WarTalk: AutoWarCom + Project Meridian

Jordan Schneider (0:00)

WarTalk, October 2nd, 2026 It is the start of a new fiscal year, but not a new fiscal budget. We have the Board of Geniuses at the Pentagon, Pete's great speech, apparently, Retriezeness, and probably a few other things. Oh, and the Farrah Fossett satellite got blown out of orbit.

Bryan Clark (0:18)

All right, Pete.

Tony Stark (0:21)

Special guest, Arthur Tellis, currently of IFP, joining us to sing Newt Gingrich's praises.

Arthur Tellis (0:30)

Yes.

Jordan Schneider (0:30)

That's right.

Tony Stark (0:32)

Our drone lord and savior.

Arthur Tellis (0:34)

A new contract with America, but this time with more pricing requirements. Prices.

Bryan Clark (0:39)

Exactly.

Tony Stark (0:41)

Newt the straight teat, Newt the straight newt. I invited him on WarTalk. We'll see if he responds.

TBD.

Bryan Clark (0:48)

He at least should give you a shout out for having stolen your idea.

Justin McIntosh (0:50)

Well, he loved the, he loved the Newt the straight, so yeah, maybe he will. Maybe he'll remember where it came from.

Bryan Clark (0:56)

So Arthur, the new contract for America, I'm interested in, you know, the terms, terms and conditions. I mean, it's a long, I didn't really read them all. I just clicked accept, but I assume it was pretty good.

Justin McIntosh (1:07)

Like doing an Apple update.

Arthur Tellis (1:09)

Yeah, it looks good. Yeah. Yeah. If someone had asked me like, is Newt Gingrich alive, like two weeks ago, I would have given like a yes with 80% confidence. Yeah.

Justin McIntosh (1:19)

But Paul had like 72

Bryan Clark (1:22)

Well, now that I saw him on the video, I give it a, you know, maybe a 90%. I'm still not fully assured that that was like a living example of him. If not, it was probably an automaton built by Elon.

Arthur Tellis (1:36)

His wife is still the ambassador to the Vatican, I think.

Jordan Schneider (1:41)

She's what?

Justin McIntosh (1:44)

The ambassador to the Holy See.

Arthur Tellis (1:46)

The Holy See.

Justin McIntosh (1:47)

Exactly.

Tony Stark (1:49)

Where is the Pope on drones?

Jordan Schneider (1:52)

He wrote a whole paper on AR. We should probably read it and discuss it and invite him on, honestly.

Tony Stark (1:57)

That's right. But no, you don't think I sent that email? Come on.

Jordan Schneider (2:02)

That's fair.

Arthur Tellis (2:03)

I like calling an encyclical a paper as if it's like a midterm or something.

Jordan Schneider (2:09)

It was basically like a white paper, but it probably takes a while for him to get the email. I think they only get owls at Hogwarts.

Bryan Clark (2:19)

It's the Vatican, not Hogwarts.

Justin McIntosh (2:21)

Hogwarts was destroyed. Actually, we just finished Book 7 with the kids, so they were enraptured the other day.

Not sure they rebuilt it completely. Maybe they did.

Tony Stark (2:33)

Justin, you actually wrote something on this. So we had six new proposals coming out of this. Only one of them, I think, is worth our time. Well, maybe we'll see. We'll get to like two or three. But Justin, AutoWarCom, yeah, AutoWarCom, AutoBotCom.

Justin McIntosh (2:50)

So AutoWarCom doesn't exist yet. It's going to be Project Agincourt, which is going to be PAE, Autonomous Weapons. I'm not even sure.

Bryan Clark (2:59)

Derpam, Autonomous, Derpam, UXS.

Justin McIntosh (3:02)

Yeah, there we go. That's easy to remember and say out loud as a human, which is maybe why we need the robots. But so what he's charged them with in a very short memo is establishing a pathway to get to a four-star command that would be equivalent to a combatant command. So think Central Command, SOCOM, Strategic Command that would then have the authorities along with the invested budget and the writ from Congress to be able to procure autonomous weapons rapidly. There's a couple of issues with the way that that works is one, that it assumes that the Congress is going to be friendly to the next administration and any changes that they want to make. So in the little, the sub-stack that I wrote, I had to go ahead and suspend disbelief and say, let's assume they agree.

These are the, and I laid out some of my issues that I have with it. The biggest one being that right now we have a distributed, a chance for distributed experiments that are occurring in real time in theaters around the world. Those are allowed to occur and they're able to occur because each of the different task forces and each of the different combatant commands have the ability to conduct these types of experiments. So like while Central Command in the war in Iran, is not actually able to be a procurement body, what they can spend money on is spending money to get new equipment into the field to be able to be tested by soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, it runs the gamut, and then be able to get feedback into the Pentagon saying, hey, we want to buy this.