The Project on Defense Alternatives was founded in 1991 by Carl Conetta and Charles Knight. They had first worked together at the Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies in Brookline, MA where they had developed ideas for how the United States could contribute to ending the Cold War by leading NATO toward a less offensive posture in Europe. Such a military reform would reassure the Soviet Union that it was taking reasonable security risks in loosening its grip on its allies in Eastern Europe.
After the Cold War ended, PDA turned its attention to helping define a less militarized world, including intensive work in eastern Europe and in southern Africa. PDA developed a detailed proposal for a UN legion that would provide for rapid-response peace operations of varied sorts.
Toward the end of the 1990s, PDA turned more attention to the military policies of the United States, doing studies of the then institutionalized Quadrennial Defense Review, the wars in the Balkans, and the so-called ‘readiness crisis’ of US armed forces.
After 911, PDA warned of the dangers and the poorly conceived strategy behind the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, providing detailed critical studies of the operations as well as extensive resource compilations for scholars and journalists.
In 2009 PDA turned increasing attention to the undisciplined way in which the defense budget had grown since 1998 and its unsustainability in the new fiscal realities in the U.S. PDA had a leading role in the Sustainable Defense Task Force in 2010 (also contributing to the follow on study of 2019.) After the report’s release to Congress, there was intense engagement with the ongoing national debate about the future composition of national security spending.
In 2017 PDA began intensive work on the potential for a counter-proliferation war in Korea led by the U.S. This included a ten-day trip in late 2017 by Charles Knight to the Manchuria region of China, Vladivostok, Russia, and Seoul, South Korea to engage and gather regional perspectives on how to avoid a new Korean war.
The chronology of PDA’s publications provides a good introduction to PDA’s 30-year contribution to international security thinking and policy.