Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Wednesday named Elon Musk, Anduril founder Palmer Luckey and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich to co-lead Project Meridian, a 120-day study meant to pin down the weapons and technologies American forces may need in conflicts still years or decades away. In the same speech he announced a new four-star Autonomous Warfare Command to push drones, robots and other autonomous systems across the military.
Hegseth laid out both efforts in his "State of the Force" address at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia, delivered to some 600 noncommissioned officers and junior officers a year to the day after he summoned the military's generals and admirals to the same base. He plans to give the speech every year. Meridian, he argued, needs voices from outside the building. "The best forecasters of future conflict do not solely reside inside the Pentagon," Hegseth said. "There are obvious biases and risks to asking ourselves to both ask the questions and answer them."
Emil Michael, the department's chief technology officer, will oversee the project, Hegseth said, and the co-leads will be joined by a wider team from government, industry, academia and policy circles. Musk previously led the administration's Department of Government Efficiency. According to the department's memo, as quoted by Breaking Defense, Meridian's primary function is to "map the trajectory of future warfare, identify critical capability gaps, and propose actionable solutions" tied to the goals of the 2026 National Security Science and Technology Strategy. Its report is due Jan. 28, 2027, and the work is to end in a public release of the findings along with a classified annex.
Hegseth said Meridian is "not about developing new strategies or new policies." Its purpose, he said, is to identify "the domains that we must conquer, and capabilities we must master," with the emphasis on "discovering, developing, and fielding" systems for battlefields that stretch "from under the Earth to beyond the moon." He said he would meet with Musk, Luckey and Gingrich in a secure facility 200 yards from the stage as soon as the speech ended.
The new command is the bigger organizational change. It will have "service-like authorities" and is designed to scale autonomous and robotic capabilities across the joint force. Sean Parnell, the Pentagon's chief spokesman, wrote on X that the department had begun creating it at Hegseth's direction. Hegseth said a four-star commander will be named soon and tied the move to an acquisition system that he said cannot keep pace with battlefield technology. "The pace of war is changing faster than the process to support it," he said.
Getting there will take time. Hegseth described the goal as a four-star functional combatant command by Oct. 1, 2027. As an interim step, the portfolio office he set up three months ago to oversee unmanned and autonomous systems becomes Project Agincourt, led by Defense Innovation Unit director Owen West and Navy SEAL Senior Chief Max Strasiser, a pairing Hegseth called a "CEO, COO partnership." A department memo says the two will help lay the groundwork for the command, including by working with lawmakers on the legislation needed to stand it up, Breaking Defense reported. The outlet said the command is almost certain to need congressional approval, since lawmakers must sign off before a combatant command gets its own acquisition authority, as they did for Special Operations Command and Cyber Command. Congress has not yet passed a fiscal 2027 defense authorization bill, but the Senate's version calls on the Pentagon to establish a Robotic and Autonomous Systems Combatant Command.
Hegseth drew his case from the war in Ukraine. "Ukraine's lesson is not that one type of drone wins wars," he said, "but rather the need for a purpose-built system that maximizes the ability to adapt." The department will also begin phasing in new military occupational specialty frameworks to give a new generation of what Hegseth called "autonomous warfighters" their own career paths. "We should have been thinking about Autonomous Warfare Command ten years ago," he said, presenting Meridian as the way to see the next technological shift coming before the military falls behind.
The appointments give two executives whose companies compete for defense work a hand in charting the military's future technology needs, CNBC noted. Musk's SpaceX holds numerous Pentagon contracts, among them a $4.16 billion Space Force award in May to build satellites that track and target airborne threats, which came days after a $2.29 billion contract for a military satellite communications network. Anduril builds autonomous weapons and other military technology, and the Marine Corps awarded it a counter-drone contract worth up to $642 million in 2025. Fox News said the arrangement could raise conflict-of-interest questions as executives whose companies compete for defense business help identify what the military should pursue. None of the three co-leads is a U.S. military veteran, CNBC reported, and Anduril, SpaceX, Tesla and Gingrich did not immediately respond to its requests for comment.
Meridian and the new command were two of six initiatives Hegseth announced in the nearly hourlong address. He called for every major military installation in the country to generate its own power, independent of the civilian grid, and said states will compete to host a new military base. He also announced an expansion of college cadet corps under a program called America's Corps of Cadets, along with an Office of Religious Affairs that will report directly to the secretary.