Who’s funding DC’s pro-war think tanks? 'Independent' experts push defence-contractor agendas

You have no doubt heard at least one variation on these themes in the last year. But did you ever ask why every “expert” seems to be saying the same thing? “Follow the money” has become cliché, but it is a useful place to start. Thanks to a new database created by the Quincy Institute (full disclosure: I work there), the consensus thinking in foreign policy can be traced, in part, to the powerful financial interests behind it.

Covering the period from 2019 to 2023, the tool permits users to track the money going to the top-50 Washington think tanks from the US government ($1.5 billion), foreign countries ($110 million), and private defence contractors ($34.7 million). Not all think tanks disclose their contributions, and many that do provide “minimum” ranges, so these totals are, if anything, conservative. An illuminating — and sordid — picture emerges when you filter who gets what and from whom, and match their substantive output over the last year on China, Ukraine, defence industrialisation, and nuclear deterrence.

Consider the Commission on National Defense Strategy. A few keystrokes reveal that the commission’s chairwoman, former Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif), is a trustee at the Aspen Institute, which received more than $8 million over the last five years from 10 different governments, including the US government, and major contractors like Boeing, GE, General Dynamics, Battelle, and McKinsey & Co. She is also the former president (now distinguished fellow) at the Wilson Center, which took in more than $52 million over five years, including $51 million or more from the US government, plus undisclosed amounts from Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin.

At a Council on Foreign Relations event to launch the report, Harman said: “It’s the United States public that has to start paying attention, because the goal is not to get into a more serious, horrible mess than we were in on 9/11, but to deter that and to put together the will to finance a larger budget and pay for it that involves all elements of national power, so we don’t get into that mess.” As it happens, CFR itself received more than $2 million from many of the same Pentagon contractors.

Another commissioner, Tom Mahnken, is the president and CEO of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. In the wake of the report’s publication, he wrote a piece for Foreign Affairs headlined, “A Three-Theater Defense Strategy: How America Can Prepare for War in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.” To Mahken’s mind, Washington should expand its military footprint abroad and pump out weapons to foreign allies and partners. “As the [NATO] alliance’s central member and main security provider, the United States must be able to meet the needs of both its own and its allies’ armed forces. To do so, the US government should provide defense companies with the kind of steady demand needed to boost production.”

Foreign Affairs identified Mahnken by his title but didn’t disclose that CSBA gets money from all the countries that he argued need US weapons, including Japan, Taiwan, Australia, Britain, Poland, and Germany. Mahnken’s think tank has also received numerous grants from the US Marines, Air Force, and Navy, and from most of the top-five contractors. According to the Quincy database, the CSBA doesn’t disclose specific amounts.

The commission is far from a rare case. In November, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, or CSIS, published a report titled “Project Atom 2024: Intra-War Deterrence in a Two-Peer Environment.” At the event launching the report, co-author Christopher Ford — who works with the Hoover Institution and is the founder of Two Ravens Policy Strategy, a contractor — smiled as he said: “I myself am relatively comfortable with nuclear-weapons use compared to some of my fellow panelists. . . . I am quite prepared to take that step should we need to do so.”

The report itself calls for expanding the US strategic arsenal. As it happens, the launch event was sponsored by Northrop Grumman, maker of the new Intercontinental Sentinel Ballistic Missile. The cost for the controversial missile has grown 81% over the last two years and is now expected to reach more than $140 billion to develop — or $214 million per missile.

CSIS, the think tank that published Ford’s report, has received at least $500,000 from Northrop Grumman since 2019. Its total intake from defence contractors was more than $4.1 million.

The Atlantic Council recently published its own nuclear report, titled “‘First, We Will Defend the Homeland’: The Case for Homeland Missile Defense,” which called for boosting funding for missile-defense technologies “to a full 1 percent of the annual defense budget.” The Atlantic Council has received at least $10 million from major Pentagon contractors that manufacture nuclear weapons and missile-defense systems, including BAE Systems, Boeing, Lockheed, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, and RTX (formerly Raytheon).

But there is perhaps no issue better primed for the think-tank racket than “AI innovation.” There are so many reports paid for by vested interests, commissions on which they sit, and governments getting their piece, it’s hard to keep track.

Some benefit more than others. Consider Michèle Flournoy, a former Pentagon official who founded the Center for New American Security and sits on its board. CNAS published a report in September titled “Integration for Innovation” as part of its “defense technology task force.” Executives from RTX (which contributed at least $450,000 to CNAS), Lockheed Martin ($600,000), Palantir ($175,000), Leidos ($300,000), and Booz Allen ($250,000) all directly contributed as members of the task force, even as they benefit from every single proposal in it.

How can a think tank purport to be independent when they are explicitly asking donor executives to produce their analysis?

As if all that weren’t incestuous enough, Flournoy is co-founder of WestExec Advisors, described by Washington Post scribe David Ignatius as trying “to bring smaller high-tech companies into the sometimes-overwhelming world of Pentagon procurement”; she has been banging the AI drum for years.

In a 2023 Foreign Affairs piece, Flournoy warned that the Pentagon would “never be able to attract as many AI experts as the private sector. The defense establishment must … deepen its conversations with technology companies…. It should also reduce some of the outdated barriers to tech firms doing business with the government.” Not disclosed by Foreign Affairs: Flournoy had served as an adviser to Shield AI, a startup trying to do business with the Pentagon, and is also on the board of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s America Frontier Fund, a defence-focused investment firm.

The Atlantic Council got in on the AI game earlier. It published its own Commission on Defense Innovation Adoption report last January. It, too, featured industry reps on a task force, whose companies, in turn, donate to the Atlantic Council, including Palantir (at least $600,000 to the council) and Booz Allen (at least $150,000). No surprise, the report concluded that the Pentagon “should increase incentives and reduce barriers for leading technology companies to do business” with the Department of Defense.

Then there is the foreign funding. In October, the Atlantic Council came out with a major report in favour of a controversial Saudi defense treaty with the United States. According to the report, “the combination of a strengthened regional air- and missile-defense network and a US defense pact with Saudi Arabia … would provide a strong deterrent against Iranian interests.” The Atlantic Council received more than $7 million from the United Arab Emirates and at least $400,000 from Saudi Arabia over the last five years.

To be sure, “follow the money” is never the entire story; ideology drives much of the policy in Washington, too. But it is worth noting much of the conventional wisdom in the capital is derived from base motivations.

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Kelley Vlahos is a senior adviser to the Quincy Institute and editorial director of its online magazine, Responsible Statecraft.

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