US Army now recruiting tech executives from Meta and OpenAI

Awful corporate jargon has entered the US Army, which is now recruiting tech leaders to its new Executive Innovation Corps. The initiative has been designed to fuse tech expertise with military innovation.

Four members of the new nerd brigade, officially called Detachment 201, already joined the Army Reserve last week at the rank of lieutenant colonel.

This might read like an April Fool’s joke – and who knows what the regular troops think about these AI Joes – but the US military has indeed been pushing for closer cooperation with Silicon Valley lately. The techies know a lot about AI, after all.

On Friday, the service swore in Meta’s chief technology officer (CTO), Andrew Bosworth; OpenAI’s chief product officer, Kevin Weil; Palantir’s CTO, Shyam Sankar; and Bob McGrew, an advisor at Thinking Machines Lab who was previously OpenAI’s chief research officer.

The senior tech executives will serve part-time in the Army Reserve as senior advisors, the press release said, adding that “they will work on targeted projects to help guide rapid and scalable tech solutions to complex problems.”

“By bringing private-sector know-how into uniform, Department 201 is supercharging efforts like the Army Transformation Initiative, which aims to make the force leaner, smarter, and more lethal,” said the US Army.

The move is probably no accident. Meta recently partnered with defense contractor Anduril Industries to develop new products for the US military. Last year, Anduril also joined forces with OpenAI.

Meta’s CTO Bosworth – the very same one now joining the Army’s Executive Innovation Corps – said in the beginning of June that there has, in fact, long existed a “silent majority” of Silicon Valley firms that want to pursue defense projects.

“There’s a much stronger patriotic underpinning than I think people give Silicon Valley credit for. Silicon Valley was founded on military development, and there’s really a long history here that we are kind of hoping to return to,” he told Bloomberg.

Not that long ago, even working on tech that might be useful to the military was anathema in Silicon Valley. But now, it seems that even tech execs don’t mind suiting up for service.

Sure, this might be just a marketing ploy, but the US Army seems hopeful that there are going to be more volunteers from the tech industry.

In the press release, it says of the geeky newbies: “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.”