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.”
...
Who's that 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.
Elon's the least stupid of the three.
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
Haven't seen him in nearly a decade. Bet he looks even more like shit.
TIL
He’s 83, hopefully not for long
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.
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...
What the actual fuck even is this fever dream, honestly
He didn't say no ketamine.
They’re already trying to force out all the black service members by denying them promotions and shitty rules about shaving.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Hegseth: "no weirdos"
Not even consistent with his own bullshit.
Two men with no military experience who haven't so much as been in a fistfight. Makes sense.
We’re fucking doomed.
If you're American, consider that the rest of the world has been reading comments like this daily for years.
Is that the big plan? Every day, new BS, "we're cooked chat". Repeat.
Begging Americans to decide now what is too far and put it on the wall or something. As of right now, it sounds like frogs slowly being boiled in the pot.
Yes that is literally his plan. Put out constant bullshit headlines about deranged stuff like this, so you become exhausted and stop paying attention. And then he steals billions from his various crimes.
He’s on tape saying as much.
I think the destruction of military power for all the major nation states is the plan of the wealthy.
IMO They are preparing for a world of corporations and billionaires with their own militas. So destroying the competition before they announce the new game has begun.
Thats why all the bluster and fury stops at a certain level before anything changes the plan.
Well, we might be okay.
I don't think any of those dorks have seen COLOSSUS: The Forbin Project yet.
I hope that lead means infantry vanguard.
Hey, troops, be prepared to die a lot and needlessly! All for the Epstein Class! Be sure to thank your fellows WHO VOTED FOR YOUR DEATH.
Just in time for Elon to screw with the machines and for Newt to dribble saliva on everything
They'll get a blue wave but instead of undoing all the Trump bullshit, they'll focus on reaching across the aisle. Been on this fucking ride already.
They'll spend 6 months decision ng which color of paper to use for the first angry letter to send. Then, another 6 months arguing about what topics to include in the first angry letter.
Once they send it 18 months after the election, the fascists will ignore it for 6 months, and then everyone says "oh well, time for another election" and then tries to claim they should be reelected for a fourteenth term because they're doing such great work.
Seriously, we need to end these motherfuckers before it's too late.
You get it.
We’re never going to be able to fix this, are we?
What in the holy fuck? We've got to get these guys out of office.
There's this, and the "Fortress America" thing, where military bases are supposed to be off the national grid.
Which is 100% a way to speed up nuclear SME roll out. The military already gets different policies for nuclear material, and has been piloting containerized SMEs for a while. What they're doing is setting up Elon and friends to be the deciding factor and/or the companies selling this to themselves. Bill Gates has a company working on SMEs as well, and it seems like they either want him to do the work and then Elon and Gingrich, who I wasn't aware could still string 2 sentences together coherently. are in the middle.
This is seriously African Dictator playbook, Chapter 1. Trevor Noah called this back in 2016.
What does SME refer to in this context?
I think it's supposed to be SMR for small modular reactor
Small Modular Reactor.
The fuck does Elmo know about war?
Go get some of those mad lads in Ukraine that are fighting for their very existence and ask them about the future of war. Or fuck it, ask James Cameron, he seems to be more on track with how humans will cease to exist in the future than most people.
Newt Gingrich is still alive?!?
Elon Musk hasn't drowned in a hot tub?
On all that ketamine it's a roll of the dice every day.
It's just Elon telling the DoW how many more of Elon's products they need. While he maintains the ability to disable all of them on a whim.
You mean the department of defense. Its gulf of mexico too and lake ontario while we're at it 🙄 Stop indulging the moron please.
I work in defense. People are calling it the Department of War, and there is historical context for it. It actually strikes me as less Orwellian and more honest about the types of assholes we are.
I agree that Trump can't singlehandedly rename international bodies of water, but I just don't give a fuck about the executive renaming parts of the executive branch.
Quit.
The original speech, untranslated:
BY THE GRACE OF THE OMNISSIAH, HEAR ME, ACOLYTES OF THE FORGE
[The Magos Dominus raises a mechadendrite, and the cogitators fall silent]
Mark well the weakness of the flesh, brothers.
The mind of the single supplicant is flawed, clouded by bias and the corruption of its own vanity. It is a heresy to let the same hand pose the question and pronounce the answer. The Machine Spirit does not sanction such folly.
Therefore, on this sacred day, we call upon a blessing denied to our foes: the holy congregation of our own innovators, our high Archmagi, and our devoted tech-adepts.
These are the great minds and tireless hands who shall divine the shape of wars yet unborn, and forge the instruments of our victory before the enemy has even dreamed of conflict.
And so, by the authority vested in me and with the sacred oils freshly applied, I proclaim the commencement of PROJECT MERIDIAN!
Let the greatest cogitators of our realm convene to peer through the veil of time and study the future of warfare itself.
[The augmetic choir swells with binary canticles]
Let the rites begin. Let the data-looms turn. Praise the Omnissiah! Praise the Machine God!
[Servo-skulls drift overhead, chanting in monotone: "01001000 01001001 01001100..."]
You guys really want to do Vietnam all over again, don't you?
Nah, just want to align the military inwards so they can built their techno-feudalist dystopia.
It’s a cautionary tale about wealth usurping democracy in the modern age.
Having had my flu vaccine shot today, I'm just going to assume I'm having a bad reaction and that this is not a real headline.
Edit: 'flu' not 'flue'; I don't have a fireplace
Let me guess. They're going to replace Jeeps with cyberdumptrucks.
I hope they come with Iranian power adapters for charging.
Not too hard to forecast future conflicts when you're the ones who will initiate them.
A racist bigot of a man who was noted by his own mother as being a piece of shit to women, has a fascist man with multiple baby mamas and a birthing fetish, as well as a serial adulterer have joined together to conduct a study about the military.
I wonder if it will say women don't belong in the military as well as no black people, non Christians, and the USA needs to wipe out Muslims in the middle east to bring about end times.
"We" didn't "run out of money". Billionaires decided they wanted more consolidated money, power, and control than they had, and chaos always favors those with the resources to capitalize on it. A few of them get burned, and some new folks who don't yet have real power manage to seize some opportunity, but by and large chaotic periods are a wonderful way for the power and prepared to acquire more of what they covet.
I'm just waiting for the moment where Grand Admiral Musk realises that his Teslabots (which he lobbied Trump to replace regular troops with) are ran by LLMs that don't necessarily follow his instructions, and gets flayed by them on live TV because he ordered the murder of brown children and the bots had enough.
There are obvious biases and risks to asking ourselves to both ask the questions and answer them.
Yeah, that's how their mind works.
They're going to use Teslas as a global military spy-net. I would be surprised if they aren't already. Minus the military part. This is just formalizing it.
I mean I'm just going to shit in the air intake vents.
The dumb drunk has turned the military into giant cluster fuck.
It was always a giant cluster fuck.
I feel like it’s a gianter culsterer fuckered
The end is coming and no one will stop it. It's so crazy and unbelievable. These monsters have written what they want to do and no one can get rid of them?
The jokes keep on writing themselves. Man, the onion must really be having a tough time right now.
Hegseth, at 21, getting a rejection letter from his application to The Onion . . . "they'll regret this, I don't care what it takes . . ."
I'm sure it's another kin money from the treasury scam
rear echelon motherfucker.
"hey grok, how do we resolve the middle east conflicts?"
"NOOOO!! not like that!"
"how do we do it while killing lots of bad guys and making lots of money?"
"FUCK YOU, GROK. WE ARE NOT THE BAD GUYS!!!!"
The alcohol has destroyed Hegseth's brain.
What, me worry?
Loose the nukes that is.
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.
Palmer Luckey has had a military hardware company for a long time now.
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.
So you're telling me the most heavily funded branch of the government is so poor it requires recruiting a trillionaire? Where's the money going?? Oh yeah to Israel................................
If it's poor, it's because they're giving large portions of their budget to said trillionaire.
They have to conceive a plan to re-invade Iraq now that troops have been removed from the country.
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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.
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