People wonder why execs, not people with actual tech skills. I'll wager that for the military/government, this is not really about what skills those people bring in - it's about that accepting this role puts them under jurisdiction of military justice, and suddenly all kinds of things that are business-as-usual when e.g. dealing with foreign powers, could become potential UCMJ offenses.
Call me conspiracy theorist if you like, but this looks to me like US Gov seeking to put a leash on the tech/AI companies, by tricking execs into getting personally exposed for things that would otherwise qualify as private business. Strategically, that's worth way more than just getting some FAANG engineers as part-time advisors.
"When their AI system went wrong and caused that massacre and required a sortie of F-35s to neutralize, we immediately took internal accountability and started processing them through the UCMJ. This kind of thing will never happen again, we are making sure of it."
Call me conspiracy theorist if you like, but this looks to me like US Gov seeking to put a leash on the tech/AI companies, by tricking execs into getting personally exposed for things that would otherwise qualify as private business. Strategically, that's worth way more than just getting some FAANG engineers as part-time advisors.