Soldiers of Reason
The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
An "entertaining and fast-paced" account of the organization that defines the military-industrial complex—and continues to shape our world today (The New York Times Book Review).
The RAND Corporation was born in the wake of World War II as a think tank to generate research and analysis for the United States military. It was a magnet for the best and the brightest—and also the most dangerous.
RAND quickly became the creator of America's anti-Soviet nuclear strategy, attracting such Cold War luminaries as Albert Wohlstetter, Bernard Brodie, and Herman Kahn, who arguably saved us from nuclear annihilation—and unquestionably created the military-industrial complex Eisenhower warned against.
In the Kennedy era, RAND analysts 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 shares a "well-researched" history of America's last half century that casts a new light on our problematic present (San Francisco Chronicle).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
