Politics & Power Quote by Lawrence Korb

Korb’s line has the tidy bluntness of someone who’s watched the Pentagon’s shopping list become its own political constituency. “We need to stop” isn’t a policy tweak; it’s an attempt to break a ritual, the annual cycle where budgets swell on autopilot and “support the troops” gets quietly translated into “fund the hardware.” The phrase “those weapons systems” is doing tactical work too: it names a target without getting pinned to a single program, inviting listeners to think of the familiar roster of overpromised, underdelivered projects that survive because cancellation is politically expensive.

The subtext is that “national security” has become a rhetorical blank check. Korb reclaims the term as a measurable standard rather than a mood. If a system doesn’t “advance” security, it’s not merely wasteful - it’s strategically distracting, siphoning money, attention, and talent away from threats that don’t look good in a procurement brochure: cyberattacks, public health shocks, climate-driven instability, disinformation.

Context matters: this is a long-running critique from within the defense-policy ecosystem, where “waste” is rarely accidental. Jobs are geographically distributed, contractors are deeply embedded, and Congress has incentives to protect local economic ecosystems even when the military’s own strategy has moved on. Korb’s sentence tries to force a taboo question into the open: what if some weapons exist less to deter enemies than to lubricate a domestic political economy? By framing the issue as security rather than morality, he’s also making an argument designed to survive the standard counterpunch - that skepticism equals weakness.