At first I thought this is some kind of clownery that American Psycho type of insecure execs would love, feeds into their ego and wannabe macho bad ass fantasies etc. But the article says they’re “recruited” for their technical skills and that they’re parts of the business elite. They’re execs so there’s no technical skill to be found, the Pentagon can get any independent contractor it wants for pure skills. I don’t remember other clown shows with Boeing, Raytheon etc execs even though these are essential companies of the military-industrial complex. So it makes very little sense.

The Pentagon would normally have liaison officers if it needed close collaboration with these companies and handling NDAs, clearances etc. And the US Gov doesn’t really need to work publicly with them anyway since the NSA has backdoors into everything and plenty of skilled manpower besides the ability to just send them a letter and force them to comply quietly.

The only thing that I get from this is that Palantir, OpenAI and Meta are going to have active execs who are under military law, have to be handed over to military police if arrested, have to be tried by military tribunals and not civil courts, and have to follow Pentagon orders. The president is the commander in chief of all the armed forces so this is a pretty strange sort of bypassing a mountain of goverment agencies and deputizing basically social media execs? Why is that even necessary?