Is Pentagon paying for study it can get for free?

Ray Locker | USA TODAY

Is the Office of Net Assessment, the Pentagon's futurist think-tank, paying $184,000 to a conservative Washington research group for a study on nuclear deterrence that has already been published and is available for free?

Last month, ONA said it would pay the National Institute for Public Policy for a study called "Identifying the Fundamental Assumptions and Logic of Minimum Deterrence and Examining Them Against Empirical Evidence." In August, the institute published a study with the same title making the same analysis that ONA says it has asked the institute to perform.

Both the Pentagon and the institute say the new contract will go into greater detail than the August study.

"Deterrence is a significant problem," said Air Force Lt. Col. Damien Pickart, a Pentagon spokesman. "The initial pilot study was very good but was preliminary and exploratory. We believed, and still believe, that a problem as complex and serious as nuclear deterrence requires a more thorough exploration. The project for ONA is a much deeper and more exhaustive examination of deterrence than what was produced in NIPP's initial effort."

Amy Joseph, the institute's chief operating officer, said Keith Payne, the institute's director, delivered the August report by hand to ONA when it was published. "The work now underway for ONA is significantly different in depth, scope, comprehensiveness and participants," she said.

Despite the comments from the Pentagon and the institute, other experts in nuclear proliferation question the need for ONA's contract.

Stephen Schwartz, an expert in nuclear disarmament issues, said he didn't understand why ONA needed to hire Payne and the institute for the study since the information was already available.

"I had seen the report earlier this summer, but I had no idea that DoD was going to pay for them to do it all over again or maybe in a different type face," said Schwartz, editor of The Nonproliferation Review, a publication of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies.

"At a time of tight budgets, it's hard to see why you would pay for something that was already done," Schwartz said, adding that Payne's views on the issue are well known in the field and certainly to top ONA officials.

Support for the institute's August report came from the Sarah Scaife Foundation, part of a quartet of conservative non-profit groups controlled by Richard Mellon Scaife, an heir to the Mellon banking fortune of Pittsburgh and a long supporter of conservative causes. Scaife was part of a network that gave money to activists pushing for investigations into President Bill Clinton that led to his impeachment by the House in 1998 and subsequent acquittal by the Senate.

Payne, a longtime defense analyst and former Pentagon official, created the institute in 1981. He and the institute's analysts have long advocated for a larger U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal, even after the fall of the Soviet Union lessened the threat of a potential nuclear war. Its staff consists of mostly conservative analysts and officials in previous Republican administrations with some exceptions, such as former senator Chuck Robb of Virginia, a Democrat.

Payne is also chairman of the Missouri State University Department of Defense and Strategic Studies. Its faculty overlaps with much of the institute's staff. The Sarah Scaife Foundation gave the institute $240,000 a year in 2011 and 2012, tax records show, and it gave $140,000 in each of those two years to the Missouri State University Foundation specifically for the defense and strategic studies department. The institute's latest tax filing shows that Payne made $423,010 in salary and bonus in 2011.

A year before Payne started the institute, he and fellow institute analyst Colin Gray published an article in Foreign Policy magazine arguing that some forms of nuclear war were winnable.

ONA has come under pressure in recent months from Pentagon budget cutters. They cite it and its $10 million budget as unnecessary.

Military records show ONA paid Payne's organization $883,823 for other research conducted in 2009 and 2010. Contracting records show ONA relies on a relatively closed circle of office alumni and like-minded think-tanks. Its largest contract is with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, run by an ONA alumnus. This year, it hired a firm run by Stephen Cambone, the former Pentagon intelligence chief under Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.