Conservatives seeking to deep-six nomination of missile-defense critic
The Cable
By Josh Rogin
March 11, 2010
President Obama’s nomination of a key White House science advisor is facing strong and mounting opposition from GOP senators, with help from leading conservative Washington think tanks, due to his views on missile defense.
In October the president nominated former lead Pentagon weapons tester Philip Coyle to become the associate director for national security and international affairs at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. There he would lead a team tasked with giving scientific advice to Obama on a range of national-security issues and would report to Director John Holdren.
But Coyle’s nomination is stalled, despite the Senate Commerce Committee reporting his nomination out favorably on Dec. 3. Since that time, a steady and growing drumbeat of conservative opposition has been building, fueled partially by the Heritage Foundation, which has been locked in a decades-long struggle with Coyle over his well-known criticisms of U.S. ballistic missile defense systems.
The pushback against the Coyle nomination first surfaced in this Weekly Standard blog post written by missile-defense supporter John Noonan, who wrote, “If theology has crept into the missile defense debate, Coyle is the high priest of nay saying.” Noonan is linked to the Foreign Policy Initiative, a new right-leaning national security organization that’s acquiring increasing influence in Washington. …
