Hegseth razing Pentagon think tank linked to Crossfire Hurricane following accusation of ‘waste, fraud and abuse’

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is razing the in-house Pentagon think tank that Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa)
accused last month of “egregious waste, fraud and abuse.”

Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell
said in a statement Thursday, “As part of the Department’s ongoing commitment to strengthening our national defense, the Secretary of Defense has directed the disestablishment of the Office of Net Assessment (ONA) and the development of a plan to rebuild it in alignment with the Department’s strategic priorities.”

“This decision ensures that our resources are focused on the most pressing national security challenges while maintaining accountability and efficiency,” added Parnell.

ONA personnel will be reassigned to mission-critical roles within the Defense Department, noted the spokesman.

Grassley celebrated the move,
stating, “After years raising Cain about the Office of Net Assessment’s failure to strengthen our national defense and its rampant abuse of taxpayer dollars, I’m thrilled to hear the news that President Trump is abolishing this wasteful and ineffective office.”

“Praise the Lord,” continued Grassley. “This wise move saves American taxpayers over 20 million dollars a year.”

The ONA, which has contracted a lot of work out to Washington, D.C.-based think tanks, was established during the Cold War as an outfit that would go beyond traditional intelligence reporting and short-term trends assessments, and instead provide long-term “comparative assessments of trends, key competition, risks, opportunities, and future prospects of U.S. military capability to the secretary of defense.”

The agency, which has apparently had trouble in recent decades performing the very
future-oriented work that it was created to do, has sunk time and money into various pet projects, or what former Pentagon press secretary John Kirby alternatively referred to as the study of “‘orthogonal’ issues — issues that may not obviously appear to affect the department, but that may indeed turn out to have important implications for the future security environment and future warfare that DOD will need to take into account.”

The Pentagon confirmed in 2014 that the agency was spending $300,000 annually to study the body language of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Politico
noted that this research continued even though the Pentagon admitted that such analysis turned out to be useless regarding the Russo-Ukrainian War, which kicked off that year.

‘ONA is not performing its mission for the taxpayer and has engaged in financial waste.’

In his Feb. 7 letter to Hegseth, Sen. Grassley highlighted another pointless study undertaken by the ONA in 2009 that
discussed the connection between the American willingness to use military force and the “persistence of Scotch-Irish culture in America” — a culture the authors claimed “must also be understood as having been reinforced by slaveholding, and American Protestant religious beliefs” and shaped by “endemic warfare that placed high value on violent and immediate personal responses to challenges and high loyalty to clan and kin.”

Grassley suggested that discussions of Scotch-Irish culture in America and the study speculating about Putin potentially having Asperger’s “have nothing to do with ONA’s core mission, which is to produce a net assessment that measures our military capabilities against our foreign adversaries.”

The senator also raised concerns about the agency’s apparent improper classification of contract and project data to “prevent embarrassment,” as well as its contracts with Stefan Halper, the professor who helped the Obama FBI get FISA warrants to spy on the 2016 Trump campaign by serving as a confidential informant for the bureau’s Crossfire Hurricane operation.

A Pentagon Office of Inspector General audit
found various problems with the ONA’s contract management and oversight process, noting that in the case of the FBI’s Trump campaign infiltrator, the ONA “could not provide sufficient documentation that Professor Halper conducted all of his work in accordance with applicable laws and regulations” and “did not require Professor Halper to submit any evidence that he interviewed personnel cited in his proposals and statements of work.”

“I remain concerned that ONA is not performing its mission for the taxpayer and has engaged in financial waste,” wrote Grassley.

To Grassley’s delight, Hegseth has directed the Pentagon’s top acquisition official in a memo
obtained by Breaking Defense to “ensure that the necessary steps are taken” by department contracting authorities to scrap “all ONA contracts awarded for ONA and ONA-related requirements.”

While the defense secretary is gutting the agency, he indicated that he wants a plan in 30 days concerning how to rebuild the office such that it is in accord with the Pentagon’s priorities.

The decision has rankled some so-called experts in the D.C. think-tank game who might be out a potential source of income.

Rush Doshi, the director of the Council on Foreign Relations’ China Strategy Initiative, called the decision to raze then rebuild the ONA “an enormous mistake.”

“This was a little-known but enormously consequential fifty year-old institution that actually thought long-term. It helped us win the Cold War, grasped the China challenge early, and figured out revolutions in warfare,” continued Doshi. “When I was at the [National Security Council], ONA produced some of the best analysis anywhere in the USG and had enormous and even historic policy impact. No other institution presently can do what it did. Ending it is another unforced error.”

Tom Shugart, an adjunct senior fellow at the D.C.-based Center for a New American Security, also clutched pearls, suggesting the ONA’s overhaul might weaken America’s national defense.

Kyle Balzer, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, called it a “poor decision.”

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