Sunday, 15 June 2025

Silicon Valley Executives To Join U.S. Army Reserve As Lieutenant Colonels – Includes Meta & Palantir

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Executives at four Silicon Valley companies will be sworn into the U.S. Army Reserve as lieutenant colonels.

The recruitment of tech executives is part of an initiative called ‘Detachment 201’ to recruit private-sector experts to accelerate the use of AI in military planning.

From Task & Purpose:

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 HTTP 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.

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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.

“Honored to accept a direct commission as a Lieutenant Colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve as part of the newly-formed Detachment 201, the Army’s Executive Innovation Corps together with @ssankar, @kevinweil , and @bobmcgrewai,” Bosworth said.

“Our primary role will be to serve as technical experts advising the Army’s modernization efforts. I have accepted this commission in a personal capacity because I am deeply invested in helping advance American technological innovation,” he added.

“Welcome to the military-tech merger,” WarRoom CFO/COO Grace Chong commented.

Per Defense News:

In their roles in Det. 201, “they will work on targeted projects to help guide rapid and scalable tech solutions to complex problems,” the Army said. “By bringing private-sector know-how into uniform, Det. 201 is supercharging efforts like the Army Transformation Initiative, which aims to make the force leaner, smarter and more lethal.”

Army Secretary Dan Driscoll unveiled the initiative last month in a memo to the force laying out major changes to the command structure, formation make-up, canceling programs deemed out of the scope of the Army’s desired modernization pathway, and accelerating programs the service wants in order to become a more lethal and agile force.

The executives come from companies who have been entrenching themselves in military technology development.

After a rough start, Palantir has been a cornerstone of Army modernization for years, providing everything from an intelligence analytics system called the Distributed Common Ground System-Army to its Vantage data platform, which is under a contract and supports 100,000 users, to its Titan system that gives the service deep-sensing and sensor-fusion capabilities.

Palantir, along with a variety of other major companies like Google and Anduril, is also working with the Army as it develops a new command-and-control architecture from the ground up.

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