Stories by Rachel Kleinfeld
Islamists are regrouping in Mali, but France wants to draw its forces down to 1,000 troops, so who will fill the gap? The UN, which already has 5,500 soldiers on the ground? A fragile truce holds in the Central Africa Republic, where more than one million people have been displaced by gruesome fighting between Muslims…
By Rachel Kleinfeld
While the talking heads chatter about the daily news, America national security system is fracturing — and no one is talking about the causes. What are the top three issues we need to address that aren’t making the headlines? Intelligence Recruitment And Clearances The real story behind Edward Snowden is not one man’s antics – but…
By Rachel Kleinfeld
As Congress awaits word from the Pentagon as to just how it will manage sequestration (the plan is due to Sen. Carl Levin‘s Senate Armed Services’s Committee today), we’ve got this interesting piece from Rachel Kleinfeld, a member of our board of contributors and president of the progressive Truman National Security Project. Kleinfeld argues…
By Rachel KleinfeldThe pundits are reading the tea leaves and the critics sharpening their knives. What would Chuck Hagel be like, really, as Secretary of Defense? If you want to understand how the SecDef-apparent thinks, however, it’s hard to do better than to look at his own words. Read them carefully, and it becomes clear that the…
By Rachel KleinfeldAs 2013 hurtles towards us, Breaking Defense has asked the experts on our Board of Contributors to forecast the key defense issues of the coming year (click here for the full 2013 forecast series). We kick off the series with this essay from Rachel Kleinfeld, founding president of the aggressively progressive Truman National Security Project.…
By Rachel KleinfeldWhile the politicization of four American deaths in Libya has some of the media distracted, those of us who care about defense need to look past the hype. The “he-said, she-said” accusations on the Libyan tragedy are obscuring major differences between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama on defense spending and strategy. President Obama’s goals are…
By Rachel Kleinfeld
For years, “realists” in foreign policy claimed that the kind of government inside another state didn’t matter – foreign policy was only about what countries did outside their borders. As Iraq and northern Syria join in a de-facto jihadist statelet, Ukraine’s east is dismantled, and Central American refugees pour into Texas, it might be time…
By Rachel Kleinfeld