Silicon Brass

Last week, LinkedIn lobbed a headline into my afternoon scroll: “Palantir, Meta, OpenAI execs to commission into Army Reserve, form ‘Detachment 201.’” The thumbnail (below) showed four unfamiliar faces squeezed into Army fatigues, creases from the dry-cleaner still visible.

I clicked into the article, assuming I would find some meme about late-stage-capitalism.

Turns out there was no punchline, just a hyperlink to a Pentagon press release.

On June 13th, at Joint Base Myer–Henderson Hall, four Silicon Valley executives,

all raised their right hands and took the Officer’s Oath, officially becoming Lieutenant Colonels.

No boot camp required!

The Army named the unit Detachment 201, a sort of pun/nod to HTTP’s 201 response (basically code for “created”, the opposite of 404). These four Lieutenant Colonels, an unusually high starting rank, had new job descriptions: serve ~120 hours a year, keep their C-suite day jobs, and tell the Army how to drag itself into the software century.

My knee-jerk reaction landed somewhere between “cringe” and “corporate coup.”

So, I crash-coursed 2025 warfare: Ukraine’s homemade drone swarms, Israel’s one-tap AI strike loops, and a Pentagon report showing it still takes 10+ years to make a decision.

Suddenly Detachment 201 felt less like tech execs playing dress-up and more like a necessary hack.

Like everything else these days, war runs on code. If America’s safety and might now depend on how fast we can update our software, giving rank to the people who control the stack might be the most pragmatic choice.

So, the question I’m chasing this week: Does putting Silicon Valley in the chain of command concede too much power to our tech overlords, or is it the unlock modern warfare demands?

The last few years, across every active war zone, have taught the same lesson: software updates are outpacing and outgunning traditional hardware.

Ukraine is the clearest case study. A volunteer team in Kharkiv starts with a $600 DJI Mavic, ordered on Monday, delivered by Tuesday. They factory reset the drone, attach a 3-D printed cradle, and rewrite the flight code to skirt treetop altitude.

On Thursday morning the drone threads a trench line and drops a small charge onto a $5 million T-90 tank. The strike shows up on Telegram before Russian forces have realized the loss. The enabling tech stack is ordinary: off-the-shelf drone, cheap plastic filament, Starlink connection, and open source code shared on a Discord.

Israel operates the same physics at a higher tier. Their classified targeting software, nicknamed “Gospel”, runs like a giant recommendation engine for airstrikes. It pulls in almost everything the Israeli Defense Forces can see or hear:

Gospel scores each piece of data, bundles matching clues, and sends a ranked list of “most likely targets” straight to tablets in F-35 cockpits and to the ground-stationed teams flying armed drones.

At that point the pilot or drone operator basically swipe confirm or pass. 

An IDF briefing last year put the average time from first enemy detection to weapon release at about sixty seconds. Ten years ago that same decision needed hours of analysts, liaison officers, and legal checks.

Every strike feeds back into the software, so Gospel learns and tightens the filter for the next victim. The result is a rolling update cycle aimed at Iranian-backed militias, rocket teams in Gaza, and drone crews on the Syrian frontier.

Across these theaters the lesson is blunt: tanks, ships, fighter jets still matter, but their fate is increasingly decided by whoever pushes code faster, whether it’s guerrilla firmware written at 2 a.m. in a basement or a machine-learning model refreshed hourly in a secure cloud.

If speed kills, then delay does, too.

For all its resources, the U.S. military is often caught flat-footed. It simply can’t deploy fast enough. While Ukrainian teenagers are rewriting drone code mid-battle and Israeli strike loops close in under a minute, America’s pipeline moves at a glacial, pre-digital pace.

According to a Government Accountability Office report from June 2025, the Army still needs 10+ years to field new systems.

It wasn’t always this way. The Manhattan Project brought us from theory to detonation in 31 months. Apollo bested gravity in under a decade. Urgency plus autonomy gave us speed.

Today, things look very different. Legacy private sector corporations survive on cost-plus contracts; delays are customary as our tax dollars pay for stock buybacks at Boeing and Lockheed. The acquisition rulebook has swollen past 2,000 pages; insurmountable layers of bureaucratic approval processes.

The Pentagon has tried to keep pace with various initiatives, and maybe they help on the margin, but the chain of command has largely stayed the same: innovation in Silicon Valley, paperwork in Washington.

So, Detachment 201 is the latest solution.

As far as I can tell, Detachment 201 didn’t go through Congressional hearings. It didn’t even get a press Q&A. Four private-sector tech executives (seriously how did the Meta guy sneak in there) were recruited over the phone, trained on Zoom, and handed fatigues.

Each commissioned officer is employed by a tech firm that’s billing the Department of Defense. Palantir’s AI contract tops $759 million. OpenAI just landed a $200 million research deal. The people advising the Army now have a direct financial stake in the vendors competing for its budget.

The move raises immediate questions about oversight and influence.

Lieutenant Colonel is normally a 20-year climb. These four made it in two weeks, without doing a single pushup. Next time they walk onto a base, combat-tested soldiers will salute men who simply have no business wearing a uniform.

That kind of shortcut cuts against norms and threatens an organization that depends on reverence to the chain of command. The resentment is already showing up on military subreddits.

The U.S. has almost always kept corporate influence outside the chain of command. Detachment 201 pierces that firewall. Once a civilian technologist wears a uniform and enters the operational stack, their incentives shift, but not always in predictable ways.

What happens if battlefield priorities clash with shareholder pressure? What if a classified system fails under the oversight of an executive with split loyalties? There’s no case law for that, and a whole lot of risk.

So I hope you can see why “corporate coup” was my first instinct. In a future crisis, a software dispute or boardroom decision could delay a military response. Military decision-making authority could shift from the joint chiefs to Mark Zuckerberg.

All those red flags are real, but honestly, so is the cost of doing nothing.

The Army has spent the last two decades trying to fix its tech pipeline with workarounds: new task forces, pitch days, contractor summits. But the chain of military command hasn’t changed, and that’s the core problem.

If the U.S. military can’t adapt faster than our adversaries, it risks falling behind in the only war that matters: the next one.

Detachment 201 feels sticky, but it might be the most functional solution on the table.

Here’s why I think it’s a calculated risk worth taking.

Across our armed forces, software tools are delivered late, underperform in the field, and get passed around like tech debt no one wants to own.

There’s an endless list of examples: multi-billion dollar programs stalled by indecision, software that takes years to deploy, and frontline tools that fail under real conditions. The military’s procurement system is in desperate need of an overhaul.

Detachment 201 puts working technologists in uniform, with the authority to cut through process and push code where it’s needed. The strategic edge now lives in software, the culture of command and influence needs to shift accordingly.

For decades, the best engineers in America have been drawn to Silicon Valley by RSUs and sushi bars. Full-time enlistment was never going to compete with free lunch.

But Detachment 201 offers a new perspective, a way to serve that doesn’t require abandoning a career, by just committing time and expertise where it counts.

It’s a small but meaningful step toward rebuilding America’s culture of public service, one where technical talent has a role and a reason to serve.

As discussed, war today runs on software: drone targeting, threat modeling, real-time coordination. When the people building those systems sit outside the chain of command, operations slow, or worse, fail.

I doubt the Military needs more consultants. It needs technical leaders with decision-making authority. Detachment 201 creates that structure. These officers hold rank, fall under military law, and can directly shape how the Army builds, deploys, and fixes its digital systems.

This approach isn’t new, in fact, it’s how how breakthroughs throughout history have always happened: Oppenheimer at Los Alamos, engineers at Apollo, DARPA’s Grand Challenge. In every case: empower the builders, set clear deadlines, and get out of their way.

This isn’t a clean fix, but it is a decisive move. A shakeup at just the right altitude. And sometimes, as I wrote about last week, the only way to reset a system is to give it something unexpected.

These companies are engineering the infrastructure of modern warfare: AI, surveillance, autonomous systems.

If they’re already shaping the battlefield and collecting billions to do it, the least we can ask is that they take an oath.

Some call China our adversary. Others call them our competitor. Either way, Beijing is moving fast.

China’s playbook is clear: mandate, confiscate, iterate. When a private company builds a breakthrough, the CCP absorbs it, immediately. No hearings and certainly no public debate. China’s speed comes from total enforced alignment between state and industry.

Detachment 201 looks comically disorganized by comparison. Four tech executives in borrowed fatigues, a tidal wave of think-pieces, and congressional staffers already drafting oversight letters. It’s noisy, public, and wide open to failure.

That friction is the best of America at work.

So yes, commissioning four colonels from Palo Alto feels weird. But weirdness is where American exceptionalism has historically lived: a garage in Los Altos, a barn in Dayton, a desert lab at Los Alamos. It’s an old American tradition, repackaged for the AI age.

If war is now a product sprint, I’ll take the system that ships fast, tests in the open, and learns in real time.

Detachment 201 is a small, scrappy wager on that tradition and I’m glad we placed it.

Up and to the right.