Published: October 1, 2026 · Last updated: October 1, 2026
TL;DR: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth tapped Elon Musk, Anduril founder Palmer Luckey, and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich to co-lead Project Meridian, a 120-day study on what weapons and technology the U.S. military needs next.
Two of the men with the most to gain financially from a bigger defense tech budget are now helping decide what the Pentagon should buy next.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Project Meridian during a “State of the Force” address, naming Elon Musk, Anduril founder Palmer Luckey, and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich as co-leads, with Defense Department CTO Emil Michael running point on the effort. The assignment: a 120-day study to study the battlefields of the future and identify the weapons and technologies American warfighters are going to need to maintain military dominance going forward.
Hegseth also used the address to announce a separate Autonomous Warfare Command, aimed at speeding up development and deployment of autonomous systems and drones, a signal of where the Pentagon expects the real growth in military spending to land over the next decade.
The conflict of interest here isn’t subtle, and nobody involved is pretending it is. SpaceX, Musk’s company, already sells launch and satellite capability to the Defense Department. Anduril, Luckey’s company, already sells autonomous weapons systems and surveillance technology to the same department. Putting both men in charge of recommending what the military should develop next means they’re effectively advising on a market their own companies are positioned to dominate. Critics don’t have to work hard to make that case, it’s right there in the org chart.
Defenders of the arrangement would point out that this is how a lot of government tech advising has always worked, pulling in people who actually understand the technology because they built it, rather than career bureaucrats guessing at capabilities from the outside. The tradeoff is real either way: expertise and self-interest tend to arrive in the same package when you’re recruiting from a pool of three or four companies that dominate an entire sector.
Gingrich’s presence rounds out the group with political rather than technical credibility, someone who can translate whatever Meridian recommends into language Congress will actually fund. A 120-day study has a natural end point sometime in late January 2027, which puts the group’s recommendations right in the middle of the next budget cycle, timing that doesn’t look accidental.
What happens after the study matters more than the study itself. Pentagon working groups produce reports regularly; the ones that actually reshape procurement are rarer, and usually depend on whether the recommendations align with what Congress was already inclined to fund. Given who’s in the room, it’s a safe bet the recommendations will point toward more autonomous systems, more private launch capacity, and more of exactly what Musk and Luckey’s companies already sell.
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Bottom Line: Project Meridian will probably produce exactly the recommendations you’d expect from a panel stocked with people who sell the technology being recommended. That doesn’t make the technology wrong for the military to want, it just means the advice isn’t neutral, and nobody involved is claiming it is.
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