Life & Wisdom Quote by Lawrence Korb

Korb’s line is blunt in a way policy talk usually isn’t. It treats “attention” as a scarce political resource, and casualties as the grim currency that buys it. The intent isn’t to romanticize sacrifice; it’s to describe how the machinery of public opinion actually moves in the United States, especially when wars drift into the background noise of an all-volunteer force.

The key subtext sits inside the phrase “one part of the country.” Guard and Reserve units are rooted in place: towns, counties, tight social webs. When those units are deployed heavily, the costs of war don’t disperse evenly across a population; they spike locally. A single bad day can hollow out a community in a way that’s impossible to ignore. Korb is pointing to a moral and political asymmetry: national leaders can sell a war as abstract strategy, but local grief is concrete, televised, and electorally radioactive.

There’s also an implicit critique of how wars become sustainable when they’re socially quarantined. If the burdens are carried by a narrow slice of America - often outside elite corridors of power - the rest of the country can remain comfortably detached. Korb is warning that concentrated loss breaks that spell. It forces a reckoning not because the policy arguments suddenly sharpen, but because the story stops being “over there” and becomes names on a hometown memorial, empty seats at a high school graduation, a main street draped in flags.

Contextually, this reads like a post-Vietnam/post-9/11 lesson about force structure: who fights isn’t just a military decision, it’s a democracy decision.