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“Project Meridian” is the stuff of satire
Elon Musk, Newt Gingrich, and Palmer Luckey walk into a bar ... and are given the keys to the DoD.
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Last week, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth once again summoned high-ranking officers to Quantico so he could tell them the Iran war has been an unmitigated triumph (“courageous and historic operations that every red blooded American is proud of”) and peacock with pride about the new, testosterone-maxxed military his purges have created.
“We are no longer the woke department or the weak department,” he said. “No fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals. Just warriors.”
Then Hegseth announced the creation of “Project Meridian,” a new effort to “creatively look to the future and identify the domains that we must conquer and capabilities we must master,” and “ruthlessly map the trajectory of wars, domains, and technologies to ensure this war department, your war department dominates the future.” Leading this project of ruthless mapping will be “three of our nation’s best minds”: Elon Musk, Palmer Luckey, and Newt Gingrich.
In other words — at the risk of being unkind — a weirdo, a beardo, and a fatty.
There’s nothing wrong with trying to anticipate what the future of war might look like and how to prepare for it, of course. But if Pete Hegseth and this trio are the ones guiding the way, we may be in for trouble.
One commission, three stooges
Let’s begin with the 83-year-old Gingrich, the former speaker of the House who is believed by many to be the individual most responsible for the ugliness of American politics today.
His political and moral judgment may be questionable at best — his speakership came to an end with the Republicans’ disastrous impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1998; it didn’t help that at the time, Gingrich himself was having an extramarital affair with a congressional staffer 23 years his junior — but he is certainly interested in the future. Or, more properly, he is given to grandiose warnings and pronouncements about the glories and dangers that technological advancement will bring.
During his ill-fated run for president in 2012, Gingrich promised that “by the end of my second term we will have the first permanent base on the moon and it will be American.” For years before, he warned darkly that America was vulnerable to an electromagnetic pulse attack, a threat he said was so great it required preemptive strikes on North Korea and Iran.
In fact, Gingrich’s judgment on matters of war has been consistent, that judgment being “Yes.” He was a fervent supporter of George W. Bush’s war on Iraq, had been promoting war with Iran long before Trump took him up on it, and recently tweeted that rather than fighting over the Strait of Hormuz, “a dozen thermonuclear detonations and you’ve got a waterway wider than the Panama Canal, deeper than the Suez, and safe from Iranian attacks.”
What could go wrong?
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