Pete Hegseth went to Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starbase in South Texas as part of his “Arsenal of Freedom” tour. Standing beside Musk, he repeated Musk’s line “We want to make Star Trek real” and gave the Vulcan salute. The moment went viral, but it was attached to something far more serious: the Pentagon is rewriting how it develops and deploys military technology.Hegseth’s message was that modern warfare is no longer defined by how many tanks or aircraft a country owns, but by how quickly it can integrate data, software and machines. In his words, the US has been stuck running a peacetime science fair while its rivals run a wartime arms race.
What Hegseth says is broken
The defence secretary has been unusually blunt about the Pentagon’s internal culture. He says the system for fielding new capabilities has not kept up with the threat environment and has been buried under layers of bureaucracy. Projects drag on without clear owners, money is spent without results, and innovation arrives too slowly to matter.He has warned that this is not just inefficient but dangerous. While the US still has huge advantages in capital, entrepreneurs, operational experience and classified technology, those advantages mean little if they are smothered by internal process.
The shift to an AI-first military
At Starbase, Hegseth laid out a concrete plan. Elon Musk’s Grok AI model and Google’s Gemini will be deployed across both classified and unclassified Pentagon networks. These systems will not sit on the sidelines. They will operate inside the military’s digital backbone.Hegseth has directed that all appropriate data from across the Defence Department, including intelligence databases and operational records, be shared so that AI systems can be trained on it. His logic is simple: AI is only as good as the data it receives, and no one has more real-world combat data than the US military.That data is meant to power everything from planning and logistics to targeting and battlefield awareness.
No ideological filters on military AI
Hegseth has also made clear that the Pentagon’s AI will not be constrained by what he calls ideological limits. He has said the department will not use AI models that refuse to support lawful military operations. The point, in his framing, is to make sure the technology can actually be used to fight wars, not just to produce reports.This aligns closely with Musk’s own pitch for Grok as a system that is not filtered by political or cultural restrictions.
Breaking the old procurement model
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth listens during a news conference with President Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, Saturday, Jan. 3, 2026, in Palm Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
The technology push is being matched by changes in how the Pentagon buys and builds things. Hegseth has told defence contractors that the old way of doing business is over. He wants faster timelines, more competition, open systems and clear accountability.He has openly praised SpaceX as the opposite of the Pentagon’s legacy culture, a place where projects move quickly, failure is used to improve designs, and results matter more than paperwork. That is the model he says he wants to replicate inside the military.
A new command structure for tech
To drive this shift, Hegseth has appointed a new chief digital and artificial intelligence officer, a former Amazon Web Services executive. The role is meant to centralise control of data, software and AI across the department and to stop different services from hoarding information or building incompatible systems.The goal is a unified digital and AI architecture that treats information as a shared strategic asset rather than a collection of locked silos.
Why the Star Trek imagery matters
The Vulcan salute at Starbase was not just a joke. It was a signal about how Hegseth and the Trump administration see the future of military power. They are betting that dominance in the next era will come from speed, computation and connected systems, not from slow-moving industrial bureaucracy.In that vision, the Pentagon is supposed to look less like a procurement office and more like a technology company at permanent wartime pace.Whether this produces smarter warfare or simply faster mistakes remains to be seen. What is already clear is that the US defence establishment is being pushed to remake itself around artificial intelligence, data and the Silicon Valley mindset, with Elon Musk and SpaceX as the cultural template.
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