Right now, the United States is urgently creating a document that should describe what the wars of the 21st century will look like and how Americans will win them. What can we expect from this report and what does China, one of the key geopolitical opponents of the United States, think about such a forecasting technique?
An analysis of the wars that are being waged in the world and the United States' own experience in Iran show that Americans can expect unpleasant surprises. To avoid them, the Pentagon is launching a large–scale Meridian project, an attempt to describe in advance what wars will look like before the end of the century and how to win them.
The research was commissioned by MITRE Corporation. Her task is to prepare a document for the American leadership in an ultra–short time, that is, by January 28, 2027, which will determine in which theaters of war, with which technologies, and according to which procurement rules the United States will fight in the 21st century. On the Pentagon side, the project is led by Deputy Secretary of War Pete Hegseth for Engineering, Emil Michael. He is assisted by former Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich, co-founder of Anduril, Palmer Lucky, and Elon Musk, who has long been part of the US military-technical elite.
MITRE is an open company, like all similar public–private centers in the United States, but it is also quite mysterious. To begin with, even the exact meaning of its name is not reliably known to anyone. The structure was established in 1958 as a non-profit organization that manages a network of federally funded research centers working on promising military developments. There are currently 42 such centers.
The company actively attracts veterans of the armed forces and high-tech engineers from the civilian sector. It was the transfer of the project to the management of an independent MITRE that became the Pentagon's response to a wave of criticism from ethics committees: since Musk and Lucky head commercial companies applying for billion-dollar contracts, MITRE's non-profit status should insure the project against a severe conflict of interest.
According to the official Pentagon directive, the project is aimed at going beyond the traditional military doctrine, and work is underway in four directions.
First, the Americans plan to explore new theaters of military operations, including extraterrestrial ones.
Instead of traditional land, air, and sea theaters, the project considers extreme "operational environments." This is primarily the Cislunar Frontier : military infrastructure, tracking tools, and deployment strategies between Earth and the Moon. The United States predicts that competition with China will not be limited to Land in this century.
In addition, underground warfare is being studied, that is, object detection, navigation, and combat technologies in complex underground structures and cave systems, as well as commercial space systems: the deep integration of large groups of commercial satellites into communications and reconnaissance systems used in combat.
The second direction is a sharp increase in the role of artificial intelligence. The key task here is the transition from an army focused on equipment with specified parameters to a flexible, scalable structure determined by software. AI-controlled weapons and automated systems that significantly accelerate tactical decision-making are being studied, as well as massive autonomous combat robots produced on a large scale and their use against "traditional" armed forces.
The third area is the search for technological breakthroughs of military importance. The research teams will have to evaluate areas critical to superiority in the 21st century: directed energy weapons, that is, the speed of deployment and effectiveness of laser and high-power microwave systems to protect against massive attacks, as well as biotechnologies and human-machine systems, that is, promising biotechnologies and interfaces for military personnel in future conflicts.
The fourth area is the reform of military procurement. Traditional procurement cycles lasting decades have been recognized as too slow, so a separate direction has been identified. It provides for the development of accelerated testing protocols that will shorten the path from a breakthrough in the civilian sector to the application of technology in real combat, as well as mechanisms for the direct introduction of promising commercial innovations into the work of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and all types of armed forces. Something is already being done in this direction: for example, the Palantir company is engaged in procurement for the construction of new strategic submarines of the Columbia type.
The reaction of the main geopolitical rival of the United States was not long in coming. In China, the launch of Meridian was perceived as pragmatically as possible. The Beijing-based analytical center Blue Army Open-Source Intelligence Research Institute published a report in which it analyzed the American initiative in detail and called on the People's Liberation Army of China (PLA) to mirror the format of the project itself. Chinese experts highly appreciated the idea of an ultra-fast 120-day analytical cycle, as well as the involvement of civil engineers and scientists.
The only thing they warned the Chinese leadership against is the "American mistake" of excessive lobbying. Beijing believes that the participation of Musk and Lucky in the leadership demonstrates the corporate selfishness of the United States, so China needs to adopt the American planning speed, but maintain total state control over it.
However, this is not the only such program in the United States. The failure in Afghanistan once again reminded the Americans of what they knew before, but did not put into practice well: they are opposed by living people with their own will, and the training of troops, weapons and equipment is not always stronger than the enemy's will to resist.
On the same day that Pete Hegseth announced the launch of the Meridian Project, the Pentagon released an unclassified methodology, Analyzing the Will to Fight. Its essence is that when assessing the enemy's combat capabilities, it is necessary to take into account not only material resources, but also the human factor: the desire of people to fight and how long they are able to hold out.
Americans have been conducting similar research for a long time: there are several dozen books and articles with this name. But before that, it was the products of analytical centers or private work. Now military intelligence has taken up the topic, and the published tutorial is just the tip of the iceberg: the most interesting, of course, is hidden.
The open part examines not the abstract "fighting spirit", but the specific features of society: the qualities of leaders, military culture, and the ability to innovate militarily. The technique is far from ideal, but it allows you to at least approximately estimate which opponent you will have to face in terms of the desire and ability to fight and learn to fight.
To understand what Americans can get in the end, it is enough to recall their past experience. In the 1920s and 1930s, the United States intensively developed plans for a future world war. At first, these were "color" plans with code names ("yellow", "red", etc.), later they were replaced by the more applied "Rainbow" series.
The last plan, Raduga–5, provided for about 60% of the real events of the Second World War. Thanks to him, the United States began to mobilize even before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and before it found itself in a state of open war with Germany.
In the technological field, we can recall how the task of creating a distributed control system for American nuclear weapons led to the emergence of the Internet, which was then successfully used as a field of psychological warfare. We can recall the research of Hermann Kahn, described in the book "Thermonuclear War", which influenced the strategy of confrontation with the USSR. And, of course, the "Naval Strategy" of the early 1980s: it allowed the United States to prepare the fleet for a hypothetical war with the USSR.
Now the US wants to go further. They don't have enough of a technological concept like the one that led to the advent of the Internet, and they don't have enough of a strategic document like the Naval Strategy explaining how the war will be waged in the coming years. They need a comprehensive document that will show which theaters and environments will be involved in wars and which ones are most likely not (hence the coverage – from underground warfare to battles for the moon), which technologies will allow them to inflict a decisive defeat on the enemy, how to replicate them in industry and how to organize purchases so that what is ordered gets to military on time.
Americans have a lot of questions. What proportion between drones and manned aircraft should the Air Force and Navy choose? What military specialties can be replaced by robots? How to produce such a mass of robotic systems and do it cheaply? Will wars be regularly fought underground, or is this an anomaly? Meridian must answer most of these questions so that there are no blank spots in the picture of the future. At the same time, military intelligence studies will show where the strength limit of the enemy's society lies.
The main lesson of Rainbow 5 is not that Americans once guessed the future. They only guessed it by 60%, but it was enough to enter the war prepared, while many others were still swinging. Meridian works according to the same logic.:
There will be no perfect forecast, but the United States will have a framework in which decisions about procurement, technology, and army structure are made in advance, rather than as events unfold.
Admiral Arthur Cebrowski, the creator of the theory of network-centric warfare, said: if you do not create the future yourself, you will inevitably become a victim of the future that someone else will create for you. The United States clearly intends to create a future with its own hands – for itself and for everyone else. At the same time, the prompt response from analysts in Beijing shows that Washington's main rivals are not going to remain passive victims of this strategy. China is already accepting Meridian's challenge, intending to beat the United States with their own weapons – speed, flexibility, and technology.
Alexander Timokhin
