson before the next conflict arrives.
The findings will arrive as a public report with a classified annex delivered to senior defense officials. A department memo said the military “must not take our current advantages for granted” as advances in artificial intelligence, autonomy, directed energy, robotics and biotechnology “profoundly alter the character of warfare.”
The first meeting began minutes after the speech, in a sensitive compartmented information facility a short walk from the stage. Hegseth said the group would “ruthlessly map the trajectory of wars, domains and technologies.”
The Pentagon has leaned on outside advisers before. The Defense Innovation Board, chaired for years by former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt, studied how the military should adopt commercial technology, and Project Maven dragged Silicon Valley into the business of analyzing drone footage. Meridian differs in ambition and in who leads it: this time the men forecasting what the next war needs also build and sell the hardware such a war would consume.
The contrast with Musk’s last turn in government is sharp. A little more than a year ago he was running the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, an effort that cut through federal agencies and drew boycotts of his companies. Meridian is narrower and shorter: 120 days, one report, no operational authority and no power to fire anyone.
For a department now two years into Hegseth’s tenure, the exercise is a bet that outside forecasters can see further than the institution that will have to pay for whatever they recommend. The risk is that the men doing the forecasting also sell what the forecast is likely to favor, and the Pentagon has invited them to answer, in public, the question of what the next war will require.
