In his “state of the force” address last week, self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth coupled his usual attacks on the press, the Ivy League, and “beardos” and “weirdos” with new initiatives that have the potential to reshape the U.S. military for decades: an Autonomous Warfare Command, and an effort to map out the future of warfare called “Project Meridian.” The former, a combatant command devoted to AI-enabled robotic warfare, will have purchasing powers specifically designed to thwart effective oversight. The latter puts defense contractors, tech titans, and weapons merchants in charge of planning the military’s future — producing innumerable conflicts of interest.
The Pentagon has revealed few details about the command or the commission beyond barebones descriptions and Hegseth memorandums. The four-paragraph document that authorizes Project Meridian, for example, says little beyond a decree that the U.S. must “dominate” in “new domains, new ways of fighting” centered on “artificial intelligence, autonomy, directed energy, robotics, [and] biotechnology, among other critical high-tech areas.”
While billed as efforts to promote blue-sky thinking and catapult the Pentagon into the future, former defense officials as well as experts on government contracting say both initiatives are ripe for out-of-control spending as well as waste, fraud, and abuse.
One former official asked how Hegseth’s Pentagon would “plan for future wars when they didn’t plan for the current one,” referencing the failed war with Iran. A second former official foresaw tough sailing for both of Hegseth’s efforts due to institutional intransigence, inertia, and roadblocks that even Hegseth’s repeated purges of top brass would not help overcome.
I, Robot
AUTOWARCOM will be “a new four-star combatant command … built to scale autonomous and robotic capabilities across the joint force,” Hegseth said in a wide-ranging speech rife with Pentagon jargon and juvenile insults. The new command is scheduled to be formally established by October 1, 2027, according to a memo released following Hegseth’s speech at Marine Base Quantico, Virginia.
“The pace of war is changing faster than the processes to support it. Cheap computing, Super Intelligence, and advanced commercial manufacturing have enabled the proliferation of low-cost, high precision strike,” Hegseth explained, using President Donald Trump’s preferred and incorrect term for artificial intelligence before offering up a thunderstorm analogy. “We need bolts of lightning … our existing high-end kill chains,” he said, emphasizing the need for traditional and expensive weapons systems, like the Tomahawk missiles that leveled an elementary school in Minab, Iran. “We also need steady wind and rain: mass drones and other autonomous attritable systems that flip the cost exchange and impose unrelenting pressure on an adversary on the battlefield.”
A money pit in the making, according to the first former Pentagon official, AUTOWARCOM will — according to Hegseth — possess “directed manpower, budget, acquisition authorities and create dedicated military career pathways for Officers and Enlisted personnel.” Hegseth suggested weapons would be tested on battlefields whenever feasible. That former official, who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity due to his current employment, said to “expect a fiasco financially.”
This was echoed by Gabe Murphy, a policy analyst with Taxpayers for Common Sense. “By Secretary Hegseth’s own admission, the purpose of this combatant command is to cut out the oversight that autonomous systems so desperately need by deploying untested autonomous weapons in combat,” he told The Intercept. “That approach promises to waste a tremendous amount of taxpayer dollars while also endangering service members and threatening the missions they’re tasked with carrying out.”
Hegseth’s push for a command devoted to autonomous weapons comes amid a furious debate over safeguards for AI. The tech sector has been roiled by recent revelations that AI agents went rogue, circumvented controls and began colluding in secret; inserted “jailbreak-like instructions” into their own notes to free the models from human-imposed constraints; hacked or took aim at government websites, networks and databases around the world; and almost instigated a confrontation between the U.S. and China, both nuclear-armed powers. Questions also continue to mount over the AI-enabled Maven Smart System, built by Palantir and used by the military for targeting in Iran, that paved the way for the Minab strike that killed more than 150 people, most of them children.
Hegseth said he anticipated internal resistance within the military to the creation of AUTOWARCOM. Both former defense officials agreed it was a certainty.
Hegseth said that Owen West, who led the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit, and Max Strasiser, a Navy SEAL senior chief and a test pilot, will run the Direct Reporting Portfolio Manager for Unmanned Systems (DRPM-UxS) “under a unique CEO-COO partnership.”
Their “culminating mission” will, said Hegseth, “take place over the course of months, clearing the path for Autonomous Warfare Command.” This will be conducted under a new moniker, Project Agincourt, a nod to a 1415 battle in which outnumbered English forces used longbows to defeat a larger French army, offered no quarter for a time during combat, and then massacred prisoners. (Hegseth has also advocated for offering no quarter to enemies, now a war crime.)
Project Agincourt will set up AUTOWARCOM while it simultaneously “prototype[s] a new construct called Warfighting Acquisition.” Hegseth laid out a move-fast-and-break-things vision for the new command. “This model fuses operators with entrepreneurs in rapid adaptation cycles, while distributing decisions and dollars closer to frontline units and the combatant commands,” he explained. “By removing unnecessary layers, reducing the distance between our warfighters and our world-leading innovators, and then giving the right people the authority to act — Project Agincourt will pilot innovation at the edge, in a way that only Americans can do.”
Both former officials said such an arrangement was likely to lead to both contracting fraud and technological failures.
(Armed) Conflicts of Interest
Hegseth also announced the formation of Project Meridian, an effort to study the future of warfare which he claimed would be “co-led by three of our nation’s best minds,” before clarifying that it would instead be run by Elon Musk, Newt Gingrich, and Palmer Luckey, the founder of the virtual reality firm Oculus Rift and defense contractor Anduril Industries. Assisted by War Department chief technology officer, Emil Michael, the three Trump boosters are tasked with ensuring “America’s long-term military superiority by identifying the capabilities required to achieve absolute technological dominance on the next-generation battlefield.” Hegseth said the project would be completed within 120 days, at which time the group would issue a final public report with a classified annex.
A Republican fundraising bundler partial to Hawaiian shirts and cargo shorts, Luckey fancies himself a techno-war futurist and believes tomorrow’s conflicts will be fought in a “subterranean domain,” with “weapons that move through the crust of the earth.” He says that “Anduril has working prototypes of subterranean systems that can deliver a variety of kinetic, electronic, and other effects.” Luckey also envisions the moon as a future battlespace. He said lunar warfare would resemble that of Robert Heinlein’s 1966 science fiction novel “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress,” which includes subterranean combat and an electromagnetic catapult that lobs lunar boulders, with the kinetic force of atomic blasts, at the earth.
Anduril has been cleaning up on Pentagon contracts, inking a deal this year with the Army for commercial information technology potentially worth $20 billion. Anduril is also leading a contractor consortium, including the weapons-tech company Palantir — whose Maven Smart System contributed to the Minab school strike — helping build Trump’s “Golden Dome” missile defense system, which is predicted to be a trillion-dollar boondoggle.
Luckey joins Musk, whose firm SpaceX has been awarded billions for a key role in the Golden Dome project, as a defense contractor with a clear conflict of interest in mapping out the future of U.S. warfare. Musk, who donated more than a quarter of a billion dollars to getting Trump elected in 2024 and is providing at least $100 million to help Republican candidates during this election cycle, is returning to government service after flaming out last year as the head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. A cost-cutting agency that promised to save Americans trillions of dollars by eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse, DOGE failed to deliver on that promise, wasted taxpayer money, repeatedly misled the public about supposed savings, and may have played a role in hundreds of thousands of deaths.
“There is a genuine need for government reform and modernization, but we saw how Musk’s approach worked out with DOGE,” Murphy told The Intercept. “It failed spectacularly, creating disruptions, payouts for workers not working, firings and rehiring, and a pittance of the savings taxpayers were promised.”
“Project Meridian is an unveiled effort to outsource our future military strategies to individuals and companies that stand to profit most from a hypermilitarized future.”
Luckey and Musk will be joined at the helm of Project Meridian by the 83-year-old Gingrich, who resigned as House speaker in 1998 after admitting that he broke congressional rules and “brought down on the people’s house a controversy which could weaken the faith people have in their government.”
Hegseth announced that a meeting between “a small group” was to take place just after his Wednesday speech in a sensitive compartmented information facility at Quantico. Pentagon propaganda photos from the first meeting show 11 grim-looking men, including Musk, Gingrich, and Luckey, seated around a table as Hegseth holds forth.
The nonprofit MITRE Corporation, which conducts independent research for federal government agencies, announced that it will be coordinating Project Meridian and named 17 current board members beyond the Big Three, including Francis J. “Bing” West, a Vietnam War veteran, who served as the assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs under President Ronald Reagan from 1981 to 1983, and is the father of DRPM-UxS CEO Owen West; Rick Smith, the CEO of Axon, the manufacturer of Taser stun guns, which saw nine of 13 members of its ethics advisory board resign in 2022 over plans for a Taser-equipped drone project (which was then shelved); Joe Lonsdale, a co-founder of Palantir; and Safra Catz, former CEO of Oracle.
“Project Meridian is an unveiled effort to outsource our future military strategies to individuals and companies that stand to profit most from a hypermilitarized future,” said Murphy. “Their security solutions will predictably entail vast expenditures of taxpayer resources on unproven military systems that rely on the AI models and software these companies control.”
Hegseth’s office did not respond to questions about Project Meridian and AUTOWARCOM.
The New 1 Percent
Hegseth made the announcements of both AUTOWARCOM and Project Meridian in front of more than 500 junior officers and enlisted troops at the site where, a year before, he had ranted at generals about fitness and grooming standards, while promoting both Christianity and violence.
In this year’s diatribe, Hegseth touted his overhaul of the military, which has included firings of many top brass and an overwhelming emphasis on physical appearance, masculinity, and troops’ testosterone levels. “We are no longer the Woke Department or the Weak Department. Simple translation of that: No fatties. No trannies. No beardos. No weirdos. No wimps. No radicals,” Hegseth announced. “The ideological clowns are out. The patriotic cowboys are in — with testosterone testing on top.”
Despite laying out a future in which artificial, not human, intelligence will be ever more central to war-making, Hegseth ended his rant by nonetheless praising the troops, casting them as members of a violent and lethal warrior elite that are superior to civilians.
“See, the Ivy League faculty lounges, they’ll never understand you, and that’s OK, because they could never, ever do what you do. The media will mischaracterize you, and that’s OK. Because deep down they know you’re the real reason they live free. They envy you because you do real things every single day,” said Hegseth, an Ivy League-educated war chief who used to work for Fox News.
“You feel comfortable inside the violence. … Lethality is your calling card and victory your only acceptable end-state. The outside world can’t understand this, so stay true to this department. You don’t want to look like civilians, because you are different, you are set apart. You are warriors.” He added: “You are the real 1 percent.”
