Obama's Brain Trust

McDonough told a March 2008 Brookings Institution panel that the United States should "set a clear deadline" for troop withdrawal from Iraq in order to reduce the federal budget deficit and help solve the current economic crisis. He also said setting a deadline would send a message to the Iraqi leadership about the urgency of political reconciliation.

Richard Danzig, Sam Nunn Prize fellow in international security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, is also a consultant to the Department of Defense on bioterrorism. Danzig was Navy secretary in the Clinton administration.

In a 2007 Armed Forces Journal roundtable, Danzig said U.S. grand security strategy should "aim to keep us and our allies free to pursue our interests and values, to reduce the amount of armed conflict in the world and to protect our citizens as much as possible (both at home and abroad) from the conflict that exists." He said U.S. defense strategy should not "over-design [sic] our military on the premise that a particular scenario, type of conflict or type of unit is the be-all and end-all."

In his role as bioweapons consultant to the Pentagon, Danzig has warned against several possible scenarios involving terrorist use of biological warfare. In 2004, Danzig said it was becoming increasingly likely that a terrorist group could create biological weapons. "It seems likely that, over a period between a few months and a few years, broadly skilled individuals equipped with modest laboratory equipment can develop biological weapons," Danzig told the Washington Post. "Only a thin wall of terrorist ignorance and inexperience now protects us."

Jonathan Scott Gration, a retired two-star general in the Air Force, is CEO of Millennium Villages, a project based on the UN Millennium Development Goals aimed at lifting African villages out of poverty. Gration speaks Swahili and spent much of his childhood in Congo.
He was director of strategy, policy, and assessments for the United States European Command in Germany. A veteran of the 1991 Gulf War, Gration also served as Commander of Task Force West during the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq before retiring. He now supports Obama's proposal to withdraw combat troops from Iraq, although he told the New York Sun in August 2007, "if it's very clear that the al-Maliki government is making significant progress, that we're turning the tide, it would be crazy not to re-adjust" that plan. Gration noted that he was not commenting on behalf of the Obama campaign in that instance.

Gration has expressed support for Obama's stated willingness to hunt al-Qaeda operatives into Pakistan. "The United States has to be willing to pursue these terrorists to where they're planning their logistics operations," Gration told Newsweek in August 2007.

Gration also has called for a reduction in nuclear weapons in the U.S. arsenal and worldwide.