Dear Reader,
Guten Morgen.
I'm back from Germany, and I had a wonderful time.
But I'll be honest — I spent most of it wanting to get back here and talk to you.
So many big stories broke while I was away.
Today I want to start with one that I think is more important than anything it got credit for.
Last Wednesday, the Pentagon announced that Elon Musk will advise on the future of warfare.
He's forming a group called Project Meridian alongside Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.
Three objectives.
Study the battlefields of the future.
Identify which weapons and technologies warfighters will need to dominate in those environments.
And deliver a report with recommendations in January.
This Is Something We've Been Saying for Years
I've studied military history my entire adult life.
And one thing repeats itself over and over again.
Great empires don't fall because they lose battles.
They fall because they fight the wrong battles.
They fight the last war.
Germany in 1940 didn't beat France with better tanks.
France actually had more tanks — and better ones.
Germany beat France because they had two-way radios in every tank.
The transmission of information won that war.
The weapons were almost irrelevant.
That lesson has never been more important than it is right now.
Because most of America's arsenal — the weapons we've spent trillions of dollars building — was designed to win wars of the 20th century.
And we are living in the 21st.
The Calcification Problem
Here's what keeps me up at night.
If you manufacture tanks, there are congressmen who support that funding.
There are workers whose livelihoods depend on it.
There are defense contractors who have spent decades building relationships in Washington around it.
Real people. Real jobs. Real political power.
That is extraordinarily difficult to uproot — even when the weapons themselves are becoming obsolete.
Countries that can't do it get conquered.
Not always militarily.
In the 21st century, commercial conquering looks different.
It looks like buying all their cars.
All their software.
Watching your own champions slowly disappear while you keep feeding a rival through transactions.
That is what losing the future of warfare actually looks like.
The Future Musk Is Describing
Musk said it directly.
"Future wars are all about drones and hypersonic missiles."
I've been saying the same thing here for almost a decade.
Forget the image of planes and pilots and guided missiles.
The future is autonomous, networked, and operating at a scale no human force can match.
Thousands of drones talking to each other.
Talking to satellites.
Talking to command.
Executing decisions at machine speed.
Three things are going to determine who wins those battles.
First, the ability to produce drones at scale.
China has an early advantage there.
Second, the software that allows these systems to communicate with each other in real time on an actual battlefield.
Third, the role of the warfighter — the human in that equation.
Is it primary? Supporting? Adjacent?
Those are the questions Project Meridian is being built to answer.
Why I'm Optimistic
I'll be honest.
A lot of what I read coming out of Washington frustrates me.
But this doesn't.
This tells me that the people at the very top of our government understand there is a gap.
They understand our arsenal is built for the last century.
And they're doing something about it.
We broke the early version of this story two years ago when Musk started making frequent trips to the Pentagon.
Project Meridian looks like the institutionalization of that work.
They're going to spend the next few months studying the future of warfare and report back in January.
But Musk already gave you the answer.
Drones. Hypersonics. Thousands of machines talking to each other at machine speed.
None of that runs without one thing.
Compute.
Massive amounts of it.
And that's exactly where Musk has placed his biggest bet.
It's called Colossus.
The AI supercomputer at the center of everything he's building, and I believe it's a $1.75 trillion story.
But here's what almost nobody has noticed.
Colossus depends on one company Wall Street has overlooked.
I sat down and laid out the whole story: who they are, and why Musk can't build the future without them.
Watch the full interview here>>>
Have a wonderful day.
I'll see you tomorrow.
“The Buck Stops Here,”
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Written by Dylan Jovine