Customer Reviews

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

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Soldiers Of Reason may have been okay if it were the biography of Wohlstetter. As it is, it resembles someone who has visited the Louvre for five days and writes a book about what Europe is like.
To consider Wolfowitz and Perle as RANDites is absurd. C Rice came a bit closer, but not much. Rumsfeld was on the Board but only on the Board, and that was a long time ago.
There was never a fist fight in any manangement meeting. Shapley (a member of the National Academy of Science) and Belman were mathemeticians, not an economist and a physicist. The correct decription of RAND by Pravda was The Academy of Death and Destruction. These are minor errors and are perhaps to be expected in any book. It always is a plus, however, for authors to do their homwork.
The author makes RAND look like a group of wild eyed hawks bent on death and destruction without a thought for human lives or social consequences.. An assemblage of Dr Strangeloves. To imply that ethics and morals was a luxury that the researchers couldn't afford or chose not to address is an insult to the vast majority of RAND researchers.
My guess is that most of the real RANDites will gasp in horror at what is portrayed of the organization. Yes, a great deal of emphasis was on the cold war and how to fight it, but also how to avoid it. To imply that our current policy in the Middle East is a direct result of RAND is another absurdity. There may be many who have taken what they wish to further from some of the studies performed at RAND, but there are different interpretations and indeed different studies to the contrary. Those mentioned above as RANDites who never were, may have been influenced by Wohlstetter but their work should not be represented as part of the history of RAND and their philosophies differ considerably from the majority of RANDites of that era.
No mention was made of the System Development Division, comprised almost entirely of psychologists who studied much of what the author says never happened at RAND. The Division spun off and formed the System Development Corporation and rapidly outgrew the parent. How could someone doing a so called history of RAND not include this?
No mention was made of the tremendous contribution in Artificial Intelligence which had much of its beginning at RAND involving Newell, Shaw and Simon as well as Minsky from MIT who was a consultant.
The entire computing field including programming (linear, dynamic and heuristic) perhaps was furthered by RAND as much or more than any other organization including IBM. The first professional computing societies were originally headed by people such as Paul Armer, Willis Ware and others from RAND
Computing as we know it today was very largley a result of the early efforts at RAND.
The really historic contributions made by the Information Sciences Department and the Mathematics Department (later merged into one) were not mentioned.
But no, we hear almost only of how Herman and Albert and few others did such damage with their concept of rational choice.
Studies at RAND included the first (outside of the Secret Service ) study and design of Presidential protection and RAND played a key role in the security of the 1984 Olympics.
Machine translation and was largely inaugurated at RAND.
Tom Lincoln began some of the very first definitive work on the treatment of leukemia.
Much work was done to avoid unauthorized lanching of nuclear weapons and assisstance was given to the DOD in establishing what at the time was known as The Human Reliability Program to ensure the behavioral soundness of those with access to those weapons. Safeguards such as the launch enabling system was of real concern within the corporation and contributions were made to the Air Force to develop such a system.
Cost analysis and a myriad of other novel sophisticated management approaches in the various commands were presented and adopted by the Air Force.
The Logistics Department made many substantial contributions to the Air Force.
Many such studies resulted in almost monumental savings of tax dollars.
The role RAND played in counterterrorism was hardly recognized for its significance, particularly its role in counter nuclear terrorism. Brian Jenkins could well be called the father of counterterrorism in this country, not only in his and his team's continued studies and analysis
but in giving the rest of the various agencies (starting, at first, with the Department of State) a jump start in combatting this threat.
The New York City debacle was fairly well covered. The eight or so people who first presenteed the concept to the Mayor (not the other way around) at a breakfast at Gracie Mansion envisioned the same type of atmosphere that was enjoyed at RAND Santa Monica (and Washington). That was not to be, and the head of the effort was not a researcher of the parent corporation. Many thought that this doomed it from the beginning. The effort seemed to be more of a job shop than research. And while it was an experiment in what might be accomplished with a RAND- like approach to the problems and compexities of running a large city, it failed.
Almost no mention was made in the book to the contributions to the Health field. And there have been many.
There are countless other studies too numerous to mention, and contributions of a much more benign nature that Rand addressed that were not covered in the book.
Instead, we read continuously all about a few people (admittedly influencal) many not ever even RANDites, and get a picture that is certainly not representative of this great corporation. To do so sadly did a very major diservice to the RAND corporation and the many researchers who will remember its history in a completely different way.


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First of all, the book is about a lot more than foreign policy, but that's what I find most interesting about RAND and what I think really shines in this compelling history. Yeah, yeah, there's social science that RAND did, too, and that's good to know, but where the writing really comes alive is with the great larger than life characters who were at the center of the Cold War -- people like Albert Wohlstetter, Herman Kahn, Bernard Brodie, Paul Wolfowitz, Daniel Ellsberg, Donald Rumsfeld, and on and on. A lot of the material has been glancingly covered elsewhere, but never has one book presented the whole story. And with the whole story in one place, it becomes shockingly clear what enormous influence RAND's "soldiers of reason" had in every administration for over 60 years.

It's a relief that for most of the book Abella just presents history -- story after story of all the players and their deeds (and more important, their incredibly influential ideas). It's also a relief that at the end Abella sums up the achievements and failings of RAND's systems analysis and approach to problems by stating: "the problem with rational choice theory is that it is not rational. It fails to comprehend the world as it is..." Exactly. One need look no further than Viet Nam (or Iraq!) for proof.

A very good secret history of American foreign policy during and after the Cold War.

A frustrating book. RAND clearly deserves a history and a cold war post mortem but this book isn't it. It reads a bit like a summary of interviews strung together with a muddled view of history and context. One would have hoped the text could have sorted through the hype, spin and fact of who this firm was and their impact on U.S. policy. Instead we get random vignettes of some of the more colorful personalities with no real insight. Hopefully someone will do a better job.

Do you remember Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove? Way too crazy to be real, right? Well, in fact, no: the famous Peter Sellers character was based on a real person, and that person, a mad genius by the name of Herman Kahn, is one of the key characters in this fascinating book by Alex Abella. Kahn and a bunch of like-minded people (extremely smart, but somehow missing any kind of ethical dimension to their thinking) formed the core of the RAND Corporation during the Cold War, and the ideas they came up with arguably have shaped the world we live in today more than anybody else's. Failsafe, mutually assured destruction, anybody? This is larger-than-life stuff, so it's not surprising that Abella's history of RAND - from its inception at the end of World War II to its providing of the ideological underpinnings for the invasion of Iraq - is not just informative, but also entertaining and scary in equal measure. Abella convincingly demonstrates that there are two big problems with RAND and, by extension, with America's military and foreign policy: first, even though the think tank wielded huge influence in every administration since 1945, it has never been accountable to an electorate. Second, and more crucially still, RANDites for too long believed that human behavior was basically predictable: faced with a choice, every human would be rational about that choice and pick what was in his/her best interest. Too bad that, outside the ivory tower, things haven't been quite as straightforward...

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."

I have a background in RAND Corp. I read this book cover to cover in a few days I was disapointed with book in a whole.It did not tell the real history of the Rand Corp. My father started working for the RAND Corp. in 1952 and retired in 1975. He then returned to work on the Dutch project.
The book did not go into the many outstanding projects that RAND had done through the years that had no conection with the defense department. A compleate history on the Rand Corp. might be intersting to some maybe the old Rand employees and families but over all my father said the place was not very exciting to work at. I remember as a young child the Santa Monica police standing guard in the front lobby on Main St. I asked him one day why they needed the police He laughed and said I am not really sure if a person wanted to take anything out the door it would be quite easy. Later the hired serurity guards he said that it made it less secure. He also told me there was not that many top secret documents in the facility.

Soldiers of Reason is an outstanding, significant book. It demystifies the enigmatic Rand Corporation think tank, which helped put America under the spell of the Military-Industrial Complex suffered during Vietnam, that yet lingers. Remarkable is the book's disclosure of Rand's contrived answer to Marxism, the rational choice economic theory, justified avarice which helped spawn our current financial collapse. This book is an excellent, enlightening chronicle that explains how, in the name of the Cold War and military might, the fabric of America was twisted and shaped into what it is today.

Soldiers of Reason offers great insight into the formation of RAND and its defense policy work. As someone who has used RAND research at work, I found the history quite interesting. Many of the reviewers are spot on though in their characterization of the book giving a lot of vignettes on RAND's more colorful characters, as opposed to a more comprehensive history.

One place that lack of a comprehensive approach appears is in the lack of discussion of RAND's work and influence outside the defense sphere. Another big gap is a lack of discussion of RAND's place in the modern think tank era. RAND was groundbreaking for its time, although places like the Naval War College did start doing some of the military think tank work the book suggest RAND pioneered, but today there are hundreds (if not more) think tanks working to influence public policy and enjoying government contracting dollars. Except for a discussion of the Urban Institute, there is no mention of other comprehensive institutes like Brookings, or more ideological ones like the Center for American Progress or Heritage Foundation. How does RAND, and its methods, fit in with this newer breed?

If you are looking for information on these issues, look somewhere else. But if you just want some general history of RAND with a focus on its defense work, the book offers a good, quick read on the topic.

The author claims to have unprecedented access to RAND's files, and yet his book provides no surprises to anyone familiar with the towering figures of that still-mysterious institution and its enormous influence. We hear some amusing anecdotes about eccentric geniuses at work and petty political rivalries, but too little of substance. This is a light and enjoyable read, but I would recommend a broader history of the Cold War to anyone truly interested in the subject matter.

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.