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Established in 2007, the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) is widely considered one of the Barack Obama administration’s key outside think tanks on national security and defense policy. CNAS describes itself as an “independent and nonpartisan research institution” that aims to engage “policymakers, experts, and the public with innovative fact-based research, ideas, and analysis to shape and elevate the national security debate.” [1]

CNAS’s leading role in Obama-era policy-making was confirmed when in 2009 the organization’s cofounders—Michele Flournoy and Kurt Campbell—and several other CNAS scholars were tapped to serve in the administration. [2] Flournoy became the undersecretary of defense for policy, the same post held by the controversial neoconservative figure Douglas Feith during the first George W. Bush administration. Campbell was tapped to serve as the State Department’s lead Asia expert. [3]

Several CNAS principals were also named to the Defense Policy Board, [4] the in-house Pentagon advisory board which, under the leadership of former chair Richard Perle, played a role in promoting an expansive “war on terror” during the Bush administration. [5]

A largely centrist think tank with liberal-hawk tendencies, [6] CNAS leadership as of mid-2009 included a range of moderate Democratic and Republican leaders, as well as several high profile corporate leaders and policy wonks. John Nagl, who replaced Flournoy as CNAS president, is a retired army officer who specializes in counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy. The Inter Press Service described Nagl as “a poster boy for COIN enthusiasts, including influential neoconservatives who featured Nagl at the March kick-off of their newest think tank, the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI).” [7]’

Members of CNAS’s advisory board and board of directors as of mid-2009 included: Michael O’Hanlon, a Brookings Institution scholar who frequently collaborates with neoconservative writers like Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute; Norman Augustine, the former chairman of defense contractor Lockheed Martin and ex-adviser to Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy; Clinton administration secretaries of state and defense,  Madeleine Albright and William Perry; Bush administration deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage; Clinton administration secretary of the navy Richard Danzig; and David Kilcullen, a former Australian infantry officer and influential expert in counterinsurgency warfare who served as an adviser to former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Among its activities, the organization hosts conferences, publishes blogs, and runs “featured projects” on policy toward Iran and Afghanistan, special forces operations, energy security and climate change, and the future of the U.S. military. It directs a “National Security Leaders Forum,” which serves as “a platform for senior civilian and military leaders to address the Washington policy community and media on the most important national security issues of the day”; sponsors “war games” like the 2008 game “Clout and Climate Change,” described as a “future scenario exercise to explore the national security implications of global climate change”; and leads a “Next Generation National Security Leaders Program,” which aims to “gather future national security leaders to participate in a series of frank and open discussions on the foreign policy challenges of today and tomorrow.” [8]

CNAS blogs include the “Natural Security Blog” on environmental issues and “Abu Muqawama,” a widely read blog on counterinsurgency run by CNAS scholar Andrew Exum. A retired U.S. army soldier who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and former fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy—a hawkishly Israel-centric policy outfit—Exum is considered a preeminent scholar on contemporary counterinsurgency strategy, though his work has been criticized as overly enthusiastic about it. [9]

CNAS drew attention in early 2009 when its president, John Nagl, participated in a conference hosted by an advocacy group founded by William Kristol and Robert Kagan called the Foreign Policy Initiative, which is viewed by some observers as a successor to the Project for the New American Century. [10] The March 31 conference, titled “Afghanistan: Planning for Success,” was striking for its support for President Obama, who had recently announced plans to send 21,000 new troops to Afghanistan. A bipartisan group of officials and policy wonks—including Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), Robert and Frederick Kagan, Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), and Nagl— praised Obama’s escalation policy. [11]

During his speech, Nagl argued that the new troops were “merely a down payment on the vastly expanded force needed to protect all 30 million Afghan people.” Offering bipartisan cover for the work of neoconservative groups like FPI, Nagl said, “There used to be a bipartisan consensus in this country on foreign policy, in particular when we have our sons and daughters at war. And I am hopeful that events like this will contribute to that.” [12]

Commenting on CNAS’s role in Washington discourse on security policy, Kelley Beaucar Vlahos wrote in The American Conservative, "COIN today is the realm of CNAS, as if Frederick Kagan and AEI had never existed. But it won’t do to deny the family resemblance, says retired Army Col. Douglas Macgregor: ‘You will hear the same things at the Center for a New American Security as you will at the American Enterprise Institute. Nation-building at gunpoint, democracy at gunpoint. What’s the difference?’” [13]

Another commentator, Andrew Bacevich, a generally conservative scholar who was a vocal critic of neoconservative influence in the George W. Bush administration, also finds similarities between CNAS and groups like AEI. Wrote Vladhos, “Adherents of the old neoconservative vision and these new security policymakers all ‘drank the Kool-Aid,’ said Boston University Professor Andrew Bacevich. … Both groups, he added, see war as ‘a perpetual condition,’ employing massive firepower and boots on the ground, draining ‘billions, if not trillions of dollars,’ in pursuit of goals based on skewed assumptions about American interests abroad.” [14]

Please note: IPS Right Web neither represents nor endorses any of the individuals or groups profiled on this site.