Radha Iyengar Plumb Sworn-in as Defense Department’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer
- In her new role, the Indian American national security expert will tasked with the integration and optimization of artificial intelligence capabilities across the department.
National security expert Radha Iyengar Plumb was sworn in this week as the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer at the Department of Defense. A department press release noted that her position “should prove key to the implementation of U.S. policies for autonomous weapon systems and autonomous systems in the kill chain.”
In her new role, the Indian American will be tasked with the integration and optimization of artificial intelligence capabilities across the DoD, as well as acceleration the departments adoption of data and analytics.
Iyengar Plumb most recently served as the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment. In post, she “built out the U.S. security industrial base and supply chain,” the DoD said.
She co-authored a working paper in October 2010 linking civilian casualties in Afghanistan to subsequent insurgent violence. “In Afghanistan we find strong evidence that local exposure to civilian casualties caused by international forces leads to increased insurgent violence over the long-run, what we term the ‘revenge’ effect,” the paper read. However, no evidence was found for a similar reaction to civilian casualties in Iraq. The paper concluded that “reducing civilian casualties is not necessarily in conflict with the objective of protecting the lives of international forces.”
Last September, in an open discussion with the Center for Strategic & International Studies in September 2023, she “described China’s rapid fusion of AI and military technology as a worrisome development, with the pacing challenge presented furthering China’s state interests in line with autocratic values,” the DoD noted. She went on to tout the U.S. economic advantage as “a hard counter to these efforts, with solutions derived from the rapid scaling of information technologies, aided by government programs to reduce sticking points in development,” the DoD added.
Before her appointment as chief of staff, she was the director of Research and Insights for Trust & Safety at Google, “leading their cross-functional teams on business analytics, data science, and technical research,” according to her White House bio. “She also served as the Global Head of Policy Analysis at Facebook where she focused on high risk/high harm safety and critical international security issues,” the bio said.
She previously was a Senior Economist at the RAND Corporation where she focused on improving the measurement and evaluation of readiness and security efforts across the Department of Defense. She also held a number of senior staff positions on national security issues at the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, and the White House National Security Council.
At the outset of her career, she was an assistant professor at the London School of Economics and did her postdoctoral work at Harvard. She received her Ph.D. and M.S. in Economics from Princeton University and holds a B.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
She is married to John F. Plumb, who serves as assistant secretary of defense for space policy. He was previously the chief of government relations at The Aerospace Corporation. In 2016, he unsuccessfully ran as the Democratic Party candidate for the 23rd congressional district in New York.
(Top photo, Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III swears in Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer Radha Plumb at the Pentagon, April 9. Photo By Air Force Tech. Sgt. Jack Sanders, DOD)