Project Meridian: Reform or Capture?

In September 2026 the US Department of War launched Project Meridian, a 120-day study of the future of warfare co-led by the heads of two firms that hold key layers of the US drone and counter-drone effort, and due to report on 28 January 2027. At the same time the Department is running a small, unusually open drone procurement programme (the Drone Dominance Program, $1.1 billion) and has requested a much larger, still unenacted autonomous-systems budget ($53.6 billion in mandatory funding, alongside about $20.6 billion in the regular budget). Read against our earlier Glass-Steagall paper, the drone effort looks like a partial implementation of its reform agenda: early procurement outside the Federal Acquisition Regulation, performance-based selection through scored field trials, and small government-owned production lines open to several designers. The same effort also contains the forces the paper warned about: each competitive phase buys from fewer vendors, and the integration software and space communications layers are each currently held by a single new firm whose head co-leads Meridian. The stylised entry model of the earlier paper predicts precisely this fork. A temporary entry programme can push an acquisition system past its threshold into a high-entry, fast-conversion state, or entry can surge and then reconsolidate around new incumbents, returning the system to the low-entry state with new names. We therefore ask not whether Meridian is reform or capture, but which equilibrium the drone effort tips into. We state the mechanism, map the case onto the model's parameters, and pre-register eight predictions with dated refutation criteria, the first of which can be scored against the Meridian report in early 2027 and the last against programme data in 2028. The paper makes no claim about the intentions of any participant.