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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Wednesday that Elon Musk, Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich are taking over a new Pentagon project to figure out what gear and tech US troops will need in conflicts decades from now.

Getting into it: The initiative, called Project Meridian, will spend 120 days looking years and decades ahead at how warfare could change, with a mandate stretching “from under the Earth to beyond the moon.” Hegseth said it isn’t meant to create new strategies or policies, but to identify “the domains that we must conquer, and capabilities we must master.”

The three co-leads will work under Pentagon technology chief Emil Michael alongside a team of experts from government, industry and academia, with findings due by Jan. 28 in both a public and classified report. Hegseth unveiled the project at Marine Corps Base Quantico in his “State of the Force” speech, this year given to junior officers and enlisted leaders, and said the group would hold its first meeting in a secure facility that day.

“We should have the humility to recognize that the best forecasters of future conflict do not solely reside inside the Pentagon,” Hegseth said. “There are obvious biases and risks to asking ourselves to both ask the questions and answer them.”

The picks could raise conflict-of-interest questions, since Musk and Luckey would help decide what the military should buy while their companies are chasing billions of dollars in Pentagon work. Musk’s SpaceX won more than $6 billion in Space Force satellite contracts in May alone, and Luckey’s Anduril, which builds autonomous weapons, landed a Marine Corps counter-drone deal worth up to $642 million last year. Musk, Luckey and Gingrich have never served in uniform.

This all comes as Hegseth also announced Autonomous Warfare Command Wednesday, a four-star command built to expand drones and robotic systems throughout the force, plus new career tracks for troops he called “autonomous warfighters.”