Principal Researchers

 

Carl Conetta

Carl ConettaCarl Conetta is a founding co-director of the Project on Defense Alternatives. Formerly he was a Research Fellow at the Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies and served for three years as editor of Defense and Disarmament News. He also has served as a consulting analyst for the Council on Foreign Relations, US House Armed Services Committee, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Mr Conetta is author or co-author of 65 reports on armed conflict, military strategy, and defense budgeting. In addition, he has contributed to 15 edited volumes and published in World Policy Journal, Security Dialogue, Defense News, National Defense, the Journal of Humanitarian Operations, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and Aviation Week, among others.

His commentary has appeared in numerous newspapers including the Washington Post, Boston Globe, and Christian Science Monitor. And he has been a commentator on ABC-TV, Al Jazeera, BBC, CBS-TV, CNN, Fox News, the History Channel, Canadian television (CBC), the BBC, Voice of America, National Public Radio, and the ABC and CBS radio networks, among others.

Mr. Conetta has made presentations before the US Commission for Fiscal Responsibility, the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, the House Armed Services Committee and House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, the US DoD Cost Analysis Symposium, the National Defense University, US Army War College, Joint Forces Staff College, the Naval War College, various congressional research agencies, the White House Office of Management and the Budget, and the UN Institute for Disarmament Research.

Charles Knight

Charles Knight Charles Knight is co-director of the Project on Defense Alternatives.  In 1989 he founded the Ground Force Alternatives Project at the Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies, Brookline, Massachusetts where he was a research fellow.  In 1991 he and Carl Conetta co-founded the Project on Defense Alternatives and moved the project to the Commonwealth Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In his work at the Project on Defense Alternatives, he has authored and co-authored numerous publications. These have appeared in such publications as Defense News, Boston Review, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Social Policy, Boston Globe, Time, International Security, and Dissent.

Mr. Knight has made numerous presentations on peace and security issues at governmental and non-governmental institutions, and during the 1994-1996 period had the honor to consult on confidence-building security options for southern Africa with the African National Congress and South African Ministry of Defense.

In 2017 Mr. Knight began intensive work on the potential for a counter-proliferation war in Korea led by the U.S. This included a ten-day trip to the Manchuria region of China, Vladivostok, Russia, and Seoul, South Korea, engaging security specialists and gathering regional perspectives on the real possibility of a new Korean war.

In the last decade, he has turned more of his attention to issues of gender, in particular how conventional masculine performances of domination and violence are reproduced at home, in the neighborhood, and at school – with repercussions all the way up to international relations.

Formerly Mr. Knight was a fellow at the Institute for Peace and International Security in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and publisher of Working Papers magazine.