Stolen Valor. Tech execs are being sworn into Army as Lt. Colonels. [View all]

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https://www.youtube.com/shorts/web2QMsfAdY

From Military.Com

Four big tech executives the Army directly commissioned to be lieutenant colonels, with no military background, will not recuse themselves from business dealings with the Department of Defense -- as the Pentagon, particularly the Army, cozies up to Silicon Valley.

Earlier this month, the Army announced Detachment 201, the name being a reference to HTTP code, for the newly commissioned executives of Palantir, Meta and OpenAI. The new formation is set to recruit tech executives to work on major Army challenges, but the service has not articulated exactly what those individuals would do -- instead focusing on recruiting talent and creating jobs around them.

https://www.military.com/daily-news/2025/06/27/tech-executives-commissioned-senior-army-officers-wont-recuse-themselves-dod-business-dealings.html

The Army Reserve has commissioned these senior tech leaders to serve as midlevel 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 that Army leaders are still hashing out, Col. Dave Butler, a spokesman for the chief of staff of the Army, said 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. He said that "you could think of it as a pilot" of the boot-camp-lite plans, adding that the new soldiers were a part of the Army's larger effort to rapidly modernize.

The execs — Shyam Sankar, the chief technology officer of Palantir; Andrew Bosworth, the chief technology officer of Meta; Kevin Weil, the chief product officer at OpenAI; and Bob McGrew, an advisor at Thinking Machines Lab who was formerly the chief research officer for OpenAI — are joining the Army as lieutenant colonels as part of an effort to turbocharge tech innovation and adoption, according to an Army press statement.

https://www.businessinsider.com/tech-execs-just-joined-the-army-boot-camp-not-required-2025-6