The hottest members club in the country should be the United States military.
Forget Soho House. Forget The Ned. Forget rooftop negronis and exclusive guest lists. The ultimate badge of ambition, patriotism, and elite performance should be a set of dress whites, a commissioning scroll, and a bar tab at the officer’s club.
There was a time when it was. When being a junior officer was both a rite of passage and a mark of status. When the hangout spot wasn’t a private speakeasy in Tribeca but the O-Club in Miramar. Aviators. Flight suits. Cheap beer. Swagger. It was loud, proud, and magnetic. Top Gun wasn’t fiction—it was recruitment. You were part of something bigger, something dangerous, something admired.
And it wasn’t just movie stars or pilots. It was presidents. Senators. CEOs. John F. Kennedy commanded a PT boat in the Pacific before he took a seat in the Oval Office. George H.W. Bush, the youngest Navy pilot in World War II, went from carrier decks to Congress. Bob Dole was wounded in combat before becoming Senate Majority Leader. Military service wasn’t a detour from elite ambition—it was the foundation of it.
Today, that culture is gone.
At America’s top universities, military service has become a thought exercise. Fewer than one percent of Ivy League graduates choose to serve. At Stanford and MIT, students who dream of solving hard national problems are far more likely to join a venture fund than a Special Forces team. Those few who consider military service are quickly dissuaded by bureaucracy, outdated systems, and the reality that their talents will likely be wasted. It’s not that this generation lacks patriotism — they lack a credible, compelling path to serve.
This is more than a cultural shift. It’s a national security crisis.
The Department of Defense is hemorrhaging talent. And not for lack of passion or idealism. Many of the best people who do sign up — technically brilliant, physically Greco-Roman, operationally sharp, mission-driven — are the very ones who are leaving. The reason is simple: we’ve made it nearly impossible for them to stay. Take a look at the numbers. An eight-year Army Major, entrusted with leading hundreds of soldiers and managing millions in equipment and operations, earns less than $100,000 a year. That’s the highest compensation listed on the Army’s own website. Compare that to what a similarly skilled leader would earn at Google, SpaceX, or even a mid-sized city government. They leave. And the military can’t replace them fast enough.
To fill the void, the Pentagon turns to contractors. From writing code to writing strategy, the most sensitive and essential work is increasingly outsourced. Beltway firms charge triple, deliver slowly, and often operate far from the urgency of the mission. Military officers, meanwhile, are left managing spreadsheets and timelines. We are training some of the most capable leaders in the country — and then asking them to be project managers for third-party vendors. It’s backwards. And it’s not sustainable.
But the most underutilized asset in the American defense apparatus is hiding in plain sight: the Reserve. If reimagined correctly, the Reserves could be the answer to this growing capability crisis. Right now, they’re not. Ask any Reservist who works in tech, finance, or academia what their drill weekends look like and you’ll hear the same thing: outdated administrative briefings, redundant paperwork, and a total mismatch between talent and task. We’re wasting the weekends of Google engineers, Palantir executives, and Stanford PhDs who signed up to serve, but aren’t given anything meaningful to do.
What if we flipped the model? What if Reserve service looked less like filing TPS reports in a strip mall armory and more like a national security fellowship? What if it became normal — expected even — for top-tier professionals to serve part-time on real-world missions? A cyber expert could help harden forward-deployed systems. A product leader could advise on battle management software. A logistics executive could overhaul procurement flows in contested environments. Instead of administrative redundancy, the Reserve could become a dynamic bridge between America’s civilian innovation economy and its military mission.
It wouldn’t just strengthen the force — it would make service aspirational again.
One initiative that offers a glimpse of this future is the military’s Direct Commission Officer program. The idea is simple: let accomplished professionals bring their existing expertise into the force without having to start at the bottom. It’s how Palantir’s CTO, Shyam Sankar, and tech executive Kevin Weil recently joined the Army. That’s the good news. The bad news is that they are the exception, not the rule. Most people who enter through the direct commission pipeline are put through years of standardized training before they’re allowed to contribute in their field of expertise. This is absurd. We don’t need to teach a software engineer how to do marching drills before letting them secure military networks. The entire premise of direct commission is to accelerate impact. Instead, we slow-walk them into frustration and irrelevance. If we want Silicon Valley minds, we have to respect Silicon Valley time.
The Reserve is just a start, but we can and should go further. Perhaps most shocking is that at present the Department of Defense doesn’t actually know who it’s losing — or why. There is no real-time, unified personnel system across the services. No dashboard to track attrition, no data layer to understand which talents are underused or underpaid, no system to forecast leadership shortfalls or skill gaps. The Pentagon can model force projection for a two-front war but can’t tell you how many software engineers are wearing a uniform. Without that baseline, there is no way to plan effectively. Whatever system ultimately replaces the current human capital mess, must start here: a unified picture of who we have, what they’re doing, and how to keep them.
The good news is that even though our data is sketchy, the path forward is obvious. Pay top performers competitively — especially in cyber, AI, and intelligence. Not everyone needs a Google-level salary, but they need to believe their skills are valued. Rebuild the prestige of service. Make it normal again for Rhodes Scholars, startup founders, and policy analysts to serve. And perhaps most urgently: change who gets promoted. Today’s system rewards conformity over creativity. Officers who think outside the box, who push for smarter training models or question outdated doctrine, are not rewarded — they’re sidelined. The safest path to advancement is to never color outside the lines. Be competent. Be quiet. Wait your turn.
But America’s military was built on innovation. On battlefield improvisation. On junior officers willing to challenge the playbook. That spirit has been systemically suppressed. The people who remain in command are often the ones best at surviving the system — not fixing it. We’re not cultivating reformers. We’re cultivating bureaucrats with badges.
This is why the military loses people like Elliott Ackerman, a Marine officer turned war novelist, Nate Fick, a platoon commander who became a tech CEO and ambassador, Andrew Exum, a former Ranger who helped shape Middle East policy, John Nagl, an Army officer and counterinsurgency scholar, David Kilcullen, a strategist who redefined modern warfare, and John Robb, a special operator turned systems theorist. And not to mention the countless talented leaders who left as junior officers, drawn to the opportunity and autonomy of the private sector.
Personnel is policy. And a military that cannot attract, retain, and empower the nation’s top minds will lose — not just in battle, but in the boardrooms and laboratories where the future of war is already being decided.
America is not short on patriots. We are short on imagination. There are thousands of brilliant, civically minded Americans who want to serve their country. But they need a path that respects their time, their skills, and their ambition.
We need to make being an officer mean something again. It shouldn’t just be a paygrade or a line on a résumé. It should be a marker of excellence, grit, and purpose — a status symbol, in the best sense of the word. Something that turns heads at a cocktail party. Something that makes a young person proud to put on their dating profile.
Bring back the officer’s club. Bring back the swagger. Bring back the best and brightest.
Let’s give them a reason to wear the uniform again.
