Andrew W Marshall Foundation

The Andrew W. Marshall Foundation (AWMF) is a private operating foundation, not a traditional pass-through grantmaker — it designs and runs its own named programs rather than reviewing unsolicited proposals from nonprofits. Its FY2023 IRS filing lists exactly four self-directed programs: the Andrew W. Marshall Paper Prize Competition ($205,479), a research project on long-term national trajectories titled "France, the United States, and China 2050" ($117,780), production of a biography of founder Andrew Marshall in partnership with the Institute for Defense Analyses ($79,952), and internal long-term planning/branding work ($64,364). Every one of the 80 grant payments recorded in AWMF's public grantee history (2021-2022 Paper Prize cycles) went to a named individual — writers and researchers such as Emily Davis, Owen Daniels, and Treston Wheat — never to a nonprofit organization. This makes AWMF fundamentally unsuited to standard nonprofit grant-seeking; its audience is individual strategic thinkers, not institutions.

The relationship progression runs through three tracks rather than an LOI-to-full-proposal pipeline: (1) the Paper Prize, an open competitive call for written work on U.S. national security, (2) the Andrew W. Marshall Fellowship, a two-year in-residence appointment (the 2025-2027 cohort, Sam Bresnick and Cole McFaul, is hosted at Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging Technology), and (3) the Andrew W. Marshall Scholar program, a year-long independent study appointment (2025 Scholar: Carl O. Pabo). Selection for Fellows and Scholars appears competitive and curated rather than open-application; recent Scholar Jake Bebber published through the Hudson Institute, suggesting AWMF also works through partner think tanks.

First-time engagers should lead with a body of original, publishable analysis on long-term U.S. strategic competition — not a cold funding request. The Foundation is led day-to-day by Executive Director Melissa Flagg (appointed May 2025), with Jaymie Durnan listed as President in recent IRS filings ($60,000-$68,846 in officer compensation across FY2020-2023). Given AWMF's total assets of roughly $3.3 million, prospective partners should expect a small, high-touch, relationship-driven funder rather than a large bureaucratic grants office.

AWMF's total charitable giving (which includes self-run program costs, not just cash grants) has been volatile: $16,856 (FY2019) → $258,735 (FY2020) → $349,133 (FY2021) → $638,839 (FY2022) → $467,124 (FY2023), a 27% pullback in the most recent filed year after peaking in 2022. Within that, the *cash grants paid to individuals* line is a much smaller slice and even more erratic: $0 (2019), $0 (2020), $10,334 (2021), $78,167 (2022), $0 (2023) — confirming that the bulk of AWMF's spending is self-directed program cost (prize administration, research commissioning, publishing), not disbursed grants.

Across the 80 individual Paper Prize payments captured in AWMF's grantee history (2021-2022 competition cycles), the average award is $2,083 and total payouts sum to $166,668. The range runs from $167 (Paul Giarra) up to a cumulative $26,000 (Emily Davis, across two prize cycles) and $25,500 (Owen Daniels and Treston Wheat, each across two cycles) — implying top single-cycle prizes around $13,000, with a long tail of smaller $250-$1,000 honorable-mention-style awards. Geographically, winners cluster heavily around the Beltway policy community: DC (16 recipients), Virginia (9), California (8), Maryland (6), New York (5), and Massachusetts (5), with smaller counts in New Jersey, Colorado, Connecticut, and Florida.

AWMF's revenue mix has shifted structurally. Contributions received fell from $1,904,350 (2019) and $1,386,997 (2020) — almost certainly an initial seed/endowment gift around the foundation's 2019 ruling date — to just $56,171-$172,314/year in 2021-2023. Net investment income has become the primary funding source ($89,727-$314,373/year), meaning AWMF is now largely running on returns from, and gradually drawing down, its original endowment rather than actively fundraising. Total assets have declined from $4.27M (2021) to $3.30M (2023), consistent with a foundation spending faster than it earns on investments in some years. At $467K-$639K in annual giving against ~$3.3M in assets, AWMF's payout ratio (roughly 14-19%) is well above the 5% IRS minimum, typical of an operating foundation funding its own programs rather than banking assets for future grants.

AWMF's database-matched peers are five small private foundations of nearly identical asset size (~$3.07M) classified under the same broad "Philanthropy & Grantmaking" NTEE code. None publish a specific focus area or application process in available filings, which is itself telling: they read as generalist, closely-held family foundations, not mission-aligned peers in the national-security philanthropy space.

AWMF is an outlier among even this asset-matched set: it is one of the few private operating foundations in this size bracket to run a visible, publicly branded, multi-track program (prize competition plus two residential fellowship tracks) rather than simply disbursing grants quietly to a family's preferred causes. Its true field peers are larger, more established national-security-focused funders such as Smith Richardson Foundation and Carnegie Corporation of New York, both of which operate at a considerably larger scale and fund research institutions directly rather than individuals — a useful contrast for applicants weighing AWMF against bigger security-policy funders.

AWMF underwent a leadership transition on 2025-05-19 when Melissa Flagg, Ph.D. — a longtime foundation advisor with a background spanning research, government, and nonprofit strategy — was named Executive Director. Flagg's stated cornerstone initiative for her first two years is a comprehensive Digital Archive and library digitizing Andrew Marshall's papers alongside works from his contemporaries and those he funded, signaling a new institution-building emphasis alongside AWMF's existing prize and fellowship work.

On 2025-06-09, AWMF named Sam Bresnick and Cole McFaul as its 2025-2027 Andrew W. Marshall Fellows, in residence at Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) — continuing the Foundation's practice of embedding Fellows at partner research institutions rather than running fellowships in-house. Two weeks later (2025-06-23), Carl O. Pabo was named the 2025 Andrew W. Marshall Scholar and published an essay on agent-based modeling for AI-era national security forecasting. On 2025-10-03, AWM Scholar Jake Bebber published a Hudson Institute policy memo on military cognitive resilience training.

Momentum continued into 2026: on 2026-04-09, Fellows Bresnick and McFaul released a CSET report analyzing Chinese military AI procurement requests (2023-2024), focused on PLA C5ISRT priorities. In June 2026, AWMF's archival work surfaced publicly — a 2026-06-22 RealClearDefense essay by Jesse Ausubel, "The Questions of Andy Marshall," and a 2026-06-24 republication of a 2003 discussion paper, "The Next Thousand Years," by Cesare Marchetti and Jesse Ausubel. No large new grant awards to nonprofit organizations were identified; AWMF's activity remains concentrated in its Fellow/Scholar placements and publication output rather than open grantmaking.

AWMF has no general LOI, RFP, or unsolicited-proposal channel for nonprofit organizations — grant-seekers should not submit a standard funding request. The three real entry points are: (1) the Andrew W. Marshall Paper Prize, an open competitive call for written work on U.S. national security (past cycles paid an average of $2,083 per award, up to roughly $13,000 for a top single-cycle prize); (2) the Andrew W. Marshall Fellowship, a competitively selected, two-year in-residence appointment currently hosted at Georgetown's CSET; and (3) the Andrew W. Marshall Scholar program, a year-long independent study appointment. All three are individual-researcher tracks, not organizational grants.

Submissions and pitches should align with AWMF's recurring thematic lenses, visible across its 2025-2026 published output: long-term (20-30 year horizon) strategic competition, artificial intelligence and emerging technology, biotechnology and genetic-warfare implications, and cognitive warfare. Work that reads as a near-term policy fix rather than a genuinely long-horizon strategic question is a poor fit — the Foundation's own framing emphasizes "asking the right questions," not solving immediate problems.

A common mistake would be treating AWMF like a typical program-support foundation seeking 990-style operating grants; its 80-payment grantee history contains zero organizational recipients. Organizations wanting a partnership role (e.g., hosting a Fellow, contributing to the new Digital Archive initiative) will get further by pitching Executive Director Melissa Flagg directly on a specific collaboration — such as supporting the archive/digitization project she announced as her signature 2025-2027 priority — than by requesting general funding. Because the Foundation's total annual program spending is modest (~$467K in FY2023) and concentrated on a handful of Fellows, Scholars, and prize winners, competition for each track is likely intense relative to the small number of awards made. The best available signal on timing is the Foundation's own newsletter and "The Latest" news page, since the "Opportunities" page currently shows no open positions and past calls (2021, 2022 Paper Prize; 2025 Fellow/Scholar cohort) have not followed a clearly published annual calendar.