Digby

NATIONAL AIR AND SPACE MUSEUM RAND CORPORATION

JOINT ORAL HISTORY PROJECT ON THE HISTORY OF THE RAND CORPORATION

EDITORIAL USE FORM PREFACE This manuscript is based upon a tape-recorded interview conducted by Martin J, Collins on January 14, 1992 The tape and the manuscript are the property of the undersigned: however, the originals and copies are indefinitely deposited, respectively, at the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution and at the RAND Corporation. I have read the transcript and have made only minor corrections and emendations. The reader is therefore asked to bear in mind that this manuscript is a record of a spoken conversation rather than a literary product. Though the smithsonian Institution and the RAND Corporation may use these materials for their own purposes as they deem appropriate, I wish to place the condition as selected below upon the use of this interview material by others and I understand that the smithsonian Institution and the RAND Corporation will make reasonable efforts to enforce the condition to the extent possible.

CONDITIONS (Check one) v PUBLIC. THE MATERIAL MAY BE MADE AVAILABLE TO AND MAY BE USED BY ANY PERSON FOR ANY LAWFUL PURPOSE. OPEN. This manuscript may be read and the tape heard by persons approved by the Smithsonian Institution or by the RAND Corporation. The user must agree not to quote from, cite or reproduce by any means this material except with the written permission of the Smithsoniar or. RAND.

MY PERMISSION REQUIRED TO QUOTE, CITE OR :?;,; : >'1~0DUCE. This manuscript and the tape are open to !:!;;..:a.i~ination as above. The user must agree not to quote from, cite or reproduce by any means this material except with the written permission of the Smithsonian or RAND in which permission I must join. Upon my death this interview becomes open. EDITORIAL CSE FORM (CONT.}

MY PERMISSION REQUIRED FOR ACCESS. - must give writen permission before the manus c~~ pt or tape can be utilized other than by Smithsonian or RAND staff =or official Smithsonian or RAND purposes. Also my permission is required to quote, cite or reproduce by any means. Upon my dea~h the interview becomes open. - ~ r. v~~ (S'gnature) ~ Mr. James Digby (Name, typed) I A)~ 1'(: (Date) James Digby January 14, 1992

TAPE 1, SIDE 1 1-2 Purpose of RAND Strategic Air Power Project, partly in response to fragmentation of RAND work. Roles of Digby, Herman Kahn, Albert Wohlstetter. Power of RAND division heads. 2-4 Continuing tension within RAND between integration across disciplines and smaller projects. Development of program management structure. 4-6 Diversity of views within RAND on nuclear strategy. Issues of research style, differences between Wohlstetter and engineers, later between engineers and associates of Robert McNamara. References to T. Finley Burke, William B. Graham, Natalie Crawford. 6-7 Digby's recollections of Frank Collbohm, Hans Speier, Bernard Brodie, John Williams, Robert Specht. 8 Contribution of engineers, later sense of exclusion. 8-9 Larry Henderson's role as intermediary between Wohlstetter and Air Force, Henderson's relations with Herman Kahn. 9-10 Frank Collbohm's disinterest in civil defense as an area for RAND. RAND interest in passive defense. 10-11 RAND approach to disarmament. References to Louis Sohn, Thomas Schelling.

TAPE 1, SIDE 2 11-12 Collbohm's attitudes towards disarmament studies, and influence of Hans Speier. Perspective of Air Force. 12-13 Digby's perspectives on the "RAND strategy." Contrast between Air Force and Department of Defense acceptance of RAND strategic ideas. Roles of McNamara, Charles Hitch, Alain Enthoven. 13 War games and kriegspiel. Wohlstetter mentioned. 13-15 Digby's perspective on RAND turning points: formation of social science department, systems analysis, concept of deterrence, counterforce, increasing public role, influence on NATO strategy. -DIGBY-1

Interviewee: Mr. James Digby

Interviewer: Mr. Martin Collins

Date: January 14, 1992

Place: RAND Corporation Santa Monica, California

TAPE 1, SIDE 1

MR. COLLINS: I wanted to follow up some odds and ends from our previous discussions. I wanted to get a little clearer sense of the Strategic Air [Power] Project (SAP) that you'd mentioned, as kind of a follow-on to the Strategic Objectives Committee (SOC) that happened before the SOFS [Strategic Offensive Force Structure] Study. Did any document come out of that, like the soc document (D-2700), "The Next Ten Years," that kind of made a map of problems and potential approaches for RAND work, or was it more informal than that?

MR. DIGBY: I don't recall an overall document. And the group was put together more as a management tool. It wasn't on quite as scholarly a basis as the Strategic Objectives Committee, which really thought of itself as reviewing the ingredients for strategic decisions and discussing them and coming out with some conclusions. The Strategic Air Power Project was more of a way of getting RAND projects to work in coordination across the various department lines.

COLLINS: Was this something that Frank [Collbohm] asked for? How did this come to happen? In part I ask that because, as you put it, the triumvirate that was leading this, you and Herman Kahn and Albert Wohlstetter, two of those people weren't especially known for their managerial acuity. [Laughter] So it just raises an interesting question of how it came to be and how the group was decided upon.

DIGBY: I'm sure it was decided upon in a management committee meeting. Frank must have agreed to it. The initiative more likely came from someone like Charlie [Charles] Hitch.

COLLINS: So the selection of the committee members is not something that stands out in your mind.

DIGBY: Well, I think Herman and Albert were considered two of -DIGBY-2 the brightest, most vigorous intellects at RAND, but it was widely felt that they were not easy to manage. They didn't do things in an orderly fashion always, as you pointed out just now. I was at that time a department head and was considered somebody who would get along with both of them and could bring a little more order to the projects.

I think the triggering impetus for this was, that over the fifties, RAND periodically realized that there was a fractionation of its talents, because there were a lot of incentives to becoming a project leader, and in some sense that's good, because we had quite a large number of very smart people. To give them their head, you had to give them a project, or at least be a co-leader of a project. But that meant that instead of having the few large projects like the [Edward] Barlow projects or the Wohlstetter projects of the early years, we saw that almost every senior person had his own project number and project, and it made it very hard to get consistent, consecutive work done.

People would switch from one project to the other, so the Strategic Air Power Project was intended as a way of countering this fractionalization of RAND work, and was meant to run across the department lines and skills in the way that RAND's earlier projects had done. In other words, it was after a period of disintegration, so to speak, into smaller projects. It was meant to be an integrative idea.

COLLINS: What were the incentives or mechanisms you had at your disposal to get people to coordinate and cooperate in the fashion that you were describing?

DIGBY: The power was almost all vested in the department heads-­ or division heads, they were. We had both divisions and departments then, as I recall. The division heads were all­ powerful in terms of hiring, firing, salaries, and program. The division heads wanted this done. They were generally quite wise people, like Hitch, [James] Lipp, Gene Root--who may have left by that time, Ed Barlow. They gave the Strategic Air Power Project its authority and backed it up.

COLLINS: I don't know how well you can respond to this question, but as we've talked over our several discussions, there seems to be this interesting tension between the development of small individual projects, or small group projects, and the desire to bring together the research effort so that it's concentrated on what are broadly perceived as critical problems and issues. I wonder whether you can give me a sense of the balance of this over time and how difficult it was for RAND to bring together these more massive efforts as opposed to what seemed to be an easier thing to do--the smaller group projects. -DIGBY-3

DIGBY: Well, it was certainly something that came up periodically. After the Strategic Air Power Project did its thing--and I can't remember just how it came to an end. It kind of dwindled in some way.--People like Herman [Kahn] and Albert [Wohlstetter] tend to start doing their own thing, regardless of what a management committee may have decided. The integrative effort in the same general area was tried again with Ed Barlow as Director of Projects and Wohlstetter as his deputy, so it's been something that RAND had tried several times. It hapened rather automatically with a few very smart and integrative people in the early fifties, then it happened by design with the Strategic Air Power Project, and then it happened again by design with the director of projects.

After that, along came the [RobertS.] McNamara period, and RAND sort of changed in many ways, although I ~uess I was a part of the next attempt to do something like that. I was the first program manager, and program managers did this kind of thing.

COLLINS: You're referring to the International Security Affairs [ISA] effort.

DIGBY: Yes. Program managers tried to get some kind of consistency and integration across the work for a single client. In my case, it was the Assistant Secretary, International Security Affairs. Right after that, we had a program manager for ARPA, and then a program manager for ARPA-AGILE which was the ARPA counterinsurgency efforts. Those were the first three program managers.

Then as RAND began to get more different kinds of contracts, we began to have program managers in every field where we had contracts. So I guess the program manager system, which persists to this day, is the way it was done. Actually, the reorganization that Jim [James] Thomson put into effect is another example of trying to do something integrative across disciplines.

COLLINS: As a point of comparison, looking back to the fifties and talking about the Strategic Air Power Project and the Director of Projects, in a sense, then, these were attempts to develop a program management approacp for that particular client, which was principally the Air Force at that point.

1Robert s. McNamara (b. 1916). U.S. government official, banker, business executive. Executive of Ford Motor Company, 1946-61; as u.s. Secretary of Defense, 1961-68, caused controversy by applying modern managerial concepts; and acting more indpendently with respect to military leaders president of International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, 1968-81. -DIGBY-4

DIGBY: Yes.

COLLINS: What were the incentives from the Air Force side? What kind of encouragement or direction was given from the Air Force side that said, "We need a more integrated, directed effort from RAND in a program management sense, as opposed to the percolation of a lot of little ideas that get fed up to us"?

DIGBY: I don't recall the Air Force saying very much of anything at the time of the Strategic Air Power Project. They were somewhat impressed by RAND and a little bit astounded by it. However, at the time of Barlow's appointment, the Air Force decided that it did want to have an integrated program at RAND, and that's the one where they sent out some fairly senior colonels.

COLLINS: This is the Strategic Offensive Forces Study. DIGBY: Yes, the SOFS study.

COLLINS: That's an interesting thing that's come up in our discussion about this dynamic between planned research, in a sense, and more individual initiative.

DIGBY: By the way, a look at the RAND project list today shows that there really are just myriad projects. So somehow while the program managers may be trying to bring integration to these programs, there really are a lot of separate projects.

I don't know how much of a quantitative historian you are, but an interesting thing to do would be just to count the project numbers on lists frbm 1952, 1 58, 1 64, and so on, about every five or six years.

COLLINS: I think that would be a useful exercise. One thing I want to get a sense of, is something we talked a little bit about in some of our other discussions, that came up in SOFS in a couple of other contexts. As the fifties moved on, there became several distinct "party lines," as Ed Lindblom called it, about nuclear strategy. I wanted to talk a little bit about the social divides that may have come up as a consequence of that, if that's an accurate characterization.

As I go back and reread your brief historical paper, the assumptions about what constituted the basis for thinking about strategy--counterforce, the ability to control the force structure, and the kinds of response that one might have in the event of a war--seemed to be sort of shared ideas between [Bernard] Brodie and Kahn and Wohlstetter. There was a core of common ideas that they accepted. So I'm interested in your perception about where the important differences lie between -DIGBY-5

these individuals or the groups that coalesced around them.

DIGBY: In some cases it was a matter of style rather than substance, and I would say that Wohlstetter•s style was very much a matter of contention among the more stolid engineering types at RAND. Of course, Herman Kahn had a very exotic style which was a lot more earthy than Wohlstetter's and appealed more to the engineers, but still was not exactly the kind of solid, careful engineering approach that many of the engineers liked.

Now, in terms of actual debates over strategic questions, I'm trying to remember some of the debates of the mid-fifties. I believe you might call it a question of research style, because Wohlstetter, being a mathematical logician, liked to take things to extreme, or a outrance. The engineers did not really feel very comfortable with that kind of approach. The engineers tended to work around averages with safety factors, as opposed to extremes and their logical consequences. So that was one of the schism lines fairly early on.

A major schism in the early sixties was from the more conservative RAND members who really liked to work for the Air Force, admired the Air Force officers, and knew what they thought. They took an engineering approach to what the Air Force should look like, versus the people who began to help McNamara-­ Andy Marshall, Harry Rowen, Dan [Daniel) Ellsberg, and so forth.

COLLINS: Who falls into the conservative engineering group that you're identifying here?

DIGBY: Well, I would have to be very careful in naming the names, but it's almost an "all other" category of people in the engineering departments. They were not always verbal in terms of putting things into written documents. I guess one example would be T. Finley Burke, who was an engineer who did the first work on precision-guided munitions, work that I later extended in a much more public way. He's an example of an engineer who, I guess, didn't like Albert. Oh, another would be Bill Graham. There were two Bill Grahams at RAND, by the way, and I'm referring to Bill Graham who was William B. Graham, the head of the Electronics Department. He was head of the Engineering Department at the time he retired.

COLLINS: I can go back and trace that.

DIGBY: Anyway, Bill Graham was a fairly trenchant critic of the Wohlstetter kind of approach to things.

COLLINS: I'm interested if you can identify that a little bit more, because in some ways Wohlstetter's approach is friendly, to the Air Force in terms of what it suggests about weapon systems -DIGBY-6 that are required, the amount of resources that are required by the Air Force to do its job. It's something in which the Air Force, in a resource sense, doesn't lose anything, or very much, and perhaps even adds to what they need.

DIGBY: Yes, but it was done in language that was not very familiar to the Air Force. In other words, the typical Air Force major general, who was at the level where you are really passing judgment on RAND things, would not be too comfortable with mathematical logic or taking things to extremes. Albert had to paint vivid pictures to these people. It was more matter of they were impressed by his intellect and his story, rather than the fact that he seemed to them to be one of them. Albert never seemed like an Air Force person to the Air Force. I'll tell you an example currently of someone who has managed to do very well at being regarded as like an Air Force person: Natalie Crawford, who is currently a program manager. Natalie learned to fly and liked to go on trips, on training missions with the Air Force people, as soon as she had the status to do so, and speaks Air Force language and really, I think, thinks of herself as an Air Force person. That was never the case with either Kahn or Wohlstetter, although Kahn had a much more earthy, plebeian approach to matters. But his language was that of physicist, and Wohlstetter's was that of the aesthete and logician, neither of which were the language of the average Air Force operational person.

COLLINS: An interesting question, then, is where Frank falls in this cultural matrix that you're describing.

DIGBY: Frank was quite an interesting phenomenon, being very much an engineer. Also he was a test pilot originally, so he was a flyer. He made good friends in the Air Force, but he had a kind of aloofness, in part due to his deafness, I guess, which may have added to Air Force feelings of respect for him. He was not a man of voluble expression. But the useful and amazing thing about Collbohm was how he tolerated the really intellectual types like John Williams and Charlie Hitch, and soon came to realize that the value of RAND to the Air Force depended on his listening to people like that and getting along with them and taking their advice.

Another person that you hear a bit less of is Hans Speier, who was head of the Social Science Department for many years. Frank listened a lot to Hans Speier. Speier, by the way, was often kind of anti-Wohlstetter in his general approach, and he was the protector of Bernard Brodie during the time that people were saying that Brodie was not worth the salary he was being paid because he didn't turn out things that the Air Force really wanted. -DIGBY-7

COLLINS: What time period is that, that you're referring to? I assume this is later fifties.

DIGBY: Late fifties.

COLLINS: I guess my question was more directed at how Frank fell on this spectrum of strategic thought about the appropriate avenues and ideas that the Air Force ought to be using to structure their activity.

DIGBY: I don't think of Frank as a partisan on these things. I think of him more as the chairman, the moderator, the person who ran a system that would tolerate all of this various intellectual ferment and then chair meetings with people like Williams, Hitch, Jimmy Lipp, that would decide what was good for the Air Force.

Frank, by style, did not like Wohlstetter. In fact, I'm sure that's why he fired Albert.

COLLINS: Just to reflect on John Williams for a moment, back in the early fifties, Williams had an intensive exchange of memos with Bernard Brodie about evolving strategic concepts and what an appropriate posture towards the Soviet Union might be. This was largely about the question of whether preventive war was an appropriate strategy. But I haven't found or seen many documents of a similar type from John Williams in the latter part of the 1950s, commenting about the strategic discussions that were going on at RAND. Is that just a reflection of the spotty records, or is it something that John Williams didn't verbally involve himself as much in at that point in time?

DIGBY: I have no specific memory of John slowing down in turning out RAND documents. To really get a record of what John Williams did, you need to have access to the RAND D Series, because that was his favorite way of putting forth arguments. John was a great advocate of putting arguments into written documents. Also, I would suggest the person who really followed John's efforts most closely was Bob (Robert] Specht. Do you remember when John died?

COLLINS: I can find the date. I don't know it precisely off the top of my head.

DIGBY: My guess is, it was about 1 62.

COLLINS: I was going to say middle sixties, but probably that's in the ball park.

DIGBY: I remember that he was alive when I was married in 1959, because my wife and I went to the Williams house as a married couple. -DIGBY-8

COLLINS: It's interesting that one of the cultural lines that you draw is between engineering staff and people like Albert and Herman Kahn. Most of the historical accounts about strategy at RAND, the input or contribution or thinking of the engineering people really haven't been a part of the story. So it's interesting that you juxtapose their view.

DIGBY: When it worked at its best, the engineers were part of these major efforts. Of course, it worked at the very best for [Ed] Paxson and for Barlow, particularly for Barlow, who was an engineer himself. They managed to channel the talents of some very good engineers into things that really bore right on the big questions that they were addressing. But later on, the engineers felt a little bit frozen out by some of the people like Wohlstetter, Ellsberg. Rowen was originally an engineer himself, a chemical engineer, but he would tend to do his own engineering sometimes or bring in consultants to do civil engineering.

COLLINS: What do you mean by "frozen out"? They weren't asked to be involved?

DIGBY: Correct, they were not asked to be involved. They may have been glad not to be asked to be involved in many cases, too.

COLLINS: Just to follow another little bit about the engineering thing, in a sense I think what you may be suggesting--correct me, if I'm putting words into your mouth--is that in doing studies for the Air Force that the engineers did, there was kind of a ~ facto set of strategic assumptions on their part about how these things were contributing to the Air Force. It wasn't articulated, but there was kind of a conservative de facto sense of what was appropriate, and what this was working toward.

DIGBY: Yes, there was. Now, could I take two minutes out to call? [Tape recorder turned off]

COLLINS: Looking at this landscape of different approaches to strategy that existed at RAND, where did Larry Henderson fit into the picture, if at all? Did he have a point of view about either (A) what was good and right, or (B) what ought to be presented to the Air Force and how?

DIGBY: Yes, he definitely had a point of view, and he was quite an effective proponent of the Wohlstetter approach and helped Albert package his material so that the Air Force would receive it. Larry was a very key figure in making the connection between Wohlstetter's output and the Air Force's input. The reason that he was able to play this role is that he himself was very much an intellectual, the son of a famous Harvard [University] professor that Wohlstetter admired. He had spent the war years working as a liaison to the Air Force, so he knew a lot about the Air Force. -DIGBY-9

He personally knew a lot of the people who were the young bright generals, because he had worked with them while in England or Italy during World War II. So he was really a key figure and a rather interesting one. He was tall and had a slightly bombastic way of speaking--very smart.

COLLINS: Did he have any particular point of view or feeling about Herman Kahn's work that you were aware of?

DIGBY: Yes, he listened to it carefully, understood it, knew what was good about it, and tried to help Herman package it so it was okay for the Air Force. But Herman being such a head strong character, I'm sure he didn't take all of Larry's advice. Larry was not one to resent Herman the way a few other people did. So you could say he would regard Herman as a kind of natural phenomenon worthy of study.

COLLINS: I think one thing you mentioned in passing in one of the interviews, when we were talking about Kahn, was Herman's interest in civil defense as part of his array of strategies for dealing with the possibility of nuclear war, but that civil defense was, at least to Frank, not a subject that RAND should give a great deal of attention to.

DIGBY: Right.

COLLINS: I wonder whether we might explore that a little bit, and what the sensitivities or ideas were that made this an unattractive area of study, or problematic area of study, for some people in the organization, and whether there were other people besides Frank who felt that way.

DIGBY: The thing that Herman felt at the time was that Collbohm did not like civil defense because he had been in charge of civil defense at Douglas Aircraft and had run into a lot of opposition, and it had come to represent an area to him that he felt was overrated, or not productive, and produced unpleasant memories. Collbohm was, for example, in charge of painting the roofs of the Douglas factory with simulated residential blocks. Some people felt that was a little silly. Frank may have come to feel that civil defense was not something he wanted to have much to do with.

The other thing about civil defense is, it required thinking about the unthinkable, to use Herman's term. People would get rather emotional when you would talk about how you would behave after twenty-five percent of Americans had been killed. Herman was willing to think about such things as an intellectual. Others--and the most notable being James R. Newman, the editor of Scientific American, who wrote a scathing review of Herman--felt that that was not something that a human should do. -DIGBY-10

COLLINS: Did Frank, and I don't know whether this is the correct word "object" to civil defense because of any Air Force feelings about it? You're rooting it more in his personal experience.

DIGBY: No, I think it was more his personal experience. The Air Force didn't really have much of a feeling about civil defense at all.

COLLINS: One other issue that comes into broad public discussion, and a little bit of discussion within RAND, beginning in the mid-fifties, is questions of the possibilities for various kinds of disarmament treaties and agreements with the Soviets. What generally was the response of people in RAND to the prospects for disarmament and how it fit into these strategic concepts that were coming into play and being developed?

DIGBY: Okay. Before I answer that, let me make an addendum to the prior question. Then I'll come back to disarmament. In addition to civil defense, RAND studied passive defense. The passive defense of bombers was a major ingredient of the Wohlstetter studies, and the Air Force didn't much like that, but that is really a separate topic from civil defense. The Air Force preferred action to concrete in terms of protecting the SAC force.

Now let me come back to the question on disarmament, as it was originally called. Some early RAND work that I recall was done by a man named Louis Bohn in, probably about '59, '60. I think I have read somewhere, although I don't believe I knew it at the time, that he was a Quaker and his feelings about disarmament were influenced by that. He wrote a series of papers that attracted a certain amount of attention within RAND. I'm trying to remember what the Strategic Objectives Committee did on that subject, and I just can't remember.

COLLINS: Because it is an issue that comes up in the mid-fifties in terms of political discussion with [Dwight D.] Eisenhower.

DIGBY: Yes. One of the first RAND contributions to that was the idea of the hot line with Moscow, which would avoid mistaken beliefs that the other side was attacking. I don't remember exactly who did the very original work on that, but [Thomas] Tom Schelling got involved, possibly during the period that he was at RAND. That seemed to be an idea that caught on pretty well in Washington, and it was an example of something that was good for both sides. The RAND approach to disarmament was that for people to reach an agreement, it had to be something that was to the advantage of both sides, and that one would not want to enter into an agreement that was disproportionately advantageous to the opponent, or the opponent wouldn't want to enter into it, if it was disproportionately advantageous to the u.s. -DIGBY-11

COLLINS: But to the best of your knowledge, there wasn't a project or a study that said, "Let's explore what might constitute a good disarmament agreement"?

DIGBY: It began to be a part of RAND studies in the late fifties. In fact, we'd have to look in some of the other records, but Schelling and Wohlstetter went to Geneva, and I think this was late fifties during one of the early arms control discussions. This, by the way, I noted in the paper that I wrote.

COLLINS: I'll have to double-check that. I don't immediately recall it.

I'm at the end of a tape here. DIGBY: Okay.

TAPE 1, SIDE 2

COLLINS: Did Frank have any particular attitudes about disarmament studies, and did the Air Force have any particular interests or concern about RAND pursuing such studies?

DIGBY: Frank was probably greatly influenced by Hans Speier that kind of question, and Hans wanted to listen to, and analyze, arms control proposals. So I think Frank went from being basically skeptical about them to deciding he should listen to them, based on advice from Hans Speier.

COLLINS: Did you have a sense of what the Air Force position was on these kinds of activities?

DIGBY: The Air Force was, of course, concerned that its force structure not be damaged by arms control proposals, so the Air Force was interested from the beginning, too. I don't recall any major interaction between the Air Force and RAND on the subject, however.

COLLINS: Just quickly scanning your paper again this morning, one line I came across, and this may have been just an exercise in literary style or something, but you allude to a "RAND strategy." I was struck by the modifier there. Would you elaborate on whether you thought there was a RAND strategy, or what others outside the organization might have thought had been a RAND strategy.

DIGBY: By the late fifties, and by the time of McNamara, I think RAND had put forward quite a body of strategic ideas. I don't recall the exact context in which I used the term "RAND strategy," but by the time McNamara was there, RAND had a kind of -DIGBY-12 public position on strategy which was basically the WohlstetterjRowen strategy.

COLLINS: In terms of a generally agreed upon set of principles for strategy.

DIGBY: And I should add Kahn.

COLLINS: So Kahn would be a part of that as well.

DIGBY: Yes. Kahn was more of a codifier of strategic ideas, early on, than Wohlstetter, and Rowen actually wrote the first consistent paper on it in his joint congressional committee paper of, I believe, 1960.

COLLINS: But the kind of de facto position of the engineers did not have as much sway, nor Brodie's more generalized approach.

DIGBY: No. I think the way it went is the engineers did not have a codified strategy. They were just objectors to the more exotic aspects. The engineers objected more to the Wohlstetter study, as a study ,than they did to the results or the strategy that came out of it. They didn't like the methods, and they felt some of the results were a little bit exotic. So I would say that the publicly expressed strategies which were first Herman, then a few somewhat difficult articles by Wohlstetter, then the very codifying article by Rowen, were all what I would call the RAND strategy. By the time McNamara came in, these things could be regarded as a of body of knowledge.

COLLINS: Maybe you've answered this question already, when you were talking about Wohlstetter's style and the difficulty the Air Force had in grabbing on to what he was saying, but it's notable, it seems, that the flower of RAND's thinking in this area was adopted not through the Air Force, but principally through DoD [Department of Defense], that it gained its acceptance at that level of the defense hierarchy. Why weren't these things embraced first through the Air Force or receive some codification within the Air Force approach to doing its job?

DIGBY: Well, some of them were, as, for example, the results of the basing study are often cited as an example. The Air Force adopted a number of other RAND ideas, but the Air Force generally thought in terms of, "What do I do with airplanes and bases and physical things?" The advent of the McNamara group brought in, first of all, a leader who was himself willing to think about these things, and he, in turn, brought in Charlie Hitch and Alain Enthoven and others who made the RAND strategic ideas his ideas to a large extent, notably with the Ann Arbor speech and its classified predecessor at Athens. So the Air Force adopted ideas that could be effected by doing things with airplanes. and bases, -DIGBY-13

and McNamara adopted some things that were much more in the strategic arena for a while, while it fit his purposes.

Let me add to that a little bit. When McNamara decided to take Charlie Hitch and Alain Enthoven into his regime, he undoubtedly did so after reading some of the things that they had written, and by that time Rowen had written his j oint congressional paper, and I'm sure McNamara read i t with interest. So in effect, that was probably a main formative thing in McNamara's thinking about air strategy.

COLLINS: In the fifties, the ferment of things that were becoming hallmarks of the RAND approach to analyzing strategic problems, things like kriegspiel and war games and that kind of thing, was this something that Wohlstetter was involved in? I get a sense that his approach to grappling with these problems really didn't always partake of that sort of cultural thing that's often described when people talk about RAND in the fifties, about people sitting around and doing kriegspiel and other kinds of scenario activities. Was Wohlstetter a part of that activity?

DIGBY: No, but he was not hostile to it. Some of his very good friends and colleagues would play kriegspiel and also participate in the war games. But I don't recall Albert being very active in those, nor do I recall him rejecting them or saying they were not good things to do. I think he just didn't happen to spend his time--Albert worked very hard, came in rather late, worked very late, and would not be likely to spend a lunch hour doing kriegspiel, which involved eating sandwiches, and I don't recall ever seeing Albert Wohlstetter eat sandwiches. [Laughter]

COLLINS: Was this an activity that you would get involved in at all?

DIGBY: No, I never became a kriegspieler. I was involved in some of the early war games.

COLLINS: I just wanted to get a sense of where some of those sort of things fit in. A couple of things as a way of wrapping up. I'd be interested in a quick review of what you regard as kind of seminal events or turning points for RAND in the period that we have been talking about--things that were critical in terms of shaping ideas, choosing projects, that sort of thing.

DIGBY: Okay. That's the kind of question that is best answered after some reflection, but let me see if I can reflect while speaking. I think the first critical thing that happened at RAND was the conference with the social scientists that resulted in the formation of a social science department, and that was before I came to RAND. So that gave RAND an entirely different cast -DIGBY-14 than any other branch of Douglas Aircraft had ever had, and made it very different from any of the other advisors to the Air Force. Second thing was the fact that Ed Paxson devised systems analysis and that he consciously brought in people with many different skills and tried to integrate their knowledge into something that would be useful in making judgments about the Air Force. The third thing was that Ed Barlow took this systems analysis technique and extended it with great personal intellectual honesty and exertion into very broad systems analyses that addressed major questions in serious ways and also bridged the gap between what a sensible person would say and what a mathematical analysis would say. The next thing is that RAND came up with the idea of deterrence, as opposed to just accepting that a war would be fought and should be fought in an efficient way. I wrote a very early paper on that. Brodie had already said something about that before he came to RAND, and then he came to RAND and talked about deterrence and wrote about it in his book. Of course, then there were Wohlstetter and Kahn, and we've talked about them enough, so I won't go into it, but their contributions were both intellectual and by being very active, energetic people. I would say the next major thing that RAND thought about was counterforce. I always think of the way this sort of came to public attention was in a u.s. News and World Report, with the headline "No Need to Bomb Cities to Win War." That was an idea that was rather strange to the Air Force in the early fifties, and they began to adopt it in part due to RAND's influence--maybe a little bit my influence. That seems to me an interesting turning point. Then another turning point was RAND moving public at the end of the fifties, beginning of the sixties, and that was done in two ways. One is that RAND people began to contribute unclassified articles to the intellectual press, and books, and, secondly, they began to be part of the McNamara Defense Department and contributed speeches and written public policies. Finally--and I'm going to stop with this one--RAND sent a boarding team over to NATO, and we greatly affected the way NATO strategy was constructed, to wit, the move from automatic nuclear retaliation to ( MC 14/3 (a strategy], the NATO document which said that you would try as hard as you could to stop a war with nonnuclear means before you resorted to nuclear weapons. -DIQBY-15

Okay. Maybe that's enough of turning point•. COLLINS& Okay. When you have a chance to review this, if you think of other things you want to in•ert in there, it can always be added. Why don't we leave it at that. DIGBYI All right. COLLINSz We'll wind it up here. Thanks very much. DIGBYI Okay.