When I read A tweet about Silicon Valley executives was introduced to the special detachment of the U.S. Army Reserve, including Metacenter Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, which I questioned. In 2025, it’s hard to tell the truth from the irony, partly because of the social media website owned by Bosworth. But this is indeed true. According to the official press release, they are now in the Army, especially the Detachment 201: Legion of Administrative Innovation. Bots is now Colonel Bosworth.
Other new commissioners include Kevin Weil, product director at OpenAI; Bob McGrew, former head of open research, now advises Mira Murati’s corporate thinking machine lab. and Shyam Sankar, CEO of Palantir. These middle-aged tech executives were sworn in in camouflage fatigue, as if they were just wandering around some army bases in Kandahar, joining a legion named after the HTTP status code. (Col. David Butler, communications adviser for the Army Chief of Staff, told me that their uniforms were not ready yet.) Detachment 201 wrote in a press release as part of a scoped military transformation initiative that “is designed to make the power more beautiful, smarter, smarter, and more lethal.”
Don’t blame Donald Trump for this. The program has been going on for over a year, and it was the creativity of Brynt Parmeter, the Pentagon’s first chief talent management officer. Parmeter, a former combat soldier who received senior support at Wal-Mart before joining the Department of Defense in 2023, has been thinking about how to bring experienced technicians into service to update a lack of technically savvy militia at a meeting earlier last year. The idea, he said, was to create “a situation similar to Oppenheimer” where senior executives can serve immediately while retaining their current work.
Both have collaborated on a plan to attract people like Sankar, who has been the vocal cheerleader of the valley’s recent advocates of the military and declared the United States in an “undeclared state of emergency” that requires technology-led military labor. When the Wall Street Journal wrote about the upcoming plan last October, Sankar vowed to “rank first.”
To show the fact that the valley is no longer taboo, that its works are closely related to the lethal force in the army, the program is fast-passing and is now in operation. “Ten years ago, that might have me cancelled,” Will told me. “It’s a better state of the world, and people look at it, ‘Oh, wow, that’s important. Freedom is not freedom.'”
The four new officers are full members of the Army Reserve. However, unlike other reserve personnel, although they will receive less immersive fitness and shooting training after induction, they will not need to receive basic training. They also have the flexibility to spend about 120 hours working remotely instead of PERK provided to other reserve personnel.
The Army also said the men would not be sent to fight, so they would not risk their lives in potential war theatres in Iran, Greenland, or downtown Los Angeles, California. Their mission is to use their undeniable expertise to school for their colleagues and bosses in the military in how to leverage cutting-edge technology to increase efficiency and deadly power.
One might think that the Army will conduct extensive research on the specific talents needed for the pilot program and draw these people from the open appeal. That didn’t happen. Sankar helped recruit three other future officers-all men, by intention or coincidence, seemed to satisfy the opposition of the present military, and they accepted it. According to Butler, “Col. Sankar said ‘I want to wear a uniform. I have three more guys who are willing to go with me.”Ver confirmed that he joined after Sankar’s request. (Parmeter told me that since this was a pilot program and the results were unknown, the closure process was appropriate.)
