If you ever wondered why I have a fixation on think tanks, why I can’t wait to sit in an office filled with books, with my corduroy jacket with the suede elbow patches and calabash pipe*, reading, researching and writing insightful papers that will change the world, its largely because despite all the time I worked as an analyst, ostensibly at a level where I should have had the time to invest in deep research and produce thoughtful analysis, there was never any time to do any such thing.
That why I didn’t want to pick up Alex Abella’s Soldiers of Reason – a history of the formation, rise and impact of the RAND corporation - at the book store; I had to. RAND wasn’t the first think tank but Abella puts forth a narrative that compellingly argues that during one of the most dangerous points in our nation’s history it was the most important.
RAND wasn’t your average house of policy wonks. The brainpower behind RAND helped build the H-bomb; it held the spawn of the men who built the A-bomb; it was where we figured out how to best use both against the “evil empire.” It was every kid who ever got his nerdy head stuck in a high school toilet going toe to intellectual toe with the guys who had just won a hot war and were in the middle of fighting a cold one. When they won those fights they got their own chance to implement their thoughts and ideas. Most lived to see their own intellectual progeny do the same thing a generation later.
The picture of Albert Wohlstetter (formulated this thing called “MAD”, Presidential Medal of Freedom), Henry Rowen (chairman of the NIC and an ASD), Andrew Marshall (runs a little thing called the Office of Net Assessment) and Alain Enthoven (a DASD and ASD) lounging on the floor of Wohlstetter’s living room chatting about national security after a gourmet meal and lord knows how many bottles of French wine says much more than a thousand words.
In an age when “strategic” analysis is always hurried, frequently cursory and watered down to a common denominator, it is refreshing to read about a time when people actually got to sit down and think about hard problems and produce a deliverable that reflected a serious level of effort (Roberta Wohlstetter, Albert's wife, took seven years to writer her analysis on Pearl Harbor and strategic warning). You don’t get a lot of that today because everyone is in a hurry, everything is a crisis, and you can’t specialize if you want to get ahead.
You can argue about their politics and their apparent lack of morality, but you cannot argue with what they accomplished.
* Yes, I’ve been to real think tanks and know it’s largely not like my fantasy (its against building codes to smoke a pipe)
