The day before Donald Trump's 250th anniversary parade for the U.S. Army, the Army swore in four Silicon Valley executives as Army Reserve lieutenant colonels as part of their new "Detachment 201: The Army's Executive Innovation Corps."  The Army said the program was "designed to fuse cutting-edge tech expertise with military innovation."

The new Army Reserve lieutenant colonels are Shyam Sankar, chief technology officer for Palantir; Andrew Bosworth, chief technology officer for Meta; Kevin Weil, chief product officer for OpenAI; and Bob McGrew, advisor at Thinking Machines Lab and former chief research officer for OpenAI.

The rank of lieutenant colonel is generally awarded to officers in their second decade of military service. The position typically commands between several hundred soldiers, but the tech executives are not expected to command traditional formations.

The Army has said Detachment 201 is focused on recruiting Big Tech executives to serve part-time in the Army Reserve as advisors on "targeted projects" to help "guide rapid and scalable tech solutions to complex problems." Detachment 201 is itself part of a broader effort known as the Army Transformation Initiative, which seeks to make the Army "leaner, smarter, and more lethal."

Col. Dave Butler said the four executives will receive two weeks of online and in-person training at Fort Benning, Georgia. Their training will focus on physical fitness, marksmanship, and basic soldier tasks. They will not participate in the Army's traditional full six-week Direct Commissioning Course at Fort Benning.

While Andrew Bosworth claimed 201 was a reference to an HTTP coding command that indicates the creation of a new programming resource, the name is reminiscent of Event 201, the October 2019 exercise that simulated how the world would respond if a coronavirus pandemic swept the planet. That simulation was organized by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, and the World Economic Forum.