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

Overview

The first-ever 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.

Editorial Reviews

When President Eisenhower famously warned against the military-industrial complex, he largely meant the Department of Defense-funded programs of the RAND Corporation. Abella (coauthor, Shadow Enemies: Hitler's Secret Terrorist Plot Against the United States) presents a sometimes dry but thorough account of this think-tank, which he asserts not only played a key role in the U.S.'s biggest foreign misadventures in Vietnam and Iraq but also, through its development of rational choice theory, has affected every aspect of our lives, not necessarily for the better. Abella, working with the cooperation of the usually secretive organization, details RAND'S history, from analyst Herman Kahn's energetic support of a virtually unrestrained nuclear arms buildup to the organization's role in sparking America's involvement in Vietnam and the current war in Iraq. But even more, Abella says, RAND theorists' notion that self-interest, rather than collective interests like religion, governs human behavior has influenced every aspect of our society, from health care to tax policy. The RAND Corporation continues today--as brilliant, controversial and, in Abella's view, amoral as ever--with the complicity of all Americans. If we look in the mirror, Abella concludes, we will see that RAND is every one of us. The question is, what are we going to do about it? 8 pages of b&w photos. (May)
Copyright (c) Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Author Information

Bio of Alex Abella

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Additional Info

Imprint

Houghton Mifflin

Filesize

4.70 MB

Number of Pages

400

eBook ISBN

9780156035125