MUSK, HEGSETH: MAKE STAR TREK REAL, RECREATE THE KAMMLERSTAB

Some stories that I receive are stories that will only manifest their importance over a long span of time, and this story - shared by V.T. with our gratitude - is one of them. Because of this long term (and I suspect, very long term) implication, it is a story that will probably be worthy of tracking  long after many of us have shuffled off this mortal coil. Indeed, there are some aspects of this story that very deliberately hearken back to historical antecedents, and by so doing, inform us that this latest iteration is part of a much longer and older game. In this case, the "game" that Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, and space entrepreneur Elon Musk want to play, is Star Trek:

Hegseth, Musk vow to unleash tech innovation at Pentagon — and make ‘Star Trek real’

There are a few paragraphs in this article that require some commentary, for they are full of implications and, incidentally, full of historical allusions for anyone familiar with the historical aspects of the story. Consider, firstly, the following:

“We want to make Star Trek real,” Musk said as he welcomed Hegseth to Starbase, the small South Texas town incorporated by SpaceX employees and home to the tech tycoon’s massive rocket-building facility and launch site.

“Star Trek real,” Hegseth quipped after being introduced by Musk.

The war secretary’s remarks – part of his “Arsenal of Freedom” tour – emphasized the need for the US to “win the strategic competition for 21st century technological supremacy,” including by topping America’s adversaries in the fields of artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, hypersonics, space capabilities, directed energy, biotechnology and long-range drones. (Emphases added)

One must, I suspect, parse these statements rather closely and peel the layers back with a razor sharp scalpel, for under the heading of "making Star Trek real", we're treated to an inventory of various areas Hegseth lists as critical: artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, hypersonics... directed energy, long range drones, biotechnology."  A fairly standard and specific list of capabilities... except that one very ambiguous entry: "space capabilities". Directed energy is the obvious and thinly veiled reference to directed energy weapons, and it is not accidental, in my opinion, that it is mentioned after the ambiguous category of "space capabilities", a phrase so generalized and ambiguous as to be almost meaningless, except when one takes its mention as the umbrella under which all the others are to be understood. In other words, the rest of the inventoried categories are the "space capabilities" that secretary Hegseth and Mr. Musk have in mind.

But the reader may have noted that, other than the reference to directed energy, the rest of the categories fall far short of conjuring capabilities resembling those of Star Trek.

Later in the article, however, we encounter some very significant and highly suggestive statements:

Until President Trump took office, the Department of War’s process for fielding new capabilities had “not kept up with the times,” Hegseth argued.

“Worse than that, we’ve done nothing but add layer upon layer” of bureaucracy, Hegseth bemoaned, lamenting the “endless projects with no accountable owners” at the Pentagon and “high churn with little progress and few outputs.”

“That sounds about like the exact opposite of SpaceX,” he said, describing it as a “dangerous game with potentially fatal consequences.”

Pledging to “supercharge” innovation at the War Department, Hegseth said the Pentagon is “done running a peacetime science fair while our potential adversaries are running a wartime arms race.”

...

As part of the military’s focus on harnessing the power of artificial intelligence, Hegseth announced the War Department will start using X’s Grok AI platform later this month, in addition to Google’s Gemini AI model, on every classified and unclassified network in the department.

Cameron Stanley, formerly an executive at Amazon Web Services, has also been appointed as the new chief digital and artificial intelligence officer at the War Department, Hegseth announced.

Noting that AI models are only as good as the data they’re trained, Hegseth announced that he’s directed “all appropriate data” to be shared across “every service and component” so it can be “fully leveraged for warfighting capability development and operational advantage.”

“We must ensure that America’s military AI dominates, so that no adversary can exploit that same technology to hold our national security interests or our citizens at risk,” the Pentagon chief said.

Hegseth warned that while US adversaries “do not have our entrepreneurs … our capital markets … our combat-proven operational data … our hard-won classified technologies,” nor the ability to go to “downtown Tehran or downtown Caracas without being seen in the process,” but none of it will matter “if we suffocate those advantages under a stifling bureaucracy.” (Italicized and boldfaced emphases added)

Before we consider what these remarks, and their implied historical antecedents might portend, we must expand that inventory of things that will "make Star Trek real", because as we've blogged about many times on this website, and commented upon and mentioned many times in interviews, a little over a decade ago DARPA (which we lovingly refer to on this website as the Diabolically Apocalyptic Research Projects Agency after a suggestion by one of our members, J.B.) made it a goal of that agency to have the United States be "warp capable" within a century. The clock is ticking, but DARPA does not do things without a reason, and in the case of inventing a practical "warp" technology enabling "faster than light" travel via space-warping capability, this reason was supplied by NASA scientist Dr Harold "Sonny" White, who reworked the warp field equations of Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre. In their reworked version, it emerged that the enormous energy requirements of Alcubierre's equations - a requirement that placed it beyond the foreseeable reach of human energy production - were perhaps not true, and that much smaller energy requirements might do the trick, requirements that were within the practical and predicted ability of humans to produce.   From this, DARPA made its announcement of the warp goal, which perforce would include the development of new sources of energy (fusion, anyone?).

But DARPA and NASA are only two agencies. What Secretary Hegseth complains of is a bloated bureaucracy and agencies acting independently and without any knowledge of what others are doing, a state of affairs which is actually stifling, not aiding, the creative processes needed in the black projects world. His solution is to take a page directly out of the historical playbook, and update it a bit: make all that data accessible to artificial intelligence, and then share it across every service and component to enable it to be fully leveraged for warfighting capability development and operational advantage. Translation: Secretary Hegseth just announced that the old black projects world of compartmentalized and carefully segregated "closed off" projects  - projects so closed off they have no connection to (and therefore cannot benefit from) other classified research - is officially over, for he means to create an infrastructure of information exchange that will crosspollinate ideas throughout the whole classified projects edifice.

This is quite a statement, because it is first an admission that the Pentagon effectively does not even know the full extent of its classified projects world, and to that extent, has lost control of it. In such a world, Hegseth's statement is a statement of existential necessity.

Notably, however, Mr. Hegseth has returned to a very interesting and highly suggestive historical antecedent, and I do not for a moment think that this antecedent was coincidentally or accidentally hit upon, but rather, that it is entirely deliberate. Regular readers here who are familiar with my various books on World War Two wartime classified research projects of Nazi Germany will recall my careful attention to the unit directing all of it by the war's end: the so-called Kammlerstab, or "Kammler Staff", named for the four-star SS general in charge of it, Dr. Ing. Hans Kammler. In establishing his research group, Kammler effectively created a kind of Nazi version of DARPA, a kind of "secret weapons and technologies think tank". He did not stop there, however. He also freed all of its scientists and technicians from adherence to Nazi party ideology in matters of science and technology, and effectively told the group to brainstorm various ideas, and the steps in the technology tree to bring the ideas to practical fruition. Even more importantly, he took the step not only of eliminating bureaucratic oversight of "ideological purity" or adherence to any stifling scientific orthodoxies, he also established a kind of top secret magazine that scientists could publish their papers and stay abreast of each other's research and ideas. In short, he eliminated compartmentalization within the group itself, allowing it to be - in Hegseth's words - "shared across every service and component to enable it to be fully leveraged for warfighting capability development and operational advantage."

Time, of course, will tell if that control can be reasserted by this means, and if efficiency can be restored, and if in turn these things can "make Star Trek real."

But if the Kammlerstab is any indicator, we know the answer to that already...

...and then there's that peculiar end of Mr. Hegseth's remarks about American forces not being seen when they entered Caracas... invisibility? Near-invisible camouflage techniques and technologies? Well, if you have been paying attention in the past couple of decades, they've been working on that too. (Just search for "invisibility cloak" on this website!)

See you on the flip side...

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