Hegseth’s ‘Project Meridian’ is a conflict of interest in the making
In a speech that covered a lot of ground, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced recently that he was creating a panel called “Project Meridian,” to look at the future of warfare. It will be led by three individuals: Elon Musk of SpaceX, Palmer Luckey of Anduril, and former Georgia House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.).
The appointment of Musk and Luckey to head the panel should sound alarm bells on Capitol Hill. Both men lead companies that have received billions of dollars in Pentagon contracts. And if our future strategy relies heavily on automated warfare, uncrewed vehicles and other AI-driven systems, they stand to make tens or hundreds of billions more in the decades to come.
In a rational approach to security, strategy drives budgets, and budgets purchase weapons that fit that strategy. In addition, military personnel, their civilian counterparts, and the growing ranks of government contractors need to be trained to use those systems effectively.
But this textbook version of national defense strategy rarely plays out so neatly. There are disagreements on strategy within the executive branch, including on when it is worth launching wars like the current conflict with Iran. Congress is also generally divided on key issues of war and peace.
In addition, decisions on weapons purchases too often hinge on where the systems are built, not whether they are aligned with a coherent strategy. Congress often adds more units of a given system to the budget than the Pentagon has requested, or prevents the department from retiring systems it sees as obsolete.
A case in point is the F-35, which has hundreds of defects despite first being proposed nearly 40 years ago, and which spends roughly half its time in the hangar being repaired rather than being deployed on actual missions. Yet the Congressional Joint Strike Fighter Caucus, named after the generic term for the F-35 and made up of members with components of the plane built in their districts, frequently adds more F-35s to the budget than the Pentagon asks for.
Or take the littoral combat ship, which was supposed to be a minesweeper, a vehicle for getting close to shore to insert Special Operations forces, and more. The Navy decided that the ship was ill-suited to a potential conflict with China, because it could not easily defend itself from modern high-speed missiles. But members of Congress from the states where the ships are maintained and repaired blocked the Navy from retiring five of the nine ships it had hoped to terminate.
Meanwhile, the Senate ICBM Coalition, composed of members with Intercontinental Ballistic Missile bases or major ballistic missile work in their states, have passed a law stating that the Air Force cannot reduce the current deployed force of 400 missiles. They did this even though experts such as former Secretary of Defense William Perry have called these missiles “among the most dangerous weapons in the world,” because a president would only have a matter of minutes to decide whether to launch them on warning of an attack, increasing the risk of an accidental nuclear conflict provoked by a false alarm.
To add insult to injury, the new ICBM that is under development by Northrop Grumman, the Sentinel, now has a projected cost more than 80 percent more than original estimates.
Given these realities, one might ask, “how much worse can it get?” The answer is, much worse.
While tech moguls like Musk and Luckey promise to build a new generation of cheaper, more effective weapons, they are also competing for major roles in President Trump’s proposed leak-proof “Golden Dome” missile defense system. Experts ranging from the American Physical Society to the Union of Concerned Scientists to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists have suggested the dome system would be physically impossible and enormously expensive — a trillion dollars or more over the next three decades, according to an estimate by the conservative American Enterprise Institute.
If executives like Musk and Luckey truly want to create an effective defense for less, they should refuse to work on Golden Dome, which, if fully pursued, could be the greatest boondoggle in the history of Pentagon spending — and that’s saying a lot.
Which brings us back to Project Meridian. Putting major weapons contractors in charge of forging a strategy, that, depending on its main outlines, could greatly enrich their own companies is the height of folly. Neither Musk nor Luckey have any background in geopolitics or defense strategy, unless you count making provocative public statements about “beating China” or pledging to ensure permanent American military dominance through the wonders of technology.
No strategist worthy of the name believes that we can bet our defenses on technology alone. An effective defense force should be grounded on well-trained, well-motivated troops who understand the laws of war and understand that their primary loyalty is to the Constitution, not any single president. Technology is just a tool, not the key to winning conflicts or deterring war.
If we want a genuinely thoughtful assessment of the future of warfare, we should recast Project Meridian with leaders who don’t have a financial stake in its deliberations — one that includes scientists, military personnel who have seen combat, experienced diplomats, academic experts, leaders of industries that don’t do business with the Pentagon, and workers from the arms industry.
Executives like Elon Musk and Palmer Luckey should be treated as vendors whose products we will buy or not based on their performance, as well as their alignment with a smart, realistic security strategy. They are not strategists, and we should not look to them to perform that critical task.
William D. Hartung is principal adviser to the Project on Government Oversight.
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