On September 30, 2026, U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth presented Project Meridian — a 120-day initiative to determine the character of warfare in 2030, 2050, and 2100. Operational leadership has been assigned to the department’s Chief Technology Officer, Emil Michael; Elon Musk, Palmer Luckey, and Newt Gingrich have been appointed co-leads. The final report, with a public section and a classified annex, is to be submitted no later than January 28, 2027.
The project’s institutional architecture is not limited to an advisory body. Emil Michael, who holds the post of Deputy Secretary of War for Research and Development and Chief Technology Officer, controls six executive organizations of the department: the Office of Digital Technologies and Artificial Intelligence, DARPA, the Defense Innovation Unit, the Office of Strategic Capital, the Office of Strategic Capabilities, and the Test Resource Management Center. All decisions on transitioning technologies from the prototype stage to serial production pass through this perimeter. Meridian’s recommendations are to form the basis of the charter documents, budget, and operational priorities of the Autonomous Warfare Command (AUTOWARCOM) — a new four-star functional combatant command whose stand-up is planned for October 1, 2027. The intermediate structure ensuring the transition from forecasting estimates to procurement decisions is Project Agincourt — the renamed Defense Innovation Unit, tasked with prototyping an acquisition model that connects operators with entrepreneurs in rapid adaptation cycles.
Elon Musk brings to the project a combination of technological expertise and political weight that makes his participation at once the most significant and the most problematic. SpaceX is a key provider of national defense launches, and Starlink provides connectivity in conditions of destroyed infrastructure. Musk’s return to the orbit of the federal government after a conflict with the Trump administration in 2025 and the subsequent reconciliation points to retained influence regardless of formal positions. It is telling that Musk supported the call by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei to slow down the development of advanced artificial intelligence systems — a position contradicting the logic of acceleration embedded in Meridian’s mandate. This contradiction reflects a deeper conflict between SpaceX’s commercial interests, which favor the deployment of orbital constellations, and caution regarding technologies capable of slipping out of control.
Palmer Luckey occupies the position that creates the most acute ethical paradox in the entire Meridian configuration. Anduril Industries is not merely a Pentagon contractor but one of the few “new defense” players successfully competing with traditional giants in autonomous combat systems, robotics, electronic warfare systems, and unmanned vehicles. The company already receives significant federal contracts, and Meridian’s recommendations in the area of autonomous systems will directly determine the volume and nature of future procurement. Luckey himself rejected accusations of conflict of interest, but the structural problem is not reducible to personal position: a supplier participates in determining which systems the armed forces will need.
Newt Gingrich serves the function of political legitimation and institutional memory. A former Speaker of the House who briefly served on the Defense Policy Board in December 2020, he does not possess technological expertise comparable to that of Musk or Luckey. His value to the project lies on a different plane: providing liaison with the legislative branch, understanding the budget process, and access to conservative political networks that will determine the fate of the recommendations after January 2027. Gingrich’s science-policy legacy, including the disbanding of the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment — a nonpartisan analytical body — indicates his skeptical attitude toward institutional intermediaries between the technological community and the state.
The concept of future war being formed within Meridian is not limited to a list of technological areas, although they constitute the operational core of the project. Five priority areas — artificial intelligence for decision-making and forecasting systems, autonomous systems with reduced human involvement, robotics for ground and specialized operations, directed energy, including high-power lasers and microwave systems, and biotechnology for defense capabilities, medical readiness, and operational resilience — form an interconnected architecture. Artificial intelligence serves as the cognitive infrastructure providing real-time data processing and optimization of resource allocation. Autonomous systems and robotics form the physical substrate of this infrastructure, enabling combat operations in conditions unacceptable for human presence. Directed energy and biotechnology represent areas in which technological superiority can provide a qualitative lead in air and missile defense, as well as in operational resilience.
Meridian’s geography is unprecedented in its breadth. The phrase “from underground depths to cislunar space” is not a rhetorical figure. It points to a fundamental expansion of the operational domain in which traditional categories of sovereignty, territory, and population lose their explanatory power. Underground operations include the protection of critical infrastructure, tunnel warfare, and subsurface communications. Cislunar space, in turn, is becoming a new strategic domain, where space assets, lunar resources, and orbital infrastructure become objects of military planning. In September 2026, American officials for the first time confirmed the deployment of weapons in space, which gives Project Meridian additional relevance in the context of the militarization of near-Earth orbit.
The project’s time horizon introduces into defense planning a dimension without analogues in contemporary practice. Traditional military planning operates with horizons of 5–10 years. Meridian involves forecasting 25, 50, and 75 years ahead, posing the question of the wars the United States “cannot afford to fight” in 2030, 2050, and 2100. Such a formulation reflects awareness that decisions taken today will determine the state’s capabilities in the distant future, and that the inertia of the defense bureaucracy does not permit an adequate response to challenges lying beyond the current budget cycle.
The critical aspect that cannot be avoided in a military-analytical assessment of Meridian is the structural conflict of interest built into the project’s very design. Two of the three co-leads are sitting executives of companies competing for defense contracts that will be determined by the project’s recommendations. However, the structural problem is not reducible to the personal ethics of the participants. It reflects a deeper transformation of the American defense procurement model, in which the distinction between government customer and private supplier is blurred. The traditional model assumed that the state formulates requirements and industry offers solutions. Meridian inverts this logic: suppliers gain an institutional opportunity to determine what requirements the state will put forward. This does not necessarily mean corruption in the legal sense, but it creates a systemic risk in which the country’s defense priorities are formed under the influence of the commercial interests of companies whose executives participate in determining them.
Moreover, Project Meridian reflects an awareness that the inertia of the U.S. defense bureaucracy does not permit an adequate response to challenges beyond the current budget cycle, and that integrating external expertise into the process of determining future needs is a necessary condition for adaptation. However, the 120-day period allotted to solve a task that by its nature requires multi-year research creates a risk of superficial elaboration and recommendations shaped by the most influential participants.
Further observation of the project’s implementation will make it possible to clarify the configuration of forces influencing the formation of U.S. defense priorities. Interim results, which will appear by the end of 2026, will make it possible to assess the extent to which Meridian’s recommendations reflect state interests and the extent to which they reflect the commercial positions of participants. The key indicator will be the structure of procurement decisions that will be made after the final report is submitted. It is during this period that it will become obvious whether the project is an instrument of strategic planning or a mechanism for institutionalizing private interests in the defense sphere.
Author: Denis Korkodinov, CEO of the International Center for Political Analysis and Forecasting “DIIPETES”
