McNamara, Faulty Analysis and Rand Corporation

The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire

In May 1948, RAND was incorporated as a not-for-profit entity independent of Douglas, but it continued to receive the bulk of its funding from the Air Force. The think tank did, however, begin to accept extensive support from the Ford Foundation, marking it as a quintessential member of the American establishment.

Collbohm stayed on as chief executive officer until 1966, when he was forced out in the disputes then raging within the Pentagon between the Air Force and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. McNamara’s “whiz kids” were Defense intellectuals, many of whom had worked at RAND and were determined to restructure the armed forces to cut costs and curb interservice rivalries. Always loyal to the Air Force and hostile to the whiz kids, Collbohm was replaced by Henry S. Rowan, an MIT-educated engineer turned economist and strategist who was himself forced to resign during the Ellsberg-Pentagon Papers scandal.

YouTube documentary:
    Pandora’s Box – Ep 2 – To The Brink of Eternity#1

Collbohm and other pioneer managers at Douglas gave RAND its commitment to interdisciplinary work and limited its product to written reports, avoiding applied or laboratory research, or actual manufacturing. RAND’s golden age of creativity lasted from approximately 1950 to 1970. During that period its theorists worked diligently on such new analytical techniques and inventions as systems analysis, game theory, reconnaissance satellites, the Internet, advanced computers, digital communications, missile defense, and intercontinental ballistic missiles. During the 1970s, RAND began to turn to projects in the civilian world, such as health financing systems, insurance, and urban governance.

Much of RAND‘s work was always ideological, designed to support the American values of individualism and personal gratification as well as to counter Marxism, but its ideological bent was disguised in statistics and equations, which allegedly made its analyses “rational” and “scientific.” Abella writes:

“If a subject could not be measured, ranged, or classified, it was of little consequence in systems analysis, for it was not rational. Numbers were all — the human factor was a mere adjunct to the empirical.”

RAND’s RESEARCH AND MILITARY DICTATORSHIP

In my opinion, Abella here confuses numerical with empirical. Most RAND analyses were formal, deductive, and mathematical but rarely based on concrete research into actually functioning societies. RAND never devoted itself to the ethnographic and linguistic knowledge necessary to do truly empirical research on societies that its administrators and researchers, in any case, thought they already understood.

For example, RAND’s research conclusions on the Third World, limited war, and counterinsurgency during the Vietnam War were notably wrong-headed. It argued that the United States should support “military modernization” in underdeveloped countries, that military takeovers and military rule were good things, that we could work with military officers in other countries, where democracy was best honored in the breach. The result was that virtually every government in East Asia during the 1960s and 1970s was a U.S.-backed military dictatorship, including South Vietnam, South Korea, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Taiwan.  

Rand and Project Star Gate

Project Stargate is the collective name for advanced psychic functioning or Remote viewing experiments and programs that were undertaken for over twenty years to create a trainable, repeatable, operational and if at all possible, accurate method of psychic spying or information gathering for the U.S. Military and intel.

Rand, NeoCons and the Iraq War

Nevertheless, RAND began to delve into social issues, including education, and even health care. At this time too the think tank was building its own post graduate school from which it would influence leading political lights, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and author of “The End of History”, Francis Fukuyama.

RAND would play a large part in the fall of the Soviet Union. It would begin with a group of “neo-conservatives” that met in Washington D.C. and would form the “Committee on the Present Danger”.