Pete Hegseth announced on Wednesday that Elon Musk will co-lead a government project to study the future of warfare, marking the SpaceX CEO’s first return to government since he ran the chaotic, so -called “department of government efficiency”, or Doge. Musk will be joined by Palmer Luckey, CEO of the defense tech company Anduril, and Newt Gingrich, the former Republican speaker of the House.
A defense department press release on the effort, called Project Meridian, described its goal as “identifying the capabilities required to achieve absolute technological dominance on the next-generation battlefield”. The project will run for 120 days and culminate in an unclassified public report of its recommendations.
The defense department’s project brings Musk back into government work a little more than a year after his explosive tenure as leader of Doge, which gutted federal agencies while failing to achieve its stated cost-cutting goals. It is also a sign of how Musk has re-entered the good graces of the Trump administration after a dramatic falling out with the president last year.
Unlike Musk’s role at Doge – which drew heavy public criticism and costly boycotts of his products – the scope and goals of Project Meridian appear as if they will be much less time-consuming for the tech mogul. The project intends to look at how the US military can utilize new technology and also carry out warfare in untested terrains including subterranean depths and on the moon, the defense department stated in its release.
“We are witnessing rapid advances in artificial intelligence, autonomy, directed energy, robotics, biotechnology, among other critical high-tech areas. Combined, these new domains, new ways of fighting, and technological developments will profoundly alter the character of warfare,” Hegseth said in a memo. “To maintain global dominance, the United States must anticipate future operational environments and act decisively to develop the tools to dominate in them.”
Musk and Luckey are far from independent arbiters of the future of warfare. Both have extensive defense department contracts through their companies, with Anduril’s business centered on the government purchasing products that it advertises as the latest advance in warfare.
Gingrich was appointed as a member of the defense policy board in December 2020 during the first Trump administration but was dismissed less than three months later after Joe Biden became president. Going back to the 1990s, he has been warning about the threat of an electromagnetic pulse attack that could knock out US power grids.
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