I came across Alex Abella's fascinating book Soldiers of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire
in the LAX airport newsstand, moments before boarding my $230 Virgin America flight to Washington. After 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. And I had stumbled across Zalmay Khalilzad's (once dean of RAND's graduate school) and Ian Lesser's futurological scenarios in my own research on the failures of American foreign policy vis-a-vis Russia, Central Asia, and NGOs.
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 establishment."
You can read an excerpt here.
