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| Soldiers of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire | 
 enlarge | Author: Alex Abella
Publisher: Harcourt
Category: Book
List Price: $27.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  (10 reviews)
Sales Rank: 42736
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 400
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 6.1 x 1.5
ISBN: 0151010811
Dewey Decimal Number: 355.070973
EAN: 9780151010813
ASIN: 0151010811
Publication Date: May 12, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
The first-ever popular history of theRAND Corporation, written with full access to its archives, Soldiers of Reason is a page-turning chronicle of the rise of the secretive think tank that has been the driving force behind American government for sixty years. Born in the wake of World WarII as an idea factory to advise the air force on how to wage and win wars, RAND quickly became the creator of America?s anti-Soviet nuclear strategy.A magnet for the best and the brightest, its ranks included Cold War luminaries such as Albert Wohlstetter, Bernard Brodie, and Herman Kahn, who arguably saved us from nuclear annihilation and unquestionably created Eisenhower?s ?military-industrial complex.? In the Kennedy era,RAND analysts became McNamara?s Whiz Kids and their theories of rational warfare steered our conduct in Vietnam. Those same theories drove our invasion of Iraq forty-five years later, championed byRAND 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 itRAND 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 has rewritten the history of America?s last half century and cast a new light on our problematic present.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 5 more reviews...
 Interesting, but odd take on RAND & think tanks August 17, 2008
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.
 A Good Start, But More Is Needed July 28, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Soldiers of Reason offers great insight into the formation of RAND and its defense policy work. As someone who has used RAND research at work, I found the history quite interesting. Many of the reviewers are spot on though in their characterization of the book giving a lot of vignettes on RAND's more colorful characters, as opposed to a more comprehensive history.
One place that lack of a comprehensive approach appears is in yhr lack of discussion of RAND's work and influence outside the defense sphere. Another big gap is a lack of discussion of RAND's place in the modern think tank era. RAND was groundbreaking for its time, although places like the Naval War College did start doing some of the military think tank work the book suggest RAND pioneered, but today there are hundreds (if not more) think tanks working to influence public policy and enjoying government contracting dollars. Except for a discussion of the Urban Institute, there is no mention of other comprehensive institutes like Brookings, or more ideological ones like the Center for American Progress or Heritage Institute. How does RAND, and its methods, fit in with this newer breed?
If you are looking for information on these issues, look somewhere else. But if you just want some general history of RAND with a focus on its defense work, the book offers a good, quick read on the topic.
 RAND Still Awaits its History June 24, 2008
10 out of 16 found this review helpful
A frustrating book. RAND clearly deserves a history and a cold war post mortem but this book isn't it. It reads a bit like a summary of interviews strung together with a muddled view of history and context. One would have hoped the text could have sorted through the hype, spin and fact of who this firm was and their impact on U.S. policy. Instead we get random vignettes of some of the more colorful personalities with no real insight. Hopefully someone will do a better job.
 author of reason? June 19, 2008
20 out of 22 found this review helpful
Soldiers Of Reason may have been okay if it were the biography of Wohlstetter. As it is, it resembles someone who has visited the Louvre for five days and writes a book about what Europe is like.
To consider Wolfowitz and Perle as RANDites is absurd. C Rice came a bit closer, but not much. Rumsfeld was on the Board but only on the Board, and that was a long time ago.
There was never a fist fight in any manangement meeting. Shapley (a member of the National Academy of Science) and Belman were mathemeticians, not an economist and a physicist. The correct decription of RAND by Pravda was The Academy of Death and Destruction. These are minor errors and are perhaps to be expected in any book. It always is a plus, however, for authors to do their homwork.
The author makes RAND look like a group of wild eyed hawks bent on death and destruction without a thought for human lives or social consequences.. An assemblage of Dr Strangeloves. To imply that ethics and morals was a luxury that the researchers couldn't afford or chose not to address is an insult to the vast majority of RAND researchers.
My guess is that most of the real RANDites will gasp in horror at what is portrayed of the organization. Yes, a great deal of emphasis was on the cold war and how to fight it, but also how to avoid it. To imply that our current policy in the Middle East is a direct result of RAND is another absurdity. There may be many who have taken what they wish to further from some of the studies performed at RAND, but there are different interpretations and indeed different studies to the contrary. Those mentioned above as RANDites who never were, may have been influenced by Wohlstetter but their work should not be represented as part of the history of RAND and their philosophies differ considerably from the majority of RANDites of that era.
No mention was made of the System Development Division, comprised almost entirely of psychologists who studied much of what the author says never happened at RAND. The Division spun off and formed the System Development Corporation and rapidly outgrew the parent. How could someone doing a so called history of RAND not include this?
No mention was made of the tremendous contribution in Artificial Intelligence which had much of its beginning at RAND involving Newell, Shaw and Simon as well as Minsky from MIT who was a consultant.
The entire computing field including programming (linear, dynamic and heuristic) perhaps was furthered by RAND as much or more than any other organization including IBM. The first professional computing societies were originally headed by people such as Paul Armer, Willis Ware and others from RAND
Computing as we know it today was very largley a result of the early efforts at RAND.
The really historic contributions made by the Information Sciences Department and the Mathematics Department (later merged into one) were not mentioned.
But no, we hear almost only of how Herman and Albert and few others did such damage with their concept of rational choice.
Studies at RAND included the first (outside of the Secret Service ) study and design of Presidential protection and RAND played a key role in the security of the 1984 Olympics.
Machine translation and was largely inaugurated at RAND.
Tom Lincoln began some of the very first definitive work on the treatment of leukemia.
Much work was done to avoid unauthorized lanching of nuclear weapons and assisstance was given to the DOD in establishing what at the time was known as The Human Reliability Program to ensure the behavioral soundness of those with access to those weapons. Safeguards such as the launch enabling system was of real concern within the corporation and contributions were made to the Air Force to develop such a system.
Cost analysis and a myriad of other novel sophisticated management approaches in the various commands were presented and adopted by the Air Force.
The Logistics Department made many substantial contributions to the Air Force.
Many such studies resulted in almost monumental savings of tax dollars.
The role RAND played in counterterrorism was hardly recognized for its significance, particularly its role in counter nuclear terrorism. Brian Jenkins could well be called the father of counterterrorism in this country, not only in his and his team's continued studies and analysis
but in giving the rest of the various agencies (starting, at first, with the Department of State) a jump start in combatting this threat.
The New York City debacle was fairly well covered. The eight or so people who first presenteed the concept to the Mayor (not the other way around) at a breakfast at Gracie Mansion envisioned the same type of atmosphere that was enjoyed at RAND Santa Monica (and Washington). That was not to be, and the head of the effort was not a researcher of the parent corporation. Many thought that this doomed it from the beginning. The effort seemed to be more of a job shop than research. And while it was an experiment in what might be accomplished with a RAND- like approach to the problems and compexities of running a large city, it failed.
Almost no mention was made in the book to the contributions to the Health field. And there have been many.
There are countless other studies too numerous to mention, and contributions of a much more benign nature that Rand addressed that were not covered in the book.
Instead, we read continuously all about a few people (admittedly influencal) many not ever even RANDites, and get a picture that is certainly not representative of this great corporation. To do so sadly did a very major diservice to the RAND corporation and the many researchers who will remember its history in a completely different way.
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Soldiers of Reason June 14, 2008
5 out of 9 found this review helpful
This is a rare book to study an influential think tank in American history. There are many think tanks with great influence in American foreign policy especially after the World War II and during the Cold War; however, there are not many books about them.
For those interested in the establishment of American military and foreign policy, this is a must-read book. For those intersted in Amerian history, this is also must-read book. You do not have to make a judgement about the influence of RAND; however, it is true that the creation of RAND help strengthening the power of United States of America in the world.
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