I have a son who is a major in the army — he worked his way up in the ranks, and he’s hoping to earn a promotion to lieutenant colonel sometime before he retires, but it gets harder and harder the farther up the ladder you climb. Next time I talk to him, I’ll have to tell him he’s been doing it all wrong. He’s about to be outranked.
The U.S. military recently announced that four executives from some of the top tech companies in Silicon Valley have joined the Army Reserve as direct-commissioned officers. The move is part of a push to speed up the adoption of technology in the military, but as the news outlet Task & Purpose points out, it’s pretty unusual.
The Army said in a press release that the four executives are Shyam Sankar, CTO at Palantir; Andrew Bosworth, CTO at Meta; Kevin Weil, Chief Product Officer of OpenAI; and Bob McGrew, an advisor at Thinking Machines Lab and former Chief Research Officer for OpenAI.
It’s not just that they’re being jumped up to high rank without earning it, but they also get a few special perks.
The four men are being commissioned at the high rank of lieutenant colonel as part of a program called Detachment 201: The Army’s Executive Innovation Corps. As Task & Purpose notes, the men will get to skip the usual process of taking a Direct Commissioning Course at Fort Benning, Georgia, and they won’t need to complete the Army Fitness Test.
They’re also only going to have to work for about 3 weeks a year, and they’re probably going to be doing everything remotely, so no real soldiers will have to salute them.
The new reservists will serve for about 120 hours a year, according to the Wall Street Journal, and will have a lot of flexibility to work remotely. They’ll work on helping the Army acquire more commercial tech, though it’s not clear how conflict-of-interest issues will be enforced, given the fact that the people all work for companies that would conceivably be selling their wares to the military. In theory, they won’t be sharing information with their companies or “participating in projects that could provide them or their companies with financial gain,” according to the Journal.
If they’re really patriotic, I say send them to bases in Kuwait to prepare for the invasion of Iran. Tip of the spear, baby.
I don’t understand why they have to be commissioned officers to do these jobs. They could just be given GS-13 or GS-14 civilian equivalents to Lt. Col.
I can’t imagine that this is going to go over well with the people who actually have to earn their rank.
A bit dull, needs a nickname. I suggest: the Bone Spur Brigade
Let’s bring back the tradition of selling commissions. It worked so well in the past.
This isn’t the first time. In 1944, David Sarnoff, the head of RCA, was commissioned and in December of that year was promoted to Brigadier General for restoring radio communication in France and for building the first Radio Free Europe transmitter. This was undoubtedly helpful to the war effort, but I can guarantee you Sarnoff did not personally chip one of his manicured fingernails plugging in vacuum tubes, he had unnamed minions do that for him. For his part, he spent the rest of his life making sure everyone addressed him as General Sarnoff (that is, when he wasn’t busy screwing over Edwin Armstrong and Philo T. Farnsworth).
Cross posted from The Infinite Thread:
Link
My father, a veteran of battles in the ET who carried a BAR, was drafted for a second time during the Korean War. He spend his second time in the Army training first time draftees in Texas. The colonel in command was a politically connected guy without the tiniest bit of experience. No amount of lower echelon warnings convinced the brass hats of the need to remove the colonel — until his direction resulted in two dead recruits. Corruption within the military is dangerous to everyone.
@#7 soc25
You’re gonna have to be a bit more specific in your acronyms for us civilian types. I can guess from the clue that it precedes the Korean War that ET might mean European Theater of WWII. I checked with Google about BAR and it suggested Browning Automatic Rifle, which would scan with the rest of your post, especially “carried”, but I don’t really see that as being significant to the point of your post.
They should be assigned to Space Force Mars invasion duties.
PZ,
“Tip of the spear, baby!”
I wholeheartedly agree!
From a military spouse and mother, here.
All the services are pushing really hard to figure out how they can leverage AI, to make them more effective both on or off the battlefield. There are known good ways of bringing in the expertise needed, however. They could set up CRADAs (Cooperative Research and Development Agreements), where a company works to solve a government problem with access to government data/resources and they get to use the knowledge gained to create products for similar customers. The DoD also has working with industry training assignments, where military or civilian DoD personnel get to work with big companies to see how they solve problems. Finally, the DoD has long leveraged the expertise of reservists that also work for big companies.
The sudden rise of AI and its global availability however have the services scrambling to stay ahead of China or any other country that can apply AI to their goals. The ingenuity of the Ukrainians in leveraging newer technologies to embarrass a much more powerful army is making the DoD painfully aware that someone can leverage AI faster and use it against us. The DoD is used to creating new weapon systems over decades (I’ve heard the F-35 uses Pentium processors because of that long lead time), and if they follow the normal developmental rules they know they will not keep up.
@11 It may also be the case that the old Pentium line is one of the few chips that is manufactured almost exclusively in the US, or in 1-2 allied countries (I think Poland might be one), but not China. This was one of the key things in the Chips Act, which of course the idiot in chief decided we didn’t need. I swear, our current administration, and frankly every standing GOP member, at this point remind me more and more of Pakled. If you go back as far enough you even get jokes about how their “leader” will be which ever titled position, whether it be president, queen, emperor, etc., “Has the biggest hat.” And all of them equate stealing from other people, and making themselves “stronger”, even if that strength is an illusion, and they have no clue what the F they are doing, as, “We are smart now!”