Rise of the Vulcans: Defence Planning Guidance & Office of Special Plans

Office of Special Plans~Feith based intelligence

The Office of Special Plans (OSP) was created by Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld to help create a case to invade Iraq. OSP evolved from the Northern Gulf Affairs Office, which fell under the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia policy office. It was renamed and expanded to the Office of Special Plans in October 2002 to to handle prewar and postwar planning.




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Conversations host Harry Kreisler welcomes Rise of the Vulcans author James Mann for a discussion of the history of the Bush administration's foreign policy.

The 1992 draft Defense Planning Guidance (DPG), crafted by then-Defense Department staffers I. Lewis Libby, Paul Wolfowitz, and Zalmay Khalilzad, is widely regarded as an early formulation of the neoconservatives' post-Cold War agenda. Under the auspices of then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, Libby and Wolfowitz, two of the few neoconservatives given posts in the realist-dominated administration of George H.W. Bush, were given the task of producing the DPG, a classified document that outlines U.S. military strategies and provides a framework for developing the defense budget. Because it would be the first DPG since the end of the Cold War, the officials had the daunting task of devising what essentially would be an entirely new framework for U.S. defense policy. In preparation for the drafting, the officials held a number of meetings with outside experts. Notable among the participants were Richard Perle, Albert Wohlstetter (former mentor to Perle and Wolfowitz), and Andrew Marshall, head of the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment.