What Lt. Col. Boz and a Band of Tech Exec Brothers Will Do within the Army | EUROtoday

When I learn a tweet about 4 famous Silicon Valley executives being inducted right into a particular detachment of the United States Army Reserve, together with Meta CTO Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, I questioned its veracity. It’s very laborious to discern reality from satire in 2025, partly due to social media websites owned by Bosworth’s firm. But it certainly was true. According to an official press launch, they’re within the Army now, particularly Detachment 201: the Executive Innovation Corps. Boz is now lieutenant colonel Bosworth.

The different newly commissioned officers embody Kevin Weil, OpenAI’s head of product; Bob McGrew, a former OpenAI head of analysis now advising Mira Murati’s firm Thinking 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 only wandered off some Army base in Kandahar, to hitch a corps that’s named after an HTTP standing code. (Colonel David Butler, communications adviser to the Army chief of employees, advised me their gown uniforms weren’t prepared but.) Detachment 201, wrote the Army in a press launch, is a part of a military-wide transformation initiative that “aims to make the force leaner, smarter, and more lethal.”

The Army’s Executive Innovation Corps (EIC) commissioning ceremony in Conmy Hall, Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall, Va., June 13, 2025.

Photograph: Leroy Council/DVIDS

Don’t blame Donald Trump for this. The program has been within the works for over a 12 months, the brainchild of Brynt Parmeter, the Pentagon’s first chief expertise administration officer. Parmeter, a former fight soldier who headed veteran assist at Walmart earlier than becoming a member of the Department of Defense in 2023, had been pondering the right way to convey skilled technologists into service to replace an insufficiently tech-savvy militia when he met Sankar at a convention early final 12 months. The concept, he says, was to create “an Oppenheimer-like situation” the place senior executives might serve immediately, whereas protecting their present jobs.

Both males collaborated on a plan to herald folks like, effectively, Sankar, who has been a vocal cheerleader of the Valley’s current 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 Street Journal wrote concerning 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 pressure within the navy, this system was fast-tracked and is now in operation. “Ten years ago this probably would have gotten me canceled,” Weil advised 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 Army Reserve. Unlike different reservists, nevertheless, they won’t be required to endure fundamental coaching, although they are going to endure much less immersive health and taking pictures coaching after induction. They can even have the pliability to spend a few of the roughly 120 annual hours working remotely, a perk not supplied to different reservists.

The Army additionally says that these males won’t 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 simple experience to high school their colleagues and superiors within the navy on the right way to make the most of cutting-edge applied sciences for effectivity and lethal pressure.

One would possibly assume the Army would have completed an intensive examine of the particular abilities required for this pilot program and pulled these folks 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 as we speak’s navy—and so they all accepted. According to 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 this can be a pilot program with an unknown consequence, a closed course of was applicable.)