The ‘Best Minds’ Who Will Plan America’s Next War

The Pentagon's answer to the future of war is a 120-day study by three men who have never held a rifle, announced the same day the department cut a fifth of its generals.

"Project Meridian will ruthlessly map the trajectory of war, domains, and technologies, to ensure this War Department, your War Department, dominates the future."

— Pete Hegseth, Secretary of War, State of the Force address, Marine Corps Base Quantico, Sept. 30

At Marine Corps Base Quantico on Wednesday, Pete Hegseth did what War Department secretaries rarely do on the same day: cut the military's leadership and announce who would fill the vacuum.

The vacuum, he explained, gets filled by Project Meridian, a 120-day initiative on the "future of warfare" that will be "co-led by three of our nation's best minds, Elon Musk, Palmer Luckey, and Newt Gingrich." None of the three has ever served in the U.S. military. Two of them make billions of dollars selling it things. The third has spent decades calling for war with the country the department is currently fighting.

Musk, for those who need a refresher, runs SpaceX, which has become one of the Pentagon's largest suppliers. In May, the Space Force awarded it $4.16 billion for threat-detection satellites, days after handing it $2.29 billion for military communications satellites. At Quantico, Hegseth told the crowd that Musk's Grok chatbot would soon be "operating inside Pentagon networks."

Translation: one of the men deciding what weapons America builds next also has his AI inside the systems that decide who gets hit.

Luckey co-founded Anduril, the defense startup building autonomous weapons. His company holds up to a $642 million contract with the Marine Corps for counter-drone systems and has publicly said it plans to produce "large numbers" of cruise missiles and fighter jets. His pitch for more arms production has always been urgent: "If we have to fight Iran, and China, and Russia all at the same time, we are screwed."

Gingrich is the only one of the three who has held public office, as former House speaker. He has pushed for war with Iran since at least 2005. Like the president, he has been accused of dodging the Vietnam draft with deferments, student and father alike. His service to the country keeps getting postponed, apparently indefinitely.

The announcement came with full ceremony. Project Meridian, Hegseth said, is "not about developing new strategies or new policies." It is about "discovering, developing, and fielding" weapons for battlefields "from under the Earth to beyond the moon." The Pentagon's chief technology officer, Emil Michael, will oversee the work, with results due in 120 days. "We are going to hit the ground running," he said.

What is not going to be running, by Hegseth's own schedule, is the officer corps. In the same address, he announced that the Pentagon will eliminate 20 percent of its roughly 800 general and admiral positions by January, doubling a May order that had already cut 10 percent under a slogan called "Less Generals, More GIs." When Hegseth was confirmed, there were 10 four-star generals on active duty. There are now five, the fewest to lead the service in years. Since taking office he has fired the Army's top general, forced out at least half a dozen senior officers, and removed or pushed aside more than two dozen senior military and civilian officials.

The cuts, he said, eliminate "redundant force structure" and "unnecessary bureaucratic layers." The board replacing them, he promised, will be joined by "hand-picked private sector leaders, and subject matter experts from across our nation's unmatched innovation, academic, and policy ecosystems."

The contradiction is not hidden. It is the point. You cannot simultaneously argue that the generals are a bureaucratic layer and that the future of war should be planned by the men who just cut them. One of those claims is a lie, and the War Department apparently believes the other one is a brand.

The conflict of interest is at least visible. Hegseth even acknowledged it from the Quantico podium, telling the audience there are "obvious biases and risks to asking ourselves to both ask the questions and answer them," and then assembling a board that does exactly that. Two of the three co-leads run companies that sell the very categories of hardware the project will map. The third is on record wanting the map to end in war.

Meanwhile, the war in the Middle East is in its eighth month, after the president promised it would take six weeks. Reports in recent months have accused Hegseth's department of concealing casualties, depleting weapons stockpiles, and tolerating conditions on long-deployed ships bad enough to produce attempted suicides. Earlier this month, the House quietly ended its voting session early to avoid an impeachment vote on the secretary. That vote, members say, will wait for after the midterms.

The generals who would have answered for any of it are, as of Wednesday, "redundant force structure."

The best forecasters of future conflict are the ones who were in the room for the last one. That is the theory behind the general officer corps. The War Department now has a better theory: three men whose combined business interests include missiles, satellites, drones, and artificial intelligence, given 120 days to map "the trajectory of war" while the people who fought the last war are being removed by the hundred.

The report will come. That is the thing about 120-day initiatives. It will be on time, and it will be exactly long enough to impress the companies already in the room. America's best minds are about to forecast the future of warfare. The only open question is whether the forecast is for the force, or for the invoices.