Speaking to a room of junior officers and noncommissioned officers at Marine Corps Base Quantico on Wednesday, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth explained why he was looking outside the building. “There are obvious biases and risks to asking ourselves to both ask the questions and answer them,” he said, according to remarks published by The New Republic. His answer to that problem was to hand one of the Pentagon’s biggest questions, what the next war will be fought with, to three people who do not work there.
The effort is called Project Meridian. Its co-directors are Elon Musk, Palmer Luckey and Newt Gingrich, and all three were in the audience, Air & Space Forces Magazine reported. They have 120 days. Here is what the Department of War has said about the project, who is involved, how it compares with the last major outside study of military technology, and what the public still has not been told.
A study, not a command
Project Meridian is a study. It is not a military unit, a weapons program or a contract. The department’s announcement describes its purpose as “identifying the capabilities required to achieve absolute technological dominance on the next-generation battlefield.” Hegseth put it more plainly in his speech: the co-directors would “creatively look to the future and identify the domains that we must conquer,” according to The New Republic. The Next Web reported a slightly longer version of the same line, “identify the domains that we must conquer, and capabilities we must master,” along with his statement that the project “is not about developing new strategies or new policies.”
The scope is wide. The department says Meridian “will examine the full spectrum of future warfighting domains, from subterranean depths to the cislunar frontier,” meaning the region of space between Earth and the Moon. Hegseth’s commissioning memo, dated Sept. 30, points to “rapid advances in artificial intelligence, autonomy, directed energy, robotics, biotechnology, among other critical high-tech areas.” It directs the project to “study the battlefields of the future,” identify the weapons and technologies warfighters will need, and propose ways to start “developing, testing and fielding” them. Its primary function, the memo says, is to “map the trajectory of future warfare, identify critical capability gaps, and propose actionable solutions in furtherance of the identified goals in the 2026 National Security Science and Technology Strategy.” The memo also tells the rest of the building to take part: “The Joint Staff and all services should be prepared to connect their future warfare efforts and research to Project Meridian.”
The deadline is firm on paper. The memo orders the findings and recommendations submitted to Hegseth’s office 120 days after the announcement, “or on January 28, 2027.” The public product, according to the department’s release, will be “an unclassified, publicly released final report containing critical findings and recommendations, accompanied by a classified annex,” according to the department.
The four people named
Elon Musk is chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX, The Next Web noted.
Palmer Luckey founded the virtual-reality company Oculus VR in 2012 and sold it to Facebook in 2014, according to Built In and Pepperdine University. In 2017 he co-founded Anduril Industries, which builds autonomous and semi-autonomous systems for military and border-security use.
Newt Gingrich represented Georgia in the House from 1979 to 1999 and served as Speaker from 1995 to 1999, according to the House’s official history office.
Emil Michael is the insider. He is the department’s Under Secretary for Research and Engineering and its chief technology officer, with oversight of the research and prototyping enterprise, including DARPA and the Missile Defense Agency, according to his official biography filed with the House Armed Services Committee. The same biography lists him as Uber’s chief business officer from 2013 to 2017. The department says Michael “is facilitating the Department’s commissioning of Project Meridian.” The memo directs him to commission the work “through a partner organization,” which it does not name.
A fifth group appears only in general terms. The department says the co-directors will be “supported by a team of elite academic, policy, and industry experts.” None of them has been named publicly. The memo itself names none of the three co-directors either. It describes the project as “drawing upon a group of top technologists, innovators, business leaders, policy makers, and national security experts.” Musk, Luckey and Gingrich were named in the department’s release and in Hegseth’s speech.
One of six announcements, and the one people confused
Meridian was one of six initiatives Hegseth announced in the address, which the department built around a speech to active-duty E-6s and O-3s rather than senior officials.
| Initiative | What the department says it does |
|---|---|
| Autonomous Warfare Command | A four-star functional combatant command to scale autonomous warfare across the force by Oct. 1, 2027 |
| America’s Corps of Cadets | Full-time cadet programs at five more schools, including LSU, Liberty, Tuskegee, Mississippi State and Hillsdale |
| FORTRESS America | Independent power at major bases, domestic supply chains and deep strategic reserves |
| Next Great American Base | A new off-grid installation, sited through a competition among states |
| Office of Religious Affairs | A new office reporting directly to the secretary |
| Project Meridian | A 120-day study of future warfare, led by Musk, Luckey and Gingrich |
Because they were announced together, Meridian is easy to confuse with the first item on that list. The Autonomous Warfare Command is an organization, planned as a four-star combatant command to scale autonomous warfare across the force. Its own memo, titled “Project Agincourt – Pathway to the Autonomous Warfare Command,” puts the Pentagon’s office for unmanned-systems programs in charge, with Owen West, director of the Defense Innovation Unit, as its chief executive and Navy SEAL Senior Chief Max Strasiser as chief operating officer. That office reports monthly to Hegseth. Unlike Meridian, the command needs Congress. The memo directs the office to “collaborate directly with Congress to secure necessary legislation with a target establishment date of October 1, 2027.”
Neither memo mentions the other, and neither gives the Meridian co-directors a role in the command or the command a role in the study. The closest link is indirect. Meridian’s memo asks the services to connect their future-warfare research to the project, and the command is to be built from forces the services provide.
The last time Washington asked outsiders this question
Bringing prominent outsiders in to map the future of military technology is not new. The closest recent precedent is the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, and the law that created it offers a useful yardstick.
Congress established the commission in the defense authorization act signed on Aug. 13, 2018. Section 1051 of that law set its membership at 15. The secretary of defense appointed two, the secretary of commerce one, and the chairs and ranking members of six congressional committees one each, a design that gave both parties a say. The law treated members as federal employees, capped the commission’s funding at $10 million, and required its reports to be made public, “but may include a classified annex.” The commission, chaired by former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt, was originally due to shut down on Oct. 1, 2020. Congress extended it to Oct. 1, 2021, in the next year’s defense bill, signed Dec. 20, 2019.
Its final report arrived in March 2021 and ran to more than 700 pages. Among its recommendations, according to a summary by the law firm Davis Wright Tremaine, was that the United States become “AI-Ready” by 2025 and that federal spending on AI research grow to as much as $40 billion a year within five years.
| Feature | NSCAI (2018–2021) | Project Meridian (2026–27) |
|---|---|---|
| Created by | Act of Congress | Secretary’s memo |
| Leadership | 15 members, picked by two Cabinet secretaries and 12 congressional leaders | 3 co-directors, named by the secretary |
| Budget | Up to $10 million, set in law | Not stated in the release |
| Time frame | About 3 years, to Oct. 1, 2021 | 120 days, to Jan. 28, 2027 |
Both bodies share one feature. Each was set up to produce a public report with room for a classified annex.
What has not been disclosed
The department’s announcement answers the basic questions of who, what and when. Several others remain open, and the memo does not settle them.
Neither the memo nor the release gives a budget for the project. Neither says whether the three co-directors will be paid, or in what capacity they will serve. The partner organization Michael will use to commission the work has not been named, and neither has any member of the expert team. The memo says findings go to Hegseth’s office; the public report and classified annex are described only in the release. The department has not said whether Congress will receive the classified annex, or how the findings will be handed to the new Autonomous Warfare Command or the services.
Some of this may be settled quickly. Hegseth said he would meet the three co-directors later on Wednesday, The New Republic reported, and he promised the findings would get a “full public rollout.”
What comes next
The clock started on Sept. 30. If the 120-day deadline holds, the co-directors’ report is due by Jan. 28, 2027. The Autonomous Warfare Command is scheduled to stand up as a four-star command by Oct. 1, 2027. “Project Meridian will ruthlessly map the trajectory of wars, domains, and technologies,” Hegseth told the troops at Quantico. The first public test of that promise arrives in about four months.
What Project Meridian is, who is running it, what it owes by Jan. 28, 2027, how it compares with the 2018 AI commission, and what isn’t yet disclosed.
Sources:
Department of War, “Secretary Hegseth Announces Six Major Initiatives at Quantico Speech,” Sept. 30, 2026 (full text via Mirage News); Department of War release (original); Secretary of War, memorandum, “Commissioning of Project Meridian: The Future of Warfare,” Sept. 30, 2026 (PDF); Secretary of War, memorandum, “Project Agincourt – Pathway to the Autonomous Warfare Command,” Sept. 30, 2026 (PDF); The Next Web, “Musk, Luckey and Gingrich get 120 days to map America’s future wars,” Sept. 30, 2026; The New Republic, Sept. 30, 2026; Air & Space Forces Magazine, “Hegseth Unveils New Autonomous Warfare Command,” Sept. 30, 2026; House Armed Services Committee, biography of Emil Michael (PDF); U.S. House, History, Art & Archives, Newt Gingrich; Built In, “Who Is Palmer Luckey?”; Pepperdine University, on Palmer Luckey; John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019, Pub. L. 115-232, Sec. 1051; National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2020, Pub. L. 116-92, Sec. 1735; Davis Wright Tremaine, on the NSCAI final report, March 2021.
Filed under: Department of War