RAND Corp: Quietly leading America into debacle after debacle

The RAND Corporation: America's University of Imperialism
By Chalmers Johnson, Tomdispatch.com
Posted on April 30, 2008, Printed on April 30, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/83910/
The RAND Corporation of Santa Monica, California, was set up
immediately after World War II by the U.S. Army Air Corps (soon to
become the U.S. 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
U.S.'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 Kármán. 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 U.S.-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 détente 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.

Albert 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 Daniel 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 U.S. 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 --
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 U.S. 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 to 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 and 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 Bernard 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, Ronald 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 neocons,
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
neoconservative thought in Washington, named its auditorium the
"Wohlstetter Conference Center." Albert 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 Albert 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 Albert Wohlstetter's reformulations of nuclear
war ignore the fact that that these led to a "constant escalation of
the nuclear arms race." By 1967, the U.S. 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 Ph.D. 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 Ph.D.s 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 U.S. 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.

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. To view a short video of Johnson
discussing military Keynesianism and imperial bankruptcy, click here.

© 2008 Tomdispatch.com All rights reserved.
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