Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth delivered his “State of the Forces” address at Quantico Wednesday, where he unveiled a series of military initiatives. Staged in front of Patton-the-movie inspired stars and stripes, Hegseth began by accusing the media of treason for criticizing the war in Iran.
He pulled no punches, encouraging those in attendance to pile on. “It’s your movements and bases that they reveal to the enemy,” he told the assembled troops. “Ultimately, it’s your lives they put directly at risk when they lie about munition stockpiles.”
He did not explain how the media's reporting on diminished stockpiles of weapons endangered the troops, rather than the diminishment itself.
Finishing his attack on the media, Hegseth then trotted out his standard culture war grievances (no beardos, no weirdos, no men in dresses), before announcing several new initiatives, peppered with Bible verses. Even though Hegseth's new Office of Religious Affairs is pushing Christian nationalism and violating the separation of church and state, the dangers of that office are not as immediate as his new Autonomous Warfare Command. Hegseth describes his newly created four-star command as a ‘unit for unmanned and semi-autonomous warfare,’ an anodized version of ‘killer robots’ and drones operated via satellite link.
A future armed with killer robots
Hegseth’s pre-address ‘Memorandum for Senior Pentagon Leadership’ explained how warfare has “changed dramatically and suddenly. Advanced computing now enables precise, low-cost weapons to be produced at massive scale. These systems increasingly threaten our costly legacy platforms and disrupt our force projection.”
It’s almost as if Hegseth was admitting what he hates the media for reporting: that the U.S. blew through $28.1 billion worth of sophisticated weaponry compared to Iran’s rocks and pebbles, yet Iran now controls Hormuz. Under Hegseth’s direction, the U.S. kept firing high volumes of costly defensive interceptors and long-range precision weapons, while Iran relied on lower-cost asymmetric warfare: cheap drones and regional proxies.
Hegseth’s new combatant command will roll out and manage artificial intelligence, robotics, drones, and counter-drone systems across the force, with dedicated manpower, budgets, and acquisition powers to fast-track deployment outside traditional routes. Hegseth is targeting an operational date of October 1, 2027, and said he intends to work with Congress to pass authorizing legislation.
Tapping the worst people to war-game the future
In a parallel initiative, Hegseth announced that Elon Musk of SpaceX, former Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA), and Palmer Luckey, co-founder of Anduril, will lead the Pentagon in studying the future of warfare, which he dubbed ‘Project Meridian.’ Anduril is a major U.S. defense contractor that builds killer robots and AI-powered software. The new Autonomous Warfare Command and ‘Project Meridian’ will work together in a conceptual-to-operational partnership to accelerate U.S. military robotic and drone capabilities.
Project Meridian asks the question: what will wars look like in the coming decades? While that question is key — as Russia learns the hard way from Ukraine — the worry isn’t the question so much as who gets to answer it. The conflict of interest here is obvious.
SpaceX and Anduril already hold Pentagon contracts worth billions. So when they recommend what technologies the U.S. should buy, they’ll be dressing up their own private sales pipeline as a “military strategy.” Private industry consultants don't face the same oversight and ethics rules that apply to government officials either, which means their proposals won’t get properly vetted.
Another problem is a lack of relevant experience. None of the three co-leads has ever served in the U.S. military, and Gingrich has no experience with the tech sector whatsoever. Musk is also contributing $100 million to Republican midterm candidates, while Luckey is Don Jr.s’ best friend and gives to Trump’s super PAC, suggesting these plums are political payback.
Hegseth’s lust for brutality will be our undoing
During Hegseth’s first speech to the Generals, he called for lessening the rules of conflict to embrace rules-adjacent ‘muscular lethality.’ Now rushing toward mass casualty events divorced from personal accountability, Hegseth is making good on his threats.
Poet of the South Robert Arnold recorded a hauntingly beautiful rejoinder to Hegseth’s bloodlust. “On the silence of the generals” warns that lethality without restraint is not strategy; it is butchery.
As if responding to Hegseth and Trump’s continuing snuff videos bragging about ongoing murders on the high seas, Arnold notes that even during the Civil War, “General Grant, bloody and relentless, knew victory meant binding the wounds of the nation — not gloating in violence.”
Arnold counters Hegseth’s call for weakening the rules of conflict, and called out the silence of the generals in the room at Quantico as they listened to Hegseth and Trump debase the seriousness of combat, writing:
"Our generals understand war is the most consequential of human actions — their decisions carry lives in the balance. They know that raw violence is a tool only to be used with precision, justification, and the dignity of restraint. They know war has consequences that echo for generations."
Hegseth does not know this.
Hegseth mistakes slogans for wisdom, violence for professionalism, brute force for strategy. He preaches lethality like a child who’s never had to carry the ghosts from a battlefield home with him. He sees the military as a weapon to be swung, not a burden to be borne.
Hegseth’s rush toward killer robots — he gave Project Meridian only 120 days to unveil its recommendations — should alarm every American. Autonomous killing devices operate without meaningful human control, delegating life-and-death decisions to machines.
Writing policy on the use of such weapons presents ethical considerations that far exceed Hegseth’s, Musk’s, and Trump’s combined intellectual and emotional capacities. Musk has already caused 800,000 deaths via USAID cuts. Trump and Hegseth have murdered hundreds of people in fishing boats on suspicion alone, and the death toll of immigrants dying in U.S custody rises daily.
We could not have assembled a more ominous cast of war-gaming morons to invent war crimes of the future.
Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.