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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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.
But he saved so much money with DOGE and nothing bad happened there!
/s
Don’t forget this douche
They should have added Palmer Luckey to the headline. Extremely concerning that he has a prominent voice in the future of the US military and access to top level sensitive information.
If people are unfamiliar with him, they should do a brief search. It deepens what a terrible idea this is.
Who’s that douche?
Palmer Luckey. He made his money in the early days of VR. Think he runs a defence contractor now. Apparently he’s a massive arsehole.
Yes he runs Anduril, and is another Thiel wannabe weirdo psychopath billionaire.
I’m so upset I bought a Rift DK2 back in the day
How long before Grok suggests invading South Africa in the name of “liberation” or some other BS
Elon’s the least stupid of the three.
Yeah but it’s such a low bar
He can’t steal the data twice!
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.
I bet if he shoved that up my ass it would be amazing.
Agreed but no need to denigrate foreign-born folks.
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.
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.
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
Newt Gingrich is still alive???
unfortunately
Haven’t seen him in nearly a decade. Bet he looks even more like shit.
I last heard his name on /b/. I haven’t been to /b/ since the 2000s.
He’s 83, hopefully not for long
The pact Newt made with the demon that shares his body has extended his lifespan but not forever.
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
Honestly he was never a trillionaire, that “worth” was merely speculative and way over-valued. A very transparent PR gimmick.
WTF…
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.
Also the name, Meridian, deeply implies and ties back to that idea that they want to control the whole Western hemisphere.
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.
Hah! You almost got me The Onion!!
Wait…
They’re going to re-segregate the army probably.
They’re already trying to force out all the black service members by denying them promotions and shitty rules about shaving.
Damn. Sucks to join an imperialist institution
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.
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.
But he just said no fatties, weirdos, or wimps.
He didn’t say no ketamine.
Yea but said ketamine addict IS a fatty, weirdo and a wimp.
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.
Don’t forget Palmer Lucky, founder of Oculus and real life version of The Incredible’s villain, Syndrome.
More importantly, he’s the founder of Anduril
Putting AMERICA First means having an ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT run Our Military!
-LITERALLY Republicans!
He just picked the wrong one. There’s probably quite a few illegal Mexicans who’d do a better job than Hegseth.
And Israel
And the tankies on here will tell you without any sort of fucking irony that Kamala would be just as bad as this fucking bullshit.
The barrier to “not be as bad as Donald Trump and his administration” is so low that my nana right now would pass it and she’s been dead for decades.
Even just “doing nothing at all” would be way, way better that what the current US Administration has been doing.
These clowns are so openly, so extremelly incompetent and evil that even a “deceitful genocide supporting hard neoliberal warmonger who only represents the ultra rich” is not as bad as them.
Mind you, my long dead nana if exhumed from her grave and given the POTUS position would still be better than the “deceitful genocide supporting hard neoliberal warmonger who only represents the ultra rich”.
That’s how fucked up the US and its power duopoly system passing itself as a Democracy are.
Yep. And yet you see the tankies all over this site saying that they’re the fucking same.
The woman who bragged about how we were going to have the most lethal military ever?
She would have been better, but still way too similar to these guys. Before you come for me, I fucking voted for her, strongly suspecting that she was going to lose over being too conservative. And let me tell you, it sucks to be right.
Oh cmon. There’s zero comparison between her and trump.
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.
Great move including the guy who disabled Ukrainian drones at the request of Putin. Totally trustworthy and won’t backfire in any way.
Best Forecasters of Future Conflict.
They know future conflict isn’t the war that a foreign nation will come at the military with. The future of warfare is how they will fight the revolutionaries that will inevitably rise against tyranny.
Musk has the ability to deploy surveillance technology anywhere. The “study” is “how do they continue to keep squeezing the iron fist?”
Edit: and by anywhere, I mean ANYWHERE. Motherfucker owns a space agency. Tesla cars rely on video processing of always network connected cameras for their driving assist mechanisms. Starlink puts network connectivity anywhere it currently isn’t.
And GUESS who is part of the PayPal mafia? Palantir. But also Yelp and LinkedIn. Those are much less important than Palantir, but Yelp can at least target businesses that don’t play along, and LinkedIn can harm people seeking employment.
The dystopia we are in is worse than people can truly grasp.
Two men with no military experience who haven’t so much as been in a fistfight. Makes sense.
