Abram Shulsky

In 2010, Shulsky was working as a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.

In 2006, Shulsky was working in the Pentagon at the Iran desk as "senior advisor to the undersecretary of defense for policy, focusing on the Mideast and terrorism." Mary Louise Kelly of NPR noted some concern from C.I.A. officials that he was in this position. Paul Krugman of The New York Times asked "Why would the Pentagon put someone who got everything wrong on Iraq in charge of intelligence on Iran?"

In a 1999 paper, "Leo Strauss and the World of Intelligence (By Which We Do Not Mean Nous)," also co-authored by Schmitt, Shulsky writes that "Strauss's view certainly alerts one to the possibility that political life may be closely linked to deception. Indeed, it suggests that deception is the norm in political life, and the hope, to say nothing of the expectation, of establishing a politics that can dispense with it is the exception."

Shulsky served as staff for the Senate Intelligence Committee in the early 1980s. He worked under Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle during the Reagan Administration and later worked for the RAND Corporation. He worked as a consultant for the Office of Net Assessment, a Pentagon think-tank. In the run up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Shulsky was the Director of the Office of Special Plans (OSP), which served as a source of intelligence. He was hired and overseen by Douglas Feith and William Luti, but Shulsky's "real boss" may have been higher up than Feith. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz advocated the creation of the pro-war OSP as he "was impatient with the C.I.A." Gordon R. Mitchell, writing in the Quarterly Journal of Speech, stated,

George Packer, Franklin Foer of The New Republic, and Mitchell all compare the OSP failures to the problems in the mid-1970s Team B competitive intelligence analysis, with Mitchell noting Shulsky "worked on the staff of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee that reviewed the original Team B exercise during the Cold War."

Abram Shulsky (born August 15, 1942) is a neoconservative scholar who has worked for U.S. government, RAND Corporation, and the Hudson Institute. Shulsky served as Director of the Office of Special Plans, a unit whose function has been compared to the 1970s Team B exercise. In the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Shulsky approved OSP memos with talking points about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction and terrorism. Shulsky is critical of the traditional intelligence analysis, which is based upon the social-scientific method, and of independent intelligence agencies. Shulsky favors a military intelligence model which can be used to support policy as, in Shulsky's words, "truth is not the goal" of intelligence operations, but "victory". Shulsky signed a letter to the Clinton White House on Iraq.