Lockheed Martin-Funded Experts Agree: South Korea Needs More Lockheed Martin Missiles

by Adam Johnson, FAIR

As tensions between the United States and North Korea continue to rise, one think tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), has become a ubiquitous voice on the topic of missile defense, providing Official-Sounding Quotes to dozens of reporters in Western media outlets. All of these quotes speak to the urgent threat of North Korea and how important the United States’s deployment of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile system is to South Korea:

• “THAADs are tailored to those medium-range threats that North Korea has in spades—North Korea regularly demonstrates that kind of capability,” says Thomas Karako, the director of the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “THAADs are exactly the kind of thing that you would want for a regional area.” (Wired, 4/23/17)
• But [CSIS’s Karako] called [THAAD] an important first step. “This is not about having a perfect shield, this is about buying time and thereby contributing to the overall credibility of deterrence,” Karako told AFP. (France24, 5/2/17)
• THAAD is a decent option, says Thomas Karako, director of the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, citing a perfect intercept record in trials to date. (Christian Science Monitor, 7/21/16)
• Seeing THAAD as a “natural consequence” of an evolving threat from North Korea, Bonnie Glaser, a senior adviser for Asia at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), told VOA that Washington should continue to tell Beijing “this system is not aimed at China … and [China] will just have to live with this decision.” (Voice of America, 3/22/17)
• Victor Cha, a Korea expert and former White House official now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, played down the chances that THAAD would be rolled back. “If THAAD is deployed prior to the elections and given the North Korean missile threat, I don’t think it would be prudent for a new government to ask that it be walked back,” Cha said. (Reuters, 3/10/17)
• Thomas Karako, senior fellow with the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said China’s indirect, retaliatory measures over the THAAD deployment would only stiffen the resolve of South Korea. He called the Chinese intervention “short-sighted.” (Voice of America, 1/23/17)

The list goes on. In the past year, FAIR has noted 30 media mentions of CSIS pushing the THAAD missile system or its underlying value proposition in US media, most of them in the past two months. Business Insider was the most eager venue for the think tank’s analysts, routinely copying–and–pasting CSIS talking points in stories warning of the North Korean menace.

Omitted from all these CSIS media appearances, however, is that one of CSIS’s top donors, Lockheed Martin, is THAAD’s primary contractor—Lockheed Martin’s take from the THAAD system is worth about $3.9 billion alone. Lockheed Martin directly funds the Missile Defense Project Program at CSIS, the program whose talking heads are cited most frequently by US media…

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