National defense may refer to:
- National security, a nation's use of military, economic and political power to maintain survival
- National missile defense, a military strategy to shield a country from missiles
- National Defense Service Medal, a decoration of the U.S. military
- National Defense Reserve Fleet, a reserve of U.S. merchant ships
- National Defense University in Washington, D.C.
- National Defense Medical College in Japan
- National Defense Medical Center in Taiwan
- National Defense College of the Philippines
- National Defense Research Committee in the U.S. in the 1940s
- National Defense Education Act
- Government of National Defense in Africa in the 1870s
Famous quotes containing the words national and/or defense:
“All experience teaches that, whenever there is a great national establishment, employing large numbers of officials, the public must be reconciled to support many incompetent men; for such is the favoritism and nepotism always prevailing in the purlieus of these establishments, that some incompetent persons are always admitted, to the exclusion of many of the worthy.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“Unlike Boswell, whose Journals record a long and unrewarded search for a self, Johnson possessed a formidable one. His life in London—he arrived twenty-five years earlier than Boswell—turned out to be a long defense of the values of Augustan humanism against the pressures of other possibilities. In contrast to Boswell, Johnson possesses an identity not because he has gone in search of one, but because of his allegiance to a set of assumptions that he regards as objectively true.”
—Jeffrey Hart (b. 1930)