Larry Korb, Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress
Biography provided by participant
Dr. Lawrence J. Korb is a Senior Fellow at American Progress and a Senior Advisor to the Center for Defense Information. Prior to joining American Progress, he was Director of National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. Korb has also served as Director of the Center for Public Policy Education and Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution; Dean of the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh; Vice President of Corporate Operations at the Raytheon Company; and Director of Defense Studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
Korb served as Assistant Secretary of Defense (Manpower, Reserve Affairs, Installations, and Logistics) from 1981 through 1985. In that position, he administered about 70 percent of the defense budget. For his service in that position, he was awarded the Department of Defense's medal for Distinguished Public Service. Korb served on active duty for four years as Naval Flight Officer, and retired from the Naval Reserve with the rank of captain.
From the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to the fall of the Twin Towers in 2001, and even now, after the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States has not had a consistent national security strategy that enjoyed the support of the American people and our allies. This situation is markedly different from the Cold War era, when our nation had a clear, coherent, widely supported strategy that focused on containing and deterring Soviet communist expansion. The tragic events of September 11, the increase in terrorism, threats from countries such as North Korea and Iraq, and… Read more
Reading the press accounts of the F-22 in particular, and the defense budget in general, one would get the impression that Secretary of Defense Gates had killed the F-22, ending the era of manned fighters, and several other conventional weapons programs and was slashing the defense budget. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Pentagon actually spent $70 billion developing and procuring the F-22, more than just about any individual weapon system it has ever built. Moreover, since taking over at the helm at the Pentagon in November 2006, Gates has requested and received funding from the Congress… Read more
For all practical purposes, the war in Iraq ended for the U.S. in November 2008, when the Bush administration signed the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with the Maliki government. Because the Iraqi government and people would not agree to allow U.S. forces to remain in the country when the UN mandate expired, without setting a specific timetable for their quick withdrawal from the cities, and a more gradual withdrawal from the entire country, the Bush administration had to agree to leave the cities by July 1, 2009 and the country by December 2011. The Maliki government insisted on this… Read more
Before taking this nation to war, American decision makers must give satisfactory answers to the following questions: -Are the objectives clear? -Is military force the only way to achieve these objectives? -Are we willing to use all the force necessary to achieve these objectives? -Do the potential benefits outweigh the potential costs? In analyzing these questions, it is clear that, among the 12 major wars this country has waged, only the American Revolution, the Civil War, World Wars I and II, Korea, the First Persian Gulf War, and Afghanistan met these criteria. While some of the other wars may… Read more
President Obama has been roundly criticized by both his supporters and his opponents for deciding to send 17,000 more American troops to Afghanistan over the next six months. Many of his supporters accuse him of reneging on his campaign promise to withdraw American troops from George Bush’s misguided wars and rely more on diplomacy and development than military force. Others argue that the President is jumping the gun by increasing American troop strength by more than 50 percent, before deciding what American goals are. Still others feel that by sending more Americans into this “graveyard of the empires,” the… Read more
When President Obama begins to implement his campaign promise to engage Iran diplomatically on all the issues dividing us, he needs to keep in mind certain events that have shaped Iran’s perception of the United States, as well as the problems that his predecessors faced when undertaking diplomatic initiatives toward “evil” regimes. And, he needs to consider that a big player in getting Iran to modify its behavior is going to be Russia. For the Iranians, at least, three events shape their attitude toward the U.S. First, the role the CIA (and the United Kingdom’s MI6) played in removing Mohammed… Read more
Since taking over for Don Rumsfeld, after the Republicans lost control of Congress in the 2006 elections, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has talked about things that should be done when it comes to defense spending as well as overall spending for national security. For example, he has said that the U.S. cannot expect to eliminate national security risks through higher defense budgets, that the Pentagon must set priorities and consider inescapable trade-offs and opportunity costs, that spending for counterinsurgency should receive higher priority in the defense budget, that F-22 production should be capped at 180, and that there is… Read more
Since the state of Israel came into being 60 years ago, U.S. security interests have been threatened by the Soviet Union during the Cold War and in the post Cold War period by extreme regimes like Iraq and violent extremists like Al Qaeda. Even if one sets aside “the emotional and religious anchors of the U.S.-Israel alliance,” the alliance has been a net plus for the United States in practical, realpolitik terms. During the Cold War, the U.S.-Israel alliance prevented the Soviet Union from expanding its influence in the Middle East. Had Israel “lost” either the Six Day War in… Read more
I am reading Dale Van Atta’s biography of Richard Nixon’s first Secretary of Defense, Melvin Laird (With Honor: Melvin Laird in War, Peace and Politics, University of Wisconsin Press, 2008.) Van Atta analyzes how Laird, who took over the Pentagon in 1969 was able to accomplish three difficult tasks that are relevant to the challenges faced by the incoming Obama Administration. First, he was able to overcome the fierce resistance by the uniformed military and National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger to removing American forces from Vietnam, the previous needless, senseless war in which the US had become engaged ,… Read more
When President-elect Obama made his campaign promise to withdraw all combat brigades from Iraq within 16 months, at the rate of one to two brigades a month, there were 20 combat brigades, consisting of about 70,000 troops in Iraq, and he was roundly criticized on two grounds. First, he was called a defeatist for setting a timetable for withdrawal. Second, he was called logistically naïve for thinking that he could remove that many troops in such a short period of time. The SOFA, which was agreed to by the Bush administration and the Maliki government undermines the first criticism.… Read more
President Obama is liable to be tested in his first months in office but not just in the way that Vice President Biden anticipated. A big test will come from some in the bureaucracy, who will try to slow walk his plan to remove all of the combat brigades from Iraq within 16 months, or about one combat brigade per month. Many civilian and military experts will no doubt argue that the drawdown should be postponed until Iraq gets through its two big rounds of elections in 2009, namely the provincial and follow-on national elections, so that the security gains… Read more
Biography provided by participant
