Army bringing in tech executives as lieutenant colonels
Four senior executives of tech giants like Meta and Palantir are being sworn into the Army Reserve as direct-commissioned officers at the unusually high rank of lieutenant colonel as part of a new program to recruit private-sector experts to speed up tech adoption.
The Army calls the program to recruit Silicon Valley executives Detachment 201: The Army's Executive Innovation Corps. The 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 Reserve's new Lt. Cols. are Shyam Sankar, chief technology officer for Palantir; Andrew 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. They are being sworn into the Reserve on Friday.
Army officials 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.
All four have spent decades at some of Silicon Valley's leading tech giants and fast-growing start-ups, roles that have made them each multi-millionaires several times over. Each now work at firms that have expressed interest in developing business with the Pentagon. The idea of incorporating private-sector expertise is a lesson the Army says it learned from 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.
All four of the executives now work at companies investing heavily in emerging fields like AI and machine learning, two subjects that the Army is looking to fold into future weapon systems. Palantir and OpenAI have been contractors for the Department of Defense, with Meta has announced a partnership with Anduril for troop augmented and virtual reality devices.
'I have accepted this commission in a personal capacity because I am deeply invested in helping advance American technological innovation,' Bosworth wrote in a post on X, adding that their primary role will be as technical experts for Army modernization efforts.
Bosworth is one of four of the most senior executives at Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, who report directly to CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg. Hired at the company in 2006, he is known as the engineer who developed the Facebook News Feed. According to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Bosworth's salary in 2023 was just under $1 million but — like most Meta executives — he received close to $20 million in Meta stock.
Sankar, the chief technology officer for Palantir was, according to his bio with the company, the firm's thirteenth employee. He sold Palantir shares worth $367 million in 2024.
McGrew, who advises Thinking Machines Lab, is an alumni of Palantir and OpenAI. According to his LinkedIn, while working as a chief research officer at OpenAI, he led efforts to 'build the world's most powerful AI models and then let the world use them through ChatGPT and the API.'
Weil's resume includes work at several major tech companies like Microsoft, Twitter, Instagram, Meta, Strava, Planet Labs, and Cisco. According to SEC filings, he cashed out shares in Twitter and PlanetLabs worth at least $15 million in 2014 and 2015, and his current role at OpenAI includes stock options in the company that, should it turn public, could be worth several hundred million dollars.
The program follows Army Chief of Staff Gen. George's announcement of the Army Transformation Initiative and his Transforming in Contact effort which has smaller prototype units testing new tactics and tech like unmanned aerial systems and electronic warfare jammers in realistic combat training scenarios.
For instance, the 3rd Infantry Division's 1st Armored Brigade Combat Team is testing new platoons that specialize in specific threats like anti-tank systems, first-person viewer attack, FPV, drones or sensing enemy drones.
'Their swearing-in is just the start of a bigger mission to inspire more tech pros to serve without leaving their careers, showing the next generation how to make a difference in uniform,' the Army said in a release.
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