July 1, 2025
Dear Friends and Family,
Adam Lovinger, the author, of The Insider Threat: How the Deep State Undermines America from Within (2024) has first-hand experience with the Deep State. From 2006 to 2017 Lovinger provided support on long-term U.S. National Security for the Secretary of Defense from the Office of Net Assessment (ONA). In 2017 he became the senior director for strategic assessments at the U.S. National Security Council (NSC) working out of the White House.
In the excerpts from his book, Lovinger describes how Obama advanced a policy of U.S. diminishment that undermines our global primacy to this day. This was accomplished by the Deep State emplacing saboteurs in the Pentagon’s highest strategic office ONA. A quote from the book, “Instead of doing their job and completing net assessments (informed national security strategies to win our wars), they advanced a plan to ‘muddle through’ for decades on end, guaranteeing our defeat. This has resulted in not only the needless death, maiming, and cognitive trauma of U.S. Military forces, but also the insidious destruction of America’s most hallowed institutions from within.”
The long set of excerpts (17 ½ pages) provides two such examples: The Obama Doctrine noted above, and sabotaging the U.S. – Japan Alliance. The short set (8 pages) only provides the former. Both sets of excerpts contain excerpts from a letter from Senator Grassley to the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, concerning the ONA. Then an article describing Hegseths actions follows. Clearly, the excerpts show that a Deep State exists in the DoD and was partially removed.
Just last week following President Trump’s announcement that the U.S. obliterated Iran’s nuclear facilities various new outlets reported that he had overstated the results based on a leaked assessment from DoD intelligence. Here is White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s response. “The alleged ‘assessment’ is flat-out wrong and was classified as ‘top secret’ but was still leaked to CNN by an anonymous, low-level loser in the intelligence community. The leaking of this alleged assessment is a clear attempt to demean President Trump and discredit the brave fighter pilots who conducted a perfectly executed mission to obliterate Iran’s nuclear program.” Hegseth countered with “You know who else knows? Iran. That’s why they came to the table right away, because their nuclear capabilities have been set back.” My assessment: Deep State operatives still exist in the Pentagon.
Happy Learning,
Harley
Dear Friends and Family,
Adam Lovinger, the author, of The Insider Threat: How the Deep State Undermines America from Within (2024) has first-hand experience with the Deep State. From 2006 to 2017 Lovinger provided support on long-term U.S. National Security for the Secretary of Defense from the Office of Net Assessment (ONA). In 2017 he became the senior director for strategic assessments at the U.S. National Security Council (NSC) working out of the White House.
In the excerpts from his book, Lovinger describes how Obama advanced a policy of U.S. diminishment that undermines our global primacy to this day. This was accomplished by the Deep State emplacing saboteurs in the Pentagon’s highest strategic office ONA. A quote from the book, “Instead of doing their job and completing net assessments (informed national security strategies to win our wars), they advanced a plan to ‘muddle through’ for decades on end, guaranteeing our defeat. This has resulted in not only the needless death, maiming, and cognitive trauma of U.S. Military forces, but also the insidious destruction of America’s most hallowed institutions from within.”
The long set of excerpts (17 ½ pages) provides two such examples: The Obama Doctrine noted above, and sabotaging the U.S. – Japan Alliance. The short set (8 pages) only provides the former. Both sets of excerpts contain excerpts from a letter from Senator Grassley to the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, concerning the ONA. Then an article describing Hegseths actions follows. Clearly, the excerpts show that a Deep State exists in the DoD and was partially removed.
Just last week following President Trump’s announcement that the U.S. obliterated Iran’s nuclear facilities various new outlets reported that he had overstated the results based on a leaked assessment from DoD intelligence. Here is White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s response. “The alleged ‘assessment’ is flat-out wrong and was classified as ‘top secret’ but was still leaked to CNN by an anonymous, low-level loser in the intelligence community. The leaking of this alleged assessment is a clear attempt to demean President Trump and discredit the brave fighter pilots who conducted a perfectly executed mission to obliterate Iran’s nuclear program.” Hegseth countered with “You know who else knows? Iran. That’s why they came to the table right away, because their nuclear capabilities have been set back.” My assessment: Deep State operatives still exist in the Pentagon.
Happy Learning,
Harley
THE GOVERNMENT OF THE EXECUTIVE BRANCH – SEGMENT 16
DEEP STATE PLAYBOOK – EXCERPTS
DISCOVERING THE DEEP STATE: The electronic file I found on a Pentagon computer one rainy morning in September 2017 seemed to have materialized overnight, out of nowhere. What my eyes beheld, but my mine struggled to comprehend, was that here before me, was a secret and detailed how-to manual on destroying one’s bureaucratic enemies, tailored just for me. A few months before that discovery, my career was ascendant. For the past dozen years, I had held prestigious posts in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and U.S. National Security Council (NSC). That all blew up after the new U.S. national security advisor, Lieutenant General (Ret.) Michael T. Flynn, brought me in to work for him at the White House. I wasn’t the only one. Many who went to work for the Trump White House were driven out for nebulous reasons. The point was to get rid of all of us quickly, with maximum damage to our careers and reputations.
Older and wiser mentors had warned me about the so-called “Deep State.” The most ruthless members of this cabal, I was told, were concentrated in the Senior Executive Service of the U.S. national security, intelligence, and law enforcement bureaucracies. At first, I dismissed their warnings of a vast criminal conspiracy perpetrated by senior bureaucrats. Surely, any organized scheme to subvert U.S. law and obstruct federal process would be checked and balanced by other government officials. No, I was told Deep State operatives are free to ignore the facts and law with impunity.
For several days I arrived at work early and left late in order to print off the entire Deep State playbook from my DoD computer. The playbook explained the workings of the Pentagon’s top strategist, James H. Baker, Director of the Office of Net Assessment (ONA).
The playbook instructs its users to hound and crush anyone who dares to expose the Deep State for the threat it poses to the Republic, and charge those who resist with “insubordination.” Further to portray their efforts to defend themselves as evidence of “divided loyalties.” Law-abiding officials are smeared as “insider threats,” stripped of their security clearances, then hurled into an interminable and costly administrative process in which the facts and laws are irrelevant.
By the time our victim realizes that he has fallen into a trap, and that all these “investigations,” “hearings,” and “appeals” are little more than a cruel joke, it is too late. His savings have been depleted fighting an unwinnable battle, and his friends and supporters have moved on, their patience and sympathy worn thin from hearing about a truth so much stranger than fiction that they begin to question his credibility.
As I learned from the playbook, if a Deep State operative doesn’t get the investigative results he wants the first time, he simply conducts “do-over” investigations until he does. Since almost no one on the receiving end of that has the financial resources to defend himself against a U.S. government investigatory juggernaut, Deep State operatives meet no meaningful resistance as they grind down and destroy whoever dares threaten to expose their incompetence, malfeasance, or criminality. All U.S. government investigations are supposed to be independent and objective. That legal doctrine is designed to maintain the integrity of federal investigations. Yet, as I learned the hard way, Deep State operatives thumb their noses at that standard, violating it and other U.S. laws with impunity.
OFFICE OF NET ASSESSMENT (ONA): Unlike intelligence assessments, net assessments are long term, looking twenty to thirty years into the future. Their purpose is to inform not just national security strategy, but grand strategy. Over the following decade I learned that parts of the U.S. national security bureaucracy and the intelligence community resented ONA. Culturally, the office had a reputation as aloof and Ivy League. But there is another reason for the friction between ONA and the rest of the Pentagon bureaucracy, and this was ONA’s reputation for engaging with politically incorrect truths. By September 11, 2001, the strictures of “political correctness” – later, “wokeness” – had fully migrated from the academy to the U.S. national security bureaucracy.
Following Al-Qaeda’s September 11 attack on America, ONA became a bureaucratic backwater. Having focused its energies on the worthy topics of Defense Transformation and China since the end of the Cold War, the office had completed no net assessments on the Middle East and Central Asia. This meant that ONA had nothing to contribute to America’s War on Terror. I knew none of this when I joined the office in 2006.
Done right, net assessments focus on the enduring characteristics of U.S. strategic competitions long term are designed to stand the test of time and can be adjusted to changing circumstances. Their continued production was imperative for those occasions when the “political class” births a strategically minded leader determined to prevent America from entering wars blindly, losing, and following in the footsteps of other once-great powers. Instead, ONA turned its attention to training the next generation of strategists, for which I am a forever grateful beneficiary. But it didn’t make up for the fact that under Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden ONA produced no net assessments to inform America’s wars in Afghanistan or Iraq.
THE OBAMA DOCTRINE: Upon entering the White House, Obama know little about foreign policy. As a student at the Harvard Law School, he had concluded that “America is a racist society.” Domestically, he supported race-based preferences that shifted resources and opportunities to address social grievances and adjust power dynamics between racial and ethnic groups. Extrapolating that worldview to foreign policy, Obama viewed the United States, and the West, more generally, as oppressors that had unjustly subjugated and exploited the non-Western world.
In 2009, the newly inaugurated President crossed several continents to address those global grievances. On June 4 of that year, from the podium of Cairo University, he expanded on his earlier confession that “we have not been perfect” and an apology for “our own darker periods of history,” given to the Turkish parliament two months before. In Egypt, he disclosed his view of Israel, analogizing the plight of Palestinians to that of South African blacks under apartheid and slaves in the antebellum American South. According to Obama, Palestinians “endure the daily humiliations – large and small – that come with occupation.” Israel was responsible for their “pain of dislocation.” In that address, Obama carefully avoided any mention of Israel as the biblical homeland of the Jewish people. He also glossed over the history of Islamic imperialism that emerged much later from the Arabian Peninsula. For Obama, none of that mattered.
At a press conference in France, Obama said that America “has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive” to foreign peoples, and that the United States was no more exceptional than other nations. Obama delivered that address, which seemed designed to invalidate the post-World War II global order that hundreds of thousands of Americans had fought and died to create and safeguard, from the very soil American soldiers liberated from tyranny twice in the last century. The purpose of the president’s “Apology Tour” was to win American support for his foreign policy agenda. The “Obama Doctrine,” as that agenda came to be known, would superimpose a race-based grievance politics paradigm onto international relations. In the name of “equity” and to correct past wrongs. Obama would adopt a strategy to intentionally erode U.S. and Western power, and augment that of non-Western countries.
After the fallout from his disastrous “Apology Tour” showed him that the American people would not accept a U.S. president degrading their country from foreign soil, much less relinquishing U.S. power to other countries to achieve a balance of power, Obama shifted his strategy. From my role in the Pentagon, I had a front-row seat to how the Obama administration abandoned U.S. primacy, dismantled the Pax Americana that upheld the liberal global order, and mobilized a secret army of hyper-empowered bureaucrats to implement the Obama Doctrine by stealth from within.
THE OBAMA DOCTRINE AND IRAN: One important facet of Obama’s balance of power strategy was the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOSA), an agreement between China, France, Germany, Iran, Russia, the United Kingdom, the EU, and the United States. Obama supported that agreement, also known as the “Iran Deal,” not on the ground that it would restrain Iran’s nuclear program, but because he knew it did just the opposite. Since, 1979 “death to America” has served as the Iranian regime’s de facto motto. A week after finalizing the JCOPA, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, exposed the president’s “signature foreign policy initiative” for fraud that Iran analysts in the DoD knew it was from the beginning: “The Americans say they stopped Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. They know it is not true.” In that same speech Khamenei declared what was known among Pentagon Iran analysts but concealed from the American people: “Even after this deal, our policy toward the arrogant U.S. will not change.”
Baker and Obama knew that Iran’s aggression would only increase once the JCPOA’s sunset clauses expired, and Tehran was free to develop nuclear weapons. What is more, at the time, these men knew something that ordinary Americans did not. In May 2011, U.S. Special Forces had seized files from Osama bin Laden’s Pakistan compound. They contained detailed Iran--Al-Qaeda joint operational-planning documents for attacks on civilian targets throughout Europe with chemical and biological weapons. The strategic objective of that operation was to reignite another post-9/11 holy war between the Islamic world and the West. Should that happen, Baker and Obama knew that Washington was required under Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty to treat an attack on any NATO ally as an attack on America. They also knew that an Iranian nuclear arsenal would clip America’s capacity to do so. But, overall, Baker assured his foreign audience, the Iran Deal, with its “sunset clauses” paving the way for Tehran’s possession of nuclear weapons, constituted a “significant and selective common gain.”
But the greatest resistance to Obama’s détente with Iran came not from Europe, Israel, or the Sunni Muslimi world, but from the Iranian people themselves. In June 2009, in the wake of rigged national elections, Iranian civilians had revolted against the regime. Regime collapse might well have occurred. If so, Israel’s regional primacy would be ensured, dashing Obama’s dream for a regional balance of power with Jerusalem’s archrival. For this reason, on the streets of Tehran, the protestors chanted, “Obama, Obama, are you with them or with us?’ Obama’s answer to that question echoing off the walls of Tehran’s killing zones was to stand on the sidelines silently. The regime interpreted what Obama’s show of no solidarity with the Iranian people meant. They could escalate their violent crackdown on the protestors with impunity. Which they did.
But within the Pentagon it was known that Obama could have tipped the balance to the Iranian people, had he wanted. It was a lost opportunity for America to stand up for democracy, freedom, and the fundamental human rights of the Iranian people. In 2009, the fact that Iran was on the brink was known to Obama. But he preferred to suppress that intelligence and prop up the regime.
Years earlier, Baker had declared that radical Islam was no longer a strategic threat to America. On May 19, 2016, Andrew May announced Baker’s decision to eliminate the “contest with Radical Islam” from ONA’s research agenda. The decision to ignore radical Islam was a return, full circle, to ONA’s institutional failure prior to 9/11. Even though radical Islamists had nearly destroyed ONA’s office suite in the Pentagon on that day, ONA continued to refuse to conduct net assessment on radical Islam or the Global War on Terror. That dereliction of duty left U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan strategically blind for two decades. These developments all advance the Obama Doctrine’s strategic purpose: to foreclose any possibility of regime change in Iran so as to prevent a free Iran from returning to its pre-1979 entente with the U.S. and Israel. If that happened, it would represent a triumph for “Western imperialism” that they could not permit.
LIEUTENANT GENERAL MICHAEL T. FLYNN: Incoming National Security Advisor Michael T. Flynn was appalled to learn that ONA had done no net assessments for the entirety of the Obama administration. To correct that deficit, my job on the NSC was to, in Flynn’s words, “do ONA’s job for it.” But crafting strategies to end America’s directionless wars also posed a strategic threat to the Deep State-contractor nexus, which had become invested in perpetuating those wars as long as possible. A week later, I met with Flynn and several other NSC staff in his West Wing office to discuss the president’s Iran policy.
In July 2012, Flynn became the 18th Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). As he recounted to me years later, before assuming that role he studied ten years of DoD Inspector General audits of DIA’s expenditures of billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars. None of those audits was “clean.” For an entire decade, at least, DIA had failed to properly account for its contractor expenditures. Seeking to root out that corruption and dysfunction, Flynn did what ordinary Americans expect from their leaders. He demanded transparency, “Right Now.”
In August 2014, Obama forced Flynn to “retire,” despite the fact that Flynn was regarded as the “best intelligence officer for the past twenty years,” in the words of NSA head Admiral Rogers. Retired four-star general Barry McCaffrey concurred, calling Flynn “the best intelligence officer of his generation. What I didn’t know at the time of my early February 2017 meeting with Flynn was that FBI Director Comey had already ambushed and fabricated a “process foul” against him. What neither of us fully realized at that moment, however, was that when your respective bosses failed to heed their threats, Obama and Baker marked us as “insider threats.” With that, the Deep State set out to weaponize federal authorities, smear our reputations, and destroy our careers.
Obama and his spy chiefs knew that within weeks of Trump’s inauguration, Flynn would methodically peel back the layers of the deception on the American people. They knew Flynn would discover how Obama and his spy chiefs had conspired to mislead the American people about that scheme as they headed to the polls to cast their vote. What’s more, Flynn, perhaps better than anyone, knew that those actions made Clinton, Obama, Biden, Brennan, Comey, and Clapper all vulnerable to various forms of Russia blackmail. As one of the new president’s most trusted advisors. Flynn would have the power and authority to hold these figures to account.
After Trump hired Flynn against their wishes, Obama and his spy chiefs went on the offensive. To dig up whatever dirt they could find, between Nov. 30, 2016, and Jan. 17, 2017, about forty different senior officials in the Obama administration would make unmasking requests of Flynn’s identity from classified intercepts. That singular focus on one person only happens when the order comes straight from the top. Among Obama’s spy chiefs, Comey seemed the most threatened by Flynn. This led him to advice the president to “not pass sensitive information related to Russia to Flynn” that made up the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment on Russia (ICA).
While Brennan and Comey continued to try their best to finesse Flynn, Obama directed them to brief the phony ICA to the Presidential Transition Team. Flynn immediately spotted the ICA as fraud. The incoming national security advisor demanded to know the identities of the sources for Annex A, which contained the Steele Dossier. Brennan, Comey, and Clapper rebuffed Flynn’s eminently reasonable request. For them that was the bureaucratic equivalent of a “kill or be killed” moment. Like a pack of hyenas hunting a solitary lion, they would ambush Flynn and then overwhelm him when he tried to fight back. He didn’t stand a chance. But first they had to find the right hook that would allow them to weaponize their federal powers. As I and countless other Deep State targets learned first-hand, that begins with falsehoods. By abusing the FBI’s investigative authorities, Comey got the dirt he needed to get Flynn removed as U.S. national security advisor – an innocuous telephone call to a Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
The damage to Flynn’s career and personal reputation was devastating. Flynn was forced to resign from the Trump administration over his non-lie to the FBI and his innocuous call with Kislyak. Getting rid of Flynn was mission critical for the Deep State because he had stumbled upon its secret plan. The thirty-three-year military veteran and top DoD intelligence officer immediately spotted Russian disinformation in the contents of the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA). With Flynn out of the way, the ICA was released to the public. The path was now clear for the Deep State to use it as the justification for its partisan guerilla war against the Trump administration, which would ultimately last years on end.
OFFICE OF NET ASSESSMENTS RESULTS: On his 2009 “Apology Tour,” Obama argued that the United States was an imperialistic power that deserved to have its wings clipped so as to achieve a global balance or power with America’s adversaries. ONA, as the Pentagon’s top strategy office played a critical role in consummating that mission. For over a decade including the four years Baker had by then led the office, ONA had completed no net assessments to inform Pentagon leadership of the future security threats to the United States. Legally, that meant that Baker and May were violating ONA’s one and only statutory requirement: to produce at least one net assessment each year. Practically, that meant that Baker’s strategic counsel to DoD leadership that there was no significant threat from China was not based on any professional or analytical assessment derived from evidence and reason. Rather, it was deduced from an ideological agenda. That meeting clarified everything for me. Not only did Baker not believe in the core mission of the very office he was entrusted to lead. He deemed ONA’s purpose anathema.
Visibly upset by Baker’s and May’s willful pattern of weaseling out of their one and only statutory duty, on Jule 2, 2020, Senator Chuck Grassley delivered a U.S. Senate floor speech in which he said,
DEEP STATE PLAYBOOK – EXCERPTS
DISCOVERING THE DEEP STATE: The electronic file I found on a Pentagon computer one rainy morning in September 2017 seemed to have materialized overnight, out of nowhere. What my eyes beheld, but my mine struggled to comprehend, was that here before me, was a secret and detailed how-to manual on destroying one’s bureaucratic enemies, tailored just for me. A few months before that discovery, my career was ascendant. For the past dozen years, I had held prestigious posts in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and U.S. National Security Council (NSC). That all blew up after the new U.S. national security advisor, Lieutenant General (Ret.) Michael T. Flynn, brought me in to work for him at the White House. I wasn’t the only one. Many who went to work for the Trump White House were driven out for nebulous reasons. The point was to get rid of all of us quickly, with maximum damage to our careers and reputations.
Older and wiser mentors had warned me about the so-called “Deep State.” The most ruthless members of this cabal, I was told, were concentrated in the Senior Executive Service of the U.S. national security, intelligence, and law enforcement bureaucracies. At first, I dismissed their warnings of a vast criminal conspiracy perpetrated by senior bureaucrats. Surely, any organized scheme to subvert U.S. law and obstruct federal process would be checked and balanced by other government officials. No, I was told Deep State operatives are free to ignore the facts and law with impunity.
For several days I arrived at work early and left late in order to print off the entire Deep State playbook from my DoD computer. The playbook explained the workings of the Pentagon’s top strategist, James H. Baker, Director of the Office of Net Assessment (ONA).
The playbook instructs its users to hound and crush anyone who dares to expose the Deep State for the threat it poses to the Republic, and charge those who resist with “insubordination.” Further to portray their efforts to defend themselves as evidence of “divided loyalties.” Law-abiding officials are smeared as “insider threats,” stripped of their security clearances, then hurled into an interminable and costly administrative process in which the facts and laws are irrelevant.
By the time our victim realizes that he has fallen into a trap, and that all these “investigations,” “hearings,” and “appeals” are little more than a cruel joke, it is too late. His savings have been depleted fighting an unwinnable battle, and his friends and supporters have moved on, their patience and sympathy worn thin from hearing about a truth so much stranger than fiction that they begin to question his credibility.
As I learned from the playbook, if a Deep State operative doesn’t get the investigative results he wants the first time, he simply conducts “do-over” investigations until he does. Since almost no one on the receiving end of that has the financial resources to defend himself against a U.S. government investigatory juggernaut, Deep State operatives meet no meaningful resistance as they grind down and destroy whoever dares threaten to expose their incompetence, malfeasance, or criminality. All U.S. government investigations are supposed to be independent and objective. That legal doctrine is designed to maintain the integrity of federal investigations. Yet, as I learned the hard way, Deep State operatives thumb their noses at that standard, violating it and other U.S. laws with impunity.
OFFICE OF NET ASSESSMENT (ONA): Unlike intelligence assessments, net assessments are long term, looking twenty to thirty years into the future. Their purpose is to inform not just national security strategy, but grand strategy. Over the following decade I learned that parts of the U.S. national security bureaucracy and the intelligence community resented ONA. Culturally, the office had a reputation as aloof and Ivy League. But there is another reason for the friction between ONA and the rest of the Pentagon bureaucracy, and this was ONA’s reputation for engaging with politically incorrect truths. By September 11, 2001, the strictures of “political correctness” – later, “wokeness” – had fully migrated from the academy to the U.S. national security bureaucracy.
Following Al-Qaeda’s September 11 attack on America, ONA became a bureaucratic backwater. Having focused its energies on the worthy topics of Defense Transformation and China since the end of the Cold War, the office had completed no net assessments on the Middle East and Central Asia. This meant that ONA had nothing to contribute to America’s War on Terror. I knew none of this when I joined the office in 2006.
Done right, net assessments focus on the enduring characteristics of U.S. strategic competitions long term are designed to stand the test of time and can be adjusted to changing circumstances. Their continued production was imperative for those occasions when the “political class” births a strategically minded leader determined to prevent America from entering wars blindly, losing, and following in the footsteps of other once-great powers. Instead, ONA turned its attention to training the next generation of strategists, for which I am a forever grateful beneficiary. But it didn’t make up for the fact that under Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden ONA produced no net assessments to inform America’s wars in Afghanistan or Iraq.
THE OBAMA DOCTRINE: Upon entering the White House, Obama know little about foreign policy. As a student at the Harvard Law School, he had concluded that “America is a racist society.” Domestically, he supported race-based preferences that shifted resources and opportunities to address social grievances and adjust power dynamics between racial and ethnic groups. Extrapolating that worldview to foreign policy, Obama viewed the United States, and the West, more generally, as oppressors that had unjustly subjugated and exploited the non-Western world.
In 2009, the newly inaugurated President crossed several continents to address those global grievances. On June 4 of that year, from the podium of Cairo University, he expanded on his earlier confession that “we have not been perfect” and an apology for “our own darker periods of history,” given to the Turkish parliament two months before. In Egypt, he disclosed his view of Israel, analogizing the plight of Palestinians to that of South African blacks under apartheid and slaves in the antebellum American South. According to Obama, Palestinians “endure the daily humiliations – large and small – that come with occupation.” Israel was responsible for their “pain of dislocation.” In that address, Obama carefully avoided any mention of Israel as the biblical homeland of the Jewish people. He also glossed over the history of Islamic imperialism that emerged much later from the Arabian Peninsula. For Obama, none of that mattered.
At a press conference in France, Obama said that America “has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive” to foreign peoples, and that the United States was no more exceptional than other nations. Obama delivered that address, which seemed designed to invalidate the post-World War II global order that hundreds of thousands of Americans had fought and died to create and safeguard, from the very soil American soldiers liberated from tyranny twice in the last century. The purpose of the president’s “Apology Tour” was to win American support for his foreign policy agenda. The “Obama Doctrine,” as that agenda came to be known, would superimpose a race-based grievance politics paradigm onto international relations. In the name of “equity” and to correct past wrongs. Obama would adopt a strategy to intentionally erode U.S. and Western power, and augment that of non-Western countries.
After the fallout from his disastrous “Apology Tour” showed him that the American people would not accept a U.S. president degrading their country from foreign soil, much less relinquishing U.S. power to other countries to achieve a balance of power, Obama shifted his strategy. From my role in the Pentagon, I had a front-row seat to how the Obama administration abandoned U.S. primacy, dismantled the Pax Americana that upheld the liberal global order, and mobilized a secret army of hyper-empowered bureaucrats to implement the Obama Doctrine by stealth from within.
THE OBAMA DOCTRINE AND IRAN: One important facet of Obama’s balance of power strategy was the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOSA), an agreement between China, France, Germany, Iran, Russia, the United Kingdom, the EU, and the United States. Obama supported that agreement, also known as the “Iran Deal,” not on the ground that it would restrain Iran’s nuclear program, but because he knew it did just the opposite. Since, 1979 “death to America” has served as the Iranian regime’s de facto motto. A week after finalizing the JCOPA, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, exposed the president’s “signature foreign policy initiative” for fraud that Iran analysts in the DoD knew it was from the beginning: “The Americans say they stopped Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. They know it is not true.” In that same speech Khamenei declared what was known among Pentagon Iran analysts but concealed from the American people: “Even after this deal, our policy toward the arrogant U.S. will not change.”
Baker and Obama knew that Iran’s aggression would only increase once the JCPOA’s sunset clauses expired, and Tehran was free to develop nuclear weapons. What is more, at the time, these men knew something that ordinary Americans did not. In May 2011, U.S. Special Forces had seized files from Osama bin Laden’s Pakistan compound. They contained detailed Iran--Al-Qaeda joint operational-planning documents for attacks on civilian targets throughout Europe with chemical and biological weapons. The strategic objective of that operation was to reignite another post-9/11 holy war between the Islamic world and the West. Should that happen, Baker and Obama knew that Washington was required under Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty to treat an attack on any NATO ally as an attack on America. They also knew that an Iranian nuclear arsenal would clip America’s capacity to do so. But, overall, Baker assured his foreign audience, the Iran Deal, with its “sunset clauses” paving the way for Tehran’s possession of nuclear weapons, constituted a “significant and selective common gain.”
But the greatest resistance to Obama’s détente with Iran came not from Europe, Israel, or the Sunni Muslimi world, but from the Iranian people themselves. In June 2009, in the wake of rigged national elections, Iranian civilians had revolted against the regime. Regime collapse might well have occurred. If so, Israel’s regional primacy would be ensured, dashing Obama’s dream for a regional balance of power with Jerusalem’s archrival. For this reason, on the streets of Tehran, the protestors chanted, “Obama, Obama, are you with them or with us?’ Obama’s answer to that question echoing off the walls of Tehran’s killing zones was to stand on the sidelines silently. The regime interpreted what Obama’s show of no solidarity with the Iranian people meant. They could escalate their violent crackdown on the protestors with impunity. Which they did.
But within the Pentagon it was known that Obama could have tipped the balance to the Iranian people, had he wanted. It was a lost opportunity for America to stand up for democracy, freedom, and the fundamental human rights of the Iranian people. In 2009, the fact that Iran was on the brink was known to Obama. But he preferred to suppress that intelligence and prop up the regime.
Years earlier, Baker had declared that radical Islam was no longer a strategic threat to America. On May 19, 2016, Andrew May announced Baker’s decision to eliminate the “contest with Radical Islam” from ONA’s research agenda. The decision to ignore radical Islam was a return, full circle, to ONA’s institutional failure prior to 9/11. Even though radical Islamists had nearly destroyed ONA’s office suite in the Pentagon on that day, ONA continued to refuse to conduct net assessment on radical Islam or the Global War on Terror. That dereliction of duty left U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan strategically blind for two decades. These developments all advance the Obama Doctrine’s strategic purpose: to foreclose any possibility of regime change in Iran so as to prevent a free Iran from returning to its pre-1979 entente with the U.S. and Israel. If that happened, it would represent a triumph for “Western imperialism” that they could not permit.
LIEUTENANT GENERAL MICHAEL T. FLYNN: Incoming National Security Advisor Michael T. Flynn was appalled to learn that ONA had done no net assessments for the entirety of the Obama administration. To correct that deficit, my job on the NSC was to, in Flynn’s words, “do ONA’s job for it.” But crafting strategies to end America’s directionless wars also posed a strategic threat to the Deep State-contractor nexus, which had become invested in perpetuating those wars as long as possible. A week later, I met with Flynn and several other NSC staff in his West Wing office to discuss the president’s Iran policy.
In July 2012, Flynn became the 18th Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). As he recounted to me years later, before assuming that role he studied ten years of DoD Inspector General audits of DIA’s expenditures of billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars. None of those audits was “clean.” For an entire decade, at least, DIA had failed to properly account for its contractor expenditures. Seeking to root out that corruption and dysfunction, Flynn did what ordinary Americans expect from their leaders. He demanded transparency, “Right Now.”
In August 2014, Obama forced Flynn to “retire,” despite the fact that Flynn was regarded as the “best intelligence officer for the past twenty years,” in the words of NSA head Admiral Rogers. Retired four-star general Barry McCaffrey concurred, calling Flynn “the best intelligence officer of his generation. What I didn’t know at the time of my early February 2017 meeting with Flynn was that FBI Director Comey had already ambushed and fabricated a “process foul” against him. What neither of us fully realized at that moment, however, was that when your respective bosses failed to heed their threats, Obama and Baker marked us as “insider threats.” With that, the Deep State set out to weaponize federal authorities, smear our reputations, and destroy our careers.
Obama and his spy chiefs knew that within weeks of Trump’s inauguration, Flynn would methodically peel back the layers of the deception on the American people. They knew Flynn would discover how Obama and his spy chiefs had conspired to mislead the American people about that scheme as they headed to the polls to cast their vote. What’s more, Flynn, perhaps better than anyone, knew that those actions made Clinton, Obama, Biden, Brennan, Comey, and Clapper all vulnerable to various forms of Russia blackmail. As one of the new president’s most trusted advisors. Flynn would have the power and authority to hold these figures to account.
After Trump hired Flynn against their wishes, Obama and his spy chiefs went on the offensive. To dig up whatever dirt they could find, between Nov. 30, 2016, and Jan. 17, 2017, about forty different senior officials in the Obama administration would make unmasking requests of Flynn’s identity from classified intercepts. That singular focus on one person only happens when the order comes straight from the top. Among Obama’s spy chiefs, Comey seemed the most threatened by Flynn. This led him to advice the president to “not pass sensitive information related to Russia to Flynn” that made up the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment on Russia (ICA).
While Brennan and Comey continued to try their best to finesse Flynn, Obama directed them to brief the phony ICA to the Presidential Transition Team. Flynn immediately spotted the ICA as fraud. The incoming national security advisor demanded to know the identities of the sources for Annex A, which contained the Steele Dossier. Brennan, Comey, and Clapper rebuffed Flynn’s eminently reasonable request. For them that was the bureaucratic equivalent of a “kill or be killed” moment. Like a pack of hyenas hunting a solitary lion, they would ambush Flynn and then overwhelm him when he tried to fight back. He didn’t stand a chance. But first they had to find the right hook that would allow them to weaponize their federal powers. As I and countless other Deep State targets learned first-hand, that begins with falsehoods. By abusing the FBI’s investigative authorities, Comey got the dirt he needed to get Flynn removed as U.S. national security advisor – an innocuous telephone call to a Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
The damage to Flynn’s career and personal reputation was devastating. Flynn was forced to resign from the Trump administration over his non-lie to the FBI and his innocuous call with Kislyak. Getting rid of Flynn was mission critical for the Deep State because he had stumbled upon its secret plan. The thirty-three-year military veteran and top DoD intelligence officer immediately spotted Russian disinformation in the contents of the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA). With Flynn out of the way, the ICA was released to the public. The path was now clear for the Deep State to use it as the justification for its partisan guerilla war against the Trump administration, which would ultimately last years on end.
OFFICE OF NET ASSESSMENTS RESULTS: On his 2009 “Apology Tour,” Obama argued that the United States was an imperialistic power that deserved to have its wings clipped so as to achieve a global balance or power with America’s adversaries. ONA, as the Pentagon’s top strategy office played a critical role in consummating that mission. For over a decade including the four years Baker had by then led the office, ONA had completed no net assessments to inform Pentagon leadership of the future security threats to the United States. Legally, that meant that Baker and May were violating ONA’s one and only statutory requirement: to produce at least one net assessment each year. Practically, that meant that Baker’s strategic counsel to DoD leadership that there was no significant threat from China was not based on any professional or analytical assessment derived from evidence and reason. Rather, it was deduced from an ideological agenda. That meeting clarified everything for me. Not only did Baker not believe in the core mission of the very office he was entrusted to lead. He deemed ONA’s purpose anathema.
Visibly upset by Baker’s and May’s willful pattern of weaseling out of their one and only statutory duty, on Jule 2, 2020, Senator Chuck Grassley delivered a U.S. Senate floor speech in which he said,
This swamp needs to be drained … It’s pretty clear that Office of Net Assessment lacks leadership and discipline, and it’s also pretty clear it has wasted tens of millions of dollars over the years. Congress must take a stand.
That speech was unequivocal about Baker’s and May’s stewardship of the Pentagon’s highest-level strategy office. So too was Grassley’s third Senate floor speech excoriating ONA, February 7, 2022. The failure was deliberate. Incapacitating ONA’s net assessment function ensured that the Pentagon would have no option but to adopt Baker’s policy of “muddling through.” In 2020 a DoD investigation confirmed that ONA – having been led by Baker for half a decade – had not produced a single net assessment, its only statutory duty, in fifteen years. Yet in 2021, between Senator Grassley’s second and third speech (“The Office of New Assessment is a Failure”), Baker received a “Presidential Rank Award for Meritorious Service.” Think about the integrity of DoD commendations, promotions, and awards. Then ask yourself: Who was the recipient of Baker’s meritorious service?
Source: The Insider Threat: How the Deep State Undermines America from Within by Adam Lovinger (2024).
February 7, 2025: Letter from Senator Grassley to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth
Since 2019, I’ve engaged in oversight of the Office of Net Assessment (ONA) within the Department of Defense requesting information and documents related to Professor Stefan Halper’s contracting work and ONA’s contracting practices more broadly. To date, ONA has failed to provide full and complete responses to my inquiries.
As part of my oversight, in January 2020, I requested that ONA “provide a list of all contracts issued for each year over the last five years, the title of each funded project, and the total cost for each contract to the taxpayer. On February 5, 2020, ONA produced a list of contracted work but classified all of it. On June 18, 2020, I wrote again to ONA noting that the list was improperly classified and only served to hide information that the taxpayers ought to know about. Accordingly, I requested that the entire list of contracts and funded projects be declassified and provided to my office. In response on July 1, 2020, ONA stated that “it remains Director Baker’s judgment that the previous classified enclosure should remain classified.” Such a position is indefensible and is designed to prevent embarrassment, which my oversight has previously highlighted.
My oversight work has shown that ONA has lost its way. In June 2020, I introduced legislation that required ONA to perform the work it was created to do – complete a net assessment, which at that time hadn’t been done since 2007. I remain concerned that ONA is not performing its mission for the taxpayer and has engaged in financial waste. Moreover, ONA’s improper classification of taxpayer funded work product must come to an end. Thank you for your prompt review and responses.
March 13, 2025: Article from Breaking Defense. Hegseth ‘disestablishing’ Office of Net Assessment Pentagon’s Strategic Analysis Specialists
A March 13 memo from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, obtained by Breaking Defense orders all employees of the Office of Net Assessment reassigned to different roles and cancels related contracts.
The memo, dated today and signed by Hegseth, directs the Pentagon’s Performance Improvement Officer and Director of Administration and Management to reassign all civilian employees to other “mission critical positions” inside the department, while military personnel will return to their service to receive new billets.
Simultaneously, the Pentagon’s top acquisition official is directed to “ensure that the necessary steps are taken” by department contracting authorities to terminate “all ONA contracts awarded for ONA and ONA-related requirements.” However, it appears ONA will live on in some manner: The memo directs the deputy secretary of defense to provide a plan in 30days to rebuild the office in a manner “consistent with priorities.” Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell sent out a brief public statement announcing the move, saying, “The Department remains committed to conducting rigorous forward-looking strategic assessments that directly inform defense planning and decision-making. [Note: All references to James H. Baker on the Internet refer to him as the former director of ONA].
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
Source: The Insider Threat: How the Deep State Undermines America from Within by Adam Lovinger (2024).
February 7, 2025: Letter from Senator Grassley to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth
Since 2019, I’ve engaged in oversight of the Office of Net Assessment (ONA) within the Department of Defense requesting information and documents related to Professor Stefan Halper’s contracting work and ONA’s contracting practices more broadly. To date, ONA has failed to provide full and complete responses to my inquiries.
As part of my oversight, in January 2020, I requested that ONA “provide a list of all contracts issued for each year over the last five years, the title of each funded project, and the total cost for each contract to the taxpayer. On February 5, 2020, ONA produced a list of contracted work but classified all of it. On June 18, 2020, I wrote again to ONA noting that the list was improperly classified and only served to hide information that the taxpayers ought to know about. Accordingly, I requested that the entire list of contracts and funded projects be declassified and provided to my office. In response on July 1, 2020, ONA stated that “it remains Director Baker’s judgment that the previous classified enclosure should remain classified.” Such a position is indefensible and is designed to prevent embarrassment, which my oversight has previously highlighted.
My oversight work has shown that ONA has lost its way. In June 2020, I introduced legislation that required ONA to perform the work it was created to do – complete a net assessment, which at that time hadn’t been done since 2007. I remain concerned that ONA is not performing its mission for the taxpayer and has engaged in financial waste. Moreover, ONA’s improper classification of taxpayer funded work product must come to an end. Thank you for your prompt review and responses.
March 13, 2025: Article from Breaking Defense. Hegseth ‘disestablishing’ Office of Net Assessment Pentagon’s Strategic Analysis Specialists
A March 13 memo from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, obtained by Breaking Defense orders all employees of the Office of Net Assessment reassigned to different roles and cancels related contracts.
The memo, dated today and signed by Hegseth, directs the Pentagon’s Performance Improvement Officer and Director of Administration and Management to reassign all civilian employees to other “mission critical positions” inside the department, while military personnel will return to their service to receive new billets.
Simultaneously, the Pentagon’s top acquisition official is directed to “ensure that the necessary steps are taken” by department contracting authorities to terminate “all ONA contracts awarded for ONA and ONA-related requirements.” However, it appears ONA will live on in some manner: The memo directs the deputy secretary of defense to provide a plan in 30days to rebuild the office in a manner “consistent with priorities.” Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell sent out a brief public statement announcing the move, saying, “The Department remains committed to conducting rigorous forward-looking strategic assessments that directly inform defense planning and decision-making. [Note: All references to James H. Baker on the Internet refer to him as the former director of ONA].
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
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