Unveiling Project Meridian during a "State of the Force" address at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia to an audience of junior officers and enlisted leaders, Hegseth drew a bright line around the mission: "Project Meridian, the future of warfare, is not about developing new strategies or new policies." Instead, he said, it is meant to "identify the domains that we must conquer, and capabilities we must master."
Hegseth named Tesla and SpaceX chief executive Elon Musk, Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich as co-leads. All three lack U.S. military service backgrounds. Musk has said that, as a teen, he relocated to Canada partly to sidestep mandatory military duty in South Africa.
Emil Michael will run the oversight, with inputs from a wider bench across the public and private sectors, universities and the policy world. In this setup, Musk and Luckey would be positioned to surface the Pentagon's future technology needs while their companies vie for billions in Defense Department work.
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Project Meridian's 120-day sprint is about anticipating how warfare could evolve over the coming years and decades. Hegseth said the focus is on "discovering, developing, and fielding" the systems future troops may need across domains he described as ranging "from under the Earth to beyond the moon." The announcement arrived as the Pentagon widened its drive into autonomous warfare, and on Wednesday it also outlined a new four-star Autonomous Warfare Command to scale autonomous and robotic systems across the force.
SpaceX already has a deep Pentagon footprint. Anduril, founded by Palmer Luckey, develops autonomous weapons and other defense technologies; in 2025, the Marine Corps issued the company a counter-drone award valued at up to $642 million. Requests for comment were not immediately answered by Anduril, SpaceX and Tesla.
For your money, the through-line is simple: defense modernization is accelerating, and the people now shaping the wish list are tied to companies already competing for big Pentagon budgets.
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