Silicon Valley Execs Join the Army as Officers (But Won’t Have to Attend Boot Camp)

The U.S. military recently announced that four executives from some of the top tech companies in Silicon Valley have joined the Army Reserve as direct-commissioned officers. The move is part of a push to speed up the adoption of technology in the military, but as the news outlet Task & Purpose points out, it’s pretty unusual.

The Army said in a press release that the four executives are Shyam Sankar, CTO at Palantir; Andrew Bosworth, CTO at Meta; Kevin Weil, Chief Product Officer of OpenAI; and Bob McGrew, an advisor at Thinking Machines Lab and former Chief Research Officer for OpenAI.

The four men are being commissioned at the high rank of lieutenant colonel as part of a program called Detachment 201: The Army’s Executive Innovation Corps. As Task & Purpose notes, the men will get to skip the usual process of taking a Direct Commissioning Course at Fort Benning, Georgia, and they won’t need to complete the Army Fitness Test.

The Army didn’t respond to questions emailed Tuesday but said in a statement published on its website that, “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.” Their role in the Army Reserve is to “work on targeted projects to help guide rapid and scalable tech solutions to complex problems,” as the Army puts it.

The new reservists will serve for about 120 hours a year, according to the Wall Street Journal, and will have a lot of flexibility to work remotely. They’ll work on helping the Army acquire more commercial tech, though it’s not clear how conflict-of-interest issues will be enforced, given the fact that the people all work for companies that would conceivably be selling their wares to the military. In theory, they won’t be sharing information with their companies or “participating in projects that could provide them or their companies with financial gain,” according to the Journal.

Silicon Valley has always benefited greatly from ties to the U.S. military. Silicon Valley companies were bringing in $5 billion annually from defense contracts during the Reagan administration, something that the average person may not remember about the 1980s. But it’s always been an uneasy alliance for consumer-facing tech companies, especially over recent decades.

That’s all changing, according to many folks who align more with President Donald Trump, who was once considered a shameful person to represent in polite company. As Andrew Bosworth, the CTO at Meta, who is joining the Army Reserves, told the Wall Street Journal, “There’s a lot of patriotism that has been under the covers that I think is coming to light in the Valley.”

Bosworth and his buddies can be a bit more open about their goals now that Trumpism has been more normalized in the president’s second term. But they also run the risk of hitching their wagons—and the reputation of the companies they represent—to a president who’s famous for acting recklessly. After all, this is the guy who just a couple of days ago told Tehran, a city of 10 million people, to evacuate and is heavily suggesting he’s going to get the U.S. into war with Iran.

Some people may think that’s a good thing, and at the very least, it might be a wise business decision for some firm like Palantir to hope for war. But OpenAI and Meta have a lot of products that depend on buy-in from the general public. And we’ve seen guys like Elon Musk take huge hits to their bottom lines after attaching themselves to Trumpism. And with Trump at the helm, any association with the Army is bound to be perilous in a time of war. We all saw the viral videos of Trump’s parade, right?