Alex Abella

When I googled RAND a minute ago to get an image for this article, one of the automatic suggests was "Does the RAND corporation still exist?" And to a paraphrase a certain Dark Lord of the Sith, this think tank is still fully operational. Abella traces the history of the RAND corporation from the years immediately after WW2 through the contemporary Bush administration War on Terror. It's a fascinating story about people, ideas, and empire, which unfortunately does not quite come show more together.

Chain Reaction, a sculpture by political cartoonist Paul Conrad which the city of Santa Monica put up across the street from RAND headquarters

RAND was born out of operational research in the Second World War, and the general melding of scientific expertise and air power. Every bomber wing had an attached operations research team, helping to find efficient solutions to logistical problems, and more broadly science had culminated in victory and the mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. With the post-war drawdown, the Army Air Corps, soon to be elevated as the separate United States Air Force, looked for an institutional scientific advising agency to preserve some of the talent that had helped it win the war. Douglas Aircraft executive Franklin R. Collbohm spun off RAND as that advisory body, and served as president for the next 20 years.

So first, the people. RAND was envisioned as a 'college without students', and snatched up a diverse collection of quantitative scholars. People associated with RAND have gone on to be awarded 32 individual Nobel prizes, mostly in physics and economics. Flush with government contracts, RANDites were cultured avante-garde gourmands, enjoying the best of midcentury modernism while fighting arcane intellectual battles with outsiders and each other. Albert Wohlstetter gets most of the attention, like due to the accessibility of his family, but Daniel Ellsberg, the once-golden child turned turned traitor, also gets plenty of space. While there is a lot on the stereotype of RAND's numerical expertise, as well as colorful portraits of people like Herman Kahn and Bernard Brodie, these sketches lack the rich detail of Lepore's If/Then.

Second were the ideas. RAND introduced major advances in systems analysis, a comprehensive extension of operations research statistical methods to map out the total cost of programs and their ability to meet policy objectives. Systems analysis has become the one way the complex programs are managed, with RAND's Air Force procurement and basing studies the origins of a approach to project management that is both data-driven, and embeds assumptions around the world. RAND also served as the genesis of the nuclear strategy that drove the Cold War, clarifying the options around mutually assured destruction, counter-force targeting, and second strike capabilities. and finally, RAND analyst Kenneth Arrow developed rational choice theory, the theory that everybody is a rational utility maximizing entity with no emotional or ideological commitments, and that government is best served by providing options to let individuals maximize their choices. Abella argues that rational choice theory is the capitalist antithesis to Marxist dialectical materialism, an idea which conquered the world because it works well-enough, but which fails because we know that we ourselves are not rational.

And finally, there's the moral dimension, the way that RAND has been intimately involved in American Empire. RAND is an ardently Cold War organization, and many of it leading lights not only thought that a nuclear war could be won, but that it should be fought as soon as possible, before the Soviets got more bombs. RAND analyst Herman Kahn (Thinking the Unthinkable) served as the inspiration for many of the characters in Kubrick's Dr Strangelove. On balance, even if the RAND analysts weighing of global thermonuclear war was horrific, as guardians of the ultimate weapon they prevented that final war. RAND's forays into limited war were far less successful. RAND research proved Vietnam would be far more difficult than the administration wanted, and was ignored by the White House. Ellsberg's leak of the The Pentagon Papers is a wound which has not yet healed. Neoconservatives incubated at RAND lead the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq. RAND's domestic policy research is a mixed bag (they invented the health insurance copay), though austerity neoliberalism is positively fuzzy compared to resurgent neofascism. Abella concludes by noting that while RAND has often proposed horrific things, they do so in "our" name, giving the rest of us license to live in the thinkable, knowing that hard truths are stored in an anodyne office in Santa Monica for when they're needed.

Soldier's of Reason is fast and readable, but it needs MORE, to go deeper into the intellectual history, or at least into the weirder personal proclivities of these mid-century mandarins. show less

Inspired by another book written by Warren Adler “Target Churchill”, this thriller involves the assassination attempts against Winston Churchill in 1933 Cuba and during the German Blitz on London by IRA sharpshooter, Marcus Riley, who was looking for revenge for the poor treatment of the Irish by the British. His orders came from Germany. But Winston was never alone, everywhere he went, tenaciously shadowing him was Walter Thompson, his thrusted bodyguard.

This intriguing plot explores show more the lack of popularity of Churchill and the plans assassinations on his life. It read much as nonfiction however it is definitely fiction, although multiple attempts were made during his time has Prime Minister, those describes in this story did not occurred.

Following Thompson trying to find Riley is quite a ride, action packed and exiting and the gripping narrative brings everything alive and is a joy to read. The author recreated scenes in England during the Blitz that is chilling and heartbreaking. The atmosphere, characterization and the presentation are top notch.

This taut thriller should please most historical fiction buff. I for one was glued to every word as the story unfolded eager to see if Riley would reach his target and end his mission...I like this determined villain...

Thank you to the Book Whisperer for providing me with this ARC show less

An easy read, full of vivid anecdotes. Its overarching thesis - that RAND's ideas of rational choice theory and systems analysis had some vague yet pivotal role in some of the worst characteristics of American policy over the past sixty years - does not follow from the evidence provided.

Readers looking for a serious history will be disappointed. Those looking for a detailed or nuanced treatment of deterrence theory, systems analysis or the role of think tanks in the policy making process show more will also be disappointed. (Trachtenberg's _History and Strategy_ provides a better discussion of the Wohlstetter-Brodie debates, Ed Quade's _Analysis for Military Decisions_ provides a better introduction to what systems analysis was during the 1950s and I'm still waiting for a nuanced treatment of the role of think tanks in policy making.)

Abella does not cite flaws in most of the RAND studies and work that the book summarizes, so readers feel almost schizophrenic as they bounce between intriguing stories of clever analysis and ominous moral judgments about the implications of RAND's role.

An organization as large and eclectic as RAND defies easy characterizations or simple narratives. Abella avoids this complexity, perhaps because it would have muddied his moral narrative. Read this for entertainment; do not take the account of any specific event or concept to be definitive.

[As one example, Abella's treatment of the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) omits any mention of the development of AirLand Battle, the purpose of which was defeating Soviet echeloned attacks in Europe. This reconnaissance-strike complex (as the Soviets termed it) involved many of the sensors (like Joint STARS) and precision weapons (including sensor-fused weapons) that were used with such devastating effect during Operation Desert Storm. There was nothing about regime change in the operational concepts developed to use these technologies. Abella's narrative, however, draws a false straight line from work on precision weapons in the 1980s to dreams of bloodless regime change in the early 2000s. A better intellectual history of these issues is Kagan's _Finding the Target_.] show less

As I read through this book, I kept thinking I should be liking it better than I actually did.

The story revolves around a man named Ramon Valdez who is on trial for killing a number of people in a jewelry store. There is no real mystery here; the crime takes place in the first chapter. Ramon is a priest in the Santeria religion, popular (apparently) among many Cuban immigrants. Ramon asks Charlie Morell to be his court-appointed investigator. This involves Charlie delving into the Santeria show more religion and meeting an unusual assortment of people and having to face ghosts (literally) from his past.

Sounds intriguing, no? But it fell flat for me. I had a hard time feeling sympathetic for any of the characters. The Santeria part was interesting but not interesting enough. The book has a good title, though. show less