Just jumping right in as a Lt Col? Is there a lot of precedent for that? I know that the armed forces have worked with a lot of scientists before, like in the Manhattan Project, but my understanding is that most of them remained civilians.
Isn't this the sort of thing that warrant officers were created for? Why wouldn't they give him a high warrant officer rank rather than a commissioned rank?
If you bring in people from other organizations, you usually give them titles that reflect their actual roles.
Warrant officers are a leftover from an era when you had to be nobility to become a commissioned officer. Today a lieutenant is just a kid with a college degree, and a lieutenant colonel is someone who did an MBA and was promoted into middle management.
Warrant officers were a realization that you didn't want the only promotion path to be into management (commissioned officers) -- deep skill specialization is critical too.
Lack of social status was historically the key. The guys who knew how to operate the ship had some critical expertise, but because they lacked the social status of nobility (or a college graduate), they were made warrant officers instead of proper officers.
Roles that historically required higher education – doctors, lawyers, and chaplains – are typically commissioned officers. Air forces similarly have commissioned officers doing the actual fighting. While they are not in management positions, their status and responsibilities are comparable to commissioned officers in other branches. In some cultures, the same extends to special forces.
This article is clearly written with an attempt to frame this as a purely patriotic and yet somehow an apolitical ideological decision, but it reads as incredibly fascistic.
It's always good to remember that the "arsenal of democracy" was matched by an "arsenal of fascism" on the other side of WW2 made up of companies like Bayer, IBM, Coca-Cola, Ford, and Mercedes.
Since fascism is more a political philosophy than an economic one, it is hard to define an "objective measure" for this type of thing, but the formal merging of corporate interests with military interests by commissioning C-suite officials is probably as close as we could get.
It might help to contrast it with an authoritarian left-wing approach to this same problem of private and state collaboration. In a system like that, we might expect these companies to be nationalized. But a right-wing system would generally be against that. They would instead keep those companies private, but the company could effectively still become state controlled by intertwining leadership such as we see here.
A free and open society should generally be against the merging of corporations and the state as it allows for too much concentrated power which can lead to both corruption and tyranny. These two sides will of course be aligned generally on the well-being of the nation, but having leadership literally splitting time between the two functions goes way beyond that as it creates problems like inherent conflicts of interest and allows for the circumvention of laws and regulations around how both the government and corporations should work. For example, the government might be prevented from spying on its people such as collecting internet histories and corporations might be prevented from exerting physical power over people like imprisoning them. But if the two groups are acting as one, this distinction doesn't matter. The corporate side can do the data collection to find who needs to be imprisoned and then the state does the dirty work of rounding people up. This would be much easier to implement and hide when it can all be orchestrated by a single person delegating their desires down whatever chain of command can legally accomplish the specific subtask at hand.
And wrapping this all up under the general banner of patriotism is doing them no favors here either as it comes off like the nationalistic propaganda that often accompanies fascism.
Unfortunately, Corporatism is well established as the status quo. Typically the failures of this system are attributed to the market, rather than the hazards of interventionism. This allows further interventions to be applied as "fixes".
Rather than attributing it to right or left, I would characterize it as a synthesis of illiberal ideas. Under Corporatism, even union and worker movements merge with the state. UAW is just as relevant here as state adjacent corporations like Palantir, GM, VW, Airbus or Boeing.
>For example, the government might be prevented from spying on its people such as collecting internet histories and corporations might be prevented from exerting physical power over people like imprisoning them. But if the two groups are acting as one, this distinction doesn't matter.
We saw a similar strategy under the previous administration. Social media companies took direction from the White House to censor user content. Proponents claimed that this didn't violate civil liberties because of the voluntary nature of the collaboration.
It isn't hard to find parallels if you look hard enough. There will always be a nexus of power around the state. Whether it is nationalized corporations or public private partnerships, malign incentives will always exist in these cases. The variation is only in degrees.
However, I think the ultimate distinction for Fascism would be in Mussolini's open call for the state to become an all-encompassing, collectivist force. There is still a contrast to the extent that the US at least plays some lip-service to liberal individualist ideals. Overall, it retains some laissez-faire elements in comparison to other major economies.
> The four new Army Reserve Lt. Cols. are Shyam Sankar, Chief Technology Officer for Palantir; Andrew Bosworth, Chief Technology Officer of Meta; Kevin Weil, Chief Product Officer of OpenAI; and Bob McGrew, advisor at Thinking Machines Lab and former Chief Research Officer for OpenAI.
Oh, great, vertical integration between the violence organizations and the three worst and most amoral companies in tech. I’m sure nothing bad will come out of this.
Where’s Luckey and Anduril? Did he not pass the drug test?
> A decade ago, it would’ve been unthinkable for so many tech heavyweights to openly align with the U.S. military.
It still is. Don’t be fooled by propaganda pieces like this.
It is followed up by two blatant falsehoods:
> But a sea change has taken place in both places because of the urgency and seriousness of the moment.
> Wars in Europe and the Middle East and, above all, the threat of a war in the Pacific have focused the national mind and initiated a scramble for mobilization.
None of this is true in the sense he means it. Businesses have scrambled to have alternatives to China, yes, but that’s nothing to do with the military.
> The Army’s Executive Innovation Corps, under the direction of the Army’s chief of staff, General Randy George, is part of a larger effort by our military to transform the way it prepares for and fights wars in the 21st century.
Expanding the military-industrial complex is of no benefit to anyone other than those in the military-industrial complex (such as the author of this article).
That's probably how Trump says in office indefinitely and makes money off it: either start a giant, unnecessary war and/or push the home front to riot. Cutting Ukraine aid to zero may be part of undermining their efforts so a wider war between NATO and Russia happens, where US might leave NATO and side with Russia.
McKinsey generally ruins most things they touch. Engineering is a different field that McKinsey may claim it has expertise in but has none. Most McKinsey roles are high responsibility and low accountability. Nobody really cares whether their recommendations have worked long term as long as the CEO makes their bonus in the next 6-8 months.
With this I'm not sure what the goal is. If it is to change the process heavy culture of the pentagon to be more automated I'm hopeful. Yes, there is a revolving door between pentagon officials and the prime defense contractors. But I think that is currently a symptom of how the pentagon works, as in, you need to understand the process AND how the product will be used.
> and commission as a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve’s newly formed Detachment 201: Executive Innovation Corps.
'New Executive Innovation Corps brings top tech talent into the Army Reserve to bridge the commercial-military tech gap, with four tech leaders set to join as officers.'[1]
lol. As someone else said in this thread, this is basically stolen valor.
I'll take that as your tacit acknowledgement of not having known of the existence of direct commissions before your outrage got ginned up to the appropriate level. I bet you also think that a president using both the National Guard and active-duty soldiers to quell unrest is, like, totally unprecedented and omg 100% Nazi.
> I bet you also think that a president using both the National Guard and active-duty soldiers to quell unrest is, like, totally unprecedented and omg 100% Nazi.
I'm curious as to what your thoughts are on this topic. From the context it seems like you're not convinced that this is the case.
1992 Los Angeles, 1957 Little Rock, and 1968 pretty much everywhere including the steps of the Capitol tell you that, no, using the National Guard and active-duty soldiers to quell unrest != "totally unprecedented and 100% Nazi".
I haven't seen National Guard and active-duty soldiers quelling any unrest recently .. the deployment to the west coast appears to be a mix of sleeping rough and unrequired performance theatre while the LAPD and state forces have things well in hand.
How exactly is the ruling class at war with the citizenry? If you're alluding to the LA deployments that seems to not be the citizenry since it's illegal immigrants.
It's right up there with the repeated mantra that Latino Trump voters who are now seeing themselves being deported en masse are regretting their vote. Such prattlers might study what they've said for hours without noticing the fallacy.
It seems likely that the reason they've accepted these titles is because they believe that they will be given roles in which they have direct command authority, not just the role of advisor.
However, it also places them in Trump's direct chain of command as CinC. They might not have thought enough about that.
I wonder what the incentives are here. I am a FAANG engineer with a clearance - but would gladly serve my country in a role if the pay cut wasn't so severe
Today? In this current version of America? You like the idea of being deployed internally against protestors? Or maybe, Greenland sounds like a nice holiday spot?
This feels disingenuous to the max. I have a younger brother who went through USAF Basic, and these tech bros just get bestowed a high rank? It smells of stolen valor.
I mean nothing ill towards the 'mud hut', but seriously? All these listed names seem like people who've never had to roll in the mud with the rest of the grunts.
It might not be stolen valor, but you just KNOW these guys are going to play up their veteran status, the Honor and Sacrifice of these Great Men, (the article is already an example of this) when really this is just a trojan horse to enrich themselves and their companies. They're not even full time positions.
Because we're rapidly descending into a fascist oligarchy, and this is a prime example of how that happens. Rapacious billionaires getting their hooks into the armed forces under the watch of a transactional wanna-be dictator, what could go wrong?
this is absolutely one of the last big steps in the fall of america - letting the preferred and loyal plutocrats take positions in the actual armed forces should be horrifying to absolutely everyone that wants a civilian republic to continue beyond the end of this term.
politicians and judges allowing trump to run again was a catastrophe, as was American citizens voting for him to get to have another go.
The Army’s Newest Recruits: Tech Execs From Meta, OpenAI and More - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44268547 - June 2025 (60 comments)