Reimagining the American War Machine
Not long after Elon Musk was tapped by Donald Trump to help lead a “Department of Government Efficiency,” he set his sights on a prime target: what the Pentagon spends its money on. In posts on his platform X in December, Mr. Musk, the chief executive of SpaceX and Tesla, declared that “America needs a large quantity of long-range drones (air, surface water and submarine) and hypersonic missiles.” He warned, “Anything manned will die very fast in a drone war.”
In some ways, Mr. Musk’s call is not new. Experts have been warning for years that we have entered a new age of autonomous warfare, and the Pentagon needs to keep up. The Trump administration is unusually open to remaking the U.S. war machine: Weeks before his inauguration, Mr. Trump began preparing to stack his Pentagon with executives from start-ups and tech investors like Stephen Feinberg, his nominee for deputy secretary of defense.