In his “state
of the force” address last week, self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth coupled his usual attacks on the press, the Ivy League, and “beardos” and “weirdos” with new initiatives that have the potential to reshape the U.S. military for decades: an Autonomous Warfare Command, and an effort to map out the future of warfare called “Project Meridian.” The former, a combatant command devoted to AI-enabled robotic warfare, will have purchasing powers specifically designed to thwart effective oversight. The latter puts defense contractors, tech titans, and weapons merchants in charge of planning the military’s future — producing innumerable conflicts of interest.
The Pentagon has revealed few details about the command or the commission beyond barebones descriptions and Hegseth memorandums. The four-paragraph document that authorizes
Project Meridian
, for example, says little beyond a decree that the U.S. must “dominate” in “new domains, new ways of fighting” centered on “artificial intelligence, autonomy, directed energy, robotics, [and] biotechnology, among other critical high-tech areas.”
While billed as efforts to promote blue-sky thinking and catapult the Pentagon into the future, former defense officials as well as experts on government contracting say both initiatives are ripe for out-of-control spending as well as waste, fraud, and abuse.
One former official asked how Hegseth’s Pentagon would “plan for future wars when they didn’t plan for the current one,” referencing the failed war with Iran. A second former official foresaw tough sailing for both of Hegseth’s efforts due to institutional intransigence, inertia, and roadblocks that even Hegseth’s repeated purges of top brass would not help overcome.
I, Robot
AUTOWARCOM will be “a new four-star combatant command … built to scale autonomous and robotic capabilities across the joint force,” Hegseth said in a wide-ranging speech rife with Pentagon jargon and juvenile insults. The new command
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