Dr Raj Iyer has been appointed as the Chief Information Officer (CIO) of the US Army. He is an electronic engineer and is from Tamil Nadu. He is the first Indian American to hold a top command in the US Army. More than 15,000 civilians and soldiers will be serving under him in 100 countries. The Pentagon created this position in 2020. This makes him the first person to ever hold this position.
Announcing his departure from Deloitte where he was the managing director of Government and Public Services for nearly six years, he said, “This move was not one that I had planned, but the call for public service is my duty. It’s also an exciting opportunity to put technology front and centre to Army modernization leveraging cloud, AI and data analytics to achieve digital overmatch against our adversaries.”
Dr Iyer will now hold the rank equivalence of a 3-star General and will be heading and supervising an annual budget of $16 billion for the US Army’s IT operations.
Dr Iyer is originally from Tiruchirapalli in Tamil Nadu, but he was raised in Bengaluru. He completed his undergraduate studies at National Institute of Technology Trichy. He holds a PhD from the University of Texas at Arlington along with multiple masters degrees, including a Master of Business Administration from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from The University of Texas at Arlington.