Google received another half million from the Pentagon to process aerial imagery
A newly public disclosure withheld from USASpending.gov reveals that Google was paid an additional half a million dollars in May to process aerial imagery for the Pentagon and National Guard.
Contracting records made public today as a result of 90 day disclosure delays reveal that Google was awarded an additional $500,000 by the Pentagon on May 17th as part of its now $900,000 contract for “processing aerial imagery”. Despite the author having reported on the initial $400,000 award in March, the contract’s involvement of the National Guard appears to have damped any significant inquiries from the broader press.
Both these awards and Google’s related $2.92 million “air logistics optimization” contract with the Pentagon and Navy Region Mid-Atlantic are through a controversial procurement mechanism known as an Other Transaction Agreement, or OTA. In addition to their primary role of circumventing much of the Pentagon’s bureaucratic contracting hurdles — known as the Federal Acquisition Regulation — OTAs also result in contracts not being disclosed by the government transparency site USASpending.gov. The combined effect is less legal and public scrutiny on defense contractors.
Perhaps the biggest lobbyist for OTAs in the past year has been the Software in Defense Coalition, which was founded by Jane Lee, a government affairs executive at the data fusion and cybersecurity contractor Rebellion Defense. Since its inception, Rebellion’s most prominent board member and investor has been former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
The public disclosure today of Google receiving an additional half million dollars from the Pentagon through an OTA to ‘process aerial imagery’ coincides with the publication this morning by the think tank Schmidt Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP) of an interview with former Joint Artificial Intelligence Center directors John N.T. Shanahan and Michael S. Groen. SCSP, the unofficial privated successor of the National Security Commission on AI also led by Eric Schmidt, has become the de facto center of AI policymaking for the U.S. national security community. But SCSP’s private control by a billionaire means that it is exempt from traditional government transparency requirements.
As part of the newly published interview, Shanahan referred to Project Maven as the “first real project by the Department of Defense to try to put AI capabilities into the field…for intelligence purposes”. Shanahan further elaborated: “Think of Project Maven as AI for intelligence and then the Joint AI Center — or the JAIC — AI for everything else in the Department of Defense. From back office functions to outerspace to cyberspace to warfighting operations, finance, medical, everything else in between.”
As the author reported in March, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency associate director for capabilities Phillip C. Chudoba publicly stated at an event hosted by the nonprofit Intelligence and National Security Alliance that Project Maven had been deployed by “a military partner who, in fact, took some of these technologies to Europe under the banner of our monitoring of the Ukraine crisis”.
And in April, the former head of Google Cloud AI, Andrew W. Moore, joined U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) as their first-ever advisor on “AI, Robotics, Cloud Computing, and Data Analytics”. The position followed Moore’s previous nomination to the National Security Commission on AI by former CENTCOM commander James N. Mattis and puts Moore into a leadership role with CENTCOM’s major experimental AI task forces for the Army, Air Force, and Navy (respectively, Task Forces 39, 59, and 99).
Roughly twenty two minutes into his SCSP interview, Shanahan referred to the war in Ukraine as “a wakeup call” and argued that relationships with U.S. tech companies are “much better now than [they were] in the Project Maven journey, where we had the episode with Google that is all but since resolved.”
Despite the nominal contract ceiling of the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability contract being $9 billion, public procurement records current up to May 17th suggest that Google has so far received only roughly $2.89 million in unclassified task orders. Due to the classified nature of Google’s similar multi-billion dollar ceiling contract with the Central Intelligence Agency, the Commercial Cloud Enterprise (C2E), it is unclear whether task orders have so far reached a significant percentage of the ostensibly multi-billion dollar cap.
Google X — the experimental division an anonymous source has claimed is handling the company’s aerial imagery contract with the Pentagon — did not respond to a request for comment.