What Hegseth needs is a new 'Project Solarium' |
What Hegseth needs is a new ‘Project Solarium’
Last week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced six major defense initiatives that, if properly executed, could transform how the Department predicts and reacts to future battlefields.
The first two are the most relevant. The first is creation of a new four star Autonomous Warfare Command, which will build on and exploit Project Agincourt, assisted by the Defense Innovative Unit that will “overhaul the way the U.S. military buys, tests and uses drones and other cutting-edge weapons.”
The second, known as “Project Meridian,” which may prove to be the more imaginative. In Meridian, he has tasked billionaires Elon Musk and Palmer Luckey and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) to “study the battlefields of the future, identify which weapons and technologies warfighters will need to harness to dominate in these environments, and propose actionable solutions to start developing, testing and fielding these capabilities no later than Jan. 28, or 120 days from now.”
Musk, with his hugely successful Starlink and Tesla companies, is the best known and is perhaps the 21st century combination of a Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller. But Musk will be greatly handicapped by his role in heading the Department of Government Efficiency — that failed enterprise aimed at cutting government waste — given the powerful negative reactions it provoked from within the Pentagon.
Luckey, inventor of the Oculus visual reality headset, started Anduril in 2017. Anduril is a leading edge technology company........