North Wind & Cerberus

who is north wind?

Behind the scenes of the shady dealings at UWar park, we find not only University officials, but also a slew of corporations profiting off war and destruction. To understand the full scope and urgency of the situation on the ground at UMore Park we must closely examine one of the University of Minnesota’s closest business partners: North Wind.

North Wind, the company behind the plot to construct The “Minnesota Aerospace Complex” at UMore Park, describes itself as “The nation’s leading independent supplier of hypersonic and mission critical RDT&E systems and services.”1 North Wind’s primary purpose is to simulate and design hypersonic technology to aid in missile development.

North Wind’s extensive ties with The Department of Defense, The University of Minnesota Board of Regents, and capital management giant Cerberus have allowed it to accrue hundreds of millions of dollars in the arms industry. The Board of Regents have made exceptions to their bylaws to make what would normally be public meetings with North Wind instead happen behind closed doors.2 The cofounder and ex-CEO of North Wind’s parent company, Cerberus, has now been inducted as Trump’s deputy secretary of defense.3 It goes all the way to the top.

Our hope is that by exposing the intricacies of the relationships between The Department of Defense, The University, and the war profiteers they contract, we can better understand how to fight their projects of mass destruction.

how did we get here?

> the north wind-cerberus timeline

The history of North Wind starts with a company created by University of Minnesota researches under the name FluiDyne. The founder, J. Leonard Frame, was an alumnus and longtime donor to the Department of Aerospace Engineering & Mechanics.4 FluiDyne had hypersonics connections from the start and likely did work at the O.G. Rosemount Aeronautical Research Laboratory. This was the UofM’s premiere aeronautics facility – based in UMore Park – from 1948-1960s.5 The legacy of destruction in Rosemount goes back to the very beginning.

Over the decades many mergers and splits occur, with the hypersonics eventually landing in the hands of Calspan. Only four years later, Cerberus buys up Calspan and guts it of its hypersonics to create North Wind.6 For all intents and purposes, based on timelines and financial moves, it seems that North Wind was formed with at least a primary intent to create the Minnesota Aerospace Complex and bring about an era of American hypersonics.

> key figures / who are these bastards?

Cerberus, through it’s hypersonics puppet North Wind, proposed the Minnesota Aerospace Complex as a means of bolstering U.S. Imperialism and maximizing their paychecks. Cerberus Capital Management has a laundry-list of troubling individuals with extensive ties to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the genocide in Gaza, and active support for U.S. war crimes.

Cerberus co-founder and longtime CEO Stephen Feinberg has shown special interest in Hypersonic weapons.7 Feinberg’s run as the CEO of Cerberus came to an end in 2025 when he was hired as the Deputy Secretary of Defense for the Trump administration. For years prior to his joining the Department of Defense, he was a high profile investor in Trump’s reactionary campaign8 and advocated for greater CIA involvement in The Middle East .9

Dan Quayle, a current Chairman of Cerberus LLC, was Vice President under Republican George H.W. Bush from 1989-1993, overseeing the Gulf War.10

John Snow, another Chairman of Cerberus LLC, was the Secretary of the U.S. Treasury and led George W. Bush’s economic team during the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.11

Brian Hook, Vice Chairman of Cerberus LLC, served under the presidencies of George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump. He was Trump’s special representative for Iran during his first term. He actively oversaw the construction of the Abraham Accords, Trump’s initiative to normalize relations between Israel and several of it’s neighbors, bolstering US/Israeli colonialism in the region.12 13

Arthur Mabbett, CEO of North Wind, is an alum of Honeywell and Raytheon, both defense contractors actively supplying the Israeli military, and spent years working for the U.S. Navy.14 15 16

David Meier, President of North Wind, is a University of Minnesota Alum and worked for MTS systems for several years, supplying buyers including Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and The U.S. Military.17

Numerous individuals, both listed and unlisted, have ties to Leidos,18 an IT company that merged with Lockheed Martin’s IT sector19 and profits massively off of its many Department of Defense contracts.20 21 Many also had to Calspan and it’s hypersonics/defense initiatives before it would eventually become North Wind.

The group of people who legislate war, advise our military, and sell our weapons are a single class of highly influential and extremely wealthy individuals. This is who, with the help of The Department of Defense and The University of Minnesota, seek to construct the Minnesota Aerospace Complex.

> what they don’t want you to know

Cerberus’ business model is to acquire (usually failing) businesses and make them profitable.22 This means the nearly $70 billion dollars Cerberus LLC manages in assets are spread across a wide variety of evil business ventures, from arms manufacturers to for-profit hospitals and military training for Saudi hitmen. The fact the corporation shares a name with a multi-headed beast from Greek mythology is an honest representation of how it presents itself to the world: a mighty dog of U.S. imperialism.

The history of scandal at Cerberus is long. When Stephen Feinberg was being confirmed for The Department of Defense, he was grilled about his company’s mismanagement of a for-profit hospital chain in Massachussets that ended in the closure of healthcare facilities that provided medical treatment for thousands.23

Another contentious point in Cerberus history is it’s subsidary ‘Tier 1 Group’ that openly trained the Saudi hit squad that murdered Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.24 In fact, Cerberus’ history in The wider Middle East is riddled with war crimes, hush money and genocide. The corporation managed Remington Arms, a former supplier of the Israeli military.25 While they owned DynCorp, they oversaw a nearly $200 million dollar contract with Elbit Systems, an Israeli defense contractor and potentially the largest supplier of the weapons the IDF uses today in The Gaza Strip.26 Cerberus has prior and current dealings that make it directly responsible for the mass surveilance employed by Apartheid Israel and the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people.

Furthering the connection between North Wind, Cerberus, and Apartheid Israel, the fact that many senior North Wind officials have extensive connections to Leidos is extremely concerning. Leidos is a military intelligence company with deep ties to Israel, The U.S. military, and notable defense contractors. Leidos Israel is based out of Be’er-Sheva, a town in which the local population was forcibly expelled to Gaza and Hebron during the Nakba.27 Leidos is an authorized supplier for the Israel Ministry of Defense. 28

Leidos Israel is working with tech giants Google and Amazon through a contract with the IDF for an initiative known as “Project Nimbus.”29 30 This military initiative seeks to bolster the use of technology in Occupied Palestine to better patrol border walls, Apartheid checkpoints, and gather real-time data on Palestinians. Until North Wind’s recent founding, CEO Arthur Mabbett spent years at Leidos, including while Leidos was being contracted by the IDF to spy on Palestinians.

The University has issued no public comment on its decision to make backroom deals with North Wind, nor the Department of Defense money it’s been promised or the decades of American Imperialism it has been complicit in. While the genocide of the Palestinian people continues and as The U.S. and Israel escalate conflict with Iran, The U seeks to deepen it’s ties to the mega-wealthy giants of the arms industry and their muddy histories of violence in The Middle East.

The Minnesota Aerospace Complex is not a politically neutral site of technological innovation. It is a testing facility bankrolled by the military to oversee the production of weapons. The companies and individuals involved have made millions to billions off of continued bloodshed abroad. It is our responsibility to unequivocally condemn the University’s ties to North Wind and Cerberus, continue to demand divestment from Israel, and Stop U-War Park!

references

  1. https://www.linkedin.com/company/north-wind ↩︎
  2. “As part of the recommended approval of this transaction,
    the administration is requesting that the Board waive their 2015 Resolution requirement to sell
    UMore Park property through a public process” (https://regents.umn.edu/sites/regents.umn.edu/files/2025-05/docket-fin-may2025-v2.pdf#page=116) ↩︎
  3. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-picks-billionaire-stephen-feinberg-to-be-deputy-defense-secretary-2024-12-22/ ↩︎
  4. https://cse.umn.edu/aem/news/prominent-alumnus-donor-and-engineer-passes-away ↩︎
  5. https://tom-kinter.stelea.ro/Outings/RosemountGhosts/Retrospect.html ↩︎
  6. https://www.cerberus.com/media/cerberus-acquires-calspans-hypersonics-and-test-systems-business-units-from-transdigm-and-forms-north-wind-a-leading-independent-supplier-of-hypersonic-test-infrastructure-systems-and-servi/ ↩︎
  7. https://www.forbes.com/sites/danalexander/2025/04/02/the-adult-in-the-room-this-billionaire-trump-appointee-actually-knows-what-hes-doing/ ↩︎
  8. https://littlesis.org/relationships/1261286 ↩︎
  9. https://responsiblestatecraft.org/stephen-feinberg ↩︎
  10. https://www.cerberus.com/our-firm/leadership/dan-quayle/ ↩︎
  11. https://www.cerberus.com/our-firm/leadership/john-w-snow/ ↩︎
  12. https://www.cerberus.com/our-firm/leadership/brian-hook/ ↩︎
  13. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/15/us/politics/us-iran-uae-israel.html ↩︎
  14. https://www.linkedin.com/in/arthur-artie-mabbett-921898bb/details/experience/ ↩︎
  15. https://afsc.org/gaza-genocide-companies ↩︎
  16. https://www.workersinpalestine.org/who-arms-israel#the-usa ↩︎
  17. https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-meier-2763552/details/experience/ ↩︎
  18. See timelines above, all sourced from LinkedIn profiles. ↩︎
  19. https://militaryembedded.com/comms/communications/merger-complete-in-leidos-and-lockheed-martin-isgs-transaction ↩︎
  20. https://www.leidos.com/insights/leidos-awarded-276-million-defense-department-contract-research-and-develop-critical ↩︎
  21. https://www.usaspending.gov/recipient/3b1c9c58-1f9e-8125-7105-02f4ff2c5b8b-P/latest ↩︎
  22. “Our main focus is buying underperforming assets and companies and then working to drive
    operational and financial improvements.” (https://www.armed-services.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/feinberg_apqs_022525.pdf) ↩︎
  23. https://www.axios.com/2024/03/06/hospital-debacle-private-equity-cerberus-steward ↩︎
  24. https://prospect.org/power/private-equity-firm-profited-khashoggi-killing-saudi/ ↩︎
  25. https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-763693 ↩︎
  26. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/business/2017-12-21/ty-article/israeli-firm-elbit-signs-major-contract-with-u-s-army-air-fleet/0000017f-f4ae-d5bd-a17f-f6be28b80000 ↩︎
  27. https://www.plands.org/en/articles-speeches/articles/2003/beer-sheba-the-forgotten-half-of-palestine ↩︎
  28. https://www.leidos.com/company/global/israel ↩︎
  29. https://theintercept.com/2022/07/24/google-israel-artificial-intelligence-project-nimbus/ ↩︎
  30. https://leidos.widen.net/s/vnp5jgkjhs/25-1205050-leidos-israel-fs-web ↩︎