Pete Hegseth decided the Department of Defense needed help from Elon Musk, Palmer Luckey, and Newt Gingrich. Three men whose combined military experience totals zero deployments and one flamethrower sold as a novelty item.
Luckey built a VR headset so people could pretend to be somewhere else. Now he gets to apply that skill to actual warfare. The pivot makes sense if you've ever watched a defense contractor explain why a toilet seat costs forty-three thousand dollars.
Musk will presumably suggest the military tweet through conflicts and maybe launch a few tanks into low Earth orbit where they'll accomplish nothing but look cool doing it. His track record on delivering functional products on time speaks for itself, which is why the Pentagon called him.
Gingrich rounds out this brain trust. A man who hasn't held office since the Clinton administration will evaluate modern military capabilities. That's like hiring a telegram operator to fix your fiber optic network.
The initiative examines military capabilities, which is consultant-speak for producing a PowerPoint deck that justifies whatever budget increase was already planned. Hegseth announced this while discussing the state of the military, as if the state of the military was unclear before three GOP megadonors showed up to clarify things.
Retail traders saw defense stocks and immediately started panic-buying calls on anything with the word "tactical" in the company name. They're convinced this means Raytheon is about to invent the Cybertruck but with missiles. It does not mean that.
The project will deliver recommendations that get filed next to every other blue-ribbon commission report gathering dust in a Pentagon basement. But at least Musk can add "military advisor" to his Twitter bio between rocket emoji and complaints about the SEC.
War is too important to leave to generals when you can hand it to a guy who thought buying Twitter for forty-four billion was a good idea.
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