Book : Soldiers Of Reason The Rand Corporation And The Rise.

-Titulo Original : Soldiers Of Reason: The RAND Corporation And The Rise Of The American Empire

-Fabricante :

Mariner Books

-Descripcion Original:

Born in the wake of World War II, 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 and their theories of rational warfare steered our conduct in Vietnam. Those same theories drove our invasion of Iraq forty-five years later, championed by RAND 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 it RAND 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. Review Praise for SOLDIERS OF REASON Well-researched... Kudos to Abella.--San Francisco Chronicle [R]evealing and original... Abella does an excellent job ferreting out details... Abellas book is an introduction to the broad range of ideas RAND has espoused.--Chalmers Johnson, Asia Times About the Author ALEX ABELLA is the coauthor, with Scott Gordon, of Shadow Enemies: Hitler’s Secret Terrorist Plot Against the United States and the author of four novels. He has also been a contributing writer to the Los Angeles Times. Born in Cuba, he lives in Los Angeles. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 1 A Great Beginning The RAND Corporation’s the boon of the world They think all day long for a fee They sit and play games about going up in flames For Counters they use you and me. The RAND Hymn, by MALVINA REYNOLDS ON OCTOBER 1, 1945, less than two months after the dropping of two nuclear bombs on Japan, the commanding general of the U.S. Army Air Forces boarded a flight from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco on a trip he was certain would be as momentous as the Manhattan Project. A man of medium stature, with pudgy features, clear eyes, and a constant smile, General Henry Harley Hap Arnold was a true believer in the power of the Air Force. He was one of only nine people ever to earn the rank of five-star general and the only one with that rank in the Air Force. He had received his military pilot license in 1912, and since then had pushed for an Air Force independent of the Army; he never wavered in his conviction of the usefulness of maximum destructive power in combat. On hearing doubts on the legitimacy of the Allied fire bombing in Dresden, Germany, Arnold wrote, We must not get soft. War must be destructive and to a certain extent inhuman and ruthless.1 General Arnold had welcomed the development and deployment of nuclear bombs especially since it had fallen to the Army Air Force to deliver, and thus control, that mightiest of weapons. (By 1947 President Truman would cleave the Air Force from its Army concatenation, setting up both services as rivals for the Pentagon’s largesse.) But Arnold was concerned that the amazing concentration of scientific minds that had made possible the Manhattan Project would prove hard to duplicate under peacetime conditions. Washington had recruited talent from far and wide for its crusade against the Axis. The production capabilities and sheer output of the country’s industries (General Motors, Ford, U.S. Steel, General Electric) had been harnessed by the best and the brightest minds from the country’s top scientific research centers (MIT, Princeton, Columbia), giving the world radar, jet fighters, the atom bomb. In the span of four years, the cou