Page 2 of
2 BOOK REVIEW America's university of
imperialism Soldiers of
Reason by
Alex
Abella
Reviewed by Chalmers
Johnson
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.
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 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 US 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, with 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 US 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 with 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 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 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, 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 neo-cons,
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
neo-conservative thought in Washington, named its
auditorium the Wohlstetter Conference Center.
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
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 Wohlstetter's reformulations of
nuclear war ignore the fact that these led to a
"constant escalation of the nuclear arms race". By
1967, the US 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 PhD 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 PhDs 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 US
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.
Soldiers of Reason: The RAND
Corporation and the Rise of the American
Empire by Alex Abella. Harcourt; 1 edition
(May 12, 2008) . ISBN-10: 0151010811. Price US427,
400 pages.
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