The Pentagon taps Elon Musk, Palmer Luckey and Newt Gingrich to design the war of the future

U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced the creation of "Project Meridian," a Pentagon initiative whose goal is to identify the military capabilities, technologies and weapons the United States will need in future wars. The announcement came during a "state of the force" speech delivered to junior officers and troop commanders at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia. According to Hegseth, the project will have 120 days to analyze how war could change in the coming years and decades, and which capabilities the U.S. military must master to maintain a technological edge.

To lead this effort, the Pentagon has turned to three figures entirely outside the institutional military world: Elon Musk, chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX; Palmer Luckey, tech entrepreneur and co-founder of the defense company Anduril; and Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House of Representatives. All three will act as co-leads of Project Meridian, under the supervision of the Pentagon's technology chief, Emil Michael, and alongside a broader team drawn from government, industry, academia and the policy world. Hegseth framed the project's mission not as designing new strategies or policies, but as the task of "identifying the domains we must conquer and the capabilities we must master," focusing on "discovering, developing and deploying" weapons systems for combat scenarios that, in his own words, range "from beneath the Earth to beyond the Moon."

One striking detail, noted in the article itself, is that none of the three co-leads has served in the military. In Musk's case, the article recalls that he moved to Canada as a teenager, in part to avoid mandatory military service in South Africa, a biographical fact that contrasts with the role he is now being given in defining the United States' wartime priorities.

The choice of Musk and Luckey is especially delicate because it places both in a privileged position to influence the Pentagon's future technology needs while their own companies actively compete for multibillion-dollar contracts with that same department. SpaceX holds a broad portfolio of defense contracts: in May, the Space Force awarded it a $4.16 billion contract to build satellites intended to track and target airborne threats, just days after granting it another $2.29 billion contract for a military satellite communications network. Anduril, Luckey's company devoted to autonomous weaponry and other military technologies, received a Marine Corps contract in 2025 worth up to $642 million for counter-drone systems.

The Project Meridian announcement also comes amid a broader Pentagon push toward autonomous warfare: that same Wednesday, plans were unveiled to create a new four-star Autonomous Warfare Command, aimed at scaling up the use of autonomous and robotic systems across all branches of the armed forces. This move reinforces the reading that the new initiative is closely tied to the development of autonomous systems and military robotics, a field in which Anduril, according to the source, already develops autonomous weaponry and other military technologies.

Neither Anduril, SpaceX, Tesla nor Gingrich immediately responded to requests for comment on their involvement in the project, so for now there is no account from those involved as to how the evident overlap between their advisory role and their direct commercial interests with the Department of Defense will be managed.

Taken together, the news illustrates a trend likely to keep drawing attention: the growing integration between figures from the private tech sector — particularly from the fields of artificial intelligence, automation and autonomous systems — and the bodies that define U.S. defense policy. That the Pentagon itself is enlisting players with active and future contracts at stake to help draw up the map of capabilities that could later benefit their own companies objectively raises a conflict-of-interest question that the original article notes but does not resolve, since none of those involved has yet commented on it.