Pentagon taps Musk and Luckey to map the future of war

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has put Elon Musk, Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich in charge of Project Meridian, a 120-day Pentagon study of where future wars will be fought and what weapons the U.S. military will need to win them.

Hegseth announced the project on Sept. 30 during his “State of the Force” address at Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia, after Pirate Wires first reported the plan. The three co-leads will work under Emil Michael, the Department of War’s chief technology officer, alongside a wider team drawn from industry, academia and the policy world, though the Pentagon has not said how many people will take part or whether the co-leads will be paid.

“Project Meridian will provide the transformative vision to secure American dominance across every future warfighting domain,” the Department of War’s chief technology office wrote on X.

In a letter launching the effort, Hegseth directed Michael to study the battlefields of the future, identify the weapons and technologies troops will need there, and propose concrete steps to start developing, testing and fielding them. The findings are due within 120 days, which puts the deadline in late January 2027, and are expected to be released in an unclassified report with a classified annex. Hegseth said the Joint Staff and all the military services should be ready to connect their own future-warfare research to the project.

Hegseth framed the effort as a look decades ahead, saying it would consider the wars the United States cannot afford to fight in 2030, 2050 and 2100. He also said the project was deliberately futuristic and was not meant to produce new strategies or policies, The Hill reported, and that the three co-leads would hold their first meeting immediately after the speech in a secure facility at the base.

The choice of leaders has drawn attention because two of them run companies that sell to the Pentagon. Musk’s SpaceX holds billions of dollars in U.S. military contracts for rocket launches and satellites, and Luckey’s Anduril builds drones, counter-drone systems and other autonomous weapons for the U.S. Army, U.S. Navy and other services, the kinds of technologies a study of future warfare is likely to examine. The Pentagon has not said how it will handle potential conflicts of interest.

The appointment is also Musk’s first official advisory role in the Trump administration since he left the Department of Government Efficiency and fell out publicly with President Donald Trump last year, Axios reported. Gingrich, who led the House from 1995 to 1999, has long written and spoken about defense reform and space policy.

Project Meridian was one of several changes Hegseth announced in the same speech, which also included a new Autonomous Warfare Command focused on robotic, drone and artificial intelligence warfare, and a plan to cut 20% of general and admiral positions by January.