When I googled RAND a minute ago to get an image for this article, one of the automatic suggests was "Does the RAND corporation still exist?" And to a paraphrase a certain Dark Lord of the Sith, this think tank is still fully operational. Abella traces the history of the RAND corporation from the years immediately after WW2 through the contemporary Bush administration War on Terror. It's a fascinating story about people, ideas, and empire, which unfortunately does not quite come together.


Chain Reaction, a sculpture by political cartoonist Paul Conrad which the city of Santa Monica put up across the street from RAND headquarters

RAND was born out of operational research in the Second World War, and the general melding of scientific expertise and air power. Every bomber wing had an attached operations research team, helping to find efficient solutions to logistical problems, and more broadly science had culminated in victory and the mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. With the post-war drawdown, the Army Air Corps, soon to be elevated as the separate United States Air Force, looked for an institutional scientific advising agency to preserve some of the talent that had helped it win the war. Douglas Aircraft executive Franklin R. Collbohm spun off RAND as that advisory body, and served as president for the next 20 years.

So first, the people. RAND was envisioned as a 'college without students', and snatched up a diverse collection of quantitative scholars. People associated with RAND have gone on to be awarded 32 individual Nobel prizes, mostly in physics and economics. Flush with government contracts, RANDites were cultured avante-garde gourmands, enjoying the best of midcentury modernism while fighting arcane intellectual battles with outsiders and each other. Albert Wohlstetter gets most of the attention, like due to the accessibility of his family, but Daniel Ellsberg, the once-golden child turned turned traitor, also gets plenty of space. While there is a lot on the stereotype of RAND's numerical expertise, as well as colorful portraits of people like Herman Kahn and Bernard Brodie, these sketches lack the rich detail of Lepore's If/Then.

Second were the ideas. RAND introduced major advances in systems analysis, a comprehensive extension of operations research statistical methods to map out the total cost of programs and their ability to meet policy objectives. Systems analysis has become the one way the complex programs are managed, with RAND's Air Force procurement and basing studies the origins of a approach to project management that is both data-driven, and embeds assumptions around the world. RAND also served as the genesis of the nuclear strategy that drove the Cold War, clarifying the options around mutually assured destruction, counter-force targeting, and second strike capabilities. and finally, RAND analyst Kenneth Arrow developed rational choice theory, the theory that everybody is a rational utility maximizing entity with no emotional or ideological commitments, and that government is best served by providing options to let individuals maximize their choices. Abella argues that rational choice theory is the capitalist antithesis to Marxist dialectical materialism, an idea which conquered the world because it works well-enough, but which fails because we know that we ourselves are not rational.

And finally, there's the moral dimension, the way that RAND has been intimately involved in American Empire. RAND is an ardently Cold War organization, and many of it leading lights not only thought that a nuclear war could be won, but that it should be fought as soon as possible, before the Soviets got more bombs. RAND analyst Herman Kahn (Thinking the Unthinkable) served as the inspiration for many of the characters in Kubrick's Dr Strangelove. On balance, even if the RAND analysts weighing of global thermonuclear war was horrific, as guardians of the ultimate weapon they prevented that final war. RAND's forays into limited war were far less successful. RAND research proved Vietnam would be far more difficult than the administration wanted, and was ignored by the White House. Ellsberg's leak of the The Pentagon Papers is a wound which has not yet healed. Neoconservatives incubated at RAND lead the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq. RAND's domestic policy research is a mixed bag (they invented the health insurance copay), though austerity neoliberalism is positively fuzzy compared to resurgent neofascism. Abella concludes by noting that while RAND has often proposed horrific things, they do so in "our" name, giving the rest of us license to live in the thinkable, knowing that hard truths are stored in an anodyne office in Santa Monica for when they're needed.

Soldier's of Reason is fast and readable, but it needs MORE, to go deeper into the intellectual history, or at least into the weirder personal proclivities of these mid-century mandarins.