The Member of the Reagan Brass who Became a Pentagon Critic

When then President Ronald Reagan was staffing up the Pentagon for his first term, an obvious choice was the director of defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. That was Lawrence Korb, former naval flight officer and professor of management at the US Naval War College. For the previous five years he had been a consultant to the Office of the Defense Secretary, as well as, that year, an advisor to the Reagan-Bush Committee.

Reagan installed Korb as his Assistant Secretary of Defense for Manpower, Reserve Affairs, and Logistics. After the first term Korb stepped down, taking along with him the defense department’s medal for Distinguished Public Service. His next move sent him down a former Pentagon official’s most-traveled path: straight into the defense industry. He was hired to run the Washington office of the Raytheon Corporation (now RTX).

Then his relatively conventional story took a turn.

With Raytheon’s permission he had joined the board of the Committee for National Security (CNS), a nonprofit with a mission to generate public debate on national security issues and ways to prevent nuclear war. According to court documents, on a lunch hour in March 1986 Korb turned up at a Senate Office Building to speak at a CNS press conference. He argued against increasing military spending to cover the costs of the Navy Secretary’s plans for an expanded 600 ship-, 15 carrier- group Navy, among other things. The CNS report displayed at the press conference included a broader critique: “The threats cited most consistently by the Reagan administration to justify its buildup have either not materialized, or have proved far less menacing than advertised.”

By then, the Reagan military buildup was already heading back down, and Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had already begun their series of summits foreshadowing the end of the Cold War. Korb’s position was definitely more in step with the times than the Navy Secretary’s.

But not in step with his employer. Two Navy officials and a Senate Armed Services Committee staffer called Raytheon to complain. Korb was soon fired from his job, and offered a temporary face-saving position as a “special advisor” on the condition that he get prior approval for any speeches and not speak to the media. Or he could be reassigned as a commercial marketing consultant at a Raytheon subsidiary in Philadelphia, barred from any contact with the Pentagon. In other words: He could end his public life, in exchange for a Raytheon salary.

Instead, he sued. The ACLU of Massachusetts took his case (Raytheon was headquartered in the state), arguing he was wrongfully terminated in bad faith and in violation of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights. They contended that this declaration “embodies a strong public policy supporting freedom of speech, and that Raytheon’s actions interfered with both [Korb’s] right to express himself and the public’s right to hear what he had to say.”

They lost. The thrust of Raytheon’s defense was that it hadn’t violated policy in firing Korb because he had “rendered himself ineffective” as the company’s spokesperson by “publicly expressing views in direct conflict with the economic interest” of the company.

Raytheon may have fired him, but it did not silence him. For the next 30-plus years he made his case for a smaller Pentagon budget from the upper echelons of civil society’s national security think tanks: as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, then as director of studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, and finally at the Center for American Progress. He made the case in countless congressional hearings, books, op-eds in The New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal, to name a few. He also appeared on widely watched programs such as Face the Nation, The News Hour, 60 Minutes, The Today Show, Larry King, and The O’Reilly Factor.

I met Korb at a Council on Foreign Relations meeting early in this century. I had read an essay of his arguing that national security could not be achieved by military force alone. It required a “full toolkit” of security tools he characterized as “offense” (the military) “defense” (homeland security), and “prevention” (including diplomacy, foreign aid, support for international institutions such as United Nations peacekeeping forces, and nuclear nonproliferation.) He argued that the country needed a Unified Security Budget to understand the relative balance in funding for these tools and to outline how it could be rebalanced.

With remarkable chutzpah I don’t usually possess, and not much in the way of credentials for the task, I asked if he’d like to collaborate with me in fleshing out this framework. He said sure.

What followed was an eight-year partnership producing the annual “Unified Security Budget for the United States.” Each year we calculated the balance and compiled a rebalanced budget incorporating the recommendations of experts in each field; Korb supplied the analysis of the Pentagon budget and rationales for what could be cut from it. No collaborative partner I’ve ever had has been easier to work with.

In representative testimony to the Senate Budget Committee on May 12, 2021, Korb promised to focus on three main subjects: the exceptionally high amount of money then President Joe Biden’s administration proposed to spend on defense for the coming fiscal year; the Pentagon’s unnecessary spending on costly yet flawed weapons systems; and the need for Pentagon leadership to vastly improve the department’s management.

Needless to say, this program of reform has languished. Korb retired in 2024, and had to watch since then, as we all have, astronomical sums being seriously entertained for the Pentagon, a disastrous war of choice, technological developments threatening to put control of dangerous weapons beyond the reach of humans, and the open embrace of new frontiers of corruption in weapons procurement.

Korb and I never talked about his history. I first learned about the court case from his son at his funeral after he passed away in late April. His odyssey from Pentagon official to Pentagon critic gave him unique and invaluable standing in the fight against Pentagon excess. The fight will miss him.