• Wired, Tuesday, March 13, 2012 12:15 PM

Defining the new military-industrial complex, Darpa director Regina Dugan has accepted a “senior executive position” at Google. According to a Darpa spokesman, Dugan couldn’t say no to an offer from such an “innovative company.” Despite what Wired calls a “controversial” tenure at Darpa, Dugan’s focus on cyber security and next-generation manufacturing reportedly earned her strong support from the White House.

“Her push into crowdsourcing and outreach to the hacker community were eye-openers in the often-closed world of military R&D,” Wires writes. “Dugan also won over some military commanders by diverting some of her research cash from long-term, blue-sky projects to immediate battlefield concerns.” Connected to her departure or not, the Pentagon’s Office of Inspector General is also actively investigating hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of contracts that Darpa gave out to RedX Defense -- a bomb-detection firm that Dugan co-founded, and still partially owns.

“Dr. Dugan’s departure is not related to an OIG investigation,” Lt. Col. Melinda Morgan, a spokesperson for the Office of the Secretary of Defense, said in a statement. What Dugan will be doing at Google is not yet clear.

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