AI Villains and the Trump Administration: Andrew Mapes

Name: Andrew Mapes

Title: Principal Deputy Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer, U.S. Defense Department

Revolver/Government Experience

• According to Mapes’ LinkedIn profile, he served in his current role as Principal Deputy Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer at the U.S. Defense Department’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) in an acting capacity from November 2025 to July 2026. In this role, he leads “the department’s digital and AI transformation, scaling enterprise data, analytics, and AI capabilities to accelerate warfighting advantage.” 

• Mapes briefly served as the CDAO’s Acting Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer from December 2025 to January 2026 until Cameron Stanley assumed the permanent role. 

• From April 2025 to November 2025, Mapes was Chief of Staff at the CDAO where he was “at the forefront of the strategic digital transformation and AI adoption across the entire [Defense Department] in alignment with the White House National AI Action Plan.”  

• Mapes was Acting Deputy Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer and Chief of Staff for Scaled Capabilities at the CDAO from December 2023 to April 2025. 

• Prior to that, throughout 2023, Mapes served as Deputy Staff Director and Strategic Advisor for Mission Integration to the Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Mission Integration Morgan Muir in the Defense Department’s Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
  • As Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Mission Integration, Morgan Muir was responsible for briefing former president Joe Biden, key cabinet members, and close advisors on intelligence and analysis on national security issues. He was a senior CIA officer who also worked as an intelligence briefer during the George W. Bush administration. He now serves as a senior advisor at WestExec Advisors, a consulting firm co-founded by Biden’s Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Obama alumni.    

• Previously, from 2020 until 2023, Mapes was Program Manager of Booz Allen Hamilton’s National Security Programs where he supported “defense and intelligence community clients.” Booz Allen Hamilton is a defense and tech consulting firm whose largest federal customer is the Defense Department. 

• Before that, from 2019 to 2020, Mapes was Chief of Staff and Senior Advisor to the Defense Department’s Chief Management Officer Lisa Hershman in the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
  • At the time, the Chief Management Officer (CMO) position was the third highest-ranking leadership position in the Defense Department behind the Defense Secretary and the Deputy Defense Secretary. As CMO, Hershman was “in charge of business transformation and reform” at the Defense Department and managed responsibility for all defense activities and field agencies. 

• Mapes served as Business Process Management Consultant at Booz Allen Hamilton from 2017 to 2019. 

• Prior to his private sector and federal government experiences, Mapes worked for the state of Indiana, first as an Employee Relations Dispute Resolution Specialist from 2012 to 2014 and then as an External Affairs Manager from 2014 to 2017.
  • During the latter period, Mapes worked within the external affairs division at the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission, an administrative agency that oversees electric, natural gas, water, and other utilities. It hears cases regarding the provision of utilities and rates charged to customers but describes itself as “neither an advocate of the public nor the utilities.” The Commission’s external affairs division keeps the public informed about Commission actions.

• Additionally, since 2003, Mapes has been in the U.S. Army Reserve. He currently serves as an Army Functional Area 30 Information Operations Officer assigned to the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. 

Trump Admin Ties

• Mapes supports the CDAO’s efforts to speed up the adoption of AI across the Defense Department. This includes helping the CDAO carry out Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s AI Strategy that was announced in January 2026.
  • Under Hegseth’s AI Strategy, the CDAO is tasked with overseeing:
    • GenAI.mil, a platform that provides Defense Department personnel with AI tools like Google’s Gemini; 
    • Swarm Forge, which is about testing “ways of fighting with and against AI-enabled capabilities”; 
    • Agent Network, which is focused on “embedding AI agents into command-and-control systems like the Maven Smart System”; 
    • Ender’s Foundry, which is aimed at accelerating “AI-enabled simulation capabilities”; 
    • Open Arsenal, which is about accelerating the transformation of intelligence into weapons; 
    • Project Grant, which seeks to enable “transformation of deterrence from static postures and speculation to dynamic pressure with interpretable results”; and 
    • Enterprise Agents, which constructs “the playbook for rapid and secure AI agent development and deployment to transform enterprise workflows.” 
  • At the Intelligence and National Security Alliance’s Spring Symposium in April 2026, Mapes said, “AI is not going to replace people, but people that use AI are going to replace those that don’t use AI.” 
  • In addition to the seven priority projects listed above, other programs that fall under the CDAO’s purview include the War Data Platform, which is designed to provide “standardized data access that streamlines secure, rapid development and integration of agentic AI and other applications Dept.-wide,” and the Maven Smart System, a “tactical AI platform built to analyze and fuse sensor data for real-time object detection.”
    • The Maven Smart System was built by Palantir and used by the U.S. military during Operation Epic Fury, the codename for strikes launched by the U.S. and Israel against Iran beginning on February 28, 2026. With Maven, U.S. forces hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in southern Iran, killing at least 175 people, most of them little girls. The strike was reportedly the result of outdated military data that was rendered lethal by Maven. 

• In May 2026, Mapes toldFederal News Network, a news organization that covers stories within the federal government, that the Pentagon now has a more robust and expansive roster of private industry partners it works with and explained that Tradewind Solutions Marketplace, which is housed under the CDAO and was launched in 2022, serves as the entry point to doing business with the Pentagon.
  • Tradewind Solutions Marketplace is “a long-term, open call for new and novel technology solutions to support the [Defense Department] in advancing research, development, prototyping, and adoption of AI/ML, digital and data analytics capabilities.” 
  • The initiative provides a forum for “Government laboratories, industry and academic organizations, and individual developers” to demonstrate “their relevant research, products, and services to prospective Government customers” and “make[s] those solutions available through rapid acquisition methods” across the Defense Department. 
  • To showcase their AI solutions on the marketplace, vendors pitch a video of their solution through the CDAO’s submission portal. Once the video has undergone assessment and been marked as “Awardable,” the solution becomes visible to Defense Department personnel who can then contact the vendor directly. Companies listed as “Awardable” include Amazon Web Services, Anduril, Anthropic, Booz Allen Hamilton, Boeing, CACI, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Palantir, and many more. There are currently 1,399 awardable solutions available to the Defense Department. 

• In December 2025, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) introduced the United States Tech Force, a program focused on recruiting and training technologists in partnership with private sector tech companies, to implement Trump’s AI Action Plan on accelerating AI adoption across the federal government. OPM’s press release indicated that its new Tech Force would collaborate closely with the CDAO. Tech Force recruits are being offered between $150,000 to $200,000 annually for an initial two-year term, after which they can choose whether or not to stay in the public sector.
  • Tech Force’s private sector partners include Amazon Web Services, Anduril, Meta, OpenAI, Oracle, Palantir, and xAI.
  • Mapes told Federal News Network that he would like to bring in “as much talent as possible in all aspects whether it’s government, civilian or contractors.” He added: “We’re going to highly leverage the Tech Force program obviously given the caliber of talent that we expect it to bring on board but looking forward to see [sic] them showing up within other parts of the department as well.” 
  • In July 2026, OPM launched a program called War Force as part of the Tech Force initiative to expand hiring of AI-focused engineers who will embed directly with the Defense Department and work on the CDAO’s seven priority projects.

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Image: Andrew Mapes speaking about the need to move quickly in adopting AI across the U.S. Defense Department at the Intelligence and National Security Alliance’s Spring Symposium on April 14, 2026. “2026 Spring Symposium-The Data-Driven Enterprise: Building, Buying, and Deploying Capabilities at Mission Speed” by INSA, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

For more check out AI Villains and The Trump Administration