A vice president with the global consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, Dov Zakheim has spent more than
two decades working in the defense industry, in both governmental and private capacities. A regular
supporter of hawkish defense policy, Zakheim has been associated with a string of neoconservative-led
groups, including the Project for the New American
Century (PNAC) and the Center for Security
Policy, where he serves on the advisory council.
Zakheim served as undersecretary for defense (comptroller) from 2001 to 2004, overseeing the Pentagon's
spending program in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the onset of the "war on terror." As
comptroller, Zakheim oversaw three Defense budgets, each totaling more than $300 billion, and implemented
six war-time supplementary budget requests (see Defense Department News Release).
With his appointment to the Pentagon in 2001, Zakheim joined a group of policy advisers who had been
instrumental in shaping President George W. Bush's defense and foreign policy since before Bush became
president; many continue to play influential roles in the administration. Zakheim was a part of the
foreign policy team. Labeled the "Vulcans," these advisers included current Secretary of
State Condoleezza Rice, former Deputy Secretary
of State Richard Armitage, former National Security Council Deputy for Iraq Robert Blackwill, Bush's
current National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, Richard
Perle, World Bank President and former U.S. trade rep Robert
Zoellick, and visiting scholar at the American
Enterprise Institute and former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul
Wolfowitz (for an account of the Vulcans, see James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans).
Zakheim was the Defense Department's chief financial officer during the 2003 efforts to streamline
the department's spending procedures and implement spending priorities that reflected Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld's vision of a 21st-century military. Critics say some of the reforms removed congressional
oversight and accountability from the defense budget. During Zakheim's tenure, the Defense Department's
Inspector General found that the Pentagon could not properly account for more than $1 trillion of spent
funds (San Francisco Chronicle, May 18, 2003).
Among his roles at the Pentagon, as undersecretary for defense (comptroller) Zakheim served as coordinator
of the Defense Department's civilian programs in Afghanistan and was an international fund-raiser for
Iraq reconstruction monies, organizing the October 2003 Madrid donors conference and the June 2003
UN potential donors conference (see Booz Allen Hamilton profile).
Zakheim's career in the defense industry began when he joined the Pentagon in 1981, serving in various
posts including special assistant to the assistant secretary for international security and assistant
undersecretary for policy and resources, before moving up into the post of deputy undersecretary
of defense for planning and resources in the Reagan administration, working in systems acquisition
and strategic planning.
When Zakheim left the Defense Department in 1987, it was for an executive vice president post in the
private sector, with the Virginia-based government consultant and contractor Systems Planning Corporation
(SPC), which has supplied the Defense Department with military technology for more than 35 years and
is a support contractor for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Zakheim
also served as CEO at subsidiary SPC International and as a consultant for the defense contractors
McDonnell Douglas (now a part of Boeing) and Northrop Grumman (see "Axis of Influence," 2002).
While working in the private sector Zakheim did not lose touch with the Washington policy machine,
contributing his ideas to open letters, articles, and policy recommendations that helped establish
him as a leading conservative thinker on defense and national security policy. While still at Systems
Planning Corporation, in April 1998, Zakheim participated in an SPC "roundtable" discussion
for the Rumsfeld Missile Commission (see
Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat, April 1998). According to a 2002 article by Vernon
Loeb in the Washington Post, it was this interaction with Rumsfeld that solidified Zakheim's
role in the Pentagon as someone who shared the defense secretary's vision of streamlining and modernizing
the U.S. military ("Not Just Writing Checks for the Military," Washington Post, January
2, 2002). After Bush took office in 2001, Zakheim was tapped by Rumsfeld for his experience with defense
and budgeting. As Rumsfeld told a Washington Post reporter in May 2001: "I put together
a few small groups, to look at some things that I thought were priority issues. Some the president
asked me to. And with the thought that we could get some bright people looking at them and then we'd
plug them into the Quadrennial Defense Review which we're going to do, and that starts now. ... Financial
management, Zakheim got on board Friday and he has taken the thought that came from the financial management
business that Senator [Robert] Byrd raised with me, and has thoughts, and they will again be doing
some internal changes and then making some proposals for legislation at some point" (DefenseLink
transcript, May 21, 2001).
In 1996, Zakheim's book Flight of the Lavi: Inside a U.S.-Israeli Crisis was published, detailing
his role in ending the IAI Lavi program, an initiative in the 1980s in which Israel researched and
developed its own fighter jets (called the IAI Lavi). Zakheim reinforced the U.S. position that Israel
should not produce an aircraft that would compete with the U.S. F-16, arguing that it was more efficient
for Israel to buy jets from the United States. An ordained rabbi and an orthodox Jew, Zakheim
was publicly criticized and harassed for his role in opposing the system and purportedly going against
the interests of Israel. Today the Israeli Air force has the largest fleet of F-16s outside of the
United States (see Journal of Palestine Studies, 1998).
He was also involved with groups like the Committee for Peace and Security in the Gulf, which formed
in 1990 to support the first President Bush during the first Gulf War. In 1998, the group sent an open
letter to President Bill Clinton calling for a "comprehensive political and military strategy
for bringing down Saddam and his regime." Fellow signatories included Rumsfeld, Perle, Wolfowitz, Douglas
Feith, Elliott Abrams, Paula
Dobriansky, Frank Gaffney, Bill
Kristol, Michael Ledeen, Joshua
Muravchik, Jeffrey Gedmin, Fred
Ikle, Robert Kagan, David
Wurmser, and Peter Rodman (see "Open
Letter").
Zakheim later joined several of these same people in supporting PNAC, a neoconservative organization
that played an important role in driving public and official support for the invasion of Iraq before
and after the 9/11 attacks. In 1998, Zakheim signed a PNAC open letter to Clinton about the crisis
in Kosovo. The letter called for U.S. support for regime change in Belgrade. Two
years later, Zakheim contributed to a PNAC paper titled, "Rebuilding America's Defenses." The
paper claims: "If the United States is to maintain its preeminence—and the military revolution
now underway is already an American-led revolution—the Pentagon must begin in earnest to transform
U.S. military forces."
The PNAC paper opines that in the absence of some "catastrophic" event akin to Pearl
Harbor, such reforms would happen at a glacial pace. A year later, 9/11 seemed to provide such
a spark to the kind of rapid transformation envisioned. "The system is a slow system to react
until something happens, and something has happened. And the system is reacting," the Washington
Post quoted Zakheim as saying in 2002. "This is going to push our [agenda]
ahead, obviously geared to the war effort, precisely because it was this kind of war that many of us
feared and anticipated."
Years later, Zakheim was still an advocate for funding and policy to promote the "military
transformation" of U.S. armed services. In a 2005 opinion piece, Zakheim wrote that Rumsfeld spent
billions on such transformation programs, and he cites the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as examples
of the need for a restructured military that is more responsive, flexible, and interconnected. As a
Pentagon comptroller, Zakheim contributed greatly to funding that transformation ("Money
Drives Rumsfeld's Changes," Financial Times, March 28, 2005).
But the main premise of "Rebuilding America's Defenses"—advocating an ever-expanding U.S.
influence in the world—seems slightly out of step with Zakheim's own worldview. In a New York Times article
published just after the 2000 election, James Traub wrote:
"Dov Zakheim, for example, has written that the scale of atrocities in places like the Balkans
is often exaggerated, and that in any case violating another nation's sovereignty threatens 'to unravel
the entire fabric of international relations.' Zakheim concludes that we should intervene 'only when
our own interests are clearly at stake, or when genocide is so manifest that refusal to act would destroy
our moral leadership of the free world.'"
In 2004 Zakheim stepped down from his post at the Pentagon with little explanation. However, his resignation
did follow a highly critical audit by the General Accountability Office. Although he is no longer in
public office, Zakheim has not disappeared from the public sphere, continuing to comment an U.S. policy.
Like other former administration officials, Zakheim has recently criticized the U.S. failure to establish
democracy in Iraq. In 2006, he coauthored a piece in the National Interest with Daniel
Pipes, Tommy Franks, and four others, stating: "Iraq's seemingly never-ending violence, whether
it is termed a civil war, or, more euphemistically, 'sectarian strife,' has created a sense of instability,
insecurity, and raw fear, for all but those Kurds living in Kurdistan. Democracy in this environment
is nothing more than a sorry catch-phrase." (Both Pipes and Zakheim are on the National Interest's
Advisory Council, along with Ikle, Conrad Black, Ruth
Wedgwood, and others.)
Following the January 2006 election of Hamas in an open contest in the Palestinian territories, Zakheim
said in an interview, "We have a situation not unlike Germany in 1932 when we had an upstart [Nazi]
party ruled by thugs that preached hatred and racism and also claimed they would clean up a corrupt
Weimar Republic. The parallels are frightening," (Timothy M. Phelps, "Some Warn Now of Rising
Islamist Tide in the Region," Newsday, January 27, 2006).
In January 2007, Zakheim stated clearly his belief that Iraq had fallen into a messy civil war and
advocated that the United States pull back to Iraq's borders ("Why America Should Operate from
Iraq's Borders," Financial Times, January 4, 2007). "No doubt some will see this
as the United States giving up on democracy and being content to stand by as Iraqis kill each other.
Yet clearly democracy in Iraq must await the end of the civil war. ... The strategic shift would bring
relief to our overstretched and over-deployed military. It would reduce combat losses. Above all, it
would give the military a mission that they can achieve. This way we can finally bring to an end a
bitter domestic debate over Iraq policy that has so undermined public faith in the judgment and wisdom
of their leaders on both sides of the political aisle." In contrast to this advice, the president
surged troop levels inside Iraq.
Zakheim's publications include "Congress and National Security in the Post-Cold War Era," (Nixon
Center, 1998), and "Toward a Fortress Europe?" (Center
for Strategic and International Studies, 2000).
