After I learn a tweet about 4 famous Silicon Valley executives being inducted right into a particular detachment of the US Military Reserve, together with Meta CTO Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, I questioned its veracity. It’s very laborious to discern reality from satire in 2025, partially due to social media websites owned by Bosworth’s firm. However it certainly was true. In response to an official press launch, they’re within the Military now, particularly Detachment 201: the Government Innovation Corps. Boz is now lieutenant colonel Bosworth.
The opposite newly commissioned officers embrace Kevin Weil, OpenAI’s head of product; Bob McGrew, a former OpenAI head of analysis now advising Mira Murati’s firm Considering Machines Lab; and Shyam Sankar, the CTO of Palantir. These middle-aged tech execs had been sworn into their posts sporting camo fatigues, as if they only wandered off some Military base in Kandahar, to affix a corps that’s named after an HTTP standing code. (Colonel David Butler, communications adviser to the Military chief of workers, advised me their costume uniforms weren’t prepared but.) Detachment 201, wrote the Military in a press launch, is a part of a military-wide transformation initiative that “goals to make the drive leaner, smarter, and extra deadly.”
Don’t blame Donald Trump for this. This system has been within the works for over a yr, the brainchild of Brynt Parmeter, the Pentagon’s first chief expertise administration officer. Parmeter, a former fight soldier who headed veteran assist at Walmart earlier than becoming a member of the Division of Protection in 2023, had been pondering the best way to carry skilled technologists into service to replace an insufficiently tech-savvy militia when he met Sankar at a convention early final yr. The concept, he says, was to create “an Oppenheimer-like scenario” the place senior executives might serve straight away, whereas conserving their present jobs.
Each males collaborated on a plan to herald folks like, properly, Sankar, who has been a vocal cheerleader of the Valley’s latest embrace of the army, proclaiming that the US is in an “undeclared state of emergency” that requires a tech-led army rehaul. When The Wall Avenue Journal wrote about the forthcoming program final October, Sankar vowed to be “first in line.”
In an indication that it’s not taboo within the Valley to face the truth that its creations go hand in hand with boosting lethal drive within the army, this system was fast-tracked and is now in operation. “Ten years in the past this most likely would have gotten me canceled,” Weil advised me. “It’s a a lot better state of the world the place folks have a look at this and go, ‘Oh, wow, that is essential. Freedom shouldn’t be free.’”
The 4 new officers are full members of the Military Reserve. Not like different reservists, nevertheless, they won’t be required to endure primary coaching, although they may endure much less immersive health and capturing coaching after induction. They may also have the pliability to spend a number of the roughly 120 annual hours working remotely, a perk not supplied to different reservists.
The Military additionally says that these males is not going to be despatched to battle, so they won’t be risking their lives in potential theaters of warfare in Iran, Greenland, or downtown Los Angeles, California. Their mission is to make use of their plain experience to high school their colleagues and superiors within the army on the best way to make the most of cutting-edge applied sciences for effectivity and lethal drive.
One may assume the Military would have finished an intensive examine of the particular abilities required for this pilot program and pulled these folks from an open name for one of the best candidates. That didn’t occur. Sankar helped recruit the opposite three future officers—all male, which by intention or coincidence appears to fulfill the anti-DEI bent of at the moment’s army—they usually all accepted. In response to Butler, “Lieutenant colonel Sankar mentioned ‘I need to put on the uniform. And I’ve three different guys keen to go along with me.’” Weil confirms that he joined after a request from Sankar. (Parmeter mentioned to me that since this can be a pilot program with an unknown final result, a closed course of was applicable.)
