[R-G] America's university of imperialism

[Anthony Fenton]

BOOK REVIEW
America's university of imperialism
Soldiers of Reason by Alex Abella
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/JE03Ak01.html
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. Some 189 nations have  
signed and ratified it.) My last contact with Wohlstetter was late in  
his life - he died in 1997 at the age of 83 - when he telephoned me to  
complain that I was too "soft" on the threats of communism and the  
former Soviet Union.

Wohlstetter was born and raised in Manhattan and studied mathematics  
at the City College of New York and Columbia University. Like many  
others of that generation, he was very much on the left and, according  
to research by Abella, was briefly a



member of a communist splinter group, the League for a Revolutionary  
Workers Party. He avoided being ruined in later years by Senator  
Joseph McCarthy and J Edgar Hoover's FBI because, as Ellsberg told  
Abella, the evidence had disappeared. In 1934, the leader of the group  
was moving the party's records to new offices and had rented a horse- 
drawn cart to do so. At a Manhattan intersection, the horse died, and  
the leader promptly fled the scene, leaving all the records to be  
picked up and disposed of by the New York City sanitation department.

After World War II, Wohlstetter moved to Southern California, and his  
wife Roberta began work on her pathbreaking RAND study, Pearl Harbor:  
Warning and Decision (1962), exploring why the US had missed all the  
signs that a Japanese "surprise attack" was imminent. In 1951, he was  
recruited by Charles Hitch for RAND's Mathematics Division, where he  
worked on methodological studies in mathematical logic until Hitch  
posed a question to him: "How should you base the Strategic Air  
Command?"

Wohlstetter then became intrigued by the many issues involved in  
providing airbases for Strategic Air Command (SAC) bombers, the  
country's primary retaliatory force in case of nuclear attack by the  
Soviet Union. What he came up with was a comprehensive and  
theoretically sophisticated basing study. It ran directly counter to  
the ideas of General Curtis LeMay, then the head of SAC, who, in 1945,  
had encouraged the creation of RAND and was often spoken of as its  
"Godfather".

In 1951, there were a total of 32 SAC bases in Europe and Asia, all  
located close to the borders of the Soviet Union. Wohlstetter's team  
discovered that they were, for all intents and purposes, undefended,  
with the bombers parked out in the open, without fortified hangars,  
and that SAC's radar defenses could easily be circumvented by low- 
flying Soviet bombers. RAND calculated that the USSR would need "only"  
120 tactical nuclear bombs of 40 kilotons each to destroy up to 85% of  
SAC's European-based fleet.

LeMay, who had long favored a preemptive attack on the Soviet Union,  
claimed he did not care. He reasoned that the loss of his bombers  
would only mean that, even in the wake of a devastating nuclear  
attack, they could be replaced with newer, more modern aircraft. He  
also believed that the appropriate retaliatory strategy for the United  
States involved what he called a "Sunday punch", massive retaliation  
using all available American nuclear weapons. According to Abella, SAC  
planners proposed annihilating three-quarters of the population in  
each of 188 Russian cities. Total casualties would be in excess of 77  
million people in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe alone.

Wohlstetter's answer to this holocaust was to start thinking about how  
a country might actually wage a nuclear war. He is credited with  
coming up with a number of concepts, all now accepted US military  
doctrine. One is "second-strike capability", meaning a capacity to  
retaliate even after a nuclear attack, which is considered the  
ultimate deterrent against an enemy nation launching a first-strike.  
Another is "fail-safe procedures", or the ability to recall nuclear  
bombers after they have been dispatched on their missions, thereby  
providing some protection against accidental war.

Wohlstetter also championed the idea that all retaliatory bombers  
should be based in the continental United States and able to carry out  
their missions via aerial refueling, although he did not advocate  
closing overseas military bases or shrinking the perimeters of the  
American empire. To do so, he contended, would be to abandon territory  
and countries to Soviet expansionism.

Wohlstetter's ideas put an end to the strategy of terror attacks on  
Soviet cities in favor of a "counter-force strategy" that targeted  
Soviet military installations. He also promoted the dispersal and  
"hardening" of SAC bases to make them less susceptible to preemptive  
attacks and strongly supported using high-altitude reconnaissance  
aircraft such as the U-2 and orbiting satellites to acquire accurate  
intelligence on Soviet bomber and missile strength.

In selling these ideas, Wohlstetter had to do an end-run around SAC's  
LeMay and go directly to the Air Force chief of staff. In late 1952  
and 1953, he and his team gave some 92 briefings to high-ranking Air  
Force officers in Washington DC. By October 1953, the Air Force had  
accepted most of Wohlstetter's recommendations.

Abella believes that most of us are alive today because of  
Wohlstetter's intellectually and politically difficult project to  
prevent a possible nuclear first strike by the Soviet Union. He writes:

     Wohlstetter's triumphs with the basing study and fail-safe not  
only earned him the respect and admiration of fellow analysts at RAND  
but also gained him entry to the top strata of government that very  
few military analysts enjoyed. His work had pointed out a fatal  
deficiency in the nation's war plans, and he had saved the Air Force  
several billion dollars in potential losses.

A few years later, Wohlstetter wrote an updated version of the basing  
study and personally briefed secretary of defense Charles Wilson on  
it, with General Thomas D White, the air force chief of staff, and  
General Nathan Twining, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in  
attendance.

Despite these achievements in toning down the official air force  
doctrine of "mutually assured destruction" (MAD), few at RAND were  
pleased by Wohlstetter's eminence. Bernard Brodie had always resented  
his influence and was forever plotting to bring him down. Still,  
Wohlstetter was popular compared with Herman Kahn. All the nuclear  
strategists were irritated by Kahn who ultimately left RAND and  
created his own think tank, the Hudson Institute, with a million- 
dollar grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.

RAND chief Frank Collbohm opposed Wohlstetter because his ideas ran  
counter to those of the air force, not to speak of the fact that he  
had backed John F Kennedy instead of Richard Nixon for president in  
1960 then compounded his sin by backing Robert McNamara for secretary  
of defense over the objections of the high command. Worse yet,  
Wohlstetter had criticized the stultifying environment that had begun  
to envelop RAND.

In 1963, in a fit of pique and resentment fueled by Brodie, Collbohm  
called in Wohlstetter and asked for his resignation. When Wohlstetter  
refused, Collbohm fired him.

Wohlstetter went on to accept an appointment as a tenured professor of  
political science at the University of Chicago. From this secure  
position, he launched vitriolic campaigns against whatever  
administration was in office "for its obsession with Vietnam at the  
expense of the current Soviet threat". He, in turn, continued to  
vastly overstate the threat of Soviet power and enthusiastically  
backed every movement that came along calling for stepped up war  
preparations against the USSR, from members of the Committee on the  
Present Danger between 1972 to 1981 to the neoconservatives in the  
1990s and 2000s.

Naturally, he supported the creation of "Team B" when George H W Bush  
was head of the CIA in 1976. Team B consisted of a group of anti- 
Soviet professors and polemicists who were convinced that the CIA was  
"far too forgiving of the Soviet Union". With that in mind, they were  
authorized to review all the intelligence that lay behind the CIA's  
National Intelligence Estimates on Soviet military strength. Actually,  
Team B and similar right-wing ad hoc policy committees had their  
evidence exactly backwards: by the late 1970s and 1980s, the fatal  
sclerosis of the Soviet economy was well underway. But Team B set the  
stage for the Reagan administration to do what it most wanted to do,  
expend massive sums on arms; in return, Reagan bestowed the  
Presidential Medal of Freedom on Wohlstetter in November 1985.

Imperial U
Wohlstetter's activism on behalf of American imperialism and  
militarism lasted well into the 1990s. According to Abella, the rise  
to prominence of Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi exile and endless source of  
false intelligence to the Pentagon, "in Washington circles came about  
at the instigation of Albert Wohlstetter, who met Chalabi in Paul  
Wolfowitz's office". (In the incestuous world of the neo-cons,  
Wolfowitz had been Wohlstetter's student at the University of  
Chicago.) In short, it is not accidental that the American Enterprise  
Institute, the current chief institutional manifestation of neo- 
conservative thought in Washington, named its auditorium the  
Wohlstetter Conference Center. Wohlstetter's legacy is, to say the  
least, ambiguous.

Needless to say, there is much more to RAND's work than the strategic  
thought of Wohlstetter, and Abella's book is an introduction to the  
broad range of ideas RAND has espoused, from "rational choice  
theory" (explaining all human behavior in terms of self-interest) to  
the systematic execution of Vietnamese in the CIA's Phoenix Program  
during the Vietnam War. As an institution, the RAND Corporation  
remains one of the most potent and complex purveyors of American  
imperialism. A full assessment of its influence, both positive and  
sinister, must await the elimination of the secrecy surrounding its  
activities and further historical and biographical analysis of the  
many people who worked there.

The RAND Corporation is surely one of the world's most unusual, Cold  
War-bred private organizations in the field of international  
relations. While it has attracted and supported some of the most  
distinguished analysts of war and weaponry, it has not stood for the  
highest standards of intellectual inquiry and debate. While RAND has  
an unparalleled record of providing unbiased, unblinking analyses of  
technical and carefully limited problems involved in waging  
contemporary war, its record of advice on cardinal policies involving  
war and peace, the protection of civilians in wartime, arms races, and  
decisions to resort to armed force has been abysmal.

For example, Abella credits RAND with "creating the discipline of  
terrorist studies", but its analysts seem never to have noticed the  
phenomenon of state terrorism as it was practiced in the 1970s and  
1980s in Latin America by American-backed military dictatorships.  
Similarly, admirers of Wohlstetter's reformulations of nuclear war  
ignore the fact that these led to a "constant escalation of the  
nuclear arms race". By 1967, the US possessed a stockpile of 32,500  
atomic and hydrogen bombs.

In Vietnam, RAND invented the theories that led two administrations to  
military escalation against North Vietnam, and even after the think  
tank's strategy had obviously failed and the secretary of defense had  
disowned it, RAND never publicly acknowledged that it had been wrong.  
Abella comments, "RAND found itself bound by the power of the purse  
wielded by its patron, whether it be the air force or the Office of  
the Secretary of Defense." And it has always relied on classifying its  
research to protect itself, even when no military secrets were involved.

In my opinion, these issues come to a head over one of RAND's most  
unusual initiatives, its creation of an in-house, fully accredited  
graduate school of public policy that offers PhD degrees to American  
and foreign students. Founded in 1970 as the RAND Graduate Institute  
and today known as the Frederick S Pardee RAND Graduate School (PRGS),  
it had, by January 2006, awarded over 180 PhDs in microeconomics,  
statistics, and econometrics, social and behavioral sciences, and  
operations research. Its faculty numbers 54 professors drawn  
principally from the staffs of RAND's research units, and it has an  
annual student body of approximately 900.

In addition to coursework, qualifying examinations, and a  
dissertation, PRGS students are required to spend 400 days working on  
RAND projects. How RAND and the Air Force can classify the research  
projects of foreign and American interns is unclear; nor does it seem  
appropriate for an open university to allow dissertation research,  
which will ultimately be available to the general public, to be done  
in the hothouse atmosphere of a secret strategic institute.

Perhaps the greatest act of political and moral courage involving RAND  
was Daniel Ellsberg's release to the public of the secret record of  
lying by every president from Dwight D Eisenhower to Lyndon Johnson  
about the US involvement in Vietnam. However, RAND itself was and  
remains adamantly hostile to what Ellsberg did.

Abella reports that Charles Wolf, Jr, the chairman of RAND's Economics  
Department from 1967 to 1982 and the first dean of the RAND Graduate  
School from 1970 to 1997, "dripped venom when interviewed about the  
[Ellsberg] incident more than thirty years after the fact." Such  
behavior suggests that secrecy and toeing the line are far more  
important at RAND than independent intellectual inquiry and that the  
products of its research should be viewed with great skepticism and  
care.

Soldiers of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American  
Empire by Alex Abella. Harcourt; 1 edition (May 12, 2008) . ISBN-10:  
0151010811. Price US427, 400 pages.

Chalmers Johnson's latest book is Nemesis: The Last Days of the  
American Republic, now available in a Holt Paperback. It is the third  
volume of his Blowback Trilogy.

(Copyright 2008 Chalmers Johnson.)