The U.S. military recently announced that four executives from some of the top tech companies in Silicon Valley have joined the Army Reserve as direct-commissioned officers. The move is part of a push to speed up the adoption of technology in the military, but as the news outlet Task & Purpose points out, it’s pretty unusual.
The Army said in a press release that the four executives are Shyam Sankar, CTO at Palantir; Andrew Bosworth, CTO at Meta; Kevin Weil, Chief Product Officer of OpenAI; and Bob McGrew, an advisor at Thinking Machines Lab and former Chief Research Officer for OpenAI.
The four men are being commissioned at the high rank of lieutenant colonel as part of a program called Detachment 201: The Army’s Executive Innovation Corps. As Task & Purpose notes, the men will get to skip the usual process of taking a Direct Commissioning Course at Fort Benning, Georgia, and they won’t need to complete the Army Fitness Test.
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The new reservists will serve for about 120 hours a year, according to the Wall Street Journal, and will have a lot of flexibility to work remotely. They’ll work on helping the Army acquire more commercial tech, though it’s not clear how conflict-of-interest issues will be enforced, given the fact that the people all work for companies that would conceivably be selling their wares to the military. In theory, they won’t be sharing information with their companies or “participating in projects that could provide them or their companies with financial gain,” according to the Journal.
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Some people may think that’s a good thing, and at the very least, it might be a wise business decision for some firm like Palantir to hope for war. But OpenAI and Meta have a lot of products that depend on buy-in from the general public. And we’ve seen guys like Elon Musk take huge hits to their bottom lines after attaching themselves to Trumpism. And with Trump at the helm, any association with the Army is bound to be perilous in a time of war. We all saw the viral videos of Trump’s parade, right?
Source: Silicon Valley Execs Join the Army as Officers (But Won’t Have to Attend Boot Camp)
This is a hugely disrespectful move to all the career officers who have had to work hard to get promoted to colonel – this is not a small rank, but a hugely powerful one.
Not only that, it smacks of the fascism of the Nazi reich where civilians were put into uniform to look more impressive. It also ensured that people with no military competence were put in charge of the decisions which turned out to be poor and ended up being catastrophic for the military campaigns being run.
And how about conflict of interest? I know that in the Trump administration, buying from your buddies, pork barrel rolling and cronyism is the norm, but in the military, wouldn’t you at least want some competent products being used?
Robin Edgar
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