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 | Cool book on RAND and American foreign policy

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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 8 reviews view larger image
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The first-ever popular history of the RAND Corporation, written with full access to its archives, Soldiers of Reason is a page-turning chronicle of the rise of the secretive think tank that has been the driving force behind American government for sixty years.

Born in the wake of World War II as an idea factory to advise the air force on how to wage and win wars, RAND quickly became the creator of America?s anti-Soviet nuclear strategy. A magnet for the best and the brightest, its ranks included Cold War luminaries such as Albert Wohlstetter, Bernard Brodie, and Herman Kahn, who arguably saved us from nuclear annihilation and unquestionably created Eisenhower?s ?military-industrial complex.?

In the Kennedy era, RAND analysts became McNamara?s Whiz Kids and their theories of rational warfare steered our conduct in Vietnam. Those same theories drove our invasion of Iraq forty-five years later, championed by RAND affiliated actors such as Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, and Zalmay Khalilzad. But RAND?s greatest contribution might be its least known: rational choice theory, a model explaining all human behavior through self-interest. Through it RAND sparked the Reagan-led transformation of our social and economic system but also unleashed a resurgence of precisely the forces whose existence it denied? religion, patriotism, tribalism.

With Soldiers of Reason, Alex Abella has rewritten the history of America?s last half century and cast a new light on our problematic present.

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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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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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Soldiers of Reason

This is a rare book to study an influential think tank in American history. There are many think tanks with great influence in American foreign policy especially after the World War II and during the Cold War; however, there are not many books about them.

For those interested in the establishment of American military and foreign policy, this is a must-read book. For those intersted in Amerian history, this is also must-read book. You do not have to make a judgement about the influence of RAND; however, it is true that the creation of RAND help strengthening the power of United States of America in the world.

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reviews: page 1, 2

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