Once I learn a tweet about 4 famous Silicon Valley executives being inducted right into a particular detachment of america Military Reserve, together with Meta CTO Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, I questioned its veracity. It’s very arduous to discern reality from satire in 2025, partly due to social media websites owned by Bosworth’s firm. But it surely certainly was true. Based on 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 have been sworn into their posts carrying camo fatigues, as if they simply wandered off some Military base in Kandahar, to hitch a corps that’s named after an HTTP standing code. (Colonel David Butler, communications adviser to the Military chief of employees, informed 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 “aims to make the force leaner, smarter, and more lethal.”
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 help at Walmart earlier than becoming a member of the Division of Protection in 2023, had been pondering find out how to convey 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 situation” the place senior executives may serve instantly, whereas retaining their present jobs.
Each males collaborated on a plan to herald individuals like, nicely, Sankar, who has been a vocal cheerleader of the Valley’s latest embrace of the navy, proclaiming that the US is in an “undeclared state of emergency” that requires a tech-led navy rehaul. When The Wall Road Journal wrote about the forthcoming program final October, Sankar vowed to be “first in line.”
In an indication that it’s now not taboo within the Valley to face the truth that its creations go hand in hand with boosting lethal drive within the navy, this system was fast-tracked and is now in operation. “Ten years ago this probably would have gotten me canceled,” Weil informed me. “It’s a much better state of the world where people look at this and go, ‘Oh, wow, this is important. Freedom is not free.’”
The 4 new officers are full members of the Military Reserve. In contrast to different reservists, nonetheless, they won’t be required to bear primary coaching, although they may bear much less immersive health and taking pictures coaching after induction. They can even have the flexibleness to spend among the roughly 120 annual hours working remotely, a perk not provided 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 conflict in Iran, Greenland, or downtown Los Angeles, California. Their mission is to make use of their plain experience to highschool their colleagues and superiors within the navy on find out how to make the most of cutting-edge applied sciences for effectivity and lethal drive.
One may assume the Military would have carried out an intensive examine of the particular abilities required for this pilot program and pulled these individuals from an open name for the perfect 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 immediately’s navy—and so they all accepted. Based on Butler, “Lieutenant colonel Sankar said ‘I want to wear the uniform. And I have three other guys willing to go with me.’” Weil confirms that he joined after a request from Sankar. (Parmeter stated to me that since it is a pilot program with an unknown final result, a closed course of was acceptable.)
