A day before the controversial military parade in Washington celebrating the US Army’s 250th anniversary (which, coincidentally, fell on President Donald Trump’s 79th birthday), a more discreet yet significant event took place. On June 13, the US Army swore four C-suite technologists into its reserve ranks with the launch of Detachment 201, its executive innovation corps.
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The newly commissioned lieutenant colonels are Shyam Sankar, Palantir Technologies’ chief technology officer; Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s chief technology officer; Kevin Weil, OpenAI’s chief product officer; and Bob McGrew, Thinking Machines Lab’s adviser and formerly OpenAI’s chief research officer.
Dressed in military fatigues at their oath-taking ceremony, the reserve officers symbolised a fusion of two of the greatest US exports: capitalism and lethality. This merger of the boardroom and the battlefield is not new. In the early 1960s, Dwight Eisenhower cautioned against the rise of the US military-industrial complex even as he recognised the “imperative need” for it.
Since then, US tech dominance – led by the private sector and supported by the government – has only accelerated the inevitability of the military-technology complex in the digital age.
But Silicon Valley’s attitude towards Washington was not always this eager. The image of libertarian tech elites in the West Coast in the early days of start-ups, along with their ideals of individual autonomy and limited government, is a far cry from the assertive nationalism of US Big Tech now.
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Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, a major US defence and security contractor that specialises in commercial data analytics software, has unapologetically championed Western dominance through a combination of hard power and technology. Contemptuous of protests by tech workers against engineering technology for US weapons development, Karp has instead embraced the idea of scaring America’s enemies and killing them, if necessary.
