Thomas McInerney, a retired Air Force general who served four tours of duty in Vietnam, is a board member of several Defense Department contractors, a military analyst for Fox News, and a vocal supporter of a militarist “war on terror” centered on the Middle East.1 McInerney chairs the advisory council of the Iran Policy Committee,2 a hawkish group led by Raymond Tanter; serves on the Military Committee of the Center for Security Policy, a neoconservative advocacy organization led by Frank Gaffney 3; is on the advisory board of Rachel Ehrenfeld’s American Center for Democracy 4; and serves on the Executive Council of the Intelligence Summit.5 He has spoken at conferences of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) on Middle East strategic issues 6 and has defended the Mideast policies of the George W. Bush administration in neoconservative outlets, including the Wall Street Journal editorial page and William Kristol’s Weekly Standard.
In early 2008, a New York Times investigative report named McInerney as one of several dozen retired military officers—many of whom served as military analysts and experts for various media outlets—who had received administration briefings as part of a controversial and hitherto unknown Pentagon program to positively influence public opinion on U.S. policies in the “war on terror.”7 According to the Times, which broke the story on April 20, 2008, the Pentagon program selected the officers, who also included Barry McCaffrey and Paul Vallely, because as retired military personnel they “often got more airtime than network reporters, and they were not merely explaining the capabilities of Apache helicopters. They were framing how viewers ought to interpret events. What is more, while the analysts were in the news media, they were not of the news media. They were military men, many of them ideologically in sync with the administration’s neoconservative brain trust, many of them important players in a military industry anticipating large budget increases to pay for an Iraq war.”8 The Pentagon program, which began in 2002, ran until it was suspended in late April 2008, after the Times investigation broke.9 Fox continued to use McInerney as an on-air analyst after the story’s publication.
The retirees, who as part of the Pentagon program received access to senior military officials and decision makers, were also frequently “involved in the business of helping companies win military contracts,” according to the Times. “Several held senior positions with contractors that gave them direct responsibility for winning new Pentagon business.… Still others held board positions with military firms that gave them responsibility for government business. General McInerney, the Fox analyst, for example, sits on the boards of several military contractors, including Nortel Government Solutions, a supplier of communication networks.”10 (Since the Iraq War began, Nortel has received two U.S. government contracts to create fiber optic networks in Iraq. The most recent, awarded in late 2006, was a $20 million contract to build a network for Iraq’s Telecommunications & Post Corporation.)11
McInerney appears to have been responsive to the administration message. In one memo obtained by the Times, McInerney responded in late 2006 to talking points he received from the Pentagon, saying, “Good work, we’ll use it.”12 (The Times did not specify the issue McInerney was referring to.)
In early 2006, a group of retired generals issued scathing critiques of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s performance and demanded his resignation. In damage-control mode, the Pentagon sought to respond via its network of retired military officers. On April 14, 2006, Pentagon officials helped McInerney and Vallely draft an op-ed piece, according to the Times.13 After Vallely sent a note to the Pentagon saying that any help with the draft would “be much appreciated,” Rumsfeld’s office “quickly forwarded talking points and statistics to rebut the notion of a spreading revolt.”14 On April 17, the Wall Street Journal published “In Defense of Donald Rumsfeld,” an op-ed by McInerney, Vallely, and two other retired generals. “In the end [Rumsfeld’s] the man in charge and the buck stops with him,” they wrote. “As long as he retains the confidence of the commander in chief he will make the important calls at the top of the department of defense. That's the way America works. So let's all breathe into a bag and get on with winning the global war against radical Islam.”15
McInerney’s comments as an analyst have revealed a common motif in recent militarist justifications for continuing the war in Iraq and the “war on terror”—a fear of Islam. In November 2006, McInerney commented on a Fox program, “I don't think the American people, and certainly the left in our country, understand that—who we are fighting. It's Islamic fascism. And this is Islamic fascism, or extremism, is what we're trying to contain, this ideology. And you only contain an ideology and change it by being in the region. And what we're trying to do [in Iraq] is create a moderate government. If people understand we're trying to create a moderate government that can contain and eliminate this Islamic extremism, then they'll understand why this fight is so tough, because those extremists, those fascists cannot let Iraq have a moderate government.”16
In his appearances on Fox and in his writings for conservative outlets, McInerney has voiced extremely hawkish—and sometimes wildly conspiratorial—positions regarding America’s purported enemies, including Russia, Iran, Syria, and North Korea. In a February 2006 television interview with Bill O’Reilly, McInerney claimed that Russia helped Saddam Hussein hide weapons of mass destruction in Syria. He claimed that Russian Special Forces “moved those weapons into three locations in Syria and one into Bekaa Valley. And they did it very thoroughly. They were very professional. They were Spetsnaz [Special Forces] with GRU [Soviet military intelligence]. They knew exactly where all the material was, because they were preventing the inspectors from finding it.”17 No evidence of such actions has ever been made public.
In a 2003 article for the Wall Street Journal, McInerney and coauthor James Woolsey, former CIA chief and a vocal hardliner who is also connected to several defense contractors, discussed attacking North Korea to solve the difficult proliferation problem that its nuclear program posed. They argued that “the reflexive rejection in the public debate of the use of force against North Korea has begun to undermine U.S. ability both to influence China to act and to take the preparatory steps necessary for effectiveness if force should be needed.… It is not reasonable to limit the use of force to a surgical strike destroying Yongbyon [where a reprocessing facility is located]. Although the facility would need to be destroyed, the possible existence of another plutonium reprocessing plant or of uranium-enrichment facilities, or of plutonium hidden elsewhere, makes it infeasible to limit the use of force to such a single objective. Moreover, military action against North Korea must protect South Korea from certain attack (particularly from artillery just north of the DMZ that can reach Seoul). In short, we must be prepared to win a war, not execute a strike.”18
McInerney again proposed an aggressive military strike as a counterproliferation solution in an April 2006 Weekly Standard article—this time in reference to Iran, should diplomacy fail to keep it from developing nuclear weapons. In describing an “effective military response,” McInerney enthusiastically wrote that he imagined an attack would “consist of a powerful air campaign led by 60 stealth aircraft (B-2s, F-117s, F-22s) and more than 400 nonstealth strike aircraft, including B-52s, B-1s, F-15s, F-16s, Tornados, and F-18s. Roughly 150 refueling tankers and other support aircraft would be deployed, along with 100 unmanned aerial vehicles for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, and 500 cruise missiles…. [the] air campaign would hit more than 1,500 aim points. Among the weapons would be the new 28,000-pound bunker busters, 5,000-pound bunker penetrators, 2,000-pound bunker busters, 1,000-pound general purpose bombs, and 500-pound GP bombs. A B-2 bomber, to give one example, can drop 80 of these 500-pound bombs independently targeted at 80 different aim points.”19
From 1996 to 2000, McInerney was president of Business Executives for National Security (BENS), promoting the idea that private companies have a responsibility to help the government improve security, and vice versa. In his role as BENS head, he stated, “We believe that the American business community of today not only has an interest in national security, but that it has a distinct role to play in cooperation with the federal government in preventing the spread and use of WMD.”20 In 2000, McInerney founded his own consulting firm, Government Reform Through Technology.
In his last role with the Air Force, McInerney was “director of the Defense Performance Review, reporting to the secretary of defense. In that capacity, he led the Pentagon’s ‘reinventing government’ effort” that “focused on making the government perform better at less cost.”21 Despite those goals, the program backfired, according to the Project on Government Oversight, which reported, “Defense contractors are taking advantage of new opportunities to rip-off the federal government under policy reforms instituted by Clinton/Gore's Reinventing Government campaign and an industry-chummy Congress. Spare parts prices have ballooned by up to fifteen times (or 1,532%) by contractors like Boeing and AlliedSignal taking advantage of lax accounting and oversight under federal policy changes.”22
McInerney is author or coauthor of several books, including the September 2007 book published by the Iran Policy Committee, Baghdad Ablaze: How to Extinguish the Fires in Iraq, which was coauthored by McInerney, Tanter, Valley, and Bruce McColm. McInerney also coauthored with Vallely Endgame: The Blueprint for Victory in the Iraq War (2004).
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Affiliations23
Iran Policy Committee: Chairman, Advisory Council; Member, Military Committee
American Center for Democracy: Advisory Board Member
Center for Security Policy: Member, Military Committee
Fox News: Military Analyst
Intelligence Summit: Executive Council Member; Speaker (2007)
Business Executives for National Security: Former President and CEO (1996-2000)
John Locke Foundation: Speaker (2006)
Government
U.S. Air Force: Retired General; Former Vice Chief of Staff and Director of the Defense Performance Review
Private Sector24
GRTT (Government Reform Through Technology): Founder
Nortel Government Solutions: Board Member
Ezenia, Inc.: Former Board Member
Loral Defense Systems-Eagan: Former Vice President
Signal Technology Corp.: Former Board Member
Pan American International Flight Academy: Former Board Member
EFederal: Former Board Member
Alloy Surfaces Company: Former Board Member
Education25
U.S. Military Academy: B.S., 1959
George Washington University: M.S. in International Relations, 1972 |
