OPINION:
Late last month, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth took the stage at the Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia to announce Project Meridian, a 120-day initiative to identify technologies that U.S. forces will need in the coming years.
Naturally, the complaints started flying before he had even left base.
A primary beef? Three of the key figures picked to co-lead the initiative: Newt Gingrich, Elon Musk and Palmer Luckey. None has ever served in the military.
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Say what? We have had commanders in chief (ahem) who never served in the military. If service were the threshold for leadership of large projects, many who have helped give this country its military edge would have been turned away at the door — and we would be weaker for it.
In 1940, former MIT engineer and science administrator Vannevar Bush brought President Franklin D. Roosevelt a one-page proposal to put the nation’s scientists to work on defense. Roosevelt approved it in about 15 minutes.
The office that Bush went on to run gave us microwave radar and the proximity fuze, put penicillin into mass production and started the atomic program. Bush never held a commission.
Neither did Robert Oppenheimer nor John von Neumann. Clarence “Kelly” Johnson, whose Skunk Works team at Lockheed delivered the U-2 and the SR-71, was a civilian.
The same goes for strategy. Andrew Marshall was rejected for World War II duty over a heart murmur. He went on to run the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment for more than 40 years, arguing long before most generals that precision weapons and computing would change the way wars are fought.
Elihu Root was a New York lawyer. As secretary of war, he created the U.S. Army General Staff and the Army War College, a structure on which our army still runs.
Mr. Hegseth has called Project Meridian “futuristic on purpose.” The goal: to figure out where warfare is heading, to look around the corner.
That is the kind of job where accomplished folks from the outside can bring in the different kinds of thinking that tend to come in terribly handy. Not many are around these days thinking more “differently” than Messrs. Gingrich, Musk or Luckey.
Mr. Gingrich is the key pick. He can do brilliantly what Marshall did: Analyze where conflict is going and push back on the Pentagon’s habit of preparing for the last war.
Having earned a Ph.D. in history before running for Congress, Mr. Gingrich has been vocal about military reform for most of his career. In 1981, as a rapidly rising leader of the minority Republican House, he helped found the Congressional Military Reform Caucus, which took on the Pentagon’s appetite for costly, questionable weaponry and other decisions.
Later, he sat on the Hart-Rudman Commission, which prophetically warned in a 1999 report that “Americans will likely die on American soil, possibly in large numbers,” if specific national security reforms were not immediately enacted.
Mr. Gingrich knows how to find good ideas and convert them into action, something at which Root also excelled. The Pentagon has shelves of smart reports that lie in dust because nobody could get them through Congress or past the “insiders.”
If Project Meridian is going to matter, it will need someone in the mix who can sell it.
Then there is Mr. Musk, who seems to be just getting started. With SpaceX, he has revolutionized rockets, making reusable boosters routine and sharply driving down launch costs, setting a clear path for civilian and military space activity.
He came up with Starlink, which, almost overnight, became something without which soldiers in Ukraine could not fight, as it has massively disrupted Russia’s war strategy from the start.
Mr. Luckey, the youngest of the bunch, built defense contractor Anduril on an idea at which much of the industry scoffed: Spend your own money, design the system first and sell the Pentagon a finished product instead of waiting for a pie-in-the-sky cost-plus contract.
Mr. Luckey is also celebrated and is definitely just getting started.
Fine Americans all three. Meridian is in the good hands of citizen servants, and we should take great pride in them and their accomplishments. So let us root for them. Most important, once they have released their findings and recommendations, let us listen to them.
• Christian Josi is a veteran media and political strategist and nonprofit executive. He writes frequently for a number of publications.
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