The U.S. Army said today it’s bringing four high-ranking tech executives into uniform to help lead a new Army innovation Corps – dubbed Detachment 201 – inside the Reserve component with a mission of helping to bridge the commercial-military tech gap.
The four execs will be sworn in tonight at the rank of lieutenant colonel, ahead of the service’s 250th birthday celebration on Saturday, the service stated in a press release.
The cohort of executives includes Shyam Sankar, the chief technology officer from Palantir; Andrew Bosworth, the CTO from Meta; Kevin Weil, OpenAI’s chief product officer; and Bob McGrew who until last November was chief research officer at OpenAI.
Detachment 20: The Army’s Executive Innovation Corps (Det. 201) is the Army’s new initiative designed to fuse cutting-edge tech expertise with military innovation. Senior tech executives will serve part-time in the Army Reserve as senior advisors in the unit, working on targeted projects to help guide rapid and scalable tech solutions to complex problems.
“By bringing private-sector know-how into uniform, Det. 201 is supercharging efforts like the Army Transformation Initiative, which aims to make the force leaner, smarter, and more lethal,” the service stated.
The Army didn’t provide additional details about how large the new innovation corps will become or if it plans to expand the unit by bringing in more personnel from the tech sector.