Who’s Funding DC’s Pro-War Think Tanks?

Last year, the US Commission on National Defense Strategy published its final report, creating intense buzz in Washington. “The threats the United States faces are the most serious and most challenging the nation has encountered since 1945,” the report warned. To meet the challenge, “the US government needs to harness all elements of national power,” starting with a 5% boost to the Pentagon budget, currently at $886 billion.

Congress created the bipartisan commission as “an independent body.” Yet some of the members of the commission are connected to think tanks and the defence contractors that fund them: from Boeing to General Electric, Northrop Grumman to Lockheed Martin. If taxpayers go along with the military buildup advocated by the report, these and other firms stand to profit handsomely.

Private firms and foreign governments presenting their material interests as disinterested “expertise” — it should be a scandal, yet it’s taken for granted as just the way Washington works. We are told that we need bigger military budgets to defend the nation and serve as a reliable ally. That artificial intelligence is the future of the battlefield, and if we don’t beat Beijing at it, we risk world freedom. Ditto for space and the high seas and nuclear weapons and Silicon Valley-backed “defence tech.”

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.