Comment by teaearlgraycold

I've never been in the military but I'm told they work this way. You often have interactions with people across the org chart (which is a massive tree with >100,000 nodes on it). If there's a dispute over resources or requirements that can't be resolved you need to find the lowest person that is above both of you to settle it. The depth of the org chart is a key similarity here as well. I think I was ~10 degrees from Sundar when I worked for Google. A soldier in the US military is a similar distance from the president. Also the financial numbers that are thrown around are larger than what most governments deal with and on par with even large nations. The US military might get a $100B influx for some war. Google/Amazon/Meta/etc. spend similarly on AI initiatives.