Four senior executives of tech giants like Meta and Palantir are being sworn into the Army Reserve as direct-commissioned officers at the unusually high rank of lieutenant colonel as part of a new program to recruit private-sector experts to speed up tech adoption. 

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.

The Reserve’s new lieutenant colonels are Shyam Sankar, chief technology officer for Palantir; Bosworth, chief technology officer of Meta; Kevin Weil, chief product officer of OpenAI; and Bob McGrew, an advisor at Thinking Machines Lab and former chief research officer for OpenAI. Each of the four, who were set to be sworn in Friday, arrive with decades of experience in some of Silicon Valley’s largest and most innovative companies, and with levels of extraordinary personal wealth that careers in the industry often amass.

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. The idea of incorporating private-sector expertise is right out of Ukraine as soldiers there who are engineers or computer scientists in their day jobs are MacGyvering makeshift drones or 3D printing parts to use on the front lines against Russia.

Army officials say the new officers will get at least a taste of traditional Army training before filling their roles tech-focused policy advisors. An Army official told Task & Purpose that the four executives will all attend the Army’s six-week Direct Commissioning Course at Fort Benning, Georgia and will complete the Army Fitness Test and marksmanship training.

Direct Commission officers fill specific roles

The four men will be directly commissioned as officers in the Army Reserve, a hybrid, part-time position that is commonly offered to a range of candidates in highly-trained professionals fields, including doctors, lawyers, veteranrians and others with specific industry skills, such as logistics. However, most Army direct commission officers begin in more junior ranks as captains or majors, where they can immediately take active jobs in their fields rather than be expected to serve in leadership roles they have not been prepared for.

The tech executives will arrive as lieutenant colonels, a rank that most officers reach and hold when they are deep into the second decade of a military career. Lieutenant colonels typically command battalion-sized units, commonly with between 300 to 1,000 soldiers. 

However, direct commission officers often take very different roles than their traditional counterparts, and the four tech executives are unlikely to command traditional formations. As senior business executives, all four have spent decades at some of Silicon Valley’s leading tech giants and fast-growing start-ups.

Silicon Valley is marching on the Pentagon

All four of the executives now work at companies investing heavily in emerging fields like AI and machine learning, two subjects that the Army is looking to fold into future weapon systems. Palantir and OpenAI have been contractors for the Department of Defense, with Meta has announced a partnership with Anduril for troop augmented and virtual reality devices.

“I have accepted this commission in a personal capacity because I am deeply invested in helping advance American technological innovation,” Bosworth wrote in a post on X, adding that their primary role will be as technical experts for Army modernization efforts.

The four are each also multi-millionaires several times over.

Bosworth is one of four of the most senior executives at Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, who report directly to CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg, according to his his hiring letter filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Originally hired at the company in 2006, he is known as one of the key engineers behind the Facebook News Feed. According to Meta filings with the SEC, Bosworth’s salary in 2023 was just under $1 million but — like most Meta executives — he received stock awards between 2018 and 2023 that the company valued at over $75 million in 2024.

Sankar, the chief technology officer for Palantir was, according to his bio with the company, the firm’s thirteenth employee. In 2024 he sold Palantir shares worth $367 million.

McGrew, who advises Thinking Machines Lab, is an alumni of Palantir and OpenAI. According to his LinkedIn, while working as a chief research officer at OpenAI, he led efforts to “build the world’s most powerful AI models and then let the world use them through ChatGPT and the API.”

Weil’s resume includes work at several major tech companies like Microsoft, Twitter, Instagram, Meta, Strava, Planet Labs, and Cisco. According to SEC filings, in 2014 and 2015 he cashed out shares in Twitter worth at least $15 million and holds Planet Labs shares worth close to $7 million. His current role at OpenAI includes stock options in the company that, should it turn public, could be worth several hundred million dollars.

The Detachment 201 program follows Army Chief of Staff Gen. George’s announcement of the Army Transformation Initiative and his Transforming in Contact effort which has smaller prototype units testing new tactics and tech like unmanned aerial systems and electronic warfare jammers in realistic combat training scenarios. 

For instance, the 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Armored Brigade Combat Team is testing new platoons that specialize in specific threats like anti-tank systems, first-person viewer attack, FPV, drones or sensing enemy drones. 

“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,” the Army said in a release.

UPDATE, 6/13/2025; This story has been updated with clarification on the role of direct commission officers in the Army and links to Securities and Exchange Commission documents.

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