Pentagon Taps Musk Luckey and Gingrich to Design Future Wars While Their Firms Win Contracts

The Pentagon has asked two of its biggest contractors to help decide what it should buy next. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Wednesday announced Project Meridian, a 120-day study that will be co-directed by Elon Musk, Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, with the goal of identifying the weapons, technologies and capabilities the US military may need to win future wars.

Hegseth unveiled the project during a State of the Force address at Marine Corps Base Quantico. The three co-directors are due to deliver their findings by January 28, 2027, as an unclassified public report plus a classified annex.

A study that covers everything from tunnels to the Moon

The scope is enormous. According to the memo, Meridian spans every warfighting domain, from subterranean depths to cislunar space, the region between Earth and the Moon. It names artificial intelligence, autonomy, directed energy, robotics and biotechnology as the fields expected to reshape combat.

Pentagon chief technology officer Emil Michael will commission the work through a partner organization the department has not named. Academic, policy and industry experts will support the three leads.

Hegseth was explicit that this is not a strategy exercise. Meridian, he said, is not about new strategies or policies but about identifying domains to conquer and capabilities to master. In other words, it is a shopping list in the making.

The people writing the list already sell to the buyer

That is where the conflict sits. None of the three co-directors has served in the US military, and two of them run companies that already depend heavily on Pentagon money.

SpaceX won Space Force awards in May worth about $4.16 billion for threat-tracking satellites and $2.29 billion for military satellite communications. Anduril landed a Marine Corps counter-drone contract worth up to $642 million in 2025. Both companies build exactly the kind of autonomous systems, space hardware and drones that the Meridian memo flags as the future of warfare.

Nothing announced so far awards any new contract through Meridian. But a public report that tells the military which capabilities matter most carries weight in budget fights, and the people shaping that report have a direct stake in the answer. Musk's relationship with Washington has already been tangled this year, from the Justice Department weighing in on the EU's fine against X to his role alongside other tech chiefs in debates over who should police AI.

Gingrich, a longtime political figure with no defense industry business of the same scale, rounds out the trio. Engadget noted the group will advise the government on the future of warfare rather than set policy directly, though the line between advice and procurement priorities is thin.

One of six bets on a more automated military

Meridian was one of six initiatives Hegseth rolled out on the same day. The most consequential may be a planned four-star Autonomous Warfare Command, meant to scale autonomous warfare across the armed forces by October 1, 2027. It builds on the existing Drone Dominance programme and Operation Epic Fury. The command does not exist yet; the date is a target.

Another initiative, FORTRESS America, aims to reshore production of rare earths, semiconductors and base power so that military installations can stay online even if the civilian grid fails. That push lines up with years of worry in Washington about supply chains that run through China.

Taken together, the announcements describe a military betting heavily on drones, autonomy, space and AI, and leaning on Silicon Valley founders to tell it how far and how fast to go.

What happens next

The clock now runs to late January. The unclassified report will be public, which means outsiders will be able to compare its recommendations against the product lines of SpaceX and Anduril. The classified annex will not.

Supporters argue that the Pentagon needs people who have actually shipped rockets and autonomous weapons at speed, and that traditional defense primes have been slow. Critics will point out that the same speed and expertise come attached to companies with billions of dollars riding on what the military decides to want. Both things can be true, and Meridian puts them in the same room.