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Last week, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth once again summoned high-ranking officers to Quantico so he could tell them the Iran war has been an unmitigated triumph (“courageous and historic operations that every red blooded American is proud of”) and peacock with pride about the new, testosterone-maxxed military his purges have created.
“We are no longer the woke department or the weak department,” he said. “No fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals. Just warriors.”
Then Hegseth announced the creation of “Project Meridian,” a new effort to “creatively look to the future and identify the domains that we must conquer and capabilities we must master,” and “ruthlessly map the trajectory of wars, domains, and technologies to ensure this war department, your war department dominates the future.” Leading this project of ruthless mapping will be “three of our nation’s best minds”: Elon Musk, Palmer Luckey, and Newt Gingrich.
In other words — at the risk of being unkind — a weirdo, a beardo, and a fatty.
There’s nothing wrong with trying to anticipate what the future of war might look like and how to prepare for it, of course. But if Pete Hegseth and this trio are the ones guiding the way, we may be in for trouble.
One commission, three stooges
Let’s begin with the 83-year-old Gingrich, the former speaker of the House who is believed by many to be the individual most responsible for the ugliness of American politics today.
His political and moral judgment may be questionable at best — his speakership came to an end with the Republicans’ disastrous impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1998; it didn’t help that at the time, Gingrich himself was having an extramarital affair with a congressional staffer 23 years his junior — but he is certainly interested in the future. Or, more properly, he is given to grandiose warnings and pronouncements about the glories and dangers that technological advancement will bring.
During his ill-fated run for president in 2012, Gingrich promised that “by the end of my second term we will have the first permanent base on the moon and it will be American.” For years before, he warned darkly that America was vulnerable to an electromagnetic pulse attack, a threat he said was so great it required preemptive strikes on North Korea and Iran.
In fact, Gingrich’s judgment on matters of war has been consistent, that judgment being “Yes.” He was a fervent supporter of George W. Bush’s war on Iraq, had been promoting war with Iran long before Trump took him up on it, and recently tweeted that rather than fighting over the Strait of Hormuz, “a dozen thermonuclear detonations and you’ve got a waterway wider than the Panama Canal, deeper than the Suez, and safe from Iranian attacks.”
What could go wrong?
Unlike Gingrich, Palmer Luckey is an actual defense contractor — though that’s part of the problem. After creating the Oculus virtual reality headset as a teenager, becoming a billionaire when he sold his company to Facebook, then falling out with Mark Zuckerberg, he founded Anduril (naturally, a “Lord of the Rings” reference), a company intended to bring the Silicon Valley “move fast and break things” ethos to the hidebound weapons industry. Luckey also has a carefully-cultivated image as a disruptive boy genius, with his uniform of Hawaiian shirts, sandals, and spectacularly ill-considered chin beard.
Anduril’s systems have proven to be anything but foolproof, with plenty of setbacks and missteps in testing and deployment. But that hasn’t stopped the young company from snagging billions of dollars in Pentagon contracts for its drones and software.
It’s all driven by a determined PR effort, telling a story that isn’t necessarily wrong in its particulars. Yes, the big, multi-decade weapons systems like the F-35 stealth fighter (total cost: nearly $2 trillion) on which we have relied create problems, and if we could do more with less that would be worthwhile. And yes, drones will undoubtedly play an important part in future conflicts.
But Luckey also wants American defense to go in a particular direction, one that just happens to be in his economic interest.
The man the New York Times called “the It Guy of the booming defense-technology industry” likes to say that rather than being the world’s police, “we have to be the world’s gun store.” He has an oft-expressed faith in the power of autonomy as the key feature of weapons of the future — weapons that will make their own decisions about how to accomplish their goals, including, eventually, decisions on whether and whom to kill.
And it’s hard to imagine that Luckey would not have gotten this role advising the Pentagon were it not for the fact that he has been pouring money into GOP coffers. According to FEC records, Luckey has made over 1,000 contributions to Republican candidates and committees since 2017; 23 of those were for over $100,000.
That brings us to Elon Musk.
If you were looking for lessons to take from the second Trump administration, “Elon Musk should not be allowed anywhere near federal policymaking” would be pretty high on the list. After spending almost $300 million to get Trump elected in 2024, he rode into Washington promising he could find $2 trillion in savings just by trimming the fat from the federal government, and Trump let him go wild. The result was utter catastrophe — the gutting of the government’s capacity to solve problems, thousands or even millions of deaths that will be caused by the withdrawal of vital food and health programs, widespread violations of data security and Americans’ privacy, and gross incompetence from a bunch of 20-something tech bros whose ignorance and arrogance was exceeded only by that of the man leading the effort.
And now he’s back.
Like Luckey, Musk has billions of dollars in defense contracts, in addition to those with NASA and other agencies. The government seems unconcerned that he is without a doubt the world’s most influential white supremacist, which might be an issue were his goals on that subject not in perfect accord with this administration. The Pentagon is already using Musk’s large language model Grok on its internal network, despite the fact that the chatbot that has called itself “MechaHitler” has been used extensively to create child sexual abuse material.
Where is Project Meridian leading?
The Pentagon has long sought input from outside the government; Gingrich himself served on the Defense Policy Board, a collection of civilians who advise the Defense Department on a range of issues. The difference here is the monetary interest Musk and Luckey have in the advice they might give.
As Sen. Mark Kelly told Politico, “forgive me if I’m skeptical of entrusting the future of American warfare to people with zero military experience who stand to financially benefit from the decisions they’re making.”
In short, what we have here is a commission made up of an octogenarian crank and two billionaires who look at a future of chaos as an opportunity to remake the world and accumulate even more billions.
Whatever conclusions they come to (the project is supposed to produce its findings within 120 days), they will be handed off to Hegseth, who believes that wars are won by whichever side’s soldiers can do the most pushups, and whose obsession with creating an all-white, all-male military leadership is dragging the Department of Defense down by the day.
Luckey, Musk, and Gingrich share a faith in the power of fantastical pronouncements and promises of technological whiz-bangery to hypnotize congressional appropriators and Pentagon procurement officers alike, opening up the spigots for infinite future contracts. None of them have shown any particular understanding of the lessons to be drawn from the conflicts of the past, especially the one America is involved in right now.
The most important lesson of the Iran war may be that war is always shaped by politics. If you can’t understand that, you’ll make the mistake of believing that all it takes to prevail is better technology and more of it. It’s a reminder that no matter the capabilities of our military, the decision to go to war — and America will always keep going to war, again and again and again — will be made by civilians. That’s as it should be, but the unfortunate fact is that our civilian leadership is not infrequently made up of fools with delusions about how war works, blinded by the potential of all those fancy machines and powerful ordnance.
Project Meridian had its first meeting soon after Hegseth delivered that speech at Quantico; the Pentagon released photos of the group around a conference table. There they sit, this collection of braggarts and blowhards, guys who’ve lived lives of endless privilege and limitless second chances. They think they have all the answers, that they’re smarter than they really are, and that the future itself will bend to whatever ideas pop into their heads, no matter how inane.
In that, Project Meridian is like so much that characterizes this moment in history: oriented toward a real challenge, but with the worst people given the power to come up with the answers. The best we can hope for may be that their recommendations get ignored and then forgotten.
That’s it for today
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Thanks for reading.
Project Meridian, to no one's surprise, is also exclusively white males.
Oh my God. I thought Newt Gingrich was light on for competence but it turns out that he's worse than incompetent!
Is there any chance that this terrible trio gets to turn up to a Democrat dominated Congressional Hearing? I'd postively love to see Elon Musk made to answer questions under oath.