Soldiers of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire

343 Pages·2008·2.22 MB·English

by  Alex Abella

Contents
Title Page
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraphs
Foreword
PART 1
1 A Great Beginning
2 The Human Factor
3 The Wages of Sin
PART 2
4 A Talk Before Dinner
5 The Secret Keepers
6 The Jester of Death
7 In RAND’s Orbit
PART 3
8 A Delicate Dance
9 Whiz Kids Rule
10 The Art of Science
11 A Final Solution to the Soviet Problem
12 An Irresistible Force
PART 4
13 A Night in Rach Kien
14 The Price of Success
15 Stealing Away
16 Plus Ça Change
17 Team B Strikes
PART 5
18 Witnessing End Times
19 The Terror Network
20 Yoda and the Knights of Counterforce
21 Back to Iraq
PART 6
22 Death of a Strategist
23 Whither RAND?
Acknowledgments
Endnotes
Bibliography
Index
Footnotes
Copyright © 2008 by Alex Abella

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Abella, Alex.
Soldiers of reason: the RAND Corporation and the rise of the American empire/Alex Abella.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. RAND Corporation—History. 2. RAND Corporation—Influence. 3. Research institutes—United States
—History—20th century. 4. Military research—United States—History—20th century. 5. United States—
Intellectual life—20th century. 6. United States—Foreign relations—1945–1989. 7. United States—Foreign
relations—1989– 8. United States—Military policy. I. Title
AS36.R35A24 2008
355'.070973—dc22 2007030691
ISBN 978-0-15-101081-3

eISBN 978-0-15-603512-5
v2.1017
To my wife and children, who never wavered.
Ad astra per aspera.
Killing, too, is a form of our ancient wandering affliction.
—RAINER MARIA RILKE

The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now,
in this very room. You can see it when you look out
your window or when you turn on your television.
You can feel it when you go to work . . . when you
go to church . . . when you pay your taxes.
—The Matrix (1999)
Reason’s dream creates monsters.
—FRANCISCO JOSÉ DE GOYA Y LUCIENTES
Foreword
If we had lost the war, we’d all have been
prosecuted as war criminals.
—AIR FORCE GENERAL CURTIS LEMAY,
in The Fog of War

I FIRST BECAME aware of RAND’s existence in the cauldron of one of the most
controversial conflicts in modern American history, the Vietnam War. The
occasion was a rally at Columbia University in 1970. Two years earlier, New
York City police had brutally ended a controversial student occupation at our
Morningside Heights campus, resulting in hundreds wounded and arrested. My
turn to get my share of abuse came on a sultry April night, when again New
York’s finest were summoned to end an antiwar protest that concluded, like so
many of the era, with shattered windows, burning trash cans, clouds of tear gas,
and the thumping of heads by police clubs to the cry of “Up against the wall, m
. . . f . . . !”
Some of my codemonstrators had procured Molotov cocktails—or at least,
what they thought were such—and ran to toss them at the building housing
computers doing work for the RAND Corporation. When I asked what RAND
was and why it deserved such violence, I was told it was a think tank in
California, a place where war criminals conducted research on how to defeat the
Vietcong and perpetuate the ruling classes, the “establishment.” In the event, my
impassioned compadres did not accomplish their goal—the sudden arrival of
dozens of blue uniforms sent us all scattering. Those who escaped repaired for a
postmortem at the university watering hole, the West End. There, consoled by
soggy fries, steins of beer, and boilermakers, white-bread revolutionaries told me
tall tales in which RAND played the simultaneous role of Dr. Strangelove and
Svengali—both deranged genius and puppet master.
Flash forward thirty-some years to a signing in Los Angeles for my last book,
a study of Hitler’s secret terrorist plot against the United States. As I
autographed away at the Westwood bookstore, I greeted a friend from RAND
who had come to lend his support. The odd conjunction of terrorism, RAND,
and books was sudden inspiration. Had anyone ever done a book on RAND?
Was such a thing even possible, given the top-secret research still being
conducted at the think tank? It might be difficult, but undoubtedly worth trying.
Just what was RAND up to nowadays?
Just what was RAND up to nowadays?
When I approached RAND leaders to get their cooperation for the project, I
never imagined they would ultimately give their consent. RAND was too
secretive, too wrapped up in mystery. A staffer told me that in the past RAND
actually had paid a public relations person to keep its name out of the
newspapers.
All the same, my idea for a book on the organization journeyed from level to
level, beginning with friends inside RAND, to the public relations office, and
onward and upward until ultimately I made my pitch to top management at a
7:30 A.M. meeting, as though we were in the Pentagon. In typical RAND mode,
management took a vote, asking not just a yes or no answer but also an ordinal
on a scale—one being extremely negative and ten extremely positive. Out of five
ballots cast, I received an average grade of seven, which I was told was the
second highest they had given to any project in years. One of the managers
confided that he thought agreeing to this book was either the brightest or the
dumbest move RAND had ever made.
RAND opened its files to me, put me in touch with its researchers and
analysts, and placed no restriction on my writing save that I use no classified
material. I agreed with some trepidation, fearing that the use of declassified
information would make the story bland and inconsequential. I need not have
worried. Most of the materials still marked top secret deal with the development
of nuclear weapons and, important as that is, it only illustrates a portion of the
extraordinarily wide-ranging influence RAND has had on the world. Once I
began my research on the sixty-year-plus RAND history, I was staggered by the
abundance of material encompassing so many fields, activities, people, and
events. That was how I found out that my friends at the West End so many years
ago, as often happens in bull sessions, had gotten their facts wrong. It was not
RAND conducting counterinsurgency studies at Columbia, but another think
tank, the Institute for Defense Analyses. Moreover, Columbia had canceled its
contract with the IDA in the wake of the 1968 student takeover.
Nonetheless, my fellow students were not too far off in their characterization.
RAND had conducted extensive research on how to defeat the Vietcong and
more in Vietnam. Its very raison d’être at its founding had been to advise the Air
Force on how to wage and win wars. And at that very moment in 1970, RAND
was transmuting the lessons it had learned in the fields of war into precepts of
urban planning, turning New York City into a research laboratory for its
controlling vision of a perfect society.
RAND was, and is, the essential establishment organization. Throughout its
history, RAND has been at the heart of that interweaving of Pentagon
concupiscence and financial rapacity that President Eisenhower aimed to call the
concupiscence and financial rapacity that President Eisenhower aimed to call the
military-industrial-legislative complex. RAND has literally reshaped the modern
world—and very few know it.
…
RAND sits by the beach in Santa Monica, squeezed in between city hall and the
pier, in what for decades was a run-down part of the California coastline until
the real estate boom turned the dowdy retirement community into Beverly Hills
by the sea.
RAND’s old buildings—a two-story boxcar intersecting a five-story slab, now
demolished—were designed to be like a campus without students, just faculty
thinking about the vicissitudes of their specialty.* Even the long hallways that
had to be negotiated to access common areas were meant to get people out of
their rooms and interacting with one another. The new RAND building was paid
for in large part by the sale of the lot the previous one was sited on. This new
structure is as much a reflection of our era, all curves and glass and postmodern
Koolhaas cool, as the earlier one was of its own angular, midcentury modernist
manner. One thing remains the same: it is still hard to go in a straight line from
one point to another; everything is interconnected, with the specific purpose of
promoting the flow of people and information.

For RAND has always been about ideas, about what-ifs, about pie in the sky.
At one point RAND could have been like TRW, a defense contractor with
dozens of factories, thousands of workers, and multimillion-dollar budgets.
Instead, its leaders deliberately chose the life of the mind, the power of the idea
whose time has come, at the expense of fame and fortune.
That was why a general, a San Francisco lawyer, and an aircraft manufacturer
conspired to establish it as a center of military-sponsored scientific research and
development, a factory of ideas, a think tank. Even its name was muscular—and
cryptic: RAND.† Not an ivory tower but a group of consiglieri who would advise
the government—specifically, the United States Air Force—on how best to
wage and win wars.

Over time, RAND disguised its mission by filing incorporation papers with
California’s secretary of state that its purpose was “To further and promote
scientific, educational, and charitable purposes, all for the public welfare and
security of the United States of America.”1 Its true aim—which never needed to