[R-G] Obama’s Pentagon-in-Waiting

[Anthony Fenton]

Obama’s Pentagon-in-Waiting
Center for a New American Security Widely Viewed as Source of People  
and Ideas
By Spencer Ackerman 11/8/08 2:20 PM
http://washingtonindependent.com/17710/obama

The rumor started to spread last week. if Sen. Barack Obama won the  
presidential election, Michele Flournoy would resign from the Center  
for a New American Security Thursday following the election. Friday at  
the latest.

It’s not difficult to understand why the talk circulated. Flournoy  
boasts an enviable resume. A veteran of the Clinton Pentagon, she  
worked on counter-proliferation issues before playing a large role in  
shaping the 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review, an overview of defense  
strategy and its implementation.

After leaving government service, Flournoy took a high-profile job at  
the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a prominent  
Washington policy organization, before co-founding the Center for a  
New American Security, an increasingly influential defense think tank,  
in 2007.

It’s not just Flournoy. CNAS, as it’s known, is widely considered a  
likely feeder for the Obama Pentagon, though the organization disputes  
this — preferring to bill itself as nonpartisan. What CNAS does not  
dispute is that, over the course of the past two years — overnight, in  
Washington terms — it has emerged as an energetic center for studying  
contemporary defense issues, including Iraq, counterinsurgency and the  
national-security effects of climate change.

CNAS fellows like John Nagl, Colin Kahl, Vikram Singh, Shawn Brimley,  
Nate Fick and Roger Carstens will likely be key players in the defense  
debates of the next several years — whether they join an Obama  
administration or not. If they do join the administration, however,  
expect counterinsurgency to be a major focus of the next Pentagon team.

“There are many good policy organizations in the current national- 
security debate, and the team at CNAS should be recognized for their  
important contribution,” said Rudy DeLeon, deputy secretary of defense  
in the Clinton administration. “In particular, they have helped give  
field- and company-grade officers a clear voice in the policy  
discussion.”

For years, Flournoy has been touted as the odds-on favorite to be the  
country’s first woman secretary of defense. While Obama isn’t believed  
to be considering her for that position, many in Washington defense  
circles are saying that she’s a shoo-in for an important Pentagon job,  
as is CNAS’s other co-founder, Kurt Campbell, another veteran of the  
Clinton Pentagon and National Security Council staff.

As of Friday afternoon, though, Flournoy was still at her desk at the  
Center for a New American Security. “She is still employed here,” said  
Price Floyd, a spokesman for CNAS. “In fact, she’s in the office today.”

Similarly, Floyd said he is unaware if the Obama transition team has  
approached the think tank’s leaders and fellows. “I have no idea. Not  
a clue,” he said. “If they had, the saying in Washington is those who  
know, don’t say, and those who say, don’t know. I don’t fit in that  
category.” CNAS fellows and leaders declined to comment for this  
article.

 From its inception, CNAS has demonstrated an ability to “punch above  
our weight,” as Floyd put it. The think tank’s launch event, in June  
2007, was at the baroque Willard Hotel near the White House — a  
favored locale for CNAS gatherings, owing both to its grandeur and its  
proximity to the think tank’s offices at 13th Street and Pennsylvania  
Avenue NW.

Among the featured speakers were former Defense Sec. William Perry;  
Sens. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) and Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.); Princeton  
University’s Anne-Marie Slaughter, and Philip Zelikow, then counselor  
to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. The introductory panel was  
moderated by former Secretary of the Navy Richard Danzig, Obama’s  
chief defense adviser and a potential secretary of defense. A keynote  
was delivered by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), then the front- 
runner for the Democratic presidential nomination.

At the time, many believed that CNAS would be a feeder for her  
administration. Floyd disputed that — “we got that rap, that we were  
Hillary’s shadow, in-waiting” Pentagon, he remembered — and added that  
the goal of the organization was always to be bipartisan, but not  
bipartisan for its own sake.

“We bring people together,” Floyd said, “not for a lowest-common- 
denominator bipartisanship, but for pragmatic solutions for problems  
we face.” CNAS papers are often vetted through an informal peer-review  
process, with experts at liberal, centrist and conservative think tanks.

Still, some progressives have said that CNAS occasionally substitutes  
received wisdom for rigor. “I think CNAS’s work on Iraq, in  
particular, has been unduly tied to the conventional wisdom,” said  
Matthew Yglesias, a leading liberal blogger for the Center for  
American Progress, another Washington policy organization, “and  
sometimes seems more focused on trying to find ways to appear  
judicious and moderate than on trying to find solutions that are equal  
to the scale of the problem.”

Much as Iraq has shaped the defense establishment over the past five  
and a half years, so too has it shaped CNAS. Its first Iraq policy,  
“Phased Transition: A Responsible Way Forward and Out of Iraq,” argued  
against firm deadlines for withdrawing U.S. troops, but also rejected  
an indefinite commitment to the country.

While several fellows, including Nagl and Kahl, have expressed support  
for President George W. Bush’s 2007 troop surge, CNAS’s follow-up  
paper, “Shaping the Iraq Inheritance” — written by Kahl, Flournoy and  
Brimley — focused on how to accomplish a withdrawal of U.S. forces  
without leaving a political and security vacuum behind.

Floyd contended that CNAS’s Iraq position has become the Washington  
consensus position. We were able to describe a responsible  
withdrawal,” he said, “and, in essence, the discussion is how to do  
that. It’s not if it will be done.”

Counterinsurgency, however, is probably the defense issue most closely  
associated with the think tank. Before Nagl retired from the Army this  
summer, he was one of the service’s leading counterinsurgency scholar- 
advocate-practitioners — putting counterinsurgency theory into  
practice as a battalion commander in Iraq and helping write the  
landmark 2006 Army/Marine Corps counterinsurgency field manual.

At CNAS, Nagl put forward a provocative proposal to create a corps  
within the Army devoted to training foreign military forces in how to  
suppress internal rebellions. Several attendees of this week’s  
Counterinsurgency Leaders’ Conference at Ft. Leavenworth, Kan., openly  
speculated whether Nagl would be made deputy assistant secretary of  
defense for special operations, low-intensity conflict and stability  
operations, the key civilian Pentagon brief for irregular warfare.

Nagl is hardly alone. Kahl, a veteran of the Office of the Secretary  
of Defense, is another leading counterinsurgency expert, focusing on  
Iraq, to which he’s made numerous trips in the brief time he’s been at  
CNAS.

Fick, a Dartmouth graduate and Marine veteran of both Iraq and  
Afghanistan — where he taught at Kabul’s Afghanistan Counterinsurgency  
Academy — has achieved a degree of prominence in both  
counterinsurgency circles and popular culture. A book chronicling his  
platoon’s place in the Iraq invasion, “Generation Kill,” was recently  
made into an HBO mini-series by David Simon, co-creator of “The Wire.”

Fick and Singh, who served in a variety of nonpolitical Pentagon jobs  
during the Bush administration, spent the late summer traveling  
through Afghanistan. They became two of the earliest and most  
prescient advocates of negotiating with elements of the Taliban, an  
initiative since pursued by the government of Hamid Karzai.

Prominent counterinsurgents give CNAS top marks, and view the  
absorption of its scholars into an Obama administration as an  
indicator of the new president’s embrace of counterinsurgency.

“I’ve been following CNAS since its inception, know many of the  
personnel there and, bottom-line, have been quite impressed with their  
analysis and recommendations on the important issues associated with  
national security,” said Dave Dilegge, editor of Small Wars Journal, a  
blog that has become the virtual forum of the counterinsurgency  
community, in an email. “The thing that impresses me the most is, that  
while conventional wisdom has held that CNAS was the ‘holding ground’  
for an Obama administration, their work reflects a nonpartisan stance  
that would stand well in any administration — Democrat or Republican.  
When it comes to issues concerning irregular warfare and a whole  
government approach to complex operations, they have some of the best  
and brightest.”

Floyd said the focus of several of CNAS’s scholars on  
counterinsurgency reflects the think tank’s broader mission to take  
fresh approaches to national security. “On the face of it,” Floyd  
said, it was fair to view CNAS as a counterinsurgency-heavy  
organization.

“But more important,” Floyd added, “is that it’s not so much that as  
that we’re looking at the current and future challenges of the United  
States. Right now a lot of our scholars have come to the conclusion  
that the best ways to deal with them are through counterinsurgency and  
counterinsurgency-like ideas.”