Elon Musk and Palmer Luckey to advise government on future of war
Newt Gingrich too, for some reason.
The US Department of Defense has announced a new initiative that it says will help identify the technological needs of future wars. According to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s commissioning memo, Project Meridian “will study the battlefields of the future, identify the weapons and technologies that warfighters will need to harness to dominate in these environments, and propose concrete solutions to begin developing, testing, and deploying these capabilities so that America will have superiority in the 21st century and beyond.” »
The project will be led by Elon Musk, Palmer Luckey and Newt Gingrich. As CNBC According to reports, no one in this trio served in the U.S. military. However, Musk’s SpaceXAI and Luckey’s Anduril both have existing commercial contracts with the Pentagon, worth up to $4.16 billion. Gingrich has no obvious ties to the technology sector, but has worked alongside the military on several projects and last year received an honorary doctorate from Air University.
Considering that in this calendar year alone, the Department of Defense has already disclosed classified war plans to a reporter during a discussion on Signal, narrowly avoided an international incident after allegedly relying on an AI-generated report, and illegally designated Anthropic as a supply chain risk after the company refused to remove guardrails on its AI models, it seems the military could use some guidance. But a cynic might think that Project Meridian looks less like a source of guidance and more like a way to give even more power and money to the friends of the current administration.
