Palantir chief technology officer Shyam Sankar has a second job in the US Army Reserve, and it has little to do with weapons or battlefield software. Speaking to CBS News on Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan, Sankar said his main role as a lieutenant colonel is helping the Army find soldiers who can code, and then making sure that talent is put to proper use.Sankar works with the Army’s G-1, the department that handles personnel and human resources. The problem he described is structural. The Army has skilled programmers in its ranks, but its career system was built for an industrial-era military, a model Sankar likened to Napoleonic codes. A soldier at the E-4 grade, a junior enlisted rank, could be an exceptional coder and still have no clear path to doing that work in uniform.
Why the US Army struggles to use its tech talent
Sankar told CBS News that “the Army is drowning in talent,” referring to uniformed soldiers who know how to write code. The catch is that their skills don’t follow rank. The Army assigns roles by seniority, but coding ability doesn’t come with stripes.His work focuses on three questions. How does the Army spot these soldiers, how does it stop them from getting lost in the system, and how does it place them on projects that use what they can do? The goal is to turn them into assets the military draws on instead of leaving them in roles unrelated to their skills.
What is Detachment 201, the Army’s tech executive corps
Sankar was sworn in in June 2025 as part of Detachment 201, the Army’s Executive Innovation Corps. The name nods to HTTP status code 201, which signals that a new resource has been created on a server. The first cohort included Meta’s Andrew Bosworth and two executives with OpenAI roots, Kevin Weil and Bob McGrew. Army officials have credited Sankar with pitching the idea and recruiting the other three.The executives serve around 120 hours a year and hold the rank of lieutenant colonel because of their private-sector expertise. They were spared basic training but still face fitness tests and marksmanship training.The arrangement has raised questions about conflicts of interest. Brennan pointed out that Palantir holds billions of dollars in US government contracts. Sankar said the Defense Department’s lawyers manage this closely, and that reservists can only work on projects where they have no conflict.He also spoke about why he signed up. Sankar’s family fled violence in Lagos when he was a child, and he called serving in the US military the greatest honour. He said his late father would have loved to see him attend a service academy. Now 44, he said he hopes he has more to give the country today than he did at 24.
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