The Center for Defense Information was founded in 1972 by retired U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Gene La Rocque. The CDI is dedicated to:
- strengthening national and international security through international cooperation;
- reducing reliance on unilateral military power to resolve conflict;
- reducing reliance on nuclear weapons;
- transforming and reforming the U.S. military establishment; and
- prudent oversight of defense programs.
Currently operating under the aegis of the World Security Institute, it is composed of academics and high-ranking retired U.S. military officers who conduct critical analyses of U.S. defense and security policy.
The CDI regularly publishes the "Defense Monitor". The group also maintains a website that includes information about terrorist activity.
After the 2008 U.S. elections, the CDI released "America’s Defense Meltdown: Pentagon Reform for President Obama and the New Congress", a collection of briefing papers by a dozen defense intellectuals and retired military officers.
Winslow T. Wheeler, director of the Straus Military Reform Project at CDI, expects costs for the F-35 Lightning II to significantly increase, in one example of the positions he has taken on military weapons systems. The reform project is funded by Philip A. Straus Jr., a photographer, and family. Wheeler, a former U.S. Senate and Government Accounting Office staffer, is a periodic contributor to CounterPunch's on-line site, among other publications.
The Center for Defense Information now exists in a research capacity as a component of the larger World Security Institute.
Read more about Center For Defense Information: Criticisms
Famous quotes containing the words center, defense and/or information:
“The question of whether it’s God’s green earth is not at center stage, except in the sense that if so, one is reminded with some regularity that He may be dying.”
—Edward Hoagland (b. 1932)
“... most Southerners of my parents’ era were raised to feel that it wasn’t respectable to be rich. We felt that all patriotic Southerners had lost everything in defense of the South, and sufficient time hadn’t elapsed for respectable rebuilding of financial security in a war- impoverished region.”
—Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 1, ch. 1 (1962)
“I believe it has been said that one copy of The Times contains more useful information than the whole of the historical works of Thucydides.”
—Richard Cobden (1804–1865)