Another wonderful Kaplan book to read along with “1959”. Together they constitute a great history of the period from 1947 (formation of RAND) to about end of the Viet Nam war in the 1970s. It was during approximately these years that were established policies effecting and affecting much about how our nation works presently and in future, in armed conflict. Let alone a pattern of how the USA came to dominate technological developments to the present through RAND.
In particular, in the case of ‘Wizards’, how our international relations and USA military applied new methods to quantitatively analyze policies and programs in planning eventuality of war. This was an era begun in use of quantitative methods (at the time named systems analysis or operations research) using which one could reduce complexities of armed conflict to realistic courses of action. For all those new technological (computers and communications) and analytical (statistics and economics for example) methods this book is worth reading.
However I found of much greater significance how quantitative ‘systems analysis’ methods tended to be misleading when based on flawed intelligence. There are two conspicuous examples in the Cold War and Viet Nam.
In the Cold War studies by RAND most e analysis was based on intelligence information indicating the USSR had a lead in both heavy bombers and nuclear weapons. In both cases later intelligence data seemed to prove they really did not have thousands of intercontinenal nuclear ballistic missiles, they actually had four. A similar misinterpretation of heavy bomber intelligence showed there neither was as many airfields for this airplane as decided nor apparently as many bombers as estimated. This all came to light when Powers was shot down in a U-2 spy plane. Then films from previous flights revealed more exactly how many air fields, bombers, and ICBMs the USSR really had.
There are undoubtedly any number of reasons, perhaps even good ones, why these errors were made. Assuming conclusions had otherwise been entirely accurate I wondered whether this better information would have improved on military performance due to divisive infighting between military services. Gen Curtis LeMay illustrates the monomaniacal propensity for each service to believe their strategies and weapons in nuclear conflict would be most decisive. Certainly the Air Force had some justification to that claim based on their successes in World War II. But that war was concluded as result of many conflicts, involving a range of military services and weapons. It is specious to claim dominance of one service as conclusive to results desired or obtained in any war. Furthermore the monstrous bombing of cities was subsequently proven to be far more ineffective than would have more focus on fields of operation, communcation lines, and the railroad system.
Viet Nam seemed to seriously challenge realistic reliance on extensive systems analysis of conflicts. We did the analysis only to see simplistic carpet bombing in Viet Nam as chosen strategy for success. In addition creating our own intelligence, and resulting news about such as the ‘Bay of Tonkin incident’. Other analysis actually included looks at unconventional strategies and tactics to counter the guerilla war being waged in Viet Nam. Again the larger underlying information led to conclusions, and reason for involvement in Nam, that the fundamental international force driving our involvement was threat of Communist takeover of the world, a domino effect driven by USSR and China. Viet Nam was believed only a toe hold of their ideology for further world domination.
The false claims for Viet Nam tactics and strategies were harsely revealed in the Pentagon Papers, about 7,000 pages of actual onsite reports of action and their consequences. Daniel Ellsberg was a major RAND analyst and also the one who released the papers through public media. A bitter, decade long war without any decisive conclusion traceable to military tactics or strategy.
Billions of tax dollars were spent by the military on the basis of this type of generally weak intelligence information and chosen action. The expenditure levels were made worse by military arms contending against each other so that weapons budget included redundancies. The force for building budgets for each military service thus were partially justified by systems analysis resulting in growth of military expenditures as share of the national budget.
Eventually when hired by the System Development Division of RAND, along with many others, I was to work on the SAGE system. The existence of SAGE and work of SDD, soon after to become the Systems Development Corporation, was generally based on the same exaggerated intelligence data. Thus more millions of dollars were spent. At least SAGE eventually turned out to be useful in air traffic control, a function perhaps beneficial to any real armed airborne attack against continental USA.
A perhaps more distinct benefit of RAND and SDD was the difference in personnel between the two. RAND analysts performed at a very high level of specialist sophistication with advanced degrees, experience in government, universities and business, and with consequent range of useful personal contacts. SDD on the other hand hired personnel that, in aggregate, fell into a widely diverse background education, experience and training.
Eventually SDD had perhaps a thousand employees. Many of them, as myself for example, went through the SDD programming school, the first of its kind in the world. It was believed this ‘school’ trained a large proportion of programmers in the USA. Out of that group came a number of experts whose work would subsequently be found in MITRE labs, ARPANET, creating programs such as Jovial and universities in Southern California, and ultimately in the world wide web.
ISBN-13: 978-0804718844
ISBN-10: 0804718849
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