The phrase “killer robots” has always been understood to indicate a bad thing. So, of course, the U.S. military under President Donald Trump is pivoting that direction.
During a Wednesday speech to assembled troops at Quantico, Virginia, CNN reported, Secretary of War (née Defense) Pete Hegseth announced plans for a new combatant command titled the Autonomous Warfare Command. That’s the same tier of military organization as STRATCOM or Cyber Command, and comes with its own four-star commander. The Pentagon simultaneously issued an announcement that it would be forming Project Meridian, which has 120 days to study the future of warfare “from subterranean depths to the cislunar frontier.”
We’ll skip the fact that the military currently does not fight in either of those places, and probably won’t any time soon unless something with the Earth’s surface goes horribly wrong. The Project Meridian co-directors recruited by Hegseth are Tesla/SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Anduril Industries co-founder Palmer Luckey, and former GOP Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich.
So, to clarify, the Pentagon believes the future of war should be dreamed up by…
- Hegseth: Their boss, an evangelical holy warrior whose priorities include trying to drive out female and Black officers, mandatory testosterone screening, and waving off accusations of war crimes.
- Gingrich: An 83-year-old former Speaker of the House and Trump ally who was likely picked because of his decades-long fascination with speculative technology. His proposals have included orbital lasers and reducing crime with “space mirrors.” He recently retweeted a post arguing for a swift resolution to the U.S. war with Iran by nuking Oman, thus carving a new canal through the bedrock that bypasses the Strait of Hormuz.
- Luckey: The founder of defense contractor Anduril, whose deals with the military have reportedly resulted in a slew of buggy hardware and concerns within the Army that its next-gen comms system has “fundamental security” issues.
- Musk: The creator of DOGE, which eviscerated funding for scientific research and acted so recklessly with government data that the Government Accountability Office is still trying to locate it. Has a web of foreign ties that make him an inherent security risk; Defense officials scrapped a planned briefing with him on China war plans just last year. Cannot think of anyone more depressing to be stuck in a Pentagon conference room with.
With the exception of Hegseth, none of these people have ever served in the military or commanded troops—Hegseth’s highest command was an infantry platoon, and he left the National Guard as a major.
This is the dream team they’ve assembled to sit around for a few months before, presumably, coming back with a plan no more intellectually rigorous than the one The Simpsons proposed in 1997: “The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots, and as you go forth today, remember always, your duty is clear: to build and maintain those robots.”
“The autonomous and robotic revolution has enormous implications for equipment, doctrine, organization, and the assumptions that have governed warfare for decades,” Hegseth told the troops, according to CNN. “Lasting change must be anchored in military command structures.”
The creation of an autonomous warfare command under Hegseth is particularly concerning because he’s already used drones in dubiously legal bombings of suspected drug traffickers in the Caribbean. That includes at least one instance where he reportedly ordered the military to kill shipwrecked survivors. Drones are reportedly enabling Hegseth to escalate military involvement in the War on Drugs all across Latin America.
Hegseth said during the speech that by the “number crunchers'” estimate, he has fired about 10% of generals and admirals in the U.S. military so far, and is further reducing available general officer slots by an additional 10%. He justified the overall 20% reduction in general officers by arguing those eliminated were woke or insufficiently deferential to “civilian control” (by which, of course, he means loyalty to him and Trump).
The officers fired “clung to the woke department or seem to think civilian control of the military is simply a suggestion,” Hegseth told the troops.
Hegseth, who is arguably losing the war with Iran on pretty much every measurable metric, specified that the future of war also involves slurs.
“We are no longer the woke department or the weak department,” he went on to say. “Simple translation of that: No fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals, just warriors, just tough, ready, committed troops.”
