Pentagon set up briefing for Elon Musk on potential war with China

WASHINGTON - The Pentagon was scheduled on March 21 to brief Mr Elon Musk on the US military’s plan for any war that might break out with China, two US officials said on March 20.

Another official said the briefing will be China-focused, without providing additional details.

A fourth official confirmed Mr Musk was to be at the Pentagon on March 21, but offered no details.

Hours after news of the planned meeting was published by The New York Times, Pentagon officials and US President Donald Trump denied that the session would be about military plans involving China.

“China will not even be mentioned or discussed,” Mr Trump said in a late-night social media post.

It was not clear if the briefing for Mr Musk would go ahead as originally planned. 

But providing Mr Musk access to some of the nation’s most closely guarded military secrets would be a dramatic expansion of

his already extensive role as an adviser

to US President Donald Trump and leader of his effort to slash spending and purge the government of people and policies they oppose.

It would also bring into sharp relief the questions about

Mr Musk’s conflicts of interest

as he ranges widely across the federal bureaucracy while continuing to run businesses that are major government contractors.

In this case, Mr Musk, the billionaire chief executive of both SpaceX and Tesla, is a leading supplier to the Pentagon and has extensive financial interests in China.

Pentagon war plans, known in military jargon as O-plans or operational plans, are among the military’s most closely guarded secrets.

If a foreign country were to learn how the US planned to fight a war against it, it could reinforce its defences and address its weaknesses, making the plans far less likely to succeed.

The top-secret briefing for the China war plan has about 20 to 30 slides that lay out how the US would fight such a conflict.

It covers the plan beginning with the indications and warning of a threat from China to various options on what Chinese targets to hit, over what time period, that would be presented to Mr Trump for decisions, according to officials with knowledge of the plan.

A White House spokesperson did not respond to an e-mail seeking comment about the purpose of the visit, how it came about, whether Mr Trump was aware of it, and whether the visit raises questions of conflicts of interest.

The White House has not said whether Mr Trump signed a conflicts of interest waiver for Mr Musk.

The chief Pentagon spokesperson, Mr Sean Parnell, initially did not respond to a similar email seeking comment about why Mr Musk was to receive a briefing on the China war plan.

Soon after The New York Times published the article online on March 20 evening, Mr Parnell gave a short statement: “The Defence Department is excited to welcome Elon Musk to the Pentagon on Friday. He was invited by Secretary Hegseth and is just visiting.”

About an hour later, Mr Parnell posted a message on his X social media account: “This is 100% Fake News. Just brazenly & maliciously wrong. Elon Musk is a patriot. We are proud to have him at the Pentagon.”

Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth also commented on X late on March 20, saying: “This is NOT a meeting about ‘top secret China war plans.’ It’s an informal meeting about innovation, efficiencies & smarter production. Gonna be great!”.

Roughly 30 minutes after that social media post, The Wall Street Journal confirmed that Mr Musk had been scheduled to be briefed on the war planning for China.

Whatever the meeting will now be about, the planning reflected the extraordinary dual role played by Mr Musk, who is both the world’s wealthiest man and has been given broad authority by Mr Trump.

Mr Musk has a security clearance, and Mr Hegseth can determine who has a need to know about the plan.

Mr Hegseth; Admiral Christopher Grady, the acting chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Admiral Samuel Paparo, the head of the military’s Indo-Pacific Command, are set to present Mr Musk with details on the US plan to counter China in the event of military conflict between the two countries, the officials said.

The meeting had been set to be held not in Mr Hegseth’s office – where an informal discussion about innovation would most likely take place – but in the Tank, a secure conference room in the Pentagon, typically used for high-level meetings of members of the Joint Chiefs, their senior staff and visiting combatant commanders.

Operational plans for major contingencies, like a war with China, are extremely difficult for people without extensive military planning experience to understand.

The technical nature is why presidents are typically presented with the broad contours of a plan, rather than the actual details of documents.

How many details Mr Musk will want or need to hear is unclear.

Mr Hegseth received part of the China war plan briefing last week and another part on March 19, according to officials familiar with the plan.

It was unclear what the impetus was for providing Mr Musk such a sensitive briefing. He is not in the military chain of command, nor is he an official adviser to Mr Trump on military matters involving China.

But there is a possible reason Mr Musk might need 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.

Take, for example, aircraft carriers. Cutting back on future aircraft carriers would save billions of dollars, money that could be spent on drones or other weaponry.

But if the US 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.

Planning for a war with China has dominated Pentagon thinking for decades, well before a possible confrontation with Beijing became more conventional wisdom on Capitol Hill.

The US has built its Air Forces, Navy and Space Forces – and even more recently its Marines and Army forces – with a possible fight against China in mind.

Critics have said the military has invested too much in big, expensive systems like fighter jets or aircraft carriers and too little in midrange drones and coastal defences.

But for Mr Musk to evaluate how to reorient Pentagon spending, he would want to know what the military intends to use and for what purpose.

Mr Musk has already called for the Pentagon to stop buying certain high-priced items like F-35 fighter jets, manufactured by one of his space-launch competitors, Lockheed Martin, in a programme that costs the Pentagon more than US$12 billion (S$15.9 billion) a year.

Yet Mr Musk’s extensive business interests make his access to strategic secrets about China a serious problem in the view of ethics experts.

Officials have said revisions to the war plans against China have focused on upgrading the plans for defending against space warfare.

China has developed a suite of weapons that can attack US satellites.

Mr Musk’s constellations of low-earth orbit Starlink satellites, which provide data and communications services from space, are considered more resilient than traditional satellites.

But he could have an interest in learning about whether or not the US could defend his satellites in a war with China.

Participating in a classified briefing on the China threat with some of the most senior Pentagon and US military officials would be a tremendously valuable opportunity for any defence contractor seeking to sell services to the military.

Mr Musk could gain insight into new tools that the Pentagon might need, and that SpaceX, where he remains the CEO, could sell.

Separately, Mr Musk has been the focus of an investigation by the Pentagon’s inspector-general over questions about his compliance with his top-secret security clearance.

The investigations started in 2024 after some SpaceX employees complained to government agencies that Mr Musk and others at SpaceX were not properly reporting contacts or conversations with foreign leaders.

Air Force officials, before the end of the Biden administration, started their own review, after Senate Democrats asked questions about Mr Musk and asserted that he was not complying with security clearance requirements.

The Air Force, in fact, had denied a request by Mr Musk for an even higher level of security clearance, known as Special Access Programme, which is reserved for extremely sensitive classified programmes, citing potential security risks associated with the billionaire.

SpaceX has become so valuable to the Pentagon that the Chinese government has said it considers the company to be an extension of the US military.

Starlink Militarisation And Its Impact On Global Strategic Stability was the headline of one publication released in 2024 from China’s National University of Defence Technology, according to a translation of the paper prepared by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.

Mr Musk and Tesla, an electric vehicle company he controls, are heavily reliant on China, which houses one of the carmaker’s flagship factories in Shanghai.

Unveiled in 2019, the state-of-the-art facility was built with special permission from the Chinese government, and now accounts for more than half of Tesla’s global deliveries.

In 2024, the company said in financial filings that it had a US$2.8 billion loan agreement with lenders in China for production expenditures.

In public, Mr Musk has avoided criticising Beijing and signalled his willingness to work with the Chinese Communist Party.

In 2022, he wrote a column for the magazine of the Cyberspace Administration of China, the country’s censorship agency, trumpeting his companies and their missions of improving humanity.

That same year, the billionaire told The Financial Times that China should be given some control over Taiwan by making a “special administrative zone for Taiwan that is reasonably palatable”, an assertion that angered politicians of the independent island.

In that same interview, he also noted that Beijing sought assurances that he would not sell Starlink in China.

The following year at a tech conference, Mr Musk called the democratic island “an integral part of China that is arbitrarily not part of China”, and compared the Taiwan-China situation to Hawaii and the US.

On X, the social media platform he owns, Mr Musk has long used his account to praise China.

He has said the country is “by far” the world leader in electric vehicles and solar power, and has commended its space programme for being “far more advanced than people realise”.

He has encouraged more people to visit the country, and posited openly about an “inevitable” Russia-China alliance. NYTIMES