Pete Hegseth flashed a Vulcan salute Monday as he joined Elon Musk at SpaceX headquarters, where the war secretary touted the Pentagon’s wartime approach to unleashing technological innovation.
“We want to make Star Trek real,” Musk said as he welcomed Hegseth to Starbase, the small South Texas town incorporated by SpaceX employees and home to the tech tycoon’s massive rocket-building facility and launch site.
“Star Trek real,” Hegseth quipped after being introduced by Musk.
The war secretary’s remarks – part of his “Arsenal of Freedom” tour – emphasized the need for the US to “win the strategic competition for 21st century technological supremacy,” including by topping America’s adversaries in the fields of artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, hypersonics, space capabilities, directed energy, biotechnology and long-range drones.
Until President Trump took office, the Department of War’s process for fielding new capabilities had “not kept up with the times,” Hegseth argued.
“Worse than that, we’ve done nothing but add layer upon layer” of bureaucracy, Hegseth bemoaned, lamenting the “endless projects with no accountable owners” at the Pentagon and “high churn with little progress and few outputs.”
“That sounds about like the exact opposite of SpaceX,” he said, describing it as a “dangerous game with potentially fatal consequences.”
Pledging to “supercharge” innovation at the War Department, Hegseth said the Pentagon is “done running a peacetime science fair while our potential adversaries are running a wartime arms race.”
He vowed to “cut through overgrown bureaucratic underbrush and clear away the debris, Elon-style, preferably with a chainsaw” to promote the deployment of new technology.
As part of the military’s focus on harnessing the power of artificial intelligence, Hegseth announced the War Department will start using X’s Grok AI platform later this month, in addition to Google’s Gemini AI model, on every classified and unclassified network in the department.
Cameron Stanley, formerly an executive at Amazon Web Services, has also been appointed as the new chief digital and artificial intelligence officer at the War Department, Hegseth announced.
Noting that AI models are only as good as the data they’re trained, Hegseth announced that he’s directed “all appropriate data” to be shared across “every service and component” so it can be “fully leveraged for warfighting capability development and operational advantage.”
“We must ensure that America’s military AI dominates, so that no adversary can exploit that same technology to hold our national security interests or our citizens at risk,” the Pentagon chief said.
Hegseth warned that while US adversaries “do not have our entrepreneurs … our capital markets … our combat-proven operational data … our hard-won classified technologies,” nor the ability to go to “downtown Tehran or downtown Caracas without being seen in the process,” but none of it will matter “if we suffocate those advantages under a stifling bureaucracy.”
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