Page 1 of 2 BOOK REVIEW America's university of imperialism Soldiers of Reason by Alex Abella
Reviewed by Chalmers Johnson
The RAND Corporation of Santa Monica, California, was set up immediately after
World War II by the US Army Air Corps (soon to become the US Air Force). The
air force generals who had the idea were trying to perpetuate the wartime
relationship that had developed between the scientific and intellectual
communities and the American military, as exemplified by the Manhattan Project
to develop and build the atomic bomb.
Soon enough, however, RAND became a key institutional building block of the
Cold War American empire. As the premier think-tank for the US's role as
hegemon of the Western world, RAND was
instrumental in giving that empire the militaristic cast it retains to this day
and in hugely enlarging official demands for atomic bombs, nuclear submarines,
intercontinental ballistic missiles, and long-range bombers. Without RAND, our
military-industrial complex, as well as our democracy, would look quite
different.
Alex Abella, the author of Soldiers of Reason, is a Cuban-American
living in Los Angeles who has written several well-received action and
adventure novels set in Cuba and a less successful nonfiction account of
attempted Nazi sabotage within the United States during World War II. The
publisher of his latest book claims that it is "the first history of the
shadowy think-tank that reshaped the modern world". Such a history is long
overdue. Unfortunately, this book does not exhaust the demand. We still need a
less hagiographic, more critical, more penetrating analysis of RAND's peculiar
contributions to the modern world.
Abella has nonetheless made a valiant, often revealing and original effort to
uncover RAND's internal struggles, not least of which involved the decision of
analyst Daniel Ellsberg, in 1971, to leak the Department of Defense's top
secret history of the Vietnam War, known as The Pentagon Papers, to Congress
and the press. But Abella's book is profoundly schizophrenic. On the one hand,
the author is breathlessly captivated by RAND's fast-talking economists,
mathematicians and thinkers-about-the-unthinkable; on the other hand, he agrees
with Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis's assessment in his book, The Cold War: A
New History, that, in promoting the interests of the air force, RAND
concocted an "unnecessary Cold War" that gave the dying Soviet empire an extra
30 years of life.
We need a study that really lives up to Abella's subtitle and takes a more
jaundiced view of RAND's geniuses, Nobel prize winners, egghead gourmands and
wine connoisseurs, Laurel Canyon swimming pool parties, and self-professed
saviors of the Western world. It is likely that, after the American empire has
gone the way of all previous empires, the RAND Corporation will be more
accurately seen as a handmaiden of the government that was always
super-cautious about speaking truth to power. Meanwhile, Soldiers of Reason
is a serviceable, if often overwrought, guide to how strategy has been
formulated in the post-World War II American empire.
The air force creates a think-tank
RAND was the brainchild of General H H "Hap" Arnold, chief of staff of the Army
Air Corps from 1941 until it became the air force in 1947, and his chief
wartime scientific adviser, the aeronautical engineer Theodore von Karman. In
the beginning, RAND was a free-standing division within the Douglas Aircraft
Company which, after 1967, merged with McDonnell Aviation to form the
McDonnell-Douglas Aircraft Corporation and, after 1997, was absorbed by Boeing.
Its first head was Franklin R Collbohm, a Douglas engineer and test pilot.
In May 1948, RAND was incorporated as a not-for-profit entity independent of
Douglas, but it continued to receive the bulk of its funding from the air
force. The think-tank did, however, begin to accept extensive support from the
Ford Foundation, marking it as a quintessential member of the American
establishment.
Collbohm stayed on as chief executive officer until 1966, when he was forced
out in the disputes then raging within the Pentagon between the air force and
secretary of defense Robert McNamara. McNamara's "whiz kids" were defense
intellectuals, many of whom had worked at RAND and were determined to
restructure the armed forces to cut costs and curb interservice rivalries.
Always loyal to the air force and hostile to the whiz kids, Collbohm was
replaced by Henry S Rowan, an MIT-educated engineer turned economist and
strategist who was himself forced to resign during the Ellsberg-Pentagon Papers
scandal.
Collbohm and other pioneer managers at Douglas gave RAND its commitment to
interdisciplinary work and limited its product to written reports, avoiding
applied or laboratory research, or actual manufacturing. RAND's golden age of
creativity lasted from approximately 1950 to 1970. During that period its
theorists worked diligently on such new analytical techniques and inventions as
systems analysis, game theory, reconnaissance satellites, the Internet,
advanced computers, digital communications, missile defense, and
intercontinental ballistic missiles. During the 1970s, RAND began to turn to
projects in the civilian world, such as health financing systems, insurance,
and urban governance.
Much of RAND's work was always ideological, designed to support the American
values of individualism and personal gratification as well as to counter
Marxism, but its ideological bent was disguised in statistics and equations,
which allegedly made its analyses "rational" and "scientific." Abella writes:
If
a subject could not be measured, ranged, or classified, it was of little
consequence in systems analysis, for it was not rational. Numbers were all -
the human factor was a mere adjunct to the empirical.
In my
opinion, Abella here confuses numerical with empirical. Most RAND analyses were
formal, deductive, and mathematical but rarely based on concrete research into
actually functioning societies. RAND never devoted itself to the ethnographic
and linguistic knowledge necessary to do truly empirical research on societies
that its administrators and researchers, in any case, thought they already
understood.
For example, RAND's research conclusions on the Third World, limited war, and
counterinsurgency during the Vietnam War were notably wrong-headed. It argued
that the United States should support "military modernization" in
underdeveloped countries, that military takeovers and military rule were good
things, that we could work with military officers in other countries where
democracy was best honored in the breach. The result was that virtually every
government in East Asia during the 1960s and 1970s was a US-backed military
dictatorship, including South Vietnam, South Korea, Thailand, the Philippines,
Indonesia and Taiwan.
It is also important to note that RAND's analytical errors were not just those
of commission - excessive mathematical reductionism - but also of omission. As
Abella notes, "In spite of the collective brilliance of RAND there would be one
area of science that would forever elude it, one whose absence would time and
again expose the organization to peril: the knowledge of the human psyche."
Following the axioms of mathematical economics, RAND researchers tended to lump
all human motives under what the Canadian political scientist C B Macpherson
called "possessive individualism" and not to analyze them further. Therefore,
they often misunderstood mass political movements, failing to appreciate the
strength of organizations like the Vietcong and its resistance to the
RAND-conceived Vietnam War strategy of "escalated" bombing of military and
civilian targets.
Similarly, RAND researchers saw Soviet motives in the blackest, most unnuanced
terms, leading them to oppose the detente that president Richard Nixon and his
national security advisor Henry Kissinger sought and, in the 1980s, vastly to
overestimate the Soviet threat. Abella observes, "For a place where thinking
the unthinkable was supposed to be the common coin, strangely enough there was
virtually no internal RAND debate on the nature of the Soviet Union or on the
validity of existing American policies to contain it. RANDites took their cues
from the military's top echelons." A typical RAND product of those years was
Nathan Leites's The Operational Code of the Politburo (1951), a fairly
mechanistic study of Soviet military strategy and doctrine and the organization
and operation of the Soviet economy.
Collbohm and his colleagues recruited a truly glittering array of intellectuals
for RAND, even if skewed toward mathematical economists rather than people with
historical knowledge or extensive experience in other countries. Among the
notables who worked for the think tank were the economists and mathematicians
Kenneth Arrow, a pioneer of game theory; John Forbes Nash, Jr, later the
subject of the Hollywood film A Beautiful Mind (2001); Herbert Simon, an
authority on bureaucratic organization; Paul Samuelson, author of Foundations of
Economic Analysis (1947); and Edmund Phelps, a specialist on economic
growth. Each one became a Nobel Laureate in economics.
Other major figures were Bruno Augenstein who, according to Abella, made what
is "arguably RAND's greatest known - which is to say declassified -
contribution to American national security, the development of the ICBM as a
weapon of war" (he invented the multiple independently targetable reentry
vehicle, or MIRV); Paul Baran who, in studying communications systems that
could survive a nuclear attack, made major contributions to the development of
the Internet and digital circuits; and Charles Hitch, head of RAND's Economics
Division from 1948 to 1961 and president of the University of California from
1967 to 1975.
Among more ordinary mortals, workers in the vineyard, and hangers-on at RAND
were Donald Rumsfeld, a trustee of the Rand Corporation from 1977 to 2001;
Condoleezza Rice, a trustee from 1991 to 1997; Francis Fukuyama, a RAND
researcher from 1979 to 1980 and again from 1983 to 1989, as well as the author
of the thesis that history ended when the United States outlasted the Soviet
Union; Zalmay Khalilzad, the second President Bush's ambassador to Afghanistan,
Iraq and the United Nations; and Samuel Cohen, inventor of the neutron bomb
(although the French military perfected its tactical use).
Thinking the unthinkable
The most notorious of RAND's writers and theorists were the nuclear war
strategists, all of whom were often quoted in newspapers and some of whom were
caricatured in Stanley Kubrick's 1964 film Dr Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to
Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. (One of them, Herman Kahn, demanded
royalties from Kubrick, to which Kubrick responded, "That's not the way it
works Herman.") RAND'S group of nuclear war strategists was dominated by
Bernard Brodie, one of the earliest analysts of nuclear deterrence and author
of Strategy in the Missile Age (1959); Thomas Schelling, a pioneer in
the study of strategic bargaining, Nobel Laureate in economics, and author of The
Strategy of Conflict (1960); James Schlesinger, Secretary of Defense
from 1973 to 1975, who was fired by President Ford for insubordination; Kahn,
author of On Thermonuclear War (1960); and last but not least, Albert
Wohlstetter, easily the best known of all RAND researchers.
Abella calls Wohlstetter "the leading intellectual figure at RAND", and
describes him as "self-assured to the point of arrogance". Wohlstetter, he
adds, "personified the imperial ethos of the mandarins who made America the
center of power and culture in the postwar Western world."
While Abella does an excellent job ferreting out details of Wohlstetter's
background, his treatment comes across as a virtual paean to the man, including
Wohlstetter's late-in-life turn to the political right and his support for the
neoconservatives. Abella believes that Wohlstetter's "basing study", which made
both RAND and him famous (and which I discuss below), "changed history."
Starting in 1967, I was, for a few years - my records are imprecise on this
point - a consultant for RAND (although it did not consult me often) and became
personally acquainted with Albert Wohlstetter. In 1967, he and I attended a
meeting in New Delhi of the Institute of Strategic Studies to help promote the
Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which was being opened for signature in
1968, and would be in force from 1970.
There, Wohlstetter gave a display of his well-known arrogance by announcing to
the delegates that he did not believe India, as a civilization, "deserved an
atom bomb". As I looked at the smoldering faces of Indian scientists and
strategists around the room, I knew right then and there that India would join
the nuclear club, which it did in 1974. (India remains one of four major
nations that have not signed the NPT. The others are North Korea, which
ratified the treaty but subsequently withdrew, Israel, and Pakistan.
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Alex Abella, the author of Soldiers of Reason, is a Cuban-American
living in Los Angeles who has written several well-received action and
adventure novels set in Cuba and a less successful nonfiction account of
attempted Nazi sabotage within the United States during World War II. The
publisher of his latest book claims that it is "the first history of the
shadowy think-tank that reshaped the modern world". Such a history is long
overdue. Unfortunately, this book does not exhaust the demand. We still need a
less hagiographic, more critical, more penetrating analysis of RAND's peculiar
contributions to the modern world.
