Four top tech execs from OpenAI, Meta, and Palantir have just joined the US Army — no obstacle courses, shouted orders, or grueling marches required.
The Army Reserve has commissioned these senior tech leaders to serve as mid-level officers, skipping tradition to pursue transformation. The newcomers won’t attend any current version of the military’s most basic and ingrained rite of passage— boot camp.
Instead, they’ll be ushered in through express training Army leaders are still hashing out, said Col. Dave Butler, a spokesman to the Chief of Staff of the Army, in a phone interview with Business Insider.
“They’ll do marksmanship training, physical training, they’ll learn the Army rank structure and history, and uniforms,” Butler explained. Of the boot camp-lite plans, “you could think of it as a pilot,” he said, adding that the new soldiers are a part of the Army’s larger effort to rapidly modernize.
The execs — Shyam Sankar, chief technology officer for Palantir; Andrew Bosworth, chief technology officer of Meta; Kevin Weil, chief product officer at OpenAI; and Bob McGrew, advisor at Thinking Machines Lab and former chief research officer for OpenAI — are joining the Army as lieutenant colonels, according to an Army press statement as part of an effort to turbocharge tech innovation and adoption.
The service’s decision to allow the four to skip “direct commissioning” boot camp, a shortened version of regular officer boot camp, is unusual, though not without historical precedence, Butler said.
“The Army has allowed the direct commission of civilians since 1861 to bring experts with critically needed skills into the force,” he wrote in an email to BI.
William Atterbury, the president of the American Railway Association, received a direct commission into the Army in 1917 and served as the director-general of transportation for Allied Expeditionary Forces in France.
Other notable examples include the president of the Columbia Gas and Electric Corporation of New York, Edward Reynolds, who commissioned as an Army colonel to serve as chief of the Medical Supply Service during World War II, and General Motors leader, William Knudsen, who direct commissioned as a lieutenant general and became the director of production for the War Department.
The new tech lieutenant colonels will have to adhere to Army standards, Butler said, and will be expected to perform the service’s annual fitness test to stay in good standing. They will spend around two weeks per year working, roughly the minimum required for military reservists.
The name of their unit, “Detachment 201” is named for the “201” status code generated when a new resource is created for Hyper Text Transfer Protocols in internet coding, Butler explained.
“In this role they will work on targeted projects to help guide rapid and scalable tech solutions to complex problems,” read an Army press release. “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.”
Lethality, a vague Pentagon buzzword, has been at the heart of the massive modernization and transformation effort the Army is undergoing to build a force that is capable of fighting and winning 21st-century conflicts.
The Army isn’t currently planning a second wave of direct commission industry leaders and still has to get these new additions through an express version of basic training, though more similar iterations are expected down the road, Butler said, noting increased interest from other private sector leaders.
It is common for the services to bring aboard officers at mid-level ranks — the vast majority of military officers join as second lieutenants, or at the rank of O-1. Historically, chaplains, veterinarians, and medical providers have been allowed to join the Army at slightly higher ranks. Other recent initiatives allow for a wider variety of commissions for highly skilled civilian workers from tech and cyber sectors, in some cases up to the rank of colonel, one level below a general.
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