Hegseth names Musk, Luckey and Gingrich to lead Pentagon future‑warfare study
Project Meridian has 120 days to name the AI, autonomy and robotics the US military needs. Hegseth also announced a four-star Autonomous Warfare Command, due by October 2027.
Pete Hegseth, who runs the Pentagon, announced Project Meridian during a State of the Force address on Wednesday, naming Elon Musk, Anduril founder Palmer Luckey and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich as its co-directors. The study, which Hegseth described as covering battlefields from the depths of the earth to the moon, is to report within 120 days.
According to The Next Web, a memo names artificial intelligence, autonomy, directed energy, robotics and biotechnology as the fields that will change how wars are fought. The deliverable is a public report with a classified annex, due on 28 January 2027. Hegseth said Meridian is not about developing new strategies or policies, but about identifying the capabilities the military must master.
Meridian was one of six initiatives Hegseth announced. Another is an Autonomous Warfare Command, which the department wants running as a four-star functional combatant command by 1 October 2027, with the job of scaling autonomous warfare across the armed forces. A third, called Fortress America, covers bringing military supply chains home, including semiconductors and rare earths.
The appointments tie the Pentagon's planning to companies that could sell the resulting systems: Luckey's Anduril builds autonomous weapons, and Musk runs SpaceX and Tesla. Reports so far do not say how conflicts of interest would be handled, or whether the three will be paid. The Pentagon has not released the memo in full.