Douglas Jay Feith served as the under secretary of Defense for Policy for United States president George W. Bush, from July 2001 until August 2005. He is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank.
Dov S. Zakheim is an American businessman, writer, and former official of the United States government. In the Reagan administration, he held various Department of Defense positions.
Michèle Angélique Flournoy is an American defense policy advisor and former government official. She was Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy under President Bill Clinton and Under Secretary of Defense for Policy under President Barack Obama.
Ashton Baldwin Carter is an American public policy professor who served as the 25th secretary of defense from February 2015 to January 2017. He is currently director of the Belfer Center for Science & International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School.
System Planning Corporation (SPC) is a Virginia-based corporation founded in 1970 that produces military electronics, such as flight control systems, radar, and Systems Engineering and Technical Assistance in airwarfare, cybersecurity, program management and research of advanced weapons systems, advanced space systems and advanced microsystems for the United States Department of Defense (DoD). SPC was acquired by ECS Federal, LLC in 2015. It is principal support contractor to cabinet-level departments, including the Department of Defense, Justice and State, and Homeland Security.
William M. Arkin is an American political commentator, best-selling author, journalist, activist, blogger, and former United States Army soldier. He has previously served as a military affairs analyst for the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and The New York Times.
Scott Douglas Sagan is the Caroline S.G. Munro Professor of Political Science at Stanford University and co-director of Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). He is known for his research on nuclear weapons policy and nuclear disarmament, including discussions of system accidents, and has published widely on these subjects.
Tara Shannon McKelvey is an American journalist who is a White House reporter for the BBC and a former correspondent for Newsweek/The Daily Beast. She has reported on topics which include national-security issues from the Middle East, South Asia and Russia.
Gloria Charmian Duffy is a former U.S. Department of Defense official, businesswoman, social entrepreneur and nonprofit executive. Since 1996, she has been the president, CEO and a member of the Board of Governors of the Commonwealth Club of California, America's largest and oldest public forum, founded in 1903. From 2010 to 2017 she led the acquisition, financing, design, entitlements and construction of the club's first headquarters building, at 110 The Embarcadero in San Francisco. The grand opening for the club's new building took place on September 12, 2017. The building received a 2016 California Heritage Council award for historic preservation.
On 29 August 2007, six AGM-129 ACM cruise missiles, each loaded with a W80-1 variable yield nuclear warhead, were mistakenly loaded onto a United States Air Force (USAF) B-52H heavy bomber at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota and transported to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. The nuclear warheads in the missiles were supposed to have been removed before the missiles were taken from their storage bunker. The missiles with the nuclear warheads were not reported missing, and remained mounted to the aircraft at both Minot and Barksdale for 36 hours. During this period, the warheads were not protected by the various mandatory security precautions for nuclear weapons.
Michelle Shephard is an independent investigative reporter, author and filmmaker. She has been awarded the Michener Award for public service journalism and won Canada's top newspaper prize, the National Newspaper Award, three times. In 2011, she was an associate producer on a documentary called Under Fire: Journalists in Combat. She produced the National Film Board documentary, Prisoners of the Absurd, which premiered at Amsterdam's film festival in 2014. Shephard also co-directed a film based on her book about Omar Khadr, Guantanamo's Child, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2015.
The Stanton Foundation is a private foundation established by Frank Stanton, a long-time president of Columbia Broadcasting System ("CBS"). The Foundation focuses primarily on three areas in which Stanton was unable to complete his philanthropic plans within his lifetime: (1) supporting the First Amendment and creating a more informed citizenry, particularly in regard to civic issues, (2) supporting policy research in international security, with special emphasis on nuclear security and (3) advancing canine welfare. The Stanton Foundation is primarily a "no unsolicited proposals" foundation, although it operates several open application programs as detailed on its website.
Hans Møller Kristensen is director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists. He writes about nuclear weapons policy there; he is coauthor of the Nuclear Notebook column in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and the World Nuclear Forces appendix in Stockholm International Peace Research Institute's annual SIPRI Yearbook.
Steven Aftergood is a critic of U.S. government secrecy policy. He directs the Federation of American Scientists project on Government Secrecy and is the author of the Federation publication Secrecy News.
Charles Maria Herzfeld was an Austrian-born American scientist and scientific manager, particularly for the US Government. He is best known for his time as Director of DARPA, during which, among other things, he personally took the decision to authorize the creation of the ARPANET, the predecessor of the Internet.
Catherine McArdle Kelleher is an American political scientist involved in national and international security policy. Currently, she is Senior Fellow at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University and College Park Professor of Public Policy at the University of Maryland. Kelleher was the Director of the Aspen Institute in Berlin from 1998 to 2001 when she was appointed Professor of Strategy at the Naval War College (2001–2006). In the 1990s she was appointed Honorarprofessor at the Free University of Berlin, and she has regularly taught at the Geneva Center for Security Policy in Switzerland for over a decade.
Bonnie Denise Jenkins is an expert on arms control and nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction and currently serves as the Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs. During the Obama Administration, she was the U.S. Department of State's Coordinator for Threat Reduction Programs in the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation.
Matthew Kroenig is an American political scientist, author, national security strategist, and former CIA officer. He is professor in the Department of Government and the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Kroenig is best known for his research on international security and nuclear weapons.
Kathleen Holland Hicks is an American government official who has served as the United States deputy secretary of defense since February 9, 2021. She is the first Senate-confirmed woman in this role. Hicks previously served as the principal deputy under secretary of defense for policy during the Obama administration. By 2020 Hicks was an American academic and national security advisor working as a senior vice president and director of the international security program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. She is the highest ranking woman currently serving in the United States Department of Defense.
Tina Westby Jonas is an expert in military, defense, and aerospace industries. She was an undersecretary of defense at the United States Department of Defense and had also served as chief financial officer of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
