John Sherman, the acting CIO, will be nominated for the top CIO role by the Biden administration. (DoD/Marvin Lynchard)
WASHINGTON: The Biden administration has selected John Sherman as its nominee for the Pentagon’s Chief Information Officer and Nickolas Guertin as its nominee to be Director of Operational Test and Evaluation, Breaking Defense has learned.
The nominations, which could come as soon as this afternoon, would go a long way to filling out DoD’s technical leadership.
Sherman, a 25 year veteran of the national security community, was named acting CIO at the Pentagon at the start of the year. He previously served as Intelligence Community CIO. His other previous stints include jobs with the CIA, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and National Intelligence Council. Sherman also served as an Air Defense Artillery officer in the 24th Infantry Division.
The CIO role, which was created only in the last few years, is the lead for the department’s efforts in modernizing its information technology — including the attempt to move to a combat cloud, which has proven to be a complicated process for the DoD.
An engineer by training, Guertin previously lead the rapid prototyping and strategic planning with the Navy’s Surface Warfare Center and was the Director for Transformation in the office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Navy for RDT&E. He was in the Navy and Naval reserve from 1979-2002, and has spent the last four years performing applied research on software and cyber systems at Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute.
The OT&E office serves as the Pentagon’s top weapons tester, with a hand on evaluating all major defense development programs.
Currently, 21 nominees have been confirmed for top DOD spots, while another 13 are awaiting confirmation in the Senate, according to a tracker maintained by the Washington Post and Partnership for Public Service. Following today’s Guertin and Sherman announcements, there are still 22 positions with no nominees.
On their face, neither candidate seems like someone who would raise red flags in Congress. However, politics always has a role, and recent events might conspire to slow the confirmation process down.
Following the chaos of America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, Republican Sen. Josh Hawley this week pledged to hold up any State or Pentagon nominees unless Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Secretary of State Antony Blinken both resign their positions.
Since that seems unlikely to happen, Hawley — a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee — will certainly get a chance to follow through on his threat. While he can’t single handily block any nominees, Hawley could institute a series of procedural moves that could slow the process down significantly.
Hawley, who famously appeared and cheered on the rally that turned into an insurrectionist mob on Jan. 6, has also called for White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan to resign.
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