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Concept
Frederick Kagan
Summary
Frederick W. Kagan is an American resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and a former professor of military history at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
Both he and his father, Donald Kagan, who was a professor at Yale and a fellow at the Hudson Institute, authored While America Sleeps: Self-Delusion, Military Weakness, and the Threat to Peace Today (2000). The book argued in favor of a large increase in military spending and warned of future threats, including from a potential revival of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program. Frederick and Robert Kagan, who is a member of the Aspen Strategy Group, and their father, Donald, were all signatories to the Project for the New American Century manifesto, Rebuilding America's Defenses (2000).
Kagan authored the "real Iraq Study Group" report as the American Enterprise Institute's rival to the Iraq Study Group report of James Baker and Lee H. Hamilton in December 2006. The AEI report, Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq, was released on January 5, 2007, and Kagan was said to have won over the ear of President George W. Bush, strongly influencing his subsequent "surge" plan for changing the course of the Iraq War. Along with retired General Jack Keane, retired Colonel Joel Armstrong, and retired Major Daniel Dwyer, Kagan is credited as one of the "intellectual architects" of the surge plan. According to Foreign Policy magazine, Kagan's essay "We're Not the Soviets in Afghanistan" influenced the strategic thinking of US Defense Secretary Robert Gates, which reportedly influenced Gates's decision to support sending 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan.
Remarking on the surge in 2015, Kagan said that while the AEI group convened that "it never occurred to me or anybody that was involved in this that we were going to affect policy. It was simply 'Maybe we can put some concrete numbers on the table, some concrete enemy on a map, some concrete units on a grid, and force other people who want to have this discussion to wrestle with the specifics of the problem.
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