Why The U.S. Army Made Four Tech Executives Lieutenant Colonels

0:07The U.S. Army Reserves has four surprising new officers. On June 13th, four executives at major technology companies, including Meta and OpenAI, were sworn in as lieutenant colonels. The Army says the exec's newfound status is part of a, quote, new initiative designed to fuse cutting-edge tech expertise with military innovation. So what does that mean? What is the Army hoping to innovate? And how are these new officers meant to serve in the armed forces? You're listening to the 1A Podcast. I'm Nyla Boodoo, in for Jen White. Stay with us. We've got a lot to get into.

0:48Let's meet our panel. Joining us in studio is Sean McFaite. He's a professor at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service. He's also a former paratrooper in the U.S. Army's 82nd Airborne Division and a former private military contractor in Africa. Sean, welcome back to 1A. Wonderful to be back. Joining us from New York City is Stephen Levy. He's an editor-at-large for Wired. Stephen, thank you for joining us as well. My pleasure. Thank you. Stephen, let's start with the backdrop to this story. Where did this idea to have tech executives join the armed forces originate based on the reporting you've been doing?

1:22Sure. So the Pentagon, as this person in charge of talent management, he's a former officer who served in combat and then went to Walmart and headed their veteran employment programs and then came back to the Pentagon for this talent management. And he had been talking to some people in Silicon Valley, including an executive at Palantir, and was talking about getting Silicon Valley smarts into the military, which is a trend that's been happening for the past few years. And they came up with the concept of having people who were currently serving in executive roles in Silicon Valley actually join the Army Reserves as senior officers.

2:15And as part of their Army Reserve duty, they would lend their expertise to the Army. And they would be inducted as lieutenant colonels of pretty high rank. They would be exempt from basic training that other reservists go through. And they would be able to do some of their duty about 120 hours a year remotely. And they recruited three more officers. You know, the volunteer fellow named Jayam Sankar recruited three more officers, including Kevin Wheel, who's the product head of OpenAI. Bob McGrew, who used to work at OpenAI. Now he advises a new company called Thinking Machine Labs. And Andrew Bosworth, who is one of the very top executives at Meta, is the CTO and head of all their AI and reality operation.

3:12And they were inducted wearing camo into the Army Reserve last week. I should note to our audience that we did reach out about having them join the program. We did not hear back, but the invitation stands. Sean, is this something that's typical for the military to do, to invite civilians, or particularly when we think about tech industry executives, to take up officer ranks? No, it's not, and it raises a lot of questions, at least on the face. This is called direct commissioning. And the last time—and a lieutenant colonel, just to be clear, it's a senior rank. Can you help us understand that? Yeah.

3:50So a lieutenant colonel is an officer in the Army. he usually has 15 to 20 years of service. So it's not like you're a private. You don't just go to basic training. You go through 15 years of training and schooling and experiences and successful commands from a company level to something higher. And this is not a small rank. So the last time we – and you just don't throw a uniform on somebody and say you're an officer now. Being an officer is more than the clothes you wear. And the idea that these people are now with no experience a lieutenant colonel, the last time we've done that was probably during World War II maybe.

4:36But that was a whole of society mobilization. Before then, the last time we routinely did this was pre-Civil War when rich people would buy a rank. A rich person would be like, hey, I'm a rich person. I'm going to become a general for this war. Here's a lot of money. And then you had 22-year-old generals running around, which wasn't good for morale or victory. But that's – over time, our military professionalized in the last 150, 175 years. And this, to me, on the outset seems a direct violation of everything that the military profession and the profession of arms in the United States has built – has evolved into.

5:20Now, maybe there's some good reasons, and later on we'll hear perhaps from— Yeah, we are going to be joined by the Army later on in the hour to talk about that. But can I ask you about the Army Reserves specifically? Because these are the reserves. So what are the implications for that? Well, there's a lot of—there's a couple of questions. One are simply conflict of interest questions. I mean, they represent companies. They are senior decision makers in companies that have huge contracts with the Department of Defense. And there's one question about, well, why do you need, you know, there's a conflict of interest there.

5:55There's another question is, why do they need to be wearing a uniform? The military has all sorts of contract vehicles for civilians to be contractors to give advice. What is the magic sauce of being a lieutenant colonel? And third is that there's a warrior ethos issue, whether you're reserves or not. So a reservist, just to be clear, these are sort of like auxiliary soldiers. They're not full-time soldiers at Fort Bragg or someplace like that. They are civilians who, if there's ever like a World War III, they'd be called up, and they would serve alongside active duty measures. We saw this during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

6:36But they basically have a civilian job. Once a month for a weekend, they will train as a unit. And two weeks a year, they will train as a unit someplace. They're not full-time, but they are soldiers. And if you're a lieutenant colonel in the reserves or a lieutenant colonel in active duty, you are a lieutenant colonel. And is that, Stephen, what the case will be for these four people? Well, yeah, they're a unit in and of themselves. So it's not like during the war in Afghanistan or Iraq, some reserve units were called up. This unit will not be called up to the battlefield. They actually said that, you know, no, we don't want these guys, they're all guys, to fight in any kind of war situation, whether it's going to be in Iran or Greenland or wherever.

7:26You know, we don't want to put them at risk. And, you know, they didn't have to go through basic training. They will do some. So, yeah, what's the – this unit, what is – based on your reporting, what is the – then for this unit, it's to, I imagine, get their tech expertise. What are their specific orders? Yeah, and that's a big question that I asked. I spoke to the talent manager. I spoke to someone from talking for their unit. Why can't they do this as consultants? Because it sounds to me, when I ask exactly what they'd be doing, it sounds like consulting work. You know, there would be a senior officer somewhere with a problem.

8:07This is a scenario they gave me. The head of, you know, operations in Asia would ask them, gee, I'm making war plans for five years from now. What would the status of AI be in our enemies? What would the battlefield look like? and they would tap their expertise on this. Or they would go out and look at a virtual battlefield and say, comment on things. And Bosworth is actually in charge of helping develop that technology for Meta. So he wouldn't be selling directly the Meta product, but certainly he would get information about that to help Meta work on the military contracts that they have. So but it seems to me like consulting.

8:58And I asked one of them. I did talk to Kevin Weil of OpenAI, who I've known for years. He's a pretty nice guy, actually. And I said, why do you need to do this? And he said, well, if we're wearing the uniform, people will have a bond with us. They'll take us more seriously. And, you know, that's what he said. Sean, can we just can we take a step back and can you just kind of give us your sense of the current readiness? of the U.S. military when it comes to specifically the growing edge of technology as we're talking about AI implementation. We know certainly as we've seen wars being fought how much that has changed just in the past couple of years.

9:39Sure. I mean, there's no question that the future of war technology will play a decisive role, especially thinking technologies like artificial intelligence. I mean, what happens if China creates an evil chat GPT and unleashes it in this country? I mean, war in some ways is becoming you win not in battlefields. You win by telling truth from lies. And we know Russia, which is a disinformation superpower. We know China, which has something called its three warfare strategy, which is all about stuff like this. The major weapons of war are no longer battle tanks and, you know, fighter jets. They are weapons of the mind, weapons of influence, weapons of distortion.

10:23If you can distort a population's perception of reality, you can manipulate it to self-implode even. Let's head to a quick break. We'll be back with more of the conversation in just a moment. Stay with us.

10:42Joining us now is U.S. Army Colonel Molly Salisbury. She's special advisor to the Army Chief of Staff. Colonel Salisbury, welcome to 1A. Thanks so much for having me today and letting me join this conversation. Sure. So as we're talking about these new lieutenant colonels, let's actually hear from Meta Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bossworth. He's talking here to CNBC about his new role in rank. This was something I'm doing in my personal capacity as a private citizen, something I've always wanted to do. I've always felt called to serve some way, and I'm just glad to find an opportunity to do that.

11:17I have a history of military service in my family. Many of my cousins are in the armed services. Colonel, as we are hearing talking about just the process of how this happened, we're getting questions from our audience. And one of our text club members was just asking, how were these people chosen? And just asking sort of basic questions about what are their responsibilities, and does this require, for example, congressional confirmation? you should? Yeah, thanks. That's a really good question. And I think that it's one that many people are sort of asking is what was the process. And I was really fortunate to be part of the Army team that was first given this opportunity or made aware of this opportunity from the Office of the SecDef in the early part of this year.

12:01But it was a conversation that had kind of been going on for about the last year prior to that. And so, you know, like all, I think, good ideas, The genesis sometimes comes from a little bit further back in history, and then people start having conversations and talking about, and in this instance, talking about permeability because we see so many dual-use technologies moving so fast on the battlefield. There was this idea starting in very much a bipartisan, both academia and in technology spaces, that we needed to figure out how to bring people in and out of government service. And that's what you mean by permeability?

12:38Yes, ma 'am. Okay. Yeah, so we started, I think, at the Army becoming aware of this in the early part of this year, but these permeability discussions have been happening quite a bit prior to that. And so there's been a lot of bipartisan discussions, I think, throughout the last couple of years. And so when we were made aware of it, we said, okay, who's interested? And they had already identified four individuals that were interested in serving and in a direct commission pathway. And so we took a look at those individuals and we put them through the Cyber Center of Excellence in the Army, put them through a board, a board process that looks at all of the interviews, them that looks at all of their credentials and and constructs kind of an idea of what their rank equivalent would be under the authorities that the Congress has given us.

13:24So the Congress gave the authorities to the DOD in 2019, and we have used direct commission since then with these authorities. But this was the first time that we'd use it at the lieutenant colonel level. Right. And, Colonel, when you said that they identified, who's the they who identified these four individuals? The Office of the SecDef had been—they were the ones that initially identified them. And so I think that, again, it came from some of that in the 2024 timeframe. And Colonel, can I just ask, just before the break, Sean was just talking about just the state of the U.S. military in, as we're thinking about modern warfare and tech readiness.

14:06How would you, what do you think are the biggest challenges right now for the Army in this area? Yeah, that is definitely, it's a great question and it's part of why General George, my boss, really has been focused on the general state of readiness and lethality in war fighting. And we see dual-use technologies as such an integral part of that. One of the initiatives that he brought to the Army over a year ago is the Transformation in Contact Initiative. And that's to put some of the key technologies in the hands of soldiers like drones, electronic warfare, counter drone efforts. And we see from battlefields around the world that these are more and more important to winning wars.

14:52And so I would say we need to really emphasize and get those technologies down to the lowest tactical levels. I think that we're doing in the Army with the Army Transformation Initiative, we're doing just that. But we do have some work to do to scale these concepts. You know, Colonel Salisbury, these new lieutenant colonels are being brought in to advise, right? So what specific military problems are you hoping that they are going to be solving here, particularly as we look at their background from Meta and Palantir and OpenAI? Yes. So I think it's a great question, and I just do want to say I share that enthusiasm, and a lot of the soldiers that I talk to share this enthusiasm.

15:34I think that the problems that they solve are going to be ones of scale. And so that's part of where their personal experience through different companies, through different problems that they've solved, I think can be applied to some of these technologies that I just mentioned. And a lot of our technologies in the Army are systematic problems, problems in various positions I've had in the last 20 years. I've been really encouraged that we can solve specific issues. And some of those were in my last command, I had about 1 ,000 people, and we could solve some of those problems. But when you get to the size, the total army is over a million people.

16:12And when you get to problems at scale, the challenge of those large, complex systems and moving fast in that space becomes really, really difficult. And so I think that that's the place we want to put them is whether it's our organic industrial base or it's our counter UAS challenges or it's our recruiting and workplace or talent management. I think that they have done a lot in their experience is going to be able to be leveraged across scalable problems. Stephen, can I just ask you, first of all, like what privacy laws look like when you're working with data in the private sector, just before we understand what that might be like in the military?

16:54Well, I mean, we don't have any good privacy laws in this country. You know, they've been trying to get a bill. Some people have been trying to get a bill for years and years, and there's no comprehensive privacy bill. There's different sectors like health care and other things, privacy. And obviously, the government has classifications of data. I think the conflict of interest problem is a salient one. They've emphasized that all these officers are serving in a private capacity. But it's a little difficult to separate that from your company when your company has a military contract. At the very least, you're going to get a huge edge over your competitors by getting a look inside the perimeter and understanding how these things work from the inside.

17:42And also, you know, by sort of recommending, you know, things that use the kind of cutting edge technologies that your company might be selling, even if it isn't specifically your company's product, that's an advantage. You know, so I think that obviously they're not going to be involved in making buying decisions. But if I were, you know, say Google, which doesn't, you know, have any, you know, military officers in this program, I was told actually that there are reservists who are generals at Google, but they're not involved in this kind of stuff. I would say, wait a minute, what about us? And then it becomes a question of where the loyalties are.

18:29Go for it. I think that the conflict of interest issue is very real because by putting a uniform on these tech execs who have DOD interests, business interests, it seems like they're crossing the fence to the other side, to the government side, and they're trying to straddle it. And I, you know, we've learned also with Doge and Elon Musk is that tech bros come in, they think they could solve all of the federal government's problems. And it turns out it's really complex. I mean, DoD is so much more complex than the biggest company in the world by 10, much less the federal government. And we saw Elon Musk flame out.

19:08And also this idea that we're setting a precedent, we'll just put like, you know, army cosplay on a tech executive with a colonel rank. I mean, where does this go? Will Elon Musk become a four-star general in Space Force? I mean, there's precedents here that I have deep concerns about in terms of the profession of the military of arms. Colonel Salisbury, I think Sean's talking about two separate issues here. So let me start with just the first, which is just what processes do currently exist for keeping conflicts of interest monitored? Certainly, as we talk about the reserves, we have, you know, hundreds of thousands, if not more, of people who are in private industry then putting on the uniform once a month.

19:50What is that supposed to look like now? And is that changing specifically for this unit? Yeah, so I think that these concerns are really important, and there's a couple different things that are important to point out. The first is that this is a pilot, and so the Army is going into this with a very measured and deliberate mindset that we're going to learn from this pilot. And the first thing that we want to learn from is ensuring that we look hard at our guardrails that we have in place. We already have a lot of existing guardrails in place to ensure that the Army follows ethics laws and follows ethics guidelines in a transparent way.

20:25And so by doing this with just four up front, our goal is to put those guardrails in place, be really purposeful about the problems that we ask them to take on. We haven't assigned their problems yet because we're first putting in place all of their initial training. And so we'll kind of go back to that question and that side of the issue. But we're first ensuring that the profession of arms and their ethos training and all of those things are what we focused on first and foremost. And part of that is ethics training. And so we actually started their ethics training before they even signed their oath so that they understood what they were getting into.

21:04they did sign nondisclosure agreements, and we use that tool with a lot of our reservists. And so that is a standard practice. So can I ask you a question? So if they sign an NDA, does that mean they can't tell their companies about what they're doing in the Army? Yes, ma 'am. The nondisclosure agreements that a lot of our reservists are put in place ensure that there is sort of that barrier there so that there's not that advantage, and it really works to ensure that ethics are maintained. I think in an important way. And so that's one of the first things. But one of the other things that we're trying to do is ensure that we understand where their companies have business so that we can kind of separate them from giving them problems and separating them from places that would put them right into that space where there would be conflicts of interest.

21:54Sean, can I just ask you if you can give us like a historical sense of what you think the military's relationship with the tech sector has looked like as we're talking about this pilot program? Well, one of the challenges that the U.S. has is that we, unlike, say, Russia or China, who have state-owned enterprises, we actually have a real private sector, right? Really, and sometimes that works against us. So like, you know, to 2011 around there, the U.S. government couldn't get Apple to unlock an iPhone in a counterterrorism case because they didn't want to lose market share in China, right? So, you know, I always say good luck finding a patriotic CEO, unless they happen to be in the beltway of Washington.

22:39So that is just, that's the price of having a free market. And there's always this question, like, the British East India Company back in the 19th century, 18th century, like, who was really in charge of the empire, the crown or the company? So there's all these questions because we know that these Fortune 50 or 10 companies, they have as much power as many states in the world and they have their own interests. And they're multinational in their makeup. So, you know, I do think it's significant that you have like Palantir's CTO. That's a powerful dude who's, you know. People who might not, can you explain a little bit more about Palantir for people who might not be familiar with what they're.

23:21Sure. And the colonel will too. I mean, Palantir is one of the megagiants. They're like the Lockheed Martin of the defense tech base. And they do amazing things, but they also have a reputation of any data they touch, they kind of suck up and cold in their vault. And so you remember like during Doge, people had concerns about Doge folks having access to the IRS and all these personnel files. and where that might go, I think some of those concerns might be relevant in such a situation as today. Because their interests, as Stephen said, their loyalty, are they loyal to company or country first? And Colonel, how are you going to police that?

24:10That's a really tough question to ask, right? Yeah, I mean, I think that some of the guardrails that I just mentioned in my previous comments, I definitely think speak to how we're going to try to police that. Probably most importantly was my last comment that the way we're picking problems is we're going to ensure that they are working on problems where, say, Palantir isn't necessarily deeply into that space where we put that individual. And so we're separating out, you know, they'll be given different problems. They won't all work on the same problems. And I think that that's a really important component of this is to ensure that we can work our way through that with each one individually and to ensure that ethics conversations are always continuing conversations and that they have that access.

24:57We've been very clear and very deliberate in ensuring that they have access to the right attorneys that they can speak to and that they can get counseling at every step of the way. And so I think that this is really about a process And it's about staying committed to those ethics rules. Let's take a quick pause here, still to come with this new connection between the tech sector and the military means for the future of the armed services. Stay with us.

25:31Let's get back to the conversation with this message we got from one of you. I do understand the need to have more technology in the military. However, I strongly disagree with giving officer status to anyone who has not served. It's a disservice to those who have sacrificed their life, their times, and their families to protect this country. Sean brought that up at the beginning of the hour, and I wanted to have you have a chance to respond to that. Great. Thanks so much. And I think that this, as a 25-year Army colonel, this is something that I hold really near and dear to me. And so as I started to look at some of our history and I looked at some of the things that we've done in World War II and even before that, as was mentioned at the outset of the show, I think that we have examples of history in history when direct commission really worked for America.

26:24And then moving forward, we have examples where the Army's been leveraging direct commission heavily over the last 30 or so years in terms of medical doctors, lawyers, chaplains, things like that. And so I was really encouraged when the Congress moved forward with the 2019 authorities to bring more technologists in because then and currently I was looking at the battlefield moving at a pace that kind of keeps me up at night. When I think about where our adversaries are as an intelligence officer, this is something I look at frequently. I don't think that we are keeping pace in the way that we need to.

27:01And so for me, this is about ensuring that in the future, our soldiers, our warfighters have everything they need to be successful to win in future fights against incredibly technologically advanced enemies. And so I think that we're at a moment in time right now where we need to maybe think differently about, in this instance, what direct commission could be. And so this seemed like a really good opportunity to try this. Sean, you're making a face. I'm sorry. I'm going to let you respond to that. My radio poker face. Well, you know, to me, this solution, I mean, I agree with the caller. I mean, to this solution, it's a solution in search of a problem.

27:41I mean, as Stephen also said at the outset, this is a job you could hire people as consultants to do. And the military has loads of ways to contract people. In fact, these CTOs have government contracts with the Department of Defense. So why do we have to, in my opinion, cheapen the uniform? because rank is earned and not given. Why do we cheapen the uniform this way? What solution is unique that contracting couldn't give us? So I think there are a lot. Contracting is one way that individuals can provide support. I think that special government employees, highly qualified employees are other ways.