Pete Hegseth wants a military with no wimps, no weirdos and no radicals. He also wants one built around autonomous weapons, superintelligence, robotics and technologies that barely exist yet. If he really pursues the former, he’ll squander the latter.
In his State of the Force address Wednesday, Hegseth revealed a grab bag of plans to prepare America for a different kind of war. Project Agincourt will lay the groundwork for a new four-star Autonomous Warfare Command, while Project Meridian gives Elon Musk, Anduril founder Palmer Luckey and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich 120 days to peer into their crystal balls and identify the technological capabilities America will need to maintain its military edge. Hegseth’s desire for fewer generals, faster procurement and more autonomous warfare systems is justified.
His personnel specification certainly isn’t. "We are no longer the woke department or the weak department," Hegseth declared. Just warriors." Real life is not a film about high school.
People cannot be neatly sorted into one-word buckets—jocks, nerds, goths, or weirdos, for that matter. The "nerdy" engineer building an autonomous targeting system might also be able to dead-lift twice his body weight. But the military Hegseth described will need an awful lot of people whose principal weapon is their brain, not their brawn.
America simultaneously breeds elite warfighters and the world’s most innovative leading technology companies precisely because it can draw talent from an enormous, unruly population encouraged to double down on what makes them great. If Hegseth insists on telling the nation that only one archetypal "warrior" class of Americans belongs in the military, he risks shooting himself—or rather, the armed forces—in the foot. Parts of the military and the Pentagon already seem to understand this.
In April, the Department of War announced its new Cyber Registered Apprenticeship Program, offering a 12-month paid apprenticeship to cultivate a new generation of cyber specialists for the department. The Army goes further: experienced civilians can direct-commission as officers in jobs requiring expertise in artificial intelligence, software engineering, reverse engineering, exploit development, embedded systems and drone technology. In June, the Navy launched its own national hunt for engineers, software architects and startup veterans willing to direct-commission into the Navy Reserve.
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