# Center for a New American Security The **Center for a New American Security (CNAS)** is a Washington, D.C. think tank founded in 2007 by Michèle Flournoy and Kurt Campbell — both of whom would go on to senior Obama administration national-security roles, and Campbell to senior Biden administration roles. CNAS sits in the **bipartisan defense-establishment band** alongside [[Center for Strategic and International Studies]] (CSIS) and the security side of [[Brookings Institution]], but with a more **operationally focused, generation-younger** profile. CNAS is positioned, ideologically, as a **center-left to center-right defense-establishment institution** — supporting strong U.S. alliance commitments, robust defense spending, hawkish-but-mainstream China policy, and the broader project of sustaining American military primacy. It is the principal institutional home for what critics on both the left ("the Blob") and the right (MAGA-restraint) target as the Washington defense-policy consensus. ## Founding and Trajectory CNAS was founded in 2007 by Michèle Flournoy and Kurt Campbell, both then mid-career national-security professionals with Clinton administration experience. The founding context was the late-Bush-43 period when many Democratic-aligned defense and national-security professionals were anticipating a return to government and needed an institutional vehicle for developing the policy proposals that would become a Democratic administration's national-security agenda. After the 2008 Obama victory, both founders entered government — Flournoy as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy (the Pentagon's number-three position), Campbell as Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs. CNAS continued operating under successive presidents (most prominently John Nagl, then Richard Fontaine since 2012) and built out a substantial bench of bipartisan defense and national-security professionals. The 2021–2025 Biden administration drew heavily from the CNAS bench: - **Kurt Campbell** — White House Indo-Pacific Coordinator, later Deputy Secretary of State - **Ely Ratner** — Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs - **Mira Rapp-Hooper** — NSC Senior Director for East Asia - Various other appointments at NSC, State, Pentagon This **CNAS → Biden administration** pipeline is the operational analog of the [[Heritage Foundation]] → [[Project 2025]] pipeline on the conservative side, though smaller in scale and ideologically distinct. ## Programmatic Focus - **Indo-Pacific Security** — Taiwan, Japan, Korea, alliance modernization; the principal CNAS research area - **Defense and Force Structure** — defense budget, force-design, capabilities-based planning - **Technology and National Security** — AI, semiconductors, biotech, quantum; the principal CNAS growth area in the 2020s - **Energy, Economics, and Security** — the intersection of economic statecraft and national security; sanctions design, export controls, supply-chain security - **Transatlantic Security** — Russia, NATO, Ukraine - **Middle East Security** — Iran, Gulf states, regional security architecture The **technology-and-national-security work** is particularly notable: CNAS has been one of the principal Washington institutions building intellectual infrastructure for the post-2018 "techno-economic competition with China" framing that has reshaped U.S. economic policy on chips, AI, biotech, and dual-use research. ## Distinctive Feature: The "Next Generation" Bench CNAS's distinctive contribution to the Washington defense-policy ecosystem has been **bench-development for next-generation defense professionals**. The CNAS Next Generation National Security Fellowship and its various junior-fellowship programs have systematically credentialed mid-career professionals who later cycle into Pentagon, NSC, State, and Hill positions. This bench-development function makes CNAS structurally comparable to the [[Federalist Society]] for the legal-conservative movement — it is not the largest or most prestigious institution in its space, but it is the most systematic about credentialing the next generation. ## Funding CNAS is funded by a mix of: - **Defense contractors** — substantial; [[Lockheed Martin]], Raytheon (RTX), Boeing, [[Northrop Grumman]], General Atomics, and others - **Foundations** — Smith Richardson, Hewlett, MacArthur, Carnegie Corporation - **Foreign governments** — Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and others (CNAS publishes a donor list) - **Tech companies** — Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and other major tech firms involved in defense/national-security contracting - **Individual donors** The combination of defense-contractor and tech-company funding creates structural incentives toward favorable framings of both U.S. defense spending and U.S. tech-policy positions on China — a structural critique that applies more broadly to the entire defense-and-tech think-tank ecosystem. ## KB Significance CNAS matters to the KB for three reasons: 1. **The Biden-administration personnel pipeline.** CNAS was the principal think-tank source of Biden-era Indo-Pacific and tech-policy personnel. Understanding the Biden administration's China policy, semiconductor industrial policy, and broader tech-policy posture requires understanding CNAS as the institutional bench from which that personnel was drawn. 2. **The bipartisan defense-establishment institutional anchor.** CNAS is one of the central institutions of what MAGA-restraint critics call "the Blob" — the bipartisan defense-policy consensus that supports robust U.S. alliance commitments and military primacy. The intra-conservative fight over CNAS-style policy is a central fault line of the contemporary right. 3. **The bench-development model.** CNAS's systematic fellowship-and-credentialing approach is a useful case study in how think tanks can build durable personnel-pipeline infrastructure — a function that the conservative-movement side has historically been better at than the bipartisan-establishment side; CNAS is the partial bipartisan-establishment answer. ## See Also - [[Center for Strategic and International Studies]] — peer bipartisan defense institution - [[Brookings Institution]] — peer establishment institution (broader policy scope) - [[Hudson Institute]] — peer defense-hawk institution (more right-leaning) - [[Foundation for Defense of Democracies]] — peer post-9/11 hawk institution (more right-leaning) - [[RAND Corporation]] — peer defense-research institution (FFRDC model) - [[Think Tank Ecosystem]] — broader ecosystem hub