Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says Elon Musk, Palmer Luckey and Newt Gingrich will co-lead a new Pentagon effort called Project Meridian, and he announced it with all three sitting in the audience.
The announcement, per C-SPAN's video of the remarks, names the project's subject as "The Future of Warfare." Hegseth said it runs at his direction, under the department's chief technology officer, Emil Michael. Hegseth called the three co-leads "three of our nation's best minds." He asked them to stand and thanked them.
Hegseth's pitch is that the Pentagon needs outside eyes. He said America has to think "years and decades even into the future" to ensure military supremacy. Then came the admission:
There are obvious biases and risks to asking ourselves to both ask the questions and answer them.
He said the best forecasters of future conflict "do not solely reside inside the Pentagon." The fix, in his telling, is "a unique source of American advantage" that adversaries do not have: America's innovators, senior leaders and technologists. He described them as "big thinkers and doers who will forecast the creative solution for tomorrow's conflicts."
The source packet does not say how long the project runs, what it will produce, or how its members were chosen. Those details were not in Hegseth's remarks as provided here.
So the department that admits it can't grade its own homework just handed the pen to three people it invited to stand up and take a bow. What Project Meridian actually delivers is still unstated.