By Emelie Rutherford
President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team yesterday announced some key members dealing with defense matters.
The Department of Defense Agency Review Team is lead by John White and Michele Flournoy, according to a statement yesterday from the transition team for Obama and Vice President-elect Joseph Biden, who will be sworn in to office Jan. 20.
White, chair of Harvard University’s Kennedy School Middle East Initiative, served as deputy defense secretary from 1995 to 1997. His other past roles include: deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget; assistant secretary of defense, manpower, reserve affairs, and logistics; and lieutenant in the Marine Corps. Prior to his most recent government service, he chaired the Commission on Roles and Missions of the Armed Forces and was director of the Center for Business and Government at Harvard.
Flournoy, president of the Center for a New American Security, was principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and threat reduction as well as deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy in the Clinton administration. She also previously was an adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a professor at the National Defense University. She is on the board of the Institute for Defense Analyses; a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Aspen Strategy Group, and the Executive Board of Women in International Security; and a former member of the Defense Policy Board.
“The Agency Review Teams will complete a thorough review of key departments, agencies and commissions of the United States government, as well as the White House, to provide the President-elect, Vice President-elect, and key advisors with information needed to make strategic policy, budgetary, and personnel decisions prior to the inauguration,” the statement says. “The Teams will begin their efforts by the end of the week, and will ensure that senior appointees have the information necessary to complete the confirmation process, lead their departments, and begin implementing signature policy initiatives immediately after they are sworn in.”
The Obama-Biden Transition Team announced yesterday the leaders of the agency review teams for the departments of defense, state, and treasury. It also revealed the overall Agency Review Team’s co-chairs–who will oversee the entire review process–and the Agency Review Working Group–which will manage and review the teams’ work and coordinate with other transition teams.
Sarah Sewall, a Harvard faculty member who served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for peacekeeping and humanitarian assistance in the early 1990’s, is a member of the Obama-Biden Transition Project’s Agency Review Working Group responsible for the national security agencies.
She is on leave from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where she is faculty director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy.
“Her research focuses on U.S. national security strategy, civil-military relations, counterinsurgency, terrorism and mass atrocity,” the statement says. She also served for six years as senior foreign policy advisor to former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell.