US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Wednesday that the Pentagon is inviting Tesla Motors and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, defense technology entrepreneur and Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich to help identify the military capabilities, technologies, and weapons the United States may need for future wars.
The initiative, called the "Meridian Plan," will spend 120 days looking ahead several years and even decades to study how warfare may change and what capabilities the US military will need to maintain its technological edge. "The Meridian Plan, the future of war, is not about creating a new strategy or new policy," Hegseth said.
Instead, he said, its purpose is to "identify the domains we must conquer and the capabilities we must master." Hegseth said the effort will focus on "discovering, developing, and deploying" the weapons and systems the future US military may need, with the battlefield spanning "from beneath the earth to beyond the moon."
He announced the initiative while delivering a "state of the force" address to junior officers and enlisted leaders at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia. Hegseth said Pentagon technology chief Emil Michael will oversee the project, with Musk, Luckey, and Gingrich serving as co-leaders, while a broader team will come from government, industry, academia, and the policy world.
None of the three co-leaders has served in the US military. Musk has said he moved to Canada as a teenager partly to avoid compulsory military service in South Africa. The role puts Musk and Luckey in a favorable position to help determine the military's future technology needs, while their companies are competing for billions of dollars in Department of Defense business.
Musk's SpaceX holds a large number of Pentagon contracts. In May, the Space Force awarded the company a $4.16 billion contract to build satellites designed to track and target aerial threats; just days earlier, the Space Force had awarded SpaceX another $2.29 billion contract for a military satellite communications network.
Luckey's Anduril develops autonomous weapons and other military technologies. In 2025, the Marine Corps awarded the company a contract worth up to $642 million for counter-drone systems.
The announcement is part of the Pentagon's broader push toward autonomous warfare, including a plan announced Wednesday to establish a new four-star autonomous warfare command aimed at scaling up autonomous and robotic systems across the entire military.