Frank Gaffney

Frank Gaffney is the founder and executive chairman of the Center for Security Policy, a Washington-based defense and national security think tank he established in 1988, and has been one of the most persistent institutional voices arguing for a hawkish, threat-focused approach to U.S. national security that places radical Islamism, Chinese Communist Party influence operations, and Iranian nuclear ambitions at the center of the American threat calculus — with strong U.S.-Israel alignment as a natural corollary of correct threat assessment. Born April 5, 1953, Gaffney attended Georgetown University and Georgetown University Law Center, and built his career in defense policy, serving as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy under President Ronald Reagan from 1987 to 1988 — a position that gave him operational experience with U.S. nuclear deterrence policy, arms control negotiations, and alliance management at the height of the Cold War's final phase.

The Center for Security Policy under Gaffney's leadership has produced assessments of the Muslim Brotherhood's influence in American institutions, the threat posed by Iranian nuclear development, and the strategic logic of robust U.S.-Israel defense cooperation that have been influential in conservative and Republican national security circles even when they have been contested by mainstream academic and intelligence community assessments. His work on "sharia finance" — the argument that Islamic banking instruments designed to comply with religious law can be used as vectors for Islamist political influence in Western financial systems — brought the Center significant attention in the 2008-2012 period. Gaffney and the Center developed extensive relationships with Republican congressional staff, conservative movement organizations, and national security-focused Christian conservative groups, making the Center one of the nodes in the network of institutions that collectively define the Republican national security establishment's right flank.

His daily radio program "Secure Freedom Radio" and the Center's publications have maintained a consistent output of analysis arguing that the Iranian nuclear program poses an existential threat requiring military action, that the Muslim Brotherhood has significant institutional footprint in U.S. government and civil society, and that strong support for Israel is strategically required as well as morally correct. Operation Epic Fury — the February 2026 joint U.S.-Israel strikes on Iran and the killing of Khamenei — represented the vindication of the strategic case Gaffney had been making about Iran for over two decades. At Rank 98, Gaffney is the Cold War defense official who built a think tank to maintain the Reagan-era threat framework as the organizing principle of U.S. national security policy, and whose decades of institutional output contributed to the intellectual environment in which muscular U.S.-Israel cooperation against Iran became the Republican consensus position.