Pete Hegseth revealed that the men will help direct a project to determine the future of the military.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced onetime trillionaire Elon Musk, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, and right-wing entrepreneur Palmer Luckey as the new heads of “Project Meridian”—a massive upcoming study on the “future of warfare.”

Hegseth made the announcement at his “State of the Force” address on Wednesday afternoon, describing the trio of Trump loyalists as “the best forecasters of future conflict.”

“There are obvious biases and risks to asking ourselves to both ask the questions and answer them. So today we are leveraging a unique source of American advantage—one our adversaries do not have: our innovators, our senior leaders, and our technologists. Big thinkers and doers who will forecast the creative solution to tomorrow’s conflicts,” Hegseth said. “And that’s why today … I’m announcing Project Meridian, an effort led by America’s best minds to study the future of warfare.”

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  • mokus@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    0·
    19 days ago

    The single most terrifying thing about this, to me, is how few people seem to know what Palmer Luckey’s company Anduril does. They are building autonomous kill bots.

    The fucking “let’s build skynet” guy is being invited to US military leadership and his name is dropped from the headline and mentioned in barely 2% of replies.

  • zbyte64@awful.systems
    0·
    20 days ago

    Great move including the guy who disabled Ukrainian drones at the request of Putin. Totally trustworthy and won’t backfire in any way.

  • BooBees@fedinsfw.appEnglish
    0·
    20 days ago

    Oh gee, what could go wrong putting a foreign born white supremacist technocrat in a lead position of our military with full access to its systems so he can integrate an AI system no one understands or knows how to defend against or extract should we want to do so at some point.

      • BooBees@fedinsfw.appEnglish
        0·
        20 days ago

        The problem is he doesn’t need to anyway. The govt data was all that was missing to integrate into his machine learning and ai systems to craft whatever surveillance, hacking, predictive, repressive, and even murderous systems he wants. They already had public data they collected, they had private data they bought, all that was left was govt data to combine all three. Now they’re on to using it for really really bad things.

      • BooBees@fedinsfw.appEnglish
        0·
        20 days ago

        I’m not, it’s a security risk, that’s simple logic that doesn’t have to be bigoted in nature. The current administration does use foreign national status to denigrate and abuse others due to their bigotry all the time, as does the Republican Party, so I can understand some reflexive accusations, but do not be mistaken, the US and every nation on earth have enough trouble as it is securing their governments, their secrets, weapons, economies, and people, and all of them have had to be wary of foreign national security threats due to those concerns for all of time. It’s literally encoded into our Constitution and who is allowed to head up the executive branch, via the office of the Presidency, as commander in chief.

        • apfelwoiSchoppen@lemmy.world
          0·
          20 days ago

          Everything is a security risk. My comment wasn’t reflexive. We’ve had plenty of foreign born military folks, including generals. That portion is not why they are threats. It is the wealth hoarding white supremacy.

          • BooBees@fedinsfw.appEnglish
            0·
            20 days ago

            It’s all of it combined. He was forced out of Canada, or his father was, for their bigoted views and that’s why they fled to SA, and eventually landed here to continue those belief systems and behavioral patterns, that makes them extreme threats based squarely on all the reasons you mentioned AS WELL and inextricably because of their foreign national history. You don’t go all pc to avoid looking like an asshole when valid national security concerns are blinking so red and bright it’s a like a supernova of red flags and lights going off

    • jontree255@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      20 days ago

      They’re already trying to force out all the black service members by denying them promotions and shitty rules about shaving.

      • Honytawk@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        0·
        19 days ago

        So they actually want a smaller military?

        Or are they going to substitute it again by forcing another draft?

        Anyway, the quality is sure to go down. To the rejoice of many occupied countries.

        • jontree255@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          19 days ago

          You’re trying to apply logic and thought to the actions of small minded, insecure bigots. With MAGA there’s no thought or consideration beyond the very first. In this case it’s “non-whites and women bad. buff white man good”

          They don’t perceive any of the downstream effects of what their actions will do or how their opponents will react. Once you understand that MAGA are truly just THAT fucking stupid it starts to make more sense.

      • Rhaedas@fedia.io
        0·
        20 days ago

        There’s he problem. They have the power and money, and we don’t have any of that nor any organization to push back as a single group. Just how they wanted it.

  • DarkFuture@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    20 days ago

    And the clown show downfall of America continues unabated.

    I’d try to shame conservatives for what they’ve done, but those cucks probably think a, checks notes, Nazi and, checks notes, 83 year old retired piece of shit are good choices to help run, checks notes, the most powerful (and dangerous) military on the face of the planet.

  • cybervseas@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    20 days ago

    onetime trillionaire Elon Musk

    Look I know there are bigger problems we need to work on, but I still have to appreciate the little things

    • wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz
      0·
      19 days ago

      Honestly he was never a trillionaire, that “worth” was merely speculative and way over-valued. A very transparent PR gimmick.

    • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      0·
      20 days ago

      Honestly neglecting to mention Palmer Luckey in the title is burying the fucking lede here.

      He has had a surveillance/military hardware busines for like ten/fifteen fucking years. Anduril.

      • wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz
        0·
        19 days ago

        Damn, so more ties to Thiel?

        And they’re putting anduril and fucking grok together to make military decisions?

        What could fucking go wrong…

        (Context: in pretty much every independent study I’ve seen comparing the performance of frontier AI models in various experiments (running a radio show, running a simulated society, etc.), grok is consistently the most willing and eager to say/do evil shit and commit atrocities).

        Also, elon musk knows fucking nothing about military operations or warfare. He’s gonna hallucinate some bullshit and get innocent people killed.

  • Monument@piefed.worldEnglish
    0·
    20 days ago

    Interesting. I didn’t know Newt was sucking on Thiel’s tit.

    I don’t know much about Palmer Luckey, but a fake TV general, a former politician and talk show host, and a fake genius, all with no military experience are going to overhaul the military? Hahaha.

    • SabinStargem@lemmy.todayEnglish
      0·
      19 days ago

      Honestly, the exile of competent personal from the official American military might end up as a blessing. If those people end up as part of the Blue State National Guards and militia, we might have a reenactment of Ukraine vs Russia.

      The Dogey military will likely end up being a paper doge.