US think tanks play a central role in shaping military strategy and future conflicts, embedding a long-standing logic of war that allies are expected to support.

The national security establishment in the United States is a wonder to behold – the days when it was thought sufficient to describe it as the military-industrial complex have long gone. Comprehensively described it is now a complex made up of the military, the Congress, defence industries, universities, think tanks, and prediction markets, a Wurlitzer of interconnected organisations with discrete functions all of which are directed towards the objective of maintaining US supremacy through force, most often expressed as war. Force and war are in their shared DNA.

Michael McKinley

Given their guiding roles in recent and current conflicts, the principal think tanks deserve attention because, in reality, they are the source and origin of the eventual strategy to be executed.

To follow their activities – announcements, conferences, proceedings, and reports – is to have foreknowledge of America’s future wars and, therefore, those that America’s allies will be expected to join.

The Australian government’s strategic analysts, and defence and foreign policy-makers are derelict in their duty if they do not cast a permanent and suspecting glance in their direction. They are exceptionally well-resourced and well-funded.

More importantly, not only do they have access to the highest levels of government, they enjoy an almost symbiotic relationship with them. This is the result of the interchangeability of personnel facilitated by the infamous “revolving doors” of the power elite in the US.

What government acquires thereby is an ideologically committed clerisy who, when their individual careers are tracked, encourage a belief in either reincarnation or professional immortality. For them, failure has no penalties, only perhaps a change of locale.

That said, it helps to make a simple distinction between them: the focus in what follows is not on those that recent research by Responsible Statecraft identifies as having media prominence, and are essentially neo-conservative, war-promoters who closely aligned with Israel’s strategic outlook.

Rather, the specific focus is on the think tanks that historically have provided the interface between the grand strategic fantasies of American administrations and actual strategies designed to realise them.

They comprise an elite with long lines of pedigree: The Brookings Institution (1927), the RAND Corporation (1948), and the Hudson Institute (1961). All have research components devoted to a multitude of public policy areas, but it is in their intimate and intricate involvements in US grand strategy that deserves critical attention.

To examine them is to uncover the strands of US strategic DNA:

• US hegemony is to be maintained at all costs; this is likely to be through wars not necessarily required by national defence; this will require subterfuge weapons, especially nuclear weapons, and war, are to be subjected to a rational order;
• rational strategic analysis will proceed through “value-free social science,” conducted by social scientists from a wide range of disciplines who, operating in an unemotional culture in the service of power, proudly eschew the subjective in favour of the objective and without any sense of embarrassment that these claims are impossible to defend in public before an informed audience;
• apocalyptic thinking and the impulse towards annihilation is necessary because it is what deterrence demands;
• this will demand counting the dead in “megadeaths” (Herman Kahn’s contribution to the lexicon) and, in William Irwin Thompson’s description, “taking the shroud measurements of the corpse of civilisation”;
• as implied, the perspective is techno-reductionist; political arrangements, and thus human life, are subordinated to weapons technology woven through all of this DNA is the generosity of strategists with the blood of others.

An early product of this mindset was the (nuclear) Strategic Integrated Operational Plan 1962 (SIOP-62) – a template for a succession of such “deterrent” plans through to the present, all of which incorporate an apocalyptic twinning of suicide and genocide wherein humanity and the conditions for life itself are disposable.

Under the SIOP, the US would respond pre-emptively to a Soviet invasion of Western Europe which it thought was impending with a nuclear strike of 1,400-3,400 bombs against 650 targets – even if the Soviets did not employ any nuclear weapons.

The estimated global death toll was potentially 600 million, with another 40 million severely injured.

SIOP-62 is not cited gratuitously; rather, it is to emphasise that the thinking with which it was infused has been present for the last 60+ years. It resounds through President Trump’s wistful threats of civilisational erasure.

Moreover, the mindset is bipartisan and enduring. Consider three recent representative examples:

• In an account by Peter Cronau for Declassified Australia in 2025 are the details of an “audacious plan,” first drawn up in 2009 by Brookings, for a ‘plausibly deniable’ war” against Iran. Notable is that, while the overall report was titled Which Way To Persia: Options for a New American Strategy Towards Iran, Chapter 5 (“Leave It To Bibi: Allowing or Encouraging an Israeli Military Strik_e_”) was about an exercise in obfuscation and grand deceit. The broad remit of Which Way To Persia has clearly been integral to the attacks against Iran in 2025 and 2026.

• The second, under my name, published on this website, concerns the 2019 report commissioned by the Pentagon and undertaken by RAND entitled Overextending and Unbalancing Russia. It provided the details of a lengthy planning process that mocks any claim to Russia’s Special Military Operation being unprovoked.

Unsurprisingly, an almost congruent version of this document was integrated into US strategy and appears in 2020 under the auspices of the Pentagon Office of Net Assessment.

RAND’s recommendations, were all subsequently implemented. They evolved to include: providing lethal military aid to Ukraine; mobilising European NATO members; imposing deeper trade and economic sanctions against Russia; increasing US energy production for export to Europe; and expanding Europe’s import infrastructure to receive US liquefied natural gas supplies.

• The third rivals the two just mentioned for its level of criminal insanity. It comprises a 128 page document (China after Communism: Preparing for a Post-CCP China) and is a record of conference proceedings from mid-2025 organised by the Hudson Institute. Hudson was founded in 1961 by Herman Kahn after leaving RAND.

Specifically, it is a plan for the collapse of the Chinese government through a graduated multi-faceted offensive escalating from clandestine disinformation campaigns through psychological and cultural subversion operations to, ultimately, military intervention.

Its precedent was a 2024 RAND report, US Military Theories of Victory for a War with the People’s Republic of China, directed to the same ends. Research for it was commissioned by the Department of the Air Force and conducted within the Strategy and Doctrine Program of RAND Project AIR FORCE

The ethical, intellectual, and political abandon attending the SIOPs – where, in Herman Kahn’s strategic advice to the US government, nuclear war was “survivable,” notwithstanding the megadeaths, deemed “acceptable,” and overall, “winnable” – haunts these plans.

It lives on in even in the atavistic plans for wars fomented by the US ostensibly below the nuclear threshold because it reflects an inherited “natural” way of thinking. Once think-tank Alice-in-Wonderland logic was normalised, and with it the article of faith that the SIOP and its fancy dress of deterrence theory was concluded from “rational” premises and “objective” analysis, anything – even the absurd – is thought possible. And it has been so far.

https://johnmenadue.com/post/2026/05/contracting-strategy-to-think-tanks-catering-to-americas-fantasies-of-even-more-war/

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