OT: Litany of Horrors: America's University of Imperialism

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http://tomdispatch.com/post/174925/chalmers_johnson_teaching_imperialism_101

A Litany of Horrors: America's University of Imperialism
By Chalmers Johnson
TomDispatch.com

Tuesday 29 April 2008

This essay is a review of Soldiers of Reason: The RAND Corporation and
the Rise of the American Empire by Alex Abella (Harcourt, 400 pp., $27)
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0151010811/ref=nosim/?tag=nationbooks08-20

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.

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http://www.amazon.com/dp/0805087281/ref=nosim/?tag=nationbooks08-20

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.
http://www.tomdispatch.com/p/chalmers_video

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