Three Tech Executives Commissioned as Army Reserve Lieutenant Colonels

Dane Knecht, chief technology officer of Cloudflare, Sam Pullara, managing director and CTO of Sutter Hill Ventures, and Serkan Piantino, former Reddit executive and co-founder of Facebook AI Research, were commissioned into the Army Reserve as lieutenant colonels on June 10, 2026, at a military base in Virginia.

The three executives joined Detachment 201, a unit whose members enter the Army as lieutenant colonels through direct commission and serve as part-time strategic advisers. Lt.

Col. Orlando Howard said the program selects applicants who are highly skilled civilian technology professionals at the executive or C-suite level to serve as part-time strategic advisers. "Their primary role is to serve as senior advisors to help drive the Army Transformation Initiative, concentrated on high-level technological strategies in areas such as cyber, AI and machine learning applications, and other data-driven capabilities," Howard stated.

Howard added that the officers use their advanced expertise in commercial tech and private industry to offer a different perspective and advise senior Army leaders on solving military problems. Detachment 201 members are reservists who can work remotely and must complete a minimum of 112 hours of service annually.

"They are governed by a multi-layered ethics framework, including the Joint Ethics Regulation," Howard said.

" "They participate in collaborative advisory and brainstorming sessions with senior military leaders to accelerate Army transformation, while also directly advising our teams in making technical system changes," Howard said. The new members join four executives who entered the Army Reserve one year earlier: Shyam Sankar, CTO of Palantir; Andrew Bosworth, CTO of Meta; Kevin Weil, former chief product officer at OpenAI; and Bob McGrew, advisor at Thinking Machines Lab and former chief research officer at OpenAI.