Our core national-security interests and the limits of military force.
Lawrence Korb
Lawrence J. Korb a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and a Senior Adviser to the Center for Defense Information, was the assistant secretary of defense from 1981 to 1985.
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Surging to Disaster
In 1964, when Lyndon Johnson began escalating America’s involvement in Vietnam, Undersecretary of State George Ball warned that “the party which seems to be losing will be tempted to keep raising the ante.” In the summer of 1965, when the United States had less than 100,000 troops in Vietnam, Ball concluded that “humiliation would be […]
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Rumsfeld’s Folly
Since coming into office, the Bush administration has radically altered national-security and military doctrines that had successfully safeguarded American interests for more than 50 years. The changes, as the current crisis in Iraq demonstrates, have actually undermined U.S. security. George W. Bush’s new national-security doctrine, officially promulgated on Sept. 17, 2001, discards the long-standing American […]
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Overpaying the Pentagon
When George Bush Senior’s administration decided that the end of the Cold War made it safe to reduce the defense budget and the size of our armed forces, many neoconservatives and defense hawks, some of whom were serving in that administration, argued against the move. They wanted the United States to maintain military dominance in […]