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

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.

This book is a mixture of a history of the origin of RAND, combined with a biography on several of the more noted personalities, especially those connected to the neo-con movement, and ending with an odd discussion on Chalabi and the Iraq war. I found the book interesting, but would disagree with his attitude towards RAND. The book focuses on the personalities of some of the key people, with Albert Wohlstetter being perhaps the most significant person throughout the book. I learned a lot about many of these people, including Daniel Elsberg. I do think that Abella is overly critical of the methodology of RAND, including rational choice theory and systems analysis. Rational choice has been the key economic model for the last 50 years and has demonstrated its explanatory power in numerous cases. And systems analysis has also shown how models from operations research and other disciplines have led to substantial improvements in society. I think the author takes several of the people at RAND who were practitioners of these approaches and with their personal and political agendas. He also attaches to RAND many people who have fairly tangential connections to it. For example, he ends with a chapter on the Iraq war and the role of Chalabi. He gives credit & blame to RAND indirectly because several of his backers had RAND connections.

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."

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.

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...