The Army recently commissioned a batch of executives from tech and venture capital firms with deep ties to Silicon Valley under a recruitment program launched last year.
The three officers were commissioned as lieutenant colonels and are the second cohort of soldiers to join an Army Reserve unit called Detachment 201. The program brings in professionals from major tech companies to serve as advisors. In June 2025, the first four came from day jobs at companies like Palantir, Meta, and OpenAI, before pinning on the rank of lieutenant colonel.
The June 10 commissioning ceremony at Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall, Virginia, was part of the Army’s build-up of its officer pipeline of tech professionals, and it occurred as the Navy launched its own direct commissioning program focused on civilian experts in similar fields.
The newest batch of Army officers includes Sam Pullara, chief technology officer of Sutter Hill Ventures, a California-based venture capital firm; Serkan Piantino, who co-founded Facebook AI Research and was a former vice president of products at Reddit; and Dane Knecht, chief technology officer of Cloudflare, a company that sells a cloud platform that acts as an intermediary between a website and its visitors.
Posted by ArcherBurgers
5 Comments
The conspiracy is that AR 670-1 doesn’t apply to rich tech bros. That’s the press release and they’re out there looking like a soup sandwich.
I’m sure it has nothing to do with permanently merging our intelligence capabilities with Israel
Yeah these dudes look ate the fuck up
It has to do with chain of command and officer level clearances when it comes to managing top secret information.
This is normal, a formality, when you involve civilians in the defense system.
So these guys went from civilians straight to officers or am I misreading?