Pentagon Set Up Briefing for Musk on Potential War With ChinaThat's from The New York Times. The Wall Street Journal also has the story, under the headline "Musk Set to Receive Top-Secret Briefing on U.S. War Plans for China." (Free to read here.)
The Pentagon was scheduled on Friday to brief Elon Musk on the U.S. military’s plan for any war that might break out with China, two U.S. officials said on Thursday.
Another official said the briefing would be China focused, without providing additional details.
My first thought when I read this was that President Trump has given his administration the structure he wanted for his first term, as reported in this story from July 2016:
One day this past May, Donald Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., reached out to a senior adviser to Gov. John Kasich of Ohio, who left the presidential race just a few weeks before.... according to the Kasich adviser (who spoke only under the condition that he not be named), Donald Jr. wanted to make him an offer ... Did he have any interest in being the most powerful vice president in history?I think that's more or less what we have in Trump's second term: Musk and the planners of Project 2025, particularly Russell Vought, are in charge of actually doing stuff. Trump is the figurehead -- although he also seems to be operating like a Cabinet secretary in his own administration, in charge of what you might call the Department of Grievance. He's ordering attacks on allies (Canada, Europe, Ukraine) and on domestic enemies (universities, big law firms that have represented his legal pursuers). But apart from that, Musk and the 2025ers are the ones who decide what's being done and how.
When Kasich’s adviser asked how this would be the case, Donald Jr. explained that his father’s vice president would be in charge of domestic and foreign policy.
Then what, the adviser asked, would Trump be in charge of?
“Making America great again” was the casual reply.
On the other hand, it's not clear that Musk is actually deciding China policy for America. The Times story tells us this:
But there is a possible reason Mr. Musk might have needed to know aspects of the war plan. If Mr. Musk and his team of cost cutters from the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, want to trim the Pentagon budget in a responsible way, they may need to know what weapons systems the Pentagon plans to use in a fight with China.Trump and Musk want us to believe that DOGE is cutting the budget of every part of the government, but defense has traditionally been sacrosanct in Washington, particularly under Republicans. We're getting mixed signals on that. This week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth boasted about $580 million in defense cuts, which he wants us to believe are part of a war on wokeness:
Take aircraft carriers, for example. Cutting back on future aircraft carriers would save billions of dollars, money that could be spent on drones or other weaponry. But if the U.S. war strategy relies on using aircraft carriers in innovative ways that would surprise China, mothballing existing ships or stopping production on future ships could cripple that plan.
... slashed grants ... include those that fund research efforts and other activities in areas of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and related social programs, climate change, social science, Covid-19 pandemic response and other areas “not aligned” with Defense Department priorities.Hegseth has also announced that 60,000 civilian defense employees will lose their jobs. On the other hand, the budget resolution that was recently passed in the House calls for a $100 billion increase in defense spending over the next decade. That's more what I expect from an all-GOP government. This administration wants to be seen as devoted to budget-cutting, but I think the Pentagon will have more say about the cuts than other parts of the government, because Republicans love military buildups. (And yes, so do most Democrats, but I think Republicans who aren't named "R. Paul" love them more.)
Those efforts include a $6 million move to decarbonize emissions of Navy ships, $5.2 million to diversify the Navy and $9 million to create “equitable” artificial intelligence.
“I need lethal machine learning models, not equitable machine learning models,” Hegseth said.
I assume the Pentagon's plan for a war with China has been on the shelf for a long time and wasn't rewritten when Trump was elected. The obvious reason Musk wants to take a look at it is to ensure that it doesn't harm his interests. From the Journal story:
The meeting underscored the crosscutting interests Musk has.... It could give him as the head of Tesla, which relies on China for car production, and SpaceX, a U.S. defense contractor, access to sensitive military secrets unavailable to business competitors....So I think this is a story about corruption more than it is about turning military planning over to our Dunning-Kruger co-president. I think it's also about the military's continued status as a sacred cow in Washington. I suspect that the Pentagon will get more backup when it says no to Musk than other parts of the government. But he'll still be corruptly permitted to use Pentagon decision-making to make himself richer and more firmly embedded as a military contractor.
He has weighed in recently on defense acquisitions, calling on the Pentagon to stop buying Lockheed Martin’s F-35 fighter jets and to shift to a large fleet of drones. “Manned fighter jets are obsolete in the age of drones anyway,” he posted to X, his social-media site, in November. “Will just get pilots killed.”
Lockheed Martin owns half of a rocket company that is one of SpaceX’s biggest competitors in space launch.
Musk has made positive comments about China in recent years, leading Beijing to hope he could be a conduit to Trump. In 2023, Musk said he was “kind of pro-China” during a conversation about whether Beijing would be helpful in writing global rules about artificial intelligence.
“I have some vested interests in China but honestly, I think China is underrated and I think the people of China are really awesome and there is a lot of positive energy there.”
Musk has been in regular contact with Russian President Vladimir Putin, a close partner of China, the country that has supported Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. During one of their conversations, Putin asked Musk not to activate a Starlink internet satellite above Taiwan as a favor to Chinese President Xi Jinping.
