The new head of defense research and engineering comes from the White House with a relatively light resume.

Updated: 10:20a.m.

The Pentagons new 33-year-old head of research and engineering lacks a basic science degree but brings deep connections to Donald Trump and controversial Silicon Valley venture capitalist PeterThiel.

Defense officials announced Monday that Michael Kratsios,the White Houses chief technology officer, would serve as acting undersecretary for research and engineering, a post that oversees top-priority projects in hypersonics, quantum computing, microelectronics, and other fields.He will continue to serve in his White Houserole.

In seeking to fill this position we wanted someone with experience in identifying and developing new technologies and working closely with a wide range of industry partners, said Defense Secretary Mark Esper in a statement on Monday. We think Michael is the right person for this job and we are excited to have him on theteam.

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Kratsios came to the White House in 2017 as deputy CTO, and moved up to CTO last year. He led efforts to further White House investment in artificial intelligence and quantum science and to expand U.S. partnerships in those areas. As the COVID-19 pandemic took hold, he helped launch a project to apply U.S. supercomputers to the U.Sresponse.

But Kratsios was a weird pick for these senior technical roles, according to one person who has served as both a senior White House and Defense Department official advising on technologyissues.

Kratsios graduated from Princeton with a bachelors degree in political science and a focus on ancient Greek democracy. The person hes replacing, Michael Griffin, holds a Ph.D. in aerospace engineering and served as a NASA administrator. Indeed, Kratsios will be less academically credentialled than most of the program-managers he oversees. So how did he gethere?

After Princeton, he went to work for Peter Thiel, soon becoming CFO of Clarium Capital Management, Thiels investment company. He then became chief of staff for the tech billionaire, who was an early backer of the Trump campaign and who has played a key role in the administrations approach totechnology.

Thiel-backed ventures like Anduril and Palantir are playing a growing role in the Defense Department. The former official said theoverlap between Thiel-backed defense contractors and his protege Kratsios need not be a cause for concern. The Department has spent years trying to improve its relationship with the private tech world from which Kratsios emerged. But the official said Kratsios might not prove to be the most effectiveambassador.

Its not clear to me that Kratsios is warming up Silicon Valley, the former official said. I dont know how the rest of Silicon Valley thinks ofKratsios.

Thiel has made a variety of enemies in the tech world and beyond; for example, he has slammed Google as being too accommodating toChina.

The development, however, is good news for the Peter Thiel portion of Silicon Valley, the former officialsaid.

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Peter Thiel's New Man In The Defense Department - Defense One