Pete Hegseth made a slew of announcements yesterday, all aimed at transforming the military in some way or another.
One makes obvious sense, one is absolutely necessary, and one has great potential, but could also become a big fat dud.
I will, of course, focus on the latter, because it will get all the cheers and jeers, while the other two are important news items.
First the obviously smart move that won’t generate much controversy, I hope. Hegseth is standing up an Autonomous Warfare Command, which is mostly code for drones, robots, and AI. The need is obvious, as the rapid pace of development in autonomous warfare, exposed by the war in Ukraine, has made it clear. Institutions rarely move quickly or adapt to massive change, and institutions as bureaucratic and tradition-bound as the military services are worse than most.
Under the pressure of war, mountains can be moved. When budget cycles dominate, procurement and implementation are messy, hidebound, and slower than molasses in January. Inertia almost always wins, with big budgets running parallel. NCOs may rapidly adapt, but institutions don’t. Placing the responsibility in one place with one mission should help, if not solve the problem.
Hegseth also announced what appears to me to be a great idea in principle, but one that will likely take years, be controversial, and cost gobs of money: making each military base self-reliant on power. This is, on the one hand, obviously a good idea. Hegseth rightly points to EMPs as a threat, but power independence is just a good idea for many reasons.
Reliability is key. Having redundant power sources, at scale and at a reasonable cost (not just diesel backups) makes perfect sense in a military context.
Expect the Democrats to want solar and wind, though, if anything.
Now the one that caught my eye:
🚨BREAKING: Secretary Pete Hegseth announces that Elon Musk, Palmer Luckey, and Newt Gingrich will co-lead Project Meridian, a new War Department effort to map the future of warfare “from under the Earth to beyond the Moon.”
The trio will work under War Department CTO Emil… pic.twitter.com/bJ2LCvA6sn
— KanekoaTheGreat (@KanekoaTheGreat) September 30, 2026
🚨BREAKING: Secretary Pete Hegseth announces that Elon Musk, Palmer Luckey, and Newt Gingrich will co-lead Project Meridian, a new War Department effort to map the future of warfare “from under the Earth to beyond the Moon.”
The trio will work under War Department CTO Emil Michael, joined by hand-picked private sector leaders and subject matter experts.
Hegseth also unveiled a new Autonomous Warfare Command focused on AI, robotics, and drone warfare.
“Project Meridian, the future of warfare, is not about developing new strategies or new policies. We already do that. Rather, its purpose is to creatively look to the future and identify the domains that we must conquer and capabilities we must master. We should have been thinking about autonomous warfare command 10 years ago… It is futuristic on purpose.”
“Their work will be focused on 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.”
“I’m directing Project Meridian’s findings to be completed and submitted within 120 days, culminating in a full public rollout. Of course, [with] a classified annex… Our first meeting with those three great Americans and a small group of us is happening in a SCIF about 200 yards away. Right after this speech, we are going to hit the ground running.”
“Project Meridian will ruthlessly map the trajectory of wars, domains, and technologies to ensure this War Department, your War Department, dominates the future.”
I love the idea, in principle, of standing up Project Meridian, which isn’t a program to start weapons programs, but to generate an overview of the coming battlespace where great powers will compete in the future. The military, for bureaucratic and budget reasons, tends to think linearly as an institution. Most do, which is why startups exist, and G.E. and IBM are not where all the new products come from.
No doubt smart people inside such institutions can be brilliant and “think outside the box,” but institutionally, that is rarely rewarded. It’s not just a military thing, although militaries are notoriously bad at restructuring or reforming; it’s an institutional thing.
Project Meridian is about bringing in brilliant people adjacent to this space , people who deal with threat environments and understand military matters at a high level — but who are outside the institution. Theoretically, you will get insights that will be different and sometimes better than those you get from people who are embedded in institutions with a culture and inertia.
Drone warfare didn’t come out of nowhere, but we were still utterly unprepared for its reality, despite being the best-funded and most forward-thinking military in the known universe. That’s just the way institutions work.
But here’s the rub: Elon and Palmer are also vendors, and Gingrich is both a hero to people and, to many, idiosyncratic. The team appeals to me a lot, but the criticisms are obvious: a guy who is something of a “futurist,” which often means kinda crazy at times, and two people who will benefit from their own recommendations.
That second criticism has some validity, but it is also true for everybody who could possibly fill those roles. And unlike the big incumbent military contractors, both have been supply-side vendors, meaning they develop the products and only then sell them to the military, at least for the most part.
In other words, they fit the profile for success perfectly: nobody said, “we need a Falcon 9, Starlink, or Starship,” and put it out for bid. Elon saw the need, developed it, and the world came to his door when the value became obvious.
Palmer Lucky is the same way. It seemed insane for an entrepreneur with relatively modest resources compared to Boeing or Lockheed to compete with them, but he built excellence, and they came to him. They see what others don’t and imagine what is necessary before others even know, or at least can conceive of delivering.
All true, but the criticisms that will come are obvious and not always unreasonable. They sell stuff to the military. They have conflicts of interest. They are…weird, by any standard outside startup culture. The idea is good, but something like this could die on the vine for any number of reasons.
Still, I like the idea, even though I have my doubts that it will yield the desired results. I think something like this will be necessary, and the military, which loves to move fast and break things on the field, hates to do so with processes unless it is under immediate pressure.
So, two and a half cheers for the project. Let’s hope it fulfills the intention.
Editor’s Note: Thanks to President Trump and his administration’s bold leadership, we are once again respected on the world stage, and our enemies are being put on notice.
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