Center for Security Policy

Center for Security Policy is a Washington-based organization set up by the hardline neoconservative Frank Gaffney, who worked in the defence department during the Ronald Reagan era. According to Jim Lobe, it is a "a small think tank funded mainly by U.S. defence contractors, far-right foundations, and right-wing Zionists". It operates with the tagline 'promoting peace through strength', by which they appear to mean that global US dominance is the route to peace.

The Center states its mission as follows:

To identify challenges and opportunities likely to affect American security, broadly defined, and to act promptly and creatively to ensure that they are the subject of focused national examination and effective action.

The Center has run campaigns and research on the subjects of nuclear deterrents, the war of ideas, weapons in space, Islamism and terror, among others. Indeed Frank J. Gaffney Jnr describes his Center for Security Policy as "the special forces in the war of ideas", stating that it has the advantage over a think tank of not being "slow and unwieldy" and being "able to turn around a product in a matter of hours".

History

1976-1988

Important in itself, the Committee on the Present Danger’s (CPD) second incarnation in the 1970s and early 1980s was an extremely important predecessor to the Center for Security Policy. Set up as an independent and not-for-profit organisation, it was to assess the Soviet Union’s capabilities and threat to the United States in a non-partisan way. The group was originally called ‘Team B’ in opposition to the ‘Team A’ which did this job for the CIA, and had a political base through the Coalition for a Democratic Majority which was founded to try and fight back against any concessions made by the Democrats to the Soviet Union with regards to Foreign Policy. In 1976, this group helped set up the Committee for Present Danger to put pressure on Democrat President Jimmy Carter. The parallels with groups such as the Center for Security Policy can be shown by looking at who have been members of both – Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and even Ronald Reagan in 1979.

1988-1992

In 1987, Frank Gaffney broke with the Reagan administration over its decision to pursue treaties that aimed for nuclear arms reduction in cooperation with the Soviet Union. Gaffney argued against this policy and continued to push for a hard-line, anti-Soviet rhetoric and the continued buildup of nuclear weapons. The following year he founded the Center for Security Policy, basing it loosely on the Committee on the Present Danger, which had taken up the same aggressive opposition to nuclear arms reduction. Gaffney and his colleagues were quick to criticise the Republican President for moving towards liberal governance and preferred to push claims about the level of threat posed to the United States by the Red Menace and the need to possess a much larger nuclear arsenal than that of their rival.

1992-2000

During the Carter and Clinton administrations, the group who formed the basis for the Center for Security Policy, the neoconservatives, found themselves in opposition to a Democratic administration with different foreign policy aims and methodologies. Along with the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), the CSP became the main bedrock of shadow defence policy during the 1990s, a time when the group helped to bring the militarisation of space from the realm of science fiction to almost reality. One of their elaborate claims throughout the 1990s resulted in support for the newly created Project for a New American Century, in which a letter was signed by several prominent CSP members, among others, and sent to President Clinton to urge him to attack Iraq due to the “scourge of Saddam and the weapons of mass destruction that he refuses to relinquish.” Gaffney was also proud of his group’s involvement in both the Rumsfeld Missile Commission and the Rumsfeld Space Commission which both suggested that the United States was under far more of a threat than previously suggested and, of course, than it realistically was. Gaffney has been known to describe his baby, the CSP, as the “Dominos Pizza of the policy business” due to its speed at being responding to any situation with a demand and suggestion for policy, usually of a hard-line, neoconservative nature.

2000-present

When George W. Bush, himself a hard-line neoconservative, was elected in the year 2000, members of the Center for Security Policy gained important positions in the administration. Frank Gaffney, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and John Bolton are all names that have become synonymous with the neoconservative agenda and aggressive "War on Terror" foreign policy that has been a feature of the world in the past 8 years, providing much work and profit to companies such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin. The events of September 11, 2001 gave the Center for Security Policy a new impetus to push both its war of ideas and its idea of “America the vulnerable”, building on its "educational video" of 1998 with the same name, and through Gaffney and the CSP’s network of members throughout the administration. Indeed, when Donald Rumsfeld addressed the ‘Keeper of the Flame’ banquet in November 2001 he said of Gaffney, "If there was any doubt about the power of your ideas, one only has to look at the number of Center associates who people this administration — and particularly the Department of Defense — to dispel them." He made this statement in front of a banner proclaiming CSP’s ominous motto of “Peace Through Strength”, suggesting that the CSP was influential in the early stages of the supposed “War on Terror”.

Center for Security Policy Board of Directors

Chairman of the Board

• James T. de Graffenreid Chairman & President, HP Associates

Directors

• Bruce J. Brotman, vice president of strategic plans at National Biometric Security.
• M.D.B. Carlisle Former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Legislative Affairs, and former Chief of Staff to Senator Thad Cochran
• Terry Elkes Principal & Co-Owner, Apollo Partners, LLC. He manages and co-owns Apollo Partners, LLC, a private equity firm engaged in acquiring media, communications, entertainment, and broadcasting companies. Elkes' experience in media acquisition dates back to his work as president and CEO of Viacom in the 1970s and 1980s.
• Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. President, Center for Security Policy. He formerly acted as the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy during the Reagan Administration, following four years of service as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear Forces and Arms Control Policy.
• James T. deGraffenreid is a former CSP chairman, and he remains on the board. He was a principal in two major defense-related industries: HP Associates (formerly Phillips Publishing), which is a "key information supplier to the Defense, Aviation, Telecommunication, and Energy Industries"; and First Service Networks (formerly Sure Air Corp)."
• Lt. Col. Marlin L. Hefti, USMC (Ret.) Vice President, Van Scoyoc Associates
• Charles M. Kupperman, the former Vice President of Strategic Integration & Operations, Missile Defense Systems, the Boeing Company
• Dominic J. Monetta, President, Resource Alternatives, Inc.
• Miles Prentice III is a Partner at Eaton & Van Winkle, LLP
• David P. Steinmann (JINSA), Managing Director of American Securities, L.P.
• Allen M. Taylor, Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation

National Security Advisory Council

CSP Board of Advisors has been renamed the National Security Advisory Council (NSAC).

Many of the members of the council also held senior positions with the George W. Bush administration, including:

• Mark Albrecht, former Executive Secretary of the White House National Space Council
• Morris Amitay, former Foreign Service Officer and legislative assistant in the House of Representatives

Most of the NSAC memberships overlap with the Committee on the Present Danger, including:

• Jon Kyl - Honorary co-chairman
• James Woolsey - Honorary co-chairman

Mark Albrecht	Morris Amitay	William Ball	Kathleen Bailey
Robert Barker	William Bennett	J. Stephen Britt	Charles Brooks
Beverly Byron	Margo D. B. Carlisle	Henry Cooper	Christopher Cox
Devon Gaffney Cross	Brian Dailey	Mitchell Daniels	Midge Decter
Diana Denman	Stanley Ebner	Andrew Ellis	Charles Fairbanks
Edwin Feulner, Jr.	Rand Fishbein	Frank Gaffney, Jr.	Paul Goble
Daniel Gouré	Douglas Graham	Margaret Graham	William Graham
Dorothy (Deecy) Gray	E.C. Grayson	James Hackett	Charles Hamilton
Amoretta Hoeber	John David Hoppe	Charles Horner	William Houser
Tim Hutchinson	Kay Bailey Hutchison	Henry Hyde	Fred Iklé
James M. Inhofe	Bruce Jackson	Jamie Jameson	Clark Judge
Phyllis Kaminsky	Garry Kasparov	Alan Keyes	George Keyworth
Jeane Kirkpatrick	Charles Kupperman	Curtin Winsor, Jr.	Christopher Lay
John Lehman	John Lenczowski	Robert Livingston	James Longley
Carnes Lord	Jennifer Macdonald	Warren Marik	Taffy Gould McCallum
Tidal McCoy	James McCrery	Kinnaird McKee	Bruce Merrifield
Philip Merrill	J.William Middendorf	Thomas Miller	Dominic Monetta
Thomas Moore	Laurie Mylroie	Robert Patron	Richard Perle
John Piotrowski	Roger Robinson, Jr.	Edward Rowny	Albert Santoli
William Schneider, Jr.	Bernard Schriever	John Shadegg	James Gregory Sherr
Bob Smith	Carl Smith	Owen T. Smith	Jose Sorzano
Howard Teicher	Edward Teller	William R. Van Cleave	Troy Wade
Arthur Waldron	Malcolm Wallop	James Webb	Curt Weldon
Faith Whittlesey	Pete Wilson	Deborah Wince-Smith

Center staff

Michael T. Reilly is vice president for operations at the Center for Security Policy. Responsibilities of this position include overseeing and controlling the general running of the institution and its staff. In addition to working closely with the President, Reilly also strives to maintain and build new relationships with outside organisations. Reilly is a former military legislative assistant to Congressman Jerry Lewis and a Marine Corps veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Alex Alexiev is the Vice President for Research at CSP. He has worked as a senior analyst for the Rand Corporation and directed many research projects. His present research focuses on issues related to Islamic extremism and terrorism.

Military Committee

In 1999, the CSP created the military committee filled with former high ranking officers in order to create links with the armed forces. the aim of this committee was to "put U.S. national security once again on sound footing — not only in the war against terrorism but in the defense transformation that is so desperately needed."

The current chairman, Maj. Gen. Paul Vallely, is a past deputy commander of all U.S. Army forces in the Pacific. According to CSP, "General Vallely is working with other members of the Committee — many of whom are among the foremost national security practitioners and thinkers of our time — to engage the military community, and those attentive to its views, as catalysts for renewing America's defense capabilities and adopting effective peace-through-strength policies to guide their use."

Academic Council

The Academic Council is comprised of 18 professors who adhere to the CSP's mandate of "peace through strength" and strive to pass on this philosophy to students across the country. Although there is large scale hostility and resistance amongst professors to the governments leadership, CSP realises the importance of educating and training the next generation and mobilises its academic council as its voice in the academic realm. The stated goals of the council are as follows:

• Help in the education and development of the next generation of robust academics and policy practitioners in the defense, national security, international affairs, intelligence and related fields.

• Serve as a networking vehicle among established and emerging scholars, their students, prospective students and the policy community

• Promote the intellectual work of its members, their colleagues and students, and to ensure them the greatest possible exposure.

Contact

Website: http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org

Related Articles

• Jim Lobe, Neo-Cons Driving Iran Divestment Campaign, InterPress Service, 11 May 2007.