So will Newt Gingrich for some reason.
The US Department of Defense has announced a new initiative that it says will identify the technological needs of future wars. According to the commission memo from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Project Meridian will “study the battlefields of the future, identify what weapons and technologies warfighters will need to leverage to dominate in these environments, and propose a handful of solutions to begin developing, testing, and executing those capabilities so that America is overmatched for the 21st century.”
The effort is led by Elon Musk, Palmer Luckey and Newt Gingrich. How CNBC reportedly, none of this trio served in the US military. However, Musk’s SpaceXAI and Luckey’s Anduril both have existing business contracts with the Pentagon, with deals worth as much as $4.16 billion. Gingrich has no obvious ties to the tech sector, but has worked on various projects alongside the military and was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Air University last year.
Considering that just this calendar year, the Department of Defense already leaked classified war plans to a journalist in a signal chat, narrowly avoided an international incident after allegedly relying on an AI-generated report, and illegally designated anthropic a supply chain risk after the company refused to remove blinders on its AI models, it seems like some military will benefit. But a cynic might think that Project Meridian sounds less like a source of guidance and more like a way to give even more power and money to friends of the current administration.