In a recent speech to top military officers, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced Project Meridian — a new initiative to formulate a “proactive vision for shaping American dominance in the future of warfare” by “identifying the capabilities required to achieve absolute technological dominance on the next-generation battlefield.” That description is fairly standard defense policy planning, but the chairs of the effort are anything but standard: former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and wealthy defense contractors Elon Musk and Palmer Luckey.
Less than a week after announcing Project Meridian, the Pentagon awarded Luckey’s company Anduril a $2.9 billion contract to build components for submarines, and another contract worth $1.9 billion to scale up command and control software. President Donald Trump even traveled to Baltimore to tout the submarine contract. These are just the latest examples of how the Trump administration is letting unqualified billionaires burrow ever deeper into the U.S. national security apparatus.
Even if Musk and Luckey weren’t Republican donors, putting defense contractors in charge of a Pentagon planning project is a massive conflict of interest.
Trying to anticipate and plan for the future of warfare is good, since decisions made now shape which weapons systems and force structures the U.S. military will have in a decade or two. The Office of Net Assessment, the Pentagon’s “internal think tank,” conducted such research for more than 50 years, until Hegseth closed it in 2025. The Office of Net Assessment was known for highly educated, nonpartisan eggheads — the type of Department of Defense employee Hegseth has targeted in his politicized purges. Musk, Luckey and Project Meridian make for a terrible replacement.
Terrible, that is, unless Hegseth’s goal is to increase the Pentagon’s conflicts of interest and generate income for GOP donors. Musk has been Trump’s and the Republicans’ biggest donor the past two electoral cycles, spending $288 million to get them elected in 2024. Even before Trump’s second term, Musk’s intertwined companies SpaceX, xAI and Tesla received tens of billions of dollars in government contracts, and over the past two years, the current administration has awarded his firms billions more.
Luckey is a major Republican “bundler” who both gives money himself and solicits donations from others. (And Donald Trump Jr.’s investment firm 1789 Capital has a major stake in Anduril.) The two recent Pentagon contracts come on top of contracts worth billions awarded in Trump’s second term. The company has received windfall after windfall even though, as The Wall Street Journal reported last year, Anduril’s record shows technological failure and safety issues. (The company defended its “highly iterative model of technology development” in a statement to the Journal, but added, “We do fail … a lot.”)
Even if Musk and Luckey weren’t Republican donors, putting defense contractors in charge of a Pentagon planning project is a massive conflict of interest. Musk’s companies sell the government services in space launch, satellite internet and artificial intelligence, and they’re getting into robotics. Luckey’s companies sell drones, software, munitions and military automation. Their thoughts about the future of U.S. military strategy will unavoidably reflect what their companies can provide now and aim to provide in the future, and the contracts they hope to secure. (Neither the Pentagon nor Musk or Luckey’s companies have commented on potential conflicts.)
That’s why, while defense contractors have advised military strategy projects before, they’re usually one of multiple consulted parties, not the chairs. An exception for a contractor who is also a defense expert might make sense, but Musk and Luckey have no experience with national security or warfare. Neither has served in the military, possesses any academic or policy track record on national security or done anything to indicate expertise in either area.
We already know of at least one instance in which Musk’s ignorance was exploited by another country.
If anything, the opposite. Luckey made his money off the Oculus VR set, which he sold to Facebook for $2 billion in 2014, and then started Anduril in 2017. In a “60 Minutes” interview last year, he argued that “we need to transition from being the world police to being the world gun store.” While Luckey might have been excited at the possibility of selling to more customers. sending more advanced weapons to America’s adversaries is against U.S. national interest, and introducing more weapons into conflict zones sometimes makes things worse.
Musk’s public pronouncements on war and international relations are as confident as they are wrong-headed. For instance, he has repeatedly criticized stealth aircraft as spottable from the ground with visual cameras. But this misses the point of stealth technology: If enemies can’t track a plane by radar, they can’t target it. And stealthy planes are so fast that usually, by the time anyone can see them, they’ve already fired their payload.
We already know of at least one instance in which Musk’s ignorance was exploited by another country. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Musk intervened to turn off Starlink satellite access for a group of Ukrainian sea drones heading to strike Russian ships off the coast of Crimea. According to Walter Isaacson’s biography of Musk, he fretted that an attack on Crimea would cause nuclear war because the Russian ambassador to the U.S. told him so.
In addition to missing the obvious motivations for the diplomat’s claim, Musk failed to grasp that giving into nuclear extortion encourages more of it, and that self-defense on Ukrainian territory is dramatically different from an existential threat to Moscow. Shortly after that aborted operation, Ukraine used different methods to hit a Russian target on Crimea, and Russia did not launch nuclear weapons in response. Musk has never acknowledged that error.
Already, Bloomberg reports that “Democrats are zeroing in on the Pentagon and defense contractors as they prepare to scrutinize potential conflicts of interest in the Trump administration.”
Because the Pentagon often builds upon or attaches to what is already at hand, initiatives such as Project Meridian embed oligarchs like Musk and Luckey further into the U.S. defense architecture. Getting these figures out of the proverbial woodwork is a difficult task, but not impossible.
At a minimum, their influence can be significantly reduced. The short answer is to review contracts with their companies, terminate any that were secured corruptly and evaluate the rest on national security grounds. Already, Bloomberg reports that “Democrats are zeroing in on the Pentagon and defense contractors as they prepare to scrutinize potential conflicts of interest in the Trump administration.” In some cases, decisions may be complicated by a lack of ready replacements (e.g. Starlink’s satellite internet) and legal obligations to fulfill a contract. But however long it takes, the next president should begin this project immediately, in both American and allied interests.
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