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| Science & Technology |
| Pentagon Enlists Technocratic Executives To Reshape The Future Of US Military Technology |
| 2025-06-16 |
| "Paint the paint with more paint!" [ZeroHedge] Friday the 13th was an apropos date for the Pentagon to take the next step forward on its march leading the United States further down a path toward becoming a technocratic hellscape. The US Army swore in 4 different executives from major technology companies as part of its newly established Detachment 201: The Executive Innovation Corps. The executives sworn in as lieutenant colonels in the US Army Reserve were Shyam Sankar, Palantir Technologies' chief technology officer; Andrew Bosworth, chief technology officer of Mark Zuckerberg's Meta; Kevin Weil, OpenAI’s chief product officer; and Bob McGrew, an advisor at Thinking Machines Lab, who previously served as the former chief research officer for OpenAI. The mission of Detachment 201 is to accelerate the modernization of military technology by embedding senior tech executives into the military as uniformed officers. However, the ties those executives have amplify concerns about the exponential growth of technocratic influence over the US government. The assimilation of AI-driven technology executives into the army's ranks from companies like Palantir operates under the guise of improving efficiencies within the Pentagon that will aid in Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth's mission to reduce the wasteful spending of a Department of Defense that paradoxically announced its intent to garner the world's first $1 trillion military budget in April. That enormous budget was confirmed by President Donald J. Trump in April during his most recent meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House. The announcement of that unprecedented spending target foreshadowed a new vision for the US military that the companies behind the executives enlisted as part of Detachment 201 are poised shape in their image. Just 3 weeks after the budget target was made public by the White House, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll announced the launch of the Army Transformation Initiative. The memo unveiling the Army Transformation Initiative in May declared sweeping changes ahead for the army's command structure en route to a modernization pathway carved out to transform the foundational branch of the US military. In the memo, Secretary Hegseth wrote that he was tasking Army Secretary Driscoll to "implement a comprehensive transformation strategy, streamline its force structure, eliminate wasteful spending, reform acquisition, modernize inefficient defense contracts, and overcome parochial interests to rebuild our Army, restore the warrior ethos and reestablish deterrence." Detachment 201 is envisioned as a major force toward achieving those lofty expectations. In the last 14 years, Palantir Technologies has laid the foundation leading to the implementation of the Executive Innovation Corps. Palatir has entrenched itself within the Department of Defense, culminating in a massive $795 million modification by the Trump administration to an existing contract it was initially awarded in May 2024 under the Biden administration. That contract modification brings its total value to nearly $1.3 billion, demonstrating the immense role Palantir will play in the modernization of the military by using its AI-driven technologies. The presence Palantir fortified by becoming a massive defense contractor over the last decade-and-a-half enabled the company to exert its influence, ultimately bringing companies aligned with its work into the fold. Palantir is far from the only Peter Thiel-backed technology company to profit from the Department of Defense's efforts at military modernization. OpenAI and Meta, whose executives were also enlisted into Detachment 201, have shifted their own operations to focus on military applications to become part of this futuristic new era of the military industrial complex. OpenAI has partnered with Anduril Industries, Inc. (another Thiel-connected AI firm whose name is a reference to lore from J.R.R. Tolkein's the Lord of the Rings) to develop AI-enhanced air defense systems in one such project. Anduril was co-founded by Palmer Luckey, the brother-in-law of former Florida congressional representative Matt Gaetz, along with former Palantri executives Matt Grimm, Trae Stephens, and Brian Schimpf in 2017 after Luckey was fired from Facebook earlier in the year. Luckey joined the company by way of founding Oculus VR in 2012 which Facebook acquired in 2014 for $2 billion. Although Anduril Industries maintains a much less visible public image compared to the like of Palantir, OpenAI, and Meta, its rapid growth since its founding has made it central to the axis those companies have formed. In the early years following its founding, Anduril was awarded billions of dollars in contracts from the Department of Defense. Those contracts included a contract worth $967 million for the Advanced Battle Management Systems for the US Air Force awarded in September 2020, as well as a subsequent $1 billion contract in February 2022 to develop counter-unmanned systems for United States Special Operations Command. By the end of 2022, the growth fueled by its billions of dollars in military contracts from the DoD was accelerated by the injection of another $1.5 billion in capital from Valor Equity Partners. That investment raised the valuation of the company to $8.5 billion, cementing its stake as a major force in the future AI and its applications on US military technologies. Evidence of the company's standing as a cornerstone of the new axis of mainstay US military contractors was further demonstrated in May following the decision of the army to reassign a $22 billion augmented reality contract from Microsoft to Anduril. That massive contract led to Anduril forming a partnership with Meta to fulfill the contract it was able to usurp from Microsoft. Anduril building its partnership with Meta also aided the rapid rebrand of the Mark Zuckerberg-founded company, which was previously viewed as an embodiment of big tech's malfeasance aiding the subjugation of the first presidential administration of Donald J. Trump, into a company now central to achieving the vision for the next epoch of the US military ushered in by the president's second administration. That vision carries ominous undertones suggesting that the nightmarish reality unleashed by a technocratic takeover of the US military has become an inevitability. The realization of those fears was made evident following Anduril's announcement of its partnership with Meta. Following the $22 billion contract transfer from Microsoft into its hands, Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey stated, “My mission has long been to turn warfighters into technomancers." Anduril and Meta aim to achieve that mission by harnessing the technology behind the VR headsets pioneered by Oculus, which led to Luckey's first work with Zuckerberg, and transforming it to used for advanced military applications. This venture will be done under a product offering named EagleEye, the flagship technology Meta and Anduril will build an ecosystem of militarized virtual and augmented reality devices around. The mission declared by Palmer Luckey to blur the line between humans and machines on the battlefield by implementing Ai-powered military technologies has been taken on even more enthusiastically by one of the other companies to have an executive enlisted in Detachment 201. Thinking Machines Lab, which was established in just February 2025, focuses its operations on human-AI collaboration. The company was founded by Mira Murati, who previously served as the chief technology officer of OpenAI. After only 3 months in business, Thinking Machines Lab was reported to have a valuation of $10 billion, making it one of the most valuable startups in the world. Despite being in its nascent days, the potential impact of the company's work on advancing US military technology has already thrust it into the echelon held by its world-renowned partners in the Executive Innovation Program: Palantir, Meta, and OpenAI. Of all the innovations the companies aligned with the Executive Innovation Corps aim to build, the vanguard of the new age of US military technology that the Trump administration has boasted about its aspirations to achieve is that of a rival to Israel's Iron Dome. Trump has named the US equivalent of Israel's defense system the Golden Dome. With an estimated price tag of $175 billion, $25 billion of which is built into the contentious Big Beautiful Bill, the Trump administration hopes to have the Golden Dome fully operational before he leaves office in 2029. Those expectations have faced tremendous opposition as the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has estimated components of the Golden Dome alone could cost taxpayers $542 billion over 20 years, with the full cost of the program reaching as much as $831 billion. The Trump administration hopes that the advancements in technology brought to the project by the likes of Anduril, Palantir, and Elon Musk's SpaceX will lead to the project being completed within that short timeframe at a cost falling far below the CBO's projections. |
| Posted by:Skidmark |
| #6 Defense contractors urge Congress to cut red tape: ‘Valley of Death’ |
| Posted by: Skidmark 2025-06-16 10:46 |
| #5 Always wondered about those wage scales with senior officers with less that 2 years time in service. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2025-06-16 10:41 |
| #4 |
| Posted by: Skidmark 2025-06-16 10:25 |
| #3 OpenAI takes down covert operations tied to China and other countries |
| Posted by: Skidmark 2025-06-16 10:14 |
| #2 US Army now recruiting tech executives from Meta and OpenAI |
| Posted by: Skidmark 2025-06-16 10:12 |
| #1 Where's Musk? |
| Posted by: Skidmark 2025-06-16 10:09 |