Who should tell the Pentagon what the next war looks like, and how much to spend getting ready for it? Pete Hegseth's answer starts with two men who sell it the gear.

On September 30, the Defense Secretary signed a memo creating Project Meridian, an advisory panel told to "map the trajectory of future warfare" and help the country "maintain global dominance." He named three co-leads: Elon Musk, the head of SpaceX, Palmer Luckey, a cofounder of the weapons company Anduril, and former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

The panel has held at least two meetings. The department hasn't disclosed what was said in them, and it hasn't released a list of who attended, though it has posted photos.

On Monday, three government watchdogs sued to stop it. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Public Citizen and the Project on Government Oversight filed in federal court in Washington, D.C.

Who profits

Two of the three people running this panel aren't neutral experts:

• SpaceX holds about $8 billion in Pentagon contracts, the lawsuit says.
• Anduril builds self-flying drones. It won a Navy contract worth up to $2.9 billion last month, days after Hegseth announced the panel.

The lawsuit says other members "likewise have direct financial stakes" in what the panel finds, or "are dedicated to aggressive military action."

Musk is also the biggest spender of this election. He put nearly $446 million into the 2026 races to help Republicans keep Congress.

Donald Sherman, CREW's president, said the Pentagon is "legally barred from getting advice in secret, by defense contractors with enormous potential conflicts of interest." The panel, he said, is "soliciting private counsel from contractors about military capacity including the president's largest political benefactor."

The law they're accused of breaking

Congress passed a law decades ago to stop exactly this kind of back-room advice. The Federal Advisory Committee Act says a panel that includes people from outside the government needs a charter, a clear purpose and a fair balance of members. It also has to open its records and meetings to the public.

The lawsuit says Project Meridian filed no charter, has shut the public out and isn't fairly balanced, and it points to "closed-door operations." It also says the panel's private-sector members, Musk and Luckey among them, raise "precisely the type of conflict-of-interest concerns" the law was written to address.

The groups want a judge to throw out Hegseth's memo, stop the panel until it follows the law, and bar the Pentagon from using its advice in the meantime.

There's a clock on this. The panel's recommendations are due January 28, 2027.

What they'll likely recommend

Robert Weissman, co-president of Public Citizen, says the answer isn't hard to guess. "Very predictably, they will recommend more spending, much more spending, on more AI-enabled weaponry," he said. That, he added, "would simultaneously make the world more dangerous and starve funding for domestic and human needs."

If he's right, the people selling the gear will have told the Pentagon to buy more of it. And so far, the public hasn't been told what was said in the room.

The short version

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth created a Pentagon advisory panel on future war and named two defense contractors, Elon Musk and Palmer Luckey, among its three co-leads. Musk's SpaceX holds about $8 billion in Pentagon contracts, and Luckey's Anduril won a Navy deal worth up to $2.9 billion days after the panel was announced. Three watchdog groups sued on November 2, saying the panel's closed-door meetings and conflicts of interest break a federal law. The Pentagon has not released an attendee list or said what was discussed.

Source

Lawsuit Targets Secretive Musk-Led Pentagon Panel Over 'Enormous Potential Conflicts of Interest', Common Dreams.