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

Soldiers of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire | Alex Abella | "Rational choice?" Think again!

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Soldiers of Reason...

	Soldiers of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire Alex Abella Harcourt, 2008 - 400 pages average customer review:based on 10 reviews view larger image
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Important and Thought-Provoking...

I came across Alex Abella's fascinating book in the LAX airport newsstand, moments before boarding my $230 Virgin America flight to Washington. After my late friend Kevin's disturbing RAND conference room memorial service, I simply had to read it cover-to-cover on the flight. It took me until somewhere over Ohio. I really could not put the book down. The desire to reduce all questions to a matter of numbers was one I had come across last week in my late father's 1941 diary. It turned out we had moved into a home of one of the the founders of RAND--J. Richard Goldstein--when we arrived in Santa Monica.

Coincidentally, a high school friend had been the son of RAND researcher Daniel Ellsberg, of Pentagon Papers fame. The cousin of someone I know worked for RAND after leaving the CIA. The girlfriend of another cousin of someone I know worked at RAND while on leave from the State Department. When I saw the book in the bookstore, I realized that I had known practically nothing about the "mother of all think-tanks." From the book I found out that the Hudson Institute was a bastard child of RAND, set up after Herman Kahn left the mother ship. The Albert Wohlstetter room at AEI is named after a RAND guru. And almost everyone who is anyone in Washington these days--especially the architects of America's Iraq and Afghanistan quagmires--seem to have some sort of RAND connection.

Yet so far as I know, there had been no book about RAND, until this. It explained a great deal, and I recommend it highly. It is about the possibilities--and limits--of operations research and systems analysis. Reading "Soldiers of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire" helped me better understand the sudden and tragic death of my friend...

Must reading for anyone interested in the ways of Washington, or what President Eisenhower (apparently with RAND in mind) called "the military-industrial complex."

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"Rational choice?" Think again!

Do you remember Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove? Way too crazy to be real, right? Well, in fact, no: the famous Peter Sellers character was based on a real person, and that person, a mad genius by the name of Herman Kahn, is one of the key characters in this fascinating book by Alex Abella. Kahn and a bunch of like-minded people (extremely smart, but somehow missing any kind of ethical dimension to their thinking) formed the core of the RAND Corporation during the Cold War, and the ideas they came up with arguably have shaped the world we live in today more than anybody else's. Failsafe, mutually assured destruction, anybody? This is larger-than-life stuff, so it's not surprising that Abella's history of RAND - from its inception at the end of World War II to its providing of the ideological underpinnings for the invasion of Iraq - is not just informative, but also entertaining and scary in equal measure. Abella convincingly demonstrates that there are two big problems with RAND and, by extension, with America's military and foreign policy: first, even though the think tank wielded huge influence in every administration since 1945, it has never been accountable to an electorate. Second, and more crucially still, RANDites for too long believed that human behavior was basically predictable: faced with a choice, every human would be rational about that choice and pick what was in his/her best interest. Too bad that, outside the ivory tower, things haven't been quite as straightforward...

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Cool book on RAND and American foreign policy

Great introduction to Rand history - the author doesn't get bogged down in high theories or boring political history. This book is easy to read and though he saves his punch for the end (basically that Rand's love affair with "rational choice theory" pretty much defined the second half of the 20th century, including cold war policy and doomsday plans, Reaganomics, so yes, the theory is really important, but "rational choice" totally fails to be politically sensible or human, pretty much), it is just plain fascinating to see how many fingers in how many pies the Rand (Research And No Development - hilarious!) octopus has had, and how many contemporary figures in Iraq, including Richard Perle, Donald Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld and Condi Rice, have had ties to Rand.

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Penetrating revisionist view of American foreign policy

First of all, the book is about a lot more than foreign policy, but that's what I find most interesting about RAND and what I think really shines in this compelling history. Yeah, yeah, there's social science that RAND did, too, and that's good to know, but where the writing really comes alive is with the great larger than life characters who were at the center of the Cold War -- people like Albert Wohlstetter, Herman Kahn, Bernard Brodie, Paul Wolfowitz, Daniel Ellsberg, Donald Rumsfeld, and on and on. A lot of the material has been glancingly covered elsewhere, but never has one book presented the whole story. And with the whole story in one place, it becomes shockingly clear what enormous influence RAND's "soldiers of reason" had in every administration for over 60 years.

It's a relief that for most of the book Abella just presents history -- story after story of all the players and their deeds (and more important, their incredibly influential ideas). It's also a relief that at the end Abella sums up the achievements and failings of RAND's systems analysis and approach to problems by stating: "the problem with rational choice theory is that it is not rational. It fails to comprehend the world as it is..." Exactly. One need look no further than Viet Nam (or Iraq!) for proof.

A very good secret history of American foreign policy during and after the Cold War.

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reviews: 1, page 2

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