Brief: Pentagon's new AI chief is former Google Trust & Safety exec who previously helped guide U.S. special operations

Former Google Trust & Safety executive Radha Iyengar Plumb will replace Craig Martell, former Head of Machine Learning at Lyft, as the Pentagon's Chief Digital and AI Officer in April.

The Pentagon’s incoming Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer, Radha Iyengar Plumb, is currently Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment. Iyengar Plumb was previously a policy executive at Google and Facebook, as well as chief of staff to Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict (ASD SO/LIC) Michael A. Sheehan. Photo Credit: U.S. Defense Department

Note: A closing paragraph was added on Google Public Sector.

An economics professor by training, Radha Iyengar Plumb will be promoted next month out of her current role as number two within the Pentagon’s Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment — which goes by the unwieldy acronym of OUSD (A&S). Contrary to her current boss William A. LaPlante critiquing ‘tech bros’ for claiming credit for fighting Russia in Ukraine using artificial intelligence, Iyengar Plumb has held management positions at both Google and Facebook.

As was reported by Breaking Defense earlier today, as well as provided to the author by an anonymous source yesterday, Iyengar Plumb is set to replace Craig Martell, the former Head of Machine Learning at rideshare company Lyft, as the head of the Pentagon’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) in April. Nearly two years ago, the CDAO absorbed the bulk of the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC), which was colloquially referred to as the “Project Maven factory” due to it having taken over the Pentagon’s flagship operational artificial intelligence program from the earlier efforts of Marines Drew Cukor and Colin Carroll. However, despite the CDAO absorbing the ‘Maven factory’, Project Maven was largely transferred to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s Data and Digital Innovation Directorate in January 2023.

(Iyengar Plumb’s husband, John F. Plumb, is also the current Assistant Secretary of Defense for Space Policy, and is the principal cyber advisor to Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin. Mr. Plumb ran an unsuccessful Congressional campaign through New York’s 23rd district as a Democrat in 2016.)

After roughly three years as an assistant professor at the London School of Economics, followed by a roughly seven month stint as an economist at the storied think-tank RAND, in May 2012 Iyengar Plumb became the chief of staff to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict (ASD SO/LIC), Michael A. Sheehan. Iyengar Plumb then spent roughly a year each as a Director at the National Security Council and then as deputy chief of staff at the Department of Energy before rejoining RAND for roughly two years, this time as a senior economist.

Iyengar Plumb’s career would significantly transition during the presidency of Donald Trump, with her morphing into a policy executive at Facebook and then Google, as well as co-hosting the podcast ‘Bombshell’ under the umbrella of the national security website and defense contractor War on the Rocks Media LLC (which does business as Metamorphic Media). While transitioning from helping to guide the Pentagon’s execution of special operations and engagement in “low-intensity conflict” may appear to be unrelated to her term as Director of Research and Insights for Google’s Trust & Safety team for roughly the year beginning in February 2020, they overlap in the increasingly central area of information warfare between the U.S. and its primary economic and military competitors, China and Russia.

Iyengar Plumb is far from the only executive to move between Google and the U.S. defense and intelligence community. Roughly one year ago, the former head of Google Cloud AI, Andrew Moore, was announced as an artificial intelligence advisor to U.S. Central Command, which is better known as CENTCOM. As noted at the time by the Chief Technology Officer of CENTCOM, Schuyler Moore, the former Google executive’s work at CENTCOM would contribute to the combatant command’s three primary task forces for integrating artificial intelligence into the battlefield: the Army’s Task Force 39, the Navy’s Task Force 59, and the Air Force’s Task Force 99. (Though Andrew Moore appears to have primarily advertised his role as CEO of the Piitsburgh-based startup Lovelace AI since the April 2023 CENTCOM announcement.)

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt also continues to lead the Schmidt Special Competitive Studies Project — a privatized continuation of the Congressionally-mandated National Security Commission on AI, whose final report was referred to by former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Michèle Flournoy as “probably the most important commission report since the 9/11 Commission.” One of the major complaints lodged by Radha Iyengar Plumb and her co-hosts through their ‘Bombshell’ podcast in late 2020, while Plumb was still working at Google, was whether it was sexist for President Biden to select the African American former Raytheon board member Lloyd Austin as Secretary of Defense over the white, female WestExec Advisors founder Flournoy.

In the incoming — as opposed to outgoing — direction, Google Public Sector has filled its board of directors with numerous former high-level U.S. defense and intelligence officials, including: former U.S. Special Operations Command head Tony “T2” Thomas, former Air Force chief of staff David L. Goldfein, and former head of the CIA’s Science & Technology directorate, Dawn Meyerriecks. Google Public Sector is understood to handle Google’s ongoing multi-billion dollar ceiling cloud computing contracts with the CIA, the Commercial Cloud Enterprise (C2E), and with the Pentagon, the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC). According to reporting in December from C4ISRNet, the Pentagon is already planning the successor to JWCC.