> [...] the four executives will all attend the Army’s six-week Direct Commissioning Course at Fort Benning, Georgia [...]
Sometimes known as "fork and knife school". I can't speak specifically for the Army, but a particular personal incident comes to mind.
When I attended AFROTC field training at Maxwell AFB, in a lot of ways it was a fairly typical boot camp experience, with roaming enlisted training instructors ready to very promptly and firmly correct any deviations from standard in a memorably expedient fashion (much less swearing than Full Metal Jacket, as it's the Air Force). One day during this fine summer camp I found myself on the receiving end of one such chewing out from a TI, for walking around the wrong side of a table in the dining facility.
It was in the midst of this comically scathing tirade (something about him threatening to crawl up my nose and living in my nightmares if I dared try it again) that this Technical Sergeant abruptly stopped, wheeled around and was about to tear into another hapless cadet that took the same detour I did. But instead, without a whit of the seething rage he was pouring out just a second before, he calmly patiently explained to this trainee that she was to take a different route, punctuating the instructions with a "right over there, ma'am". It was at that moment that I noticed that she did not have cadet insignia on her lapels, but captain's bars. It turns out she was a proper M.D., fresh from med school, directly commissioned and immediately outranking the sergeant that was giving me the what-for and her polite guidance.
I remember my grandfather’s descriptions of WWII in the pacific. One was a Marine who made a number of landings and was involved in a lot that “I wish I could forget”.
The other was a Navy doctor. An officer, but really because he was a doctor.
Their experiences were wildly different. Not so much about risk but the Marine was a grunt and his description oozed what it meant to be at that level of rank. The doctor ... his description was that doctors, while they had rank, were largely left alone to their own devices to do what they needed to do. Rank wasn't really relevant to their daily lives.
> One was a Marine who made a number of landings and was involved in a lot that “I wish I could forget”.
My grandfather landed at Tarawa. He only talked about privately, it to family members that were in the service.
> The doctor ... his description was that doctors, while they had rank, were largely left alone to their own devices to do what they needed to do. Rank wasn't really relevant to their daily lives.
From my experience, military doctors tend to be doctors that happen to wear a uniform. They already have the skills actually needed by the service (unlike most military jobs, where it's assumed that you know little to nothing of the job), the direct commissioning training is mostly so they can function and fit in that environment.
My wife and I were at a formal event dinner banquet related to her med school. We were in a small group chatting: On one side an Air Force ROTC med student in his dress uniform and his wife. On the other side another med student and her Navy NCO husband in his dress uniform. I remember distinctly that the Navy NCO kept politely saying “sir” when he addressed the Air Force ROTC.
The Air Force officer mentioned that he got a “light” version of basic training. The Navy NCO said nothing. His ROTC’s wife added that it must have been petty light, because she remembered a call from him where he mentioned that they ran out of ice cream.
Having been through both: AFROTC field training is about half the length of USAF enlisted basic. In fairness to the cadets, they attend training throughout their college years before and after Field Traning - the whole experience is more of a slow long ramp of goofy BS that tries one's patience in ways most enlisted troops won't quite comprehend until they're an experienced NCO. It's also much easier to "just be a number" and muddle through enlisted BMT. Try that in officer training, and you'll be ranked bottom of the class with limited career options.
In terms of physical exertion, enlisted BMT is a bit more intense. Job-specific training might be much more intense, for the handful of AFSCs that see ground combat.
I'm reminded of an ex who was inquiring about paying for dental school on a ROTC scholarship. She tells the recruiter that she was worried about all the yelling she'd have to deal with at bootcamp since she has severe anxiety. And the recruiter told her the medical officers don't do any of that, she had nothing to worry about.
I also went to ROTC field training at Maxwell, and had a similar experience. Once on the way to the dinning hall with another cadet, we were saluted by two new medical officers who were very confused.
They are part time and this is just another revolving door between the military and industry. They are literally there to sell their products (and brag about "having served").
"The Army in March 2021 awarded Microsoft a 10-year contract worth up to $21.9 billion for IVAS, but the initial version of the system experienced technical difficulties with a number of soldiers experiencing dizziness, headaches or nausea after wearing the goggles."
Notably, it was not formally possible to buy a commission in the British Navy. This is because the British Empire was an island and so their Navy actually mattered and couldn’t be lead by a bunch of idiots with vanity titles.
Yup, I’d expect a data scientist or equivalent programmer commissioning as a captain, not a c-suite executive that is more of an MBA graduate. It all seems fishy.
I have never been an officer, but the C-suite in the military is like "flag rank" which is above Colonel (Brigadier General.) Colonels are more like high management. But they likely won't be promoted, won't have an actual command, and rank means little more than the title.
Making military doctors and dentists colonels is mostly about putting them on an equivalent place on the pay scale to where they would be in civilian life.
Some airline someday is going to figure out that if you guarantee overhead luggage space, people will pay more to get on the plane last instead of first.
Don’t forget there was already a team of industry-sourced (non-commissioned) tech experts in the Pentagon, the Defense Digital Service, that operated for almost a decade before being sidelined by DOGE:
The key difference is the DDS folks were not uniformed military. That can make all the difference when trying to sell your product or service to a military decision maker.
It's not even that. The biggest difference is by being sworn in, they now have Legal authorities and rights awarded to military personnel, but are also subject to the UCMJ. Depending on how they structure the program they may be able to get Title 10 and 50 coverage and possibly others. This drastically changes what they legally can or can't do on behalf of the USG. There's more to this than people realize. It's also not all that new. In the past they had "Consultants" deeply integrated into agencies to solve the same issues.
Palantir, Crowdstrike, many others pretty much started inside the govt and were built around classified information as a means to get their advantage. It's not right, but It's definitely something that happens. Source: I was there for it with both orgs and even back then everyone though Dmitry formely from CS was a dick. I still have the mousepad that Palantir created for the office in lieu of a training guide (just a bunch of printed shortcuts / commands).
Direct commissioning is for bringing people in as lieutenants (O1). Think a 22 year old college graduate.
Lieutenant colonels are the equivalent of corporate senior directors (O5). This means they could be either a battalion commander, approximate footprint of 300-500 people, or a senior staff officer for a command/division. By that point they are expected to have at least 15 years military experience.
The challenge at that level of management is writing and evaluating plans for their organization that must be able to move across the battlefield and roll up all corresponding metrics. Think of that as moving your entire office staff to a new location 50 miles away as frequently as needed. A 6 week bootcamp won’t get you that. As someone with 28 years military experience and a corporate nerd with almost 20 years experience I promise that corporate management is not the same. That part time job can suddenly feel like a full time responsibility.
The exception to this are licensed doctors and lawyers. They enter the military as captains instead of lieutenants.
> The exception to this are licensed doctors and lawyers. They enter the military as captains instead of lieutenants.
And chaplains, I think. The three professions corresponding to higher faculties in a medieval university. Many weird things in the military make more sense when you recognize them as leftovers from ancient social structures.
Chaplains are complicated. The Army has a dire shortage of chaplains so they may enter as first lieutenants (O2) as they attend their seminary education on condition they must attain a divinity masters and sponsorship from a religious organization. It used to be they would enter as captains just like doctors and lawyers.
It's rare as hell, but you can commission directly at higher ranks if you have the required experience and credentials and there is sufficient need in the service. The CO of the dental unit at Fort Hood that did my gum grafts 14 years ago direct commissioned at O6.
As there isn't really any civilian equivalent to combat branches of service, however, they won't direct commission anyone into the infrantry at that level, sure, at least not since the civil war era.
The point of commissioning them isn’t for them to take command of a line infantry battalion. It’s to have them have authority to do stuff that requires a Lt col, but is not actually commanding. It’s like how we commissioned a whole bunch of people in WWII to do admin jobs.
I get that. I am a signal officer. Those guys will be signal officers. I have a pretty solid idea of what their level of actual responsibility is. The point is they need some expertise to exercise that level of responsibility. Otherwise they are tiny advisors masquerading as people with real legal authority.
Isn't there already a system in place for that sort of thing. I know a couple civilian experts who worked as consultants in iraq (think like water treatment plant engineers) who were given "effective" officer ranks to smooth out interactions with the military members they worked with directly, clarify who they could and couldn't tell what to do. But they didn't wear uniforms, weren't saluted, weren't considered members of the military for most purposes, are not counted as veterans, etc.
If it were simply that, this is a problem the military has run into before and has solutions to it. This is something else: at best weird propaganda at worst I don't really know.
As former enlisted myself, I don't understand why they need to be in the military to serve as advisors. No one's going to treat them like real LTCs anyway (outwardly they will, of course, but not with the same respect).
That also strikes me as odd. When I was deployed, we had plenty of contractors/DOD civilians to handle various technical things, and to help maintain continuity while the rest of us rotated in and out of the theater. They didn't need to be commissioned.
If these execs were experienced engineers that needed to be embedded in a unit in the field, maybe, and definitely not at O-5. Usually these sorts of urgently-needed experts become instructors and teach troops the specific technical skills without the need for being enlisted/commissioned/warrant themselves.
Someone more familiar with the political games inside the Pentagon will better understand this decision.
It’s probably a fun ego boost for the execs involved. And it makes them subject to following orders, to military jail for not obeying, etc, which is presumably a nice thing to have in your back pocket when managing egostistic jerks.
Contractors down range used to have something like a company logo or something as their rank, you could always tell because it would be some guy with a gut and long hair in fatigues with a weird rank. Give them that and let them feel like soldiers, not an oak leaf
In Boz I can't think of anyone less suited to the task.
At every stage of the RL expansion there has been a stunning lack of both solid direction and attention to detail. Not to mention piss poor logistics.
The default position for anything in meta/facebook is to just throw people at the problem. Which I suppose is a good match for a stereotypical view of the army.
> The Detachment 201 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.
So we're taking executives from companies that sell to the government and military to advise the military on what to adopt. And not only are we bringing them into the fold, we're commissioning so we can give them a pension in 20 years after they've recommended their own employers' services and products.
It's just building a club for rich folks to commission in as a field grade officer and give them a fancy dress uniform to wear to official government events where they get to direct contracts towards their parent companies.
That's all it is. Normally the officers come up through the ranks and build a grift to retire and peddle back to the military (see things like BeaverFit), but Detachment 201 lets them direct commission the grift back.
By paycheck my company's CEO is worth 95 senior engineers and that's before stock options. With stock options he's worth 265 senior engineers! (Or 240 and 670 junior developers respectively)
He's so skilled he splits atoms with his mind. He probably should be president, except he's nowhere near the highest paid executive in the US. Probably not in the top 500.
Officers are management, a lt col is similar to a director at a tech company.
If they're trying to modernize the strategy and direction of the organization before bringing in additional SMEs, this makes a lot of sense. Good leadership and a good direction really does matter.
After the overall direction and vision is in place, then they can bring in technical SMEs who are hopefully also direct commissioned in and not just contractors hired for a year or 2.
This strikes me as very odd. First of all, what's in it for the execs. Surely pay is worse so there must be some insider benefit. Or can they hold both positions? That just screams conflict of interest.
Secondly, why execs instead of people with actual technical skills. Surely military execs are already better prepared at managing military than some tech execs.
Lastly, as a non-U.S. citizen the optics seem horrible to me. Fire generals/people who served "the normal way" and bring in tech execs...that's gotta piss of just about anyone who ever served as a storyline or am I totally off base here?
Of course the optics are terrible but it doesn’t matter. Everyone is already either pissed off with trump or dedicated to never being pissed off at him.
But recent developments with Musk, the FY26 budget proposal, and CA National Guard make me think that the Republican party is starting to fracture more, and some of them must be taking a dimmer view of Trump in the process.
Maybe this gives US gov an extra leash on them? Surely the standards of what's approaching treason are different for people in service, so maybe it's just a way to trick execs into getting personally under government control, so they'll not be able to shield behind the whole "free enterprise" / "private business" thing when they want to trade with China or EU against the US Gov preferences?
Maybe they get to pull a pension too? There's lots of examples of Admirals and Generals who "retire", get their pension payouts, but come back as an "advisor" effectively doubling their pay.
> The recruits won’t work on projects involving their employers, George said, and will be firewalled from sharing information with their employers or participating in projects that could provide them or their companies with financial gain.
The reality is that other countries are preparing for Ender's Game style warfare with drones, robotics, and digital sabotage so the U.S. needs to keep pace. This announcement doesn't surprise me at all.
Look up everything from Assault Breaker we didn't develop because the funding ran out. Drones guiding artillery? Been there done that. Digital sabotage? Little thing called Stuxnet comes to mind.
Keeping pace by helping with other countries' sabotage efforts? If these actions actually ended up benefiting the country rather than being yet another nepotism based snipe hunt for woke, that would be a pleasant surprise.
Yea! We can't fall behind as the worlds leading weapons manufacturer. It's important that we tap even Silicon Valley to continue producing weapons of war and death.
> This announcement doesn't surprise me at all.
Our burgeoning legacy hasn't surprised me since the 90s.
not sure why ender’s game needs a reference when #1 & #3 have been around for 10-15+ years. i sort of remain doubtful that robotics will play as large of a role with how large much less of a role that infantry has played in modern warfare (think of exoskeletons, robotic carriers, terminator style killing machines)
What exactly do you call modern warfare, because I've been "involved in warfare" pretty recently, and without a lot of infantry nothing really happens.
It's a short walk from Facebook to Palantir, literally and metaphorically. Meta staffing for a long time has been packed with IDF operatives and AIPAC goons. All hail our not-so-new tech overlords next time you watch footage of a block in Gaza being "precison" targeted, taking out the whole extended family of an AI-generated target.
The Royal Aircraft Factory (Farnborough) during the notorious "White Feather" campaign hysteria of World War I; its workers were given a military rank, its superintendent, Mervyn O'Gorman, got field-promoted to lieutenant-colonel.
The somewhat famous quote "Alight here for the Home of Rest with Army Exemption thrown in", a familiar greeting to RAF's working force by Farnborough's tram conductors, is a testament to it.
WW2, William Knudsen, president of General Motors, was directly commissioned in as a 3 star general. He was in charge of War Production. Sometimes, deep industry expertise can’t wait for OCS. Granted, this was wartime.
These guys are being commissioned into the Army Reserve the idea is that they can get basic military instruction now and when the shit hits the fan the Army can immediately call up their expertise and they will understand how things work.
O-5 isn't that much power - as a battalion commander, that's leading about 300-1,000 soldiers. They wouldn't necessarily be leading troops, but instead be in advisory roles where the rank might have them be taken a little more seriously by flag officers than if they were commissioned as a company grade officer.
Direction commission officers aren't line-officers (AFAIK), so they are don't command in the way you're describing. That assumes doctor/lawyer/nurse though...
I don't know any tech execs and I am only remotely familiar with the military, but I am hazarding a guess that the cultures in tech and the military are not at all similar. I'm also guessing that there is a massive difference between fighting for Ukraine by using your tech skills and participating in a time-limited, no-real-skin-in-the-game learning exercise.
Not to mention that at the same time this is happening, SecDef fired a number of generals, and the military is being used for political purposes, at least according to some.
This is common w/the Army and Navy, less so with other branches (and uncommon in the Marine Corps).
But it's most common for medical skills training, and very unusual to bring them in at this rank. Even MDs typically come in around O-3 (Captain/equivalent).
People wonder why execs, not people with actual tech skills. I'll wager that for the military/government, this is not really about what skills those people bring in - it's about that accepting this role puts them under jurisdiction of military justice, and suddenly all kinds of things that are business-as-usual when e.g. dealing with foreign powers, could become potential UCMJ offenses.
Call me conspiracy theorist if you like, but this looks to me like US Gov seeking to put a leash on the tech/AI companies, by tricking execs into getting personally exposed for things that would otherwise qualify as private business. Strategically, that's worth way more than just getting some FAANG engineers as part-time advisors.
"When their AI system went wrong and caused that massacre and required a sortie of F-35s to neutralize, we immediately took internal accountability and started processing them through the UCMJ. This kind of thing will never happen again, we are making sure of it."
I got detached, as a professional, to NATO. I got an officer grade despite never having been in the army.
The first thing I did when I met the real soldiers was to clarify that I got the grade for reasons, but that I absolutely am a civil and have no intent to be a bighead asshole who will boss them around just because that have less bars on the shoulders than I was given.
We started from a very, very good foot and had a wonderful collaboration.
Just do not pretend to be what you're not and things will be fine.
As overt corporatism goes, you can do a lot worse than simultaneously embed tech execs in the military command chain, and military commanders in the tech industry.
> The four new Army Reserve 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, advisor at Thinking Machines Lab and former Chief Research Officer for OpenAI.
I've always said that the FUD surrounding AGI destroying humanity is silly, as long as we aren't so stupid as to bring AI into military decisions. This group of leaders doesn't bode well from that perspective.
I would have thought for sure any such transformation would come from the NSA, since they strike me as a more tech-forward organization, or from In-Q-Tel (which I believe is mostly the CIA) that already has a strong relationship with the commercial tech space
I also saw a lot of blockchain specialists joining the banks a few years back. Coincidence? Not quite. Defense is probably the largest consumer of technology and also driving force behind tech innovations (ARPANET?).
> The Army calls the program to recruit Silicon Valley executives Detachment 201: The Army’s Executive Innovation Corps. One of the executives, Andrew Bosworth of Meta (formerly Facebook) posted on X that the “201” monicker was a nod to an HTML coding command, in which a “201” response indicates the creation of a new programming resource.
Somehow I imagine that Andrew Bosworth didn't phrase things quite that way.
Imagine a former Huawei executive joins PLA, all hell would break loose. Somehow it's more moral or patriotic for these guys. Seems like the hawkish were right all along.
> Imagine a former Huawei executive joins PLA, all hell would break loose.
What makes you think PLA soldiers and officers aren’t embedded in Chinese tech companies already? After all, their executive boards usually have CCP “representation”.
Yeah because someone who spent their days building dashboards or working on the metaverse will have the first clue on how to deploy drones in the military. What a joke!
Their not asking them to be mission specialists. They're asking to guidance on how to build out and maintain a tech platform for the product (drone) folks to build on.
But they don't have experience to do that in the context of the military. All they have experience with is building leaking spyware platforms. Terribly unfit for the military.
maybe the drones will play tiktok videos to the insurgents and thus render them dumb and thoughtless, or perhaps cause them to fight amongst themselves
Such ranks tend to be mostly for pay grade and they count for some formal but mostly meaningless stuff like who salutes whom first and who gets to tell off whom (in practice for such officers, it's more a shield than a weapon - everyone knows which kind of officers they are) in general situations. These officers aren't going to be leading direct fighting or anything like that.
Source: Was a draftee once, talked to a technical officer later.
https://archive.md/fDLHK
Comments merged from :
U.S. Army bringing in big tech executives as lieutenant colonels - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44270660 - June 2025 (55 comments)
> [...] the four executives will all attend the Army’s six-week Direct Commissioning Course at Fort Benning, Georgia [...]
Sometimes known as "fork and knife school". I can't speak specifically for the Army, but a particular personal incident comes to mind.
When I attended AFROTC field training at Maxwell AFB, in a lot of ways it was a fairly typical boot camp experience, with roaming enlisted training instructors ready to very promptly and firmly correct any deviations from standard in a memorably expedient fashion (much less swearing than Full Metal Jacket, as it's the Air Force). One day during this fine summer camp I found myself on the receiving end of one such chewing out from a TI, for walking around the wrong side of a table in the dining facility.
It was in the midst of this comically scathing tirade (something about him threatening to crawl up my nose and living in my nightmares if I dared try it again) that this Technical Sergeant abruptly stopped, wheeled around and was about to tear into another hapless cadet that took the same detour I did. But instead, without a whit of the seething rage he was pouring out just a second before, he calmly patiently explained to this trainee that she was to take a different route, punctuating the instructions with a "right over there, ma'am". It was at that moment that I noticed that she did not have cadet insignia on her lapels, but captain's bars. It turns out she was a proper M.D., fresh from med school, directly commissioned and immediately outranking the sergeant that was giving me the what-for and her polite guidance.
So by Direct Commissioning, it is indeed direct.
I remember my grandfather’s descriptions of WWII in the pacific. One was a Marine who made a number of landings and was involved in a lot that “I wish I could forget”.
The other was a Navy doctor. An officer, but really because he was a doctor.
Their experiences were wildly different. Not so much about risk but the Marine was a grunt and his description oozed what it meant to be at that level of rank. The doctor ... his description was that doctors, while they had rank, were largely left alone to their own devices to do what they needed to do. Rank wasn't really relevant to their daily lives.
> One was a Marine who made a number of landings and was involved in a lot that “I wish I could forget”.
My grandfather landed at Tarawa. He only talked about privately, it to family members that were in the service.
> The doctor ... his description was that doctors, while they had rank, were largely left alone to their own devices to do what they needed to do. Rank wasn't really relevant to their daily lives.
From my experience, military doctors tend to be doctors that happen to wear a uniform. They already have the skills actually needed by the service (unlike most military jobs, where it's assumed that you know little to nothing of the job), the direct commissioning training is mostly so they can function and fit in that environment.
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I guess that rank is invisible to military doctors the same way that money is to rich people or positive attention is to good looking people.
My wife and I were at a formal event dinner banquet related to her med school. We were in a small group chatting: On one side an Air Force ROTC med student in his dress uniform and his wife. On the other side another med student and her Navy NCO husband in his dress uniform. I remember distinctly that the Navy NCO kept politely saying “sir” when he addressed the Air Force ROTC.
The Air Force officer mentioned that he got a “light” version of basic training. The Navy NCO said nothing. His ROTC’s wife added that it must have been petty light, because she remembered a call from him where he mentioned that they ran out of ice cream.
Having been through both: AFROTC field training is about half the length of USAF enlisted basic. In fairness to the cadets, they attend training throughout their college years before and after Field Traning - the whole experience is more of a slow long ramp of goofy BS that tries one's patience in ways most enlisted troops won't quite comprehend until they're an experienced NCO. It's also much easier to "just be a number" and muddle through enlisted BMT. Try that in officer training, and you'll be ranked bottom of the class with limited career options.
In terms of physical exertion, enlisted BMT is a bit more intense. Job-specific training might be much more intense, for the handful of AFSCs that see ground combat.
Reminds of the story of Major Major from Catch 22 who was promoted due to a computer bug to the rank of Major and outranked everyone in flight school
Iirc it was due to a literal computer finding it funny, back when computer was a job title and not a machine.
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I'm reminded of an ex who was inquiring about paying for dental school on a ROTC scholarship. She tells the recruiter that she was worried about all the yelling she'd have to deal with at bootcamp since she has severe anxiety. And the recruiter told her the medical officers don't do any of that, she had nothing to worry about.
I also went to ROTC field training at Maxwell, and had a similar experience. Once on the way to the dinning hall with another cadet, we were saluted by two new medical officers who were very confused.
LOL.
They are part time and this is just another revolving door between the military and industry. They are literally there to sell their products (and brag about "having served").
What are other nepotistic initiatives?
https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2024/10/10/...
"The Army in March 2021 awarded Microsoft a 10-year contract worth up to $21.9 billion for IVAS, but the initial version of the system experienced technical difficulties with a number of soldiers experiencing dizziness, headaches or nausea after wearing the goggles."
Long ago the British Army used to sell commissions. A form of highly institutionalalized corruption. Mostly about social status.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchase_of_commissions_in_t...
Maybe it's going to be a system for allowing tech companies to deploy their personal defense battalion against riots?
Notably, it was not formally possible to buy a commission in the British Navy. This is because the British Empire was an island and so their Navy actually mattered and couldn’t be lead by a bunch of idiots with vanity titles.
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Yup, I’d expect a data scientist or equivalent programmer commissioning as a captain, not a c-suite executive that is more of an MBA graduate. It all seems fishy.
I have never been an officer, but the C-suite in the military is like "flag rank" which is above Colonel (Brigadier General.) Colonels are more like high management. But they likely won't be promoted, won't have an actual command, and rank means little more than the title.
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Making military doctors and dentists colonels is mostly about putting them on an equivalent place on the pay scale to where they would be in civilian life.
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None of these people are MBA types. They’re also not “data scientists or equivalent,” but quite hands-dirty operators nonetheless.
>They are literally there to sell their products (and brag about "having served").
Gets you free priority boarding on all flights you take.
Some airline someday is going to figure out that if you guarantee overhead luggage space, people will pay more to get on the plane last instead of first.
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Not sure it’s relevant in the cloths these guys take
Don’t forget there was already a team of industry-sourced (non-commissioned) tech experts in the Pentagon, the Defense Digital Service, that operated for almost a decade before being sidelined by DOGE:
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/15/pentagons-digital-r...
The key difference is the DDS folks were not uniformed military. That can make all the difference when trying to sell your product or service to a military decision maker.
It's not even that. The biggest difference is by being sworn in, they now have Legal authorities and rights awarded to military personnel, but are also subject to the UCMJ. Depending on how they structure the program they may be able to get Title 10 and 50 coverage and possibly others. This drastically changes what they legally can or can't do on behalf of the USG. There's more to this than people realize. It's also not all that new. In the past they had "Consultants" deeply integrated into agencies to solve the same issues.
Palantir, Crowdstrike, many others pretty much started inside the govt and were built around classified information as a means to get their advantage. It's not right, but It's definitely something that happens. Source: I was there for it with both orgs and even back then everyone though Dmitry formely from CS was a dick. I still have the mousepad that Palantir created for the office in lieu of a training guide (just a bunch of printed shortcuts / commands).
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Really? I would assume that most ranked personnel would be less impressed by a person wearing a uniform that they never earned and don’t deserve.
But then again, pomp and circumstance…
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Direct commissioning is for bringing people in as lieutenants (O1). Think a 22 year old college graduate.
Lieutenant colonels are the equivalent of corporate senior directors (O5). This means they could be either a battalion commander, approximate footprint of 300-500 people, or a senior staff officer for a command/division. By that point they are expected to have at least 15 years military experience.
The challenge at that level of management is writing and evaluating plans for their organization that must be able to move across the battlefield and roll up all corresponding metrics. Think of that as moving your entire office staff to a new location 50 miles away as frequently as needed. A 6 week bootcamp won’t get you that. As someone with 28 years military experience and a corporate nerd with almost 20 years experience I promise that corporate management is not the same. That part time job can suddenly feel like a full time responsibility.
The exception to this are licensed doctors and lawyers. They enter the military as captains instead of lieutenants.
> The exception to this are licensed doctors and lawyers. They enter the military as captains instead of lieutenants.
And chaplains, I think. The three professions corresponding to higher faculties in a medieval university. Many weird things in the military make more sense when you recognize them as leftovers from ancient social structures.
Chaplains are complicated. The Army has a dire shortage of chaplains so they may enter as first lieutenants (O2) as they attend their seminary education on condition they must attain a divinity masters and sponsorship from a religious organization. It used to be they would enter as captains just like doctors and lawyers.
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It's rare as hell, but you can commission directly at higher ranks if you have the required experience and credentials and there is sufficient need in the service. The CO of the dental unit at Fort Hood that did my gum grafts 14 years ago direct commissioned at O6.
As there isn't really any civilian equivalent to combat branches of service, however, they won't direct commission anyone into the infrantry at that level, sure, at least not since the civil war era.
The point of commissioning them isn’t for them to take command of a line infantry battalion. It’s to have them have authority to do stuff that requires a Lt col, but is not actually commanding. It’s like how we commissioned a whole bunch of people in WWII to do admin jobs.
I get that. I am a signal officer. Those guys will be signal officers. I have a pretty solid idea of what their level of actual responsibility is. The point is they need some expertise to exercise that level of responsibility. Otherwise they are tiny advisors masquerading as people with real legal authority.
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Isn't there already a system in place for that sort of thing. I know a couple civilian experts who worked as consultants in iraq (think like water treatment plant engineers) who were given "effective" officer ranks to smooth out interactions with the military members they worked with directly, clarify who they could and couldn't tell what to do. But they didn't wear uniforms, weren't saluted, weren't considered members of the military for most purposes, are not counted as veterans, etc.
If it were simply that, this is a problem the military has run into before and has solutions to it. This is something else: at best weird propaganda at worst I don't really know.
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I've seen some specialist docs with extensive experience direct commission as an O5
As former enlisted myself, I don't understand why they need to be in the military to serve as advisors. No one's going to treat them like real LTCs anyway (outwardly they will, of course, but not with the same respect).
That also strikes me as odd. When I was deployed, we had plenty of contractors/DOD civilians to handle various technical things, and to help maintain continuity while the rest of us rotated in and out of the theater. They didn't need to be commissioned.
If these execs were experienced engineers that needed to be embedded in a unit in the field, maybe, and definitely not at O-5. Usually these sorts of urgently-needed experts become instructors and teach troops the specific technical skills without the need for being enlisted/commissioned/warrant themselves.
Someone more familiar with the political games inside the Pentagon will better understand this decision.
It’s probably a fun ego boost for the execs involved. And it makes them subject to following orders, to military jail for not obeying, etc, which is presumably a nice thing to have in your back pocket when managing egostistic jerks.
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Contractors down range used to have something like a company logo or something as their rank, you could always tell because it would be some guy with a gut and long hair in fatigues with a weird rank. Give them that and let them feel like soldiers, not an oak leaf
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In Boz I can't think of anyone less suited to the task.
At every stage of the RL expansion there has been a stunning lack of both solid direction and attention to detail. Not to mention piss poor logistics.
The default position for anything in meta/facebook is to just throw people at the problem. Which I suppose is a good match for a stereotypical view of the army.
> The default position for anything in meta/facebook is to just throw people at the problem
sounds like a perfect match for the military
Because this is a different country now. I imagine someone who lived under a military dictatorship would not be shocked by this new approach.
Your comment doesn’t really make sense.
It’s too late to edit, but it could use significantly improve clarity/elaboration.
Possibly to subject them to military law and therefore exert significantly more control over their commissioned period.
I wonder which vaccines they'll be required to take and whether they'll be subjected to drug testing :)
It's an ego trip. That's all.
It's kind of weird how getting owned by the state might be ego boost for those people.
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Get those sweet "Veteran" plates.
Get those sweet "Veteran" plates.
In my state that only requires a DD-214 with honorable discharge and $50.
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> The Detachment 201 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.
So we're taking executives from companies that sell to the government and military to advise the military on what to adopt. And not only are we bringing them into the fold, we're commissioning so we can give them a pension in 20 years after they've recommended their own employers' services and products.
It's just building a club for rich folks to commission in as a field grade officer and give them a fancy dress uniform to wear to official government events where they get to direct contracts towards their parent companies.
That's all it is. Normally the officers come up through the ranks and build a grift to retire and peddle back to the military (see things like BeaverFit), but Detachment 201 lets them direct commission the grift back.
You think they’ll still be in for 20 years? And you need 20 “good years” to get a pension for non-active duty service.
https://www.wsj.com/tech/army-reserve-tech-executives-meta-p...
https://archive.is/pGSZO
The choice to pick up executives rather than engineers is a bit confusing if the goal is to modernize.
Executives are obviously more skilled. Just check out their paychecks. Each of them is worth at least a dozen engineers.
By paycheck my company's CEO is worth 95 senior engineers and that's before stock options. With stock options he's worth 265 senior engineers! (Or 240 and 670 junior developers respectively)
He's so skilled he splits atoms with his mind. He probably should be president, except he's nowhere near the highest paid executive in the US. Probably not in the top 500.
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Officers are management, a lt col is similar to a director at a tech company.
If they're trying to modernize the strategy and direction of the organization before bringing in additional SMEs, this makes a lot of sense. Good leadership and a good direction really does matter.
After the overall direction and vision is in place, then they can bring in technical SMEs who are hopefully also direct commissioned in and not just contractors hired for a year or 2.
I think it would have been cool to see them allow a hand chosen direct report join them. And maybe that direct report’s hand chosen direct report too.
In fairness, the military is full of engineers.
It's about pushing an agenda and selecting the people with the correct (lack of) morality to do it.
This strikes me as very odd. First of all, what's in it for the execs. Surely pay is worse so there must be some insider benefit. Or can they hold both positions? That just screams conflict of interest.
Secondly, why execs instead of people with actual technical skills. Surely military execs are already better prepared at managing military than some tech execs.
Lastly, as a non-U.S. citizen the optics seem horrible to me. Fire generals/people who served "the normal way" and bring in tech execs...that's gotta piss of just about anyone who ever served as a storyline or am I totally off base here?
Of course the optics are terrible but it doesn’t matter. Everyone is already either pissed off with trump or dedicated to never being pissed off at him.
I somewhat agree with your thesis.
But recent developments with Musk, the FY26 budget proposal, and CA National Guard make me think that the Republican party is starting to fracture more, and some of them must be taking a dimmer view of Trump in the process.
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Maybe this gives US gov an extra leash on them? Surely the standards of what's approaching treason are different for people in service, so maybe it's just a way to trick execs into getting personally under government control, so they'll not be able to shield behind the whole "free enterprise" / "private business" thing when they want to trade with China or EU against the US Gov preferences?
Maybe they get to pull a pension too? There's lots of examples of Admirals and Generals who "retire", get their pension payouts, but come back as an "advisor" effectively doubling their pay.
> Surely military execs are already better prepared at managing military than some tech execs.
That’s an assumption
Former Major, Iraq War Veteran and Air Force academy graduate here.
I can’t think of many worse ideas.
But here we are
Ah, "the merger of corporate and state power", what's the word for that again?
> The recruits won’t work on projects involving their employers, George said, and will be firewalled from sharing information with their employers or participating in projects that could provide them or their companies with financial gain.
A laudable goal. Let's see how that works out.
The reality is that other countries are preparing for Ender's Game style warfare with drones, robotics, and digital sabotage so the U.S. needs to keep pace. This announcement doesn't surprise me at all.
If I was in charge of preparing for drone war, tech company execs are the last people I'd hire. (With one or two exceptions.)
Look up everything from Assault Breaker we didn't develop because the funding ran out. Drones guiding artillery? Been there done that. Digital sabotage? Little thing called Stuxnet comes to mind.
Keeping pace by helping with other countries' sabotage efforts? If these actions actually ended up benefiting the country rather than being yet another nepotism based snipe hunt for woke, that would be a pleasant surprise.
I have read your 2nd sentence several times but don't understand it. Can you explain?
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> so the U.S. needs to keep pace.
Yea! We can't fall behind as the worlds leading weapons manufacturer. It's important that we tap even Silicon Valley to continue producing weapons of war and death.
> This announcement doesn't surprise me at all.
Our burgeoning legacy hasn't surprised me since the 90s.
> It's important that we tap even Silicon Valley to continue producing weapons of war and death.
What else do you propose? NATO, NATO aligned, Ukraine, Taiwan, and Axis of Evil take each other’s hands and start singing Kumbaya?
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Same. I encourage this, in fact.
not sure why ender’s game needs a reference when #1 & #3 have been around for 10-15+ years. i sort of remain doubtful that robotics will play as large of a role with how large much less of a role that infantry has played in modern warfare (think of exoskeletons, robotic carriers, terminator style killing machines)
What exactly do you call modern warfare, because I've been "involved in warfare" pretty recently, and without a lot of infantry nothing really happens.
Have you not followed the war in Ukraine at all? It's all about drones.
It's a short walk from Facebook to Palantir, literally and metaphorically. Meta staffing for a long time has been packed with IDF operatives and AIPAC goons. All hail our not-so-new tech overlords next time you watch footage of a block in Gaza being "precison" targeted, taking out the whole extended family of an AI-generated target.
To what extent will these folks be legally obliged to follow orders from the executive branch? Can they leave the military at any time?
Is there modern precedent for this?
I thought the modern US military was very big on process and tradition in the development of officers.
The Royal Aircraft Factory (Farnborough) during the notorious "White Feather" campaign hysteria of World War I; its workers were given a military rank, its superintendent, Mervyn O'Gorman, got field-promoted to lieutenant-colonel.
The somewhat famous quote "Alight here for the Home of Rest with Army Exemption thrown in", a familiar greeting to RAF's working force by Farnborough's tram conductors, is a testament to it.
Yes, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_commission_officer
And for individuals with the right skills and experience, O-5 isn't unusual.
EDIT: Here's a random example:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Military_Medicine/comments/1468l1f/...
WW2, William Knudsen, president of General Motors, was directly commissioned in as a 3 star general. He was in charge of War Production. Sometimes, deep industry expertise can’t wait for OCS. Granted, this was wartime.
These guys are being commissioned into the Army Reserve the idea is that they can get basic military instruction now and when the shit hits the fan the Army can immediately call up their expertise and they will understand how things work.
Does this count as "Bought Valor?"
Kevin Weil, that tracks...
Are they buying their position?
Yes.
This is such a bad idea, I can't even...
O-5 isn't that much power - as a battalion commander, that's leading about 300-1,000 soldiers. They wouldn't necessarily be leading troops, but instead be in advisory roles where the rank might have them be taken a little more seriously by flag officers than if they were commissioned as a company grade officer.
Direction commission officers aren't line-officers (AFAIK), so they are don't command in the way you're describing. That assumes doctor/lawyer/nurse though...
Is it about giving them power? Or making them subject to it?
I don't know any tech execs and I am only remotely familiar with the military, but I am hazarding a guess that the cultures in tech and the military are not at all similar. I'm also guessing that there is a massive difference between fighting for Ukraine by using your tech skills and participating in a time-limited, no-real-skin-in-the-game learning exercise.
Not to mention that at the same time this is happening, SecDef fired a number of generals, and the military is being used for political purposes, at least according to some.
Everything you said is true. But regarding your last point, I mean, the military has always been used for political purposes.
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Why?
Bad for whom?
This is common w/the Army and Navy, less so with other branches (and uncommon in the Marine Corps).
But it's most common for medical skills training, and very unusual to bring them in at this rank. Even MDs typically come in around O-3 (Captain/equivalent).
Military-Civilian fusion, with US characteristics
People wonder why execs, not people with actual tech skills. I'll wager that for the military/government, this is not really about what skills those people bring in - it's about that accepting this role puts them under jurisdiction of military justice, and suddenly all kinds of things that are business-as-usual when e.g. dealing with foreign powers, could become potential UCMJ offenses.
Call me conspiracy theorist if you like, but this looks to me like US Gov seeking to put a leash on the tech/AI companies, by tricking execs into getting personally exposed for things that would otherwise qualify as private business. Strategically, that's worth way more than just getting some FAANG engineers as part-time advisors.
For engineers it would make sense to bring them in as warrant officers which is where you put technical experts that don’t lead.
"When their AI system went wrong and caused that massacre and required a sortie of F-35s to neutralize, we immediately took internal accountability and started processing them through the UCMJ. This kind of thing will never happen again, we are making sure of it."
I had this same thought reading some other comments. It doesn’t seem much of a conspiratorial stretch.
I got detached, as a professional, to NATO. I got an officer grade despite never having been in the army.
The first thing I did when I met the real soldiers was to clarify that I got the grade for reasons, but that I absolutely am a civil and have no intent to be a bighead asshole who will boss them around just because that have less bars on the shoulders than I was given.
We started from a very, very good foot and had a wonderful collaboration.
Just do not pretend to be what you're not and things will be fine.
You are all the same to me.
As overt corporatism goes, you can do a lot worse than simultaneously embed tech execs in the military command chain, and military commanders in the tech industry.
> The four new Army Reserve 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, advisor at Thinking Machines Lab and former Chief Research Officer for OpenAI.
I've always said that the FUD surrounding AGI destroying humanity is silly, as long as we aren't so stupid as to bring AI into military decisions. This group of leaders doesn't bode well from that perspective.
Are they being run through the Direct Commission Officer Course?[1] That's a six-week boot camp.
[1]https://www.army.mil/article/106407/direct_commission_course...
Surely the incentives that makes a tech exec capable are wildly different from the sort of capabilities expected from any military innovation context?
Regardless of rank or an easy track to a commission, there's no "increasing shareholder value" incentive in the military?
I would have thought for sure any such transformation would come from the NSA, since they strike me as a more tech-forward organization, or from In-Q-Tel (which I believe is mostly the CIA) that already has a strong relationship with the commercial tech space
The key is those agencies are not under the total control of the commander in chief.
Lol this "AI alignment" rap is such a crock in light of all these things.
I also saw a lot of blockchain specialists joining the banks a few years back. Coincidence? Not quite. Defense is probably the largest consumer of technology and also driving force behind tech innovations (ARPANET?).
> The Army calls the program to recruit Silicon Valley executives Detachment 201: The Army’s Executive Innovation Corps. One of the executives, Andrew Bosworth of Meta (formerly Facebook) posted on X that the “201” monicker was a nod to an HTML coding command, in which a “201” response indicates the creation of a new programming resource.
Somehow I imagine that Andrew Bosworth didn't phrase things quite that way.
Maybe he did, he was an executive...
Imagine a former Huawei executive joins PLA, all hell would break loose. Somehow it's more moral or patriotic for these guys. Seems like the hawkish were right all along.
> Imagine a former Huawei executive joins PLA, all hell would break loose.
What makes you think PLA soldiers and officers aren’t embedded in Chinese tech companies already? After all, their executive boards usually have CCP “representation”.
Yeah because someone who spent their days building dashboards or working on the metaverse will have the first clue on how to deploy drones in the military. What a joke!
Their not asking them to be mission specialists. They're asking to guidance on how to build out and maintain a tech platform for the product (drone) folks to build on.
But they don't have experience to do that in the context of the military. All they have experience with is building leaking spyware platforms. Terribly unfit for the military.
Am I understanding correctly that this is to make them obey? If they are in the army they must follow the orders of higher-ups.
I wonder if they joined volunarily or not.
Civic tech is dead.
Reminds me of the scene in “Barton Fink” where the Hollywood producer is made a Lieutenant Colonel immediately after Pearl Harbor.
So, valid targets for US enemies now?
maybe the drones will play tiktok videos to the insurgents and thus render them dumb and thoughtless, or perhaps cause them to fight amongst themselves
good, now the military planning to use technology more and more into war machine
hope franchise film that build dystopian future (ehm ehm ehm T1000 flashback) did not happen
Are they now legitimate military targets?
PLTR stock up or what?
Anything to get more clueless corporate management losers out of industry.
Understand the sentiment..
but I mean..
why put them in the military?
That seems like, I don't know, maybe something that can go south in a lot of different ways.
Such ranks tend to be mostly for pay grade and they count for some formal but mostly meaningless stuff like who salutes whom first and who gets to tell off whom (in practice for such officers, it's more a shield than a weapon - everyone knows which kind of officers they are) in general situations. These officers aren't going to be leading direct fighting or anything like that.
Source: Was a draftee once, talked to a technical officer later.