Two new Obama administration senior officials got sent up for nomination today: Philip Mudd, undersecretary-designate for intelligence at the Department of Homeland Security; and Kurt Campbell, assistant secretary-designate for East Asian and Pacific Affairs at the State Department.

Mudd is, as I wrote in October when I heard him speak at a conference, a real CIA luminary who served in a variety of counterterrorism and South Asia capacities since the 80s. He has a pretty balanced view of where al-Qaeda stands now: ideologically a spent force, but metastacizing into something dangerous in Pakistan. Most recently he was at the FBI’s national-security division, which gives him one of the most rounded-out national-security backgrounds of anyone who’s come into or through DHS. (Well, him and Charlie Allen.) Along with former White House counterterrorism chief Rand Beers, who’s also nominated to be a DHS undersecretary, Mudd’s nomination is a pretty good sign that the department is shaping up as a power center.

Campbell is, with Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy, a co-founder of the Center for a New American Security, which is the most powerful global-affairs institution since the Trilateral Commission, except that one day it will come up with a plan for intergalactic exploration and conquest. I hear Andrew Exum is writing a paper about a population-centric-counterinsurgency approach for the Alpha Centaurions.

Crossposted to The Streak.