U.S. Army bringing in big tech executives as lieutenant colonels

Summary

Four senior executives of tech giants like Meta and Palantir are being sworn into the Army Reserve as direct-commissioned officers at the unusually high rank of lieutenant colonel as part of a new program to recruit private-sector experts to speed up tech adoption. The Army calls the program to recruit Silicon Valley executives Detachment 201: The Army’s Executive Innovation Corps. One of the executives, Andrew Bosworth of Meta (formerly Facebook) posted on X that the “201” monicker was a nod to an HTML coding command, in which a “201” response indicates the creation of a new programming resource. The Reserve’s new lieutenant colonels are Shyam Sankar, chief technology officer for Palantir; Bosworth, chief technology officer of Meta; Kevin Weil, chief product officer of OpenAI; and Bob McGrew, an advisor at Thinking Machines Lab and former chief research officer for OpenAI. Each of the four, who were set to be sworn in Friday, arrive with decades of experience in some of Silicon Valley’s largest and most innovative companies, and with levels of extraordinary personal wealth that careers in the industry often amass. The Detachment 201 program is aimed at bringing in part-time advisors from the private sector to help the service adopt and scale commercial technology like drones and robots into its formations. The idea of incorporating private-sector expertise is right out of Ukraine as soldiers there who are engineers or computer scientists in their day jobs are MacGyvering makeshift drones or 3D printing parts to use on the front lines against Russia. Army officials say the new officers will get at least a taste of traditional Army training before filling their roles tech-focused policy advisors. An Army official told Task & Purpose that the four executives will all attend the Army’s six-week Direct Commissioning Course at Fort Benning, Georgia and will complete the Army Fitness Test and marksmanship training. Direct Commission officers fill specific roles The four m...