The Institute focuses on science, technology and national security issues, and describes its mission as the facilitation of non-partisan discussion and debate with the goal of informing public policy.
Institute leadership includes co-founder, chairman and CEO Michael Swetnam, a former Special Consultant to President George H. W. Bush's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and current member of the Technical Advisory Group to the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
[1] The institute's Board of Regents is led by General Alfred M. Gray, USMC (Ret.
The institute currently includes four Divisions: Policy Research, Strategy & Planning, Concepts & Analyses, and the Center for Emerging Threats and Opportunities (CETO) at the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory, Quantico, VA, which serves as an internal Marine Corps think tank.
2010 Navigator Awards winners included Dr. Gerald Edelman, 1972 Nobel laureate and president of The Neurosciences Institute, and Elon Musk, co-founder of PayPal, SpaceX, and Tesla Motors.