Pete Hegseth made a high-profile visit Monday to SpaceX headquarters alongside Elon Musk, flashing a Vulcan salute as the war secretary outlined a push to overhaul how the Pentagon develops and deploys new technology.
Welcoming Hegseth to Starbase, the South Texas community built around SpaceX’s launch and manufacturing complex, Musk framed the moment with a pop-culture nod. “We want to make Star Trek real,” Musk said as he greeted the Pentagon chief at the sprawling rocket facility.
Hegseth echoed the sentiment with a brief aside of his own, responding, “Star Trek real,” after Musk introduced him to the audience.
Speaking as part of his “Arsenal of Freedom” tour, Hegseth laid out a sweeping vision for maintaining U.S. dominance in what he described as a global race for technological superiority. He stressed the urgency of outpacing rival nations in areas such as artificial intelligence, autonomous platforms, hypersonic weapons, space systems, directed-energy technology, biotechnology, and long-range drones.
He argued that prior to President Trump taking office, the Department of War’s system for bringing new capabilities into service had fallen badly behind modern realities.
“Worse than that, we’ve done nothing but add layer upon layer” of bureaucracy, Hegseth said, criticizing what he called “endless projects with no accountable owners” and a culture of “high churn with little progress and few outputs.”
Comparing the Pentagon’s approach unfavorably to SpaceX’s rapid-development model, Hegseth said, “That sounds about like the exact opposite of SpaceX,” warning that such stagnation is a “dangerous game with potentially fatal consequences.”
He promised a dramatic shift, saying the department would “supercharge” innovation and abandon what he characterized as a complacent mindset. According to Hegseth, the Pentagon is “done running a peacetime science fair while our potential adversaries are running a wartime arms race.”
To make that change tangible, he pledged to “cut through overgrown bureaucratic underbrush and clear away the debris, Elon-style, preferably with a chainsaw,” to speed the rollout of new technologies.
As part of that effort, Hegseth revealed that the War Department will begin using X’s Grok artificial intelligence system later this month, alongside Google’s Gemini model. Both tools will be deployed across the department’s classified and unclassified networks, he said.
He also announced a key leadership appointment, naming Cameron Stanley, a former Amazon Web Services executive, as the Pentagon’s new chief digital and artificial intelligence officer.
Emphasizing that artificial intelligence depends on the quality and breadth of its data, Hegseth said he has ordered “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.
He concluded with a warning that the United States’ inherent strengths could be squandered if mismanaged. Hegseth said America’s rivals “do not have our entrepreneurs … our capital markets … our combat-proven operational data … our hard-won classified technologies,” nor the ability to operate in places like “downtown Tehran or downtown Caracas without being seen in the process.” Still, he cautioned, those advantages will count for nothing “if we suffocate those advantages under a stifling bureaucracy.”
{Matzav.com}
