During his “State of the Force” speech last week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Project Meridian, a 120-day effort to study and identify the weapons and battlefields of the future.
Hegseth said the project was “not about developing new strategies or new policies,” but rather, “to creatively look to the future and identify the domains that we must conquer, and capabilities we must master.”
Palmer Luckey, who is co-leading the workgroup alongside Elon Musk and Newt Gingrich, talked about his vision for the future of defense in an interview with the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics days ahead of the speech.
Luckey co-founded the defense technology company Anduril, which makes autonomous platforms like drones and submersibles. Before that, he founded virtual headset maker Oculus VR, which was acquired by Facebook in 2014. His two ideas would seemingly merge in the Army’s Integrated Visual Augmentation System, or IVAS.
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Sci-fi inspired tech
Luckey explained that much of what he does in the defense space was inspired by science fiction movies like Stealth, which is about an autonomous fighter jet that goes rogue after becoming sentient, and classic science fiction novels that theorized how technology would evolve.
“Turns out, everything we’re doing was predicted by guys who were really sharp [and] really knew what they were doing,” he said, referencing author Robert Heinlein as an example when he wrote about voice activation.
“I love building the things that were invented by people who didn’t have to worry about how it was going to become real. They just knew it would be the right thing,” Luckey added.
He went on to discuss a range of topics for keeping the U.S. wartime-ready, including developing trust in autonomous systems, open source versus patents for weapon designs, and balancing intuitive design with user skill, but he started with his thoughts on industrial manufacturing.
Scaling the industrial base
In response to the question of how the U.S. can regain battlefield dominance, Luckey talked about unified design and information sharing.
“We need to have unified command and control. We need to have unified information sharing. You need to have every sensor be a sensor for every effector and vice versa. You can’t have these stove pipes across systems, across services, and especially across our ally and partner forces. We want everyone to be able to share everything,” he said.
He added that he thinks everyone agrees with that notion, but he differs on how industry should be designed.
“We need to design missiles that can be made in car factories. We need to design aircraft that can be made in tractor factories,” he said. “And we’ve done this before.”
He argued that in World War II, military equipment was designed to be manufactured with commercial equipment and techniques.
“We made weapons to be made by car and tractor and sewing machine factories, etcetera, and I think we need to start doing that again,” he said.
He added that it would serve the practical purpose of meeting wartime demand while also sending a message to adversaries like China that U.S. factories could quickly switch gears and crank out weaponry.
Subterranean fighting
While it might seem obvious that future battlefields might be in space, Luckey listed “the subterranean domain” as a realistic option and “inevitable.”
While the interpretation of “subterranean” is to mean fighting in tunnels or trenches, he said he’s literally talking about “the real deal no shit sub-T fight, where you are using the crust of the earth as a three-dimensional maneuver and battle space.”
“Everyone says that I’m nuts for this and I’m going to keep saying it because it is true,” he said. “The U.S. used to believe this. The Soviets used to believe this. Both countries were working on subterrains, so vehicles that could move through the crust of the earth.”
Why he thinks this is realistic, he argued, is that autonomous systems will make it easier to bore through subterranean environments, and the primary cost is moving forward.
“Everything you drag through it afterwards is free,” he said.
He added that the space could be used for battle or to launch attacks against enemies on the ground.
According to Hegseth’s Project Meridian memo, the working group is expected to submit its findings and recommendations by Jan. 28, 2027.