Early RAND As a Talent Incubator an Extraordinary Experiment
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Deception, Disinformation, and Strategic Communications: How One Interagency Group Made a Major Difference by Fletcher Schoen and Christopher J
STRATEGIC PERSPECTIVES 11 Deception, Disinformation, and Strategic Communications: How One Interagency Group Made a Major Difference by Fletcher Schoen and Christopher J. Lamb Center for Strategic Research Institute for National Strategic Studies National Defense University Institute for National Strategic Studies National Defense University The Institute for National Strategic Studies (INSS) is National Defense University’s (NDU’s) dedicated research arm. INSS includes the Center for Strategic Research, Center for Complex Operations, Center for the Study of Chinese Military Affairs, Center for Technology and National Security Policy, Center for Transatlantic Security Studies, and Conflict Records Research Center. The military and civilian analysts and staff who comprise INSS and its subcomponents execute their mission by conducting research and analysis, publishing, and participating in conferences, policy support, and outreach. The mission of INSS is to conduct strategic studies for the Secretary of Defense, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Unified Combatant Commands in support of the academic programs at NDU and to perform outreach to other U.S. Government agencies and the broader national security community. Cover: Kathleen Bailey presents evidence of forgeries to the press corps. Credit: The Washington Times Deception, Disinformation, and Strategic Communications: How One Interagency Group Made a Major Difference Deception, Disinformation, and Strategic Communications: How One Interagency Group Made a Major Difference By Fletcher Schoen and Christopher J. Lamb Institute for National Strategic Studies Strategic Perspectives, No. 11 Series Editor: Nicholas Rostow National Defense University Press Washington, D.C. June 2012 Opinions, conclusions, and recommendations expressed or implied within are solely those of the contributors and do not necessarily represent the views of the Defense Department or any other agency of the Federal Government. -
Kahn Used the Metaphor of an 'Escalation Ladder'
Preventing Nuclear Use: Internationally-Controlled Theater Missile Defenses Among Non- Super-Arsenal States1 Carolyn C. James, PhD University of Missouri, Columbia INTRODUCTION The current debates over missile defenses in the United States all have a common aspect - the systems are meant to provide a defense for US territory, allies, or troops abroad.2 This article proposes a different view with significant security potential. Specifically, theater missile defenses (TMD) should be considered as an international tool to prevent nuclear weapons use among proliferated states.3 Internationally-controlled TMD placed at potential flash points could prevent conflicts and crises from escalating to nuclear levels. These areas include borders with so-called “rogue” states, such as North Korea, Iran and Iraq, all of whom have seemingly aggressive ballistic missile programs and are embroiled in protracted conflicts with their neighbors.4 Similar to the goal of peacekeeping, reducing and limiting conflict in regions such as the Middle East clearly is in the US national interest. How, then, can nuclear use be prevented? Currently, there are seven declared nuclear weapon states (US, Russia, China, Great Britain, France, Pakistan, India), one non-declared “opaque” nuclear weapon state (Israel), and several states with known or suspected nuclear aspirations (including Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Libya and Taiwan). Two of these, the US and Russia, have established a legacy of Cold War deterrence policies. Nuclear deterrence, in particular, has been credited with maintaining crisis stability during those years.5 Today, a major debate in the field of security studies surrounds the question: Does nuclear deterrence really work? A common failure in most of these discussions about successful deterrence and avoiding nuclear use is the lack of distinction among nuclear force levels.6 The debate tends to be clarified by asking whether it was nuclear weapons, or mutual assured destruction (MAD), that kept the Cold War cold. -
The Organizational Process and Bureaucratic Politics Paradigms: Retrospect and Prospect Author(S): David A
The Organizational Process and Bureaucratic Politics Paradigms: Retrospect and Prospect Author(s): David A. Welch Source: International Security , Fall, 1992, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Fall, 1992), pp. 112-146 Published by: The MIT Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2539170 REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2539170?seq=1&cid=pdf- reference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms The MIT Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to International Security This content downloaded from 209.6.197.28 on Wed, 07 Oct 2020 15:39:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms The Organizational David A. Welch Process and Bureaucratic Politics Paradigms Retrospect and Prospect 1991 marked the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Graham Allison's Essence of De- cision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis. ' The influence of this work has been felt far beyond the study of international politics. Since 1971, it has been cited in over 1,100 articles in journals listed in the Social Sciences Citation Index, in every periodical touching political science, and in others as diverse as The American Journal of Agricultural Economics and The Journal of Nursing Adminis- tration. -
Omnicide “Here Is What We Now Know: the United States and Russia Each Have an Actual Doomsday Machine.”
Omnicide “Here is what we now know: the United States and Russia each have an actual Doomsday Machine.” By Daniel Ellsberg From The Doomsday Machine, published by Bloomsbury. The book is an account of America’s nuclear program in the 1960s drawn from Ellsberg’s experience as a consultant to the Department of Defense and the White House, drafting Secretary Robert McNamara’s plans for nuclear war. Ellsberg is the author of Secrets, a book about his experiences leaking the Pentagon Papers. At the conclusion of his 1964 film, Dr. Strangelove, Stanley Kubrick introduced the concept of a “Doomsday Machine”—designed by the Soviet Union to deter nuclear attack against the country by automating the destruction of all human life as a response to such an attack. The movie’s Russian leader had installed the system before revealing it to the world, however, and it was now being triggered by a single nuclear explosion from an American B-52 sent off by a rogue commander without presidential authorization. Kubrick had borrowed the name and the concept of the Doomsday machine from my former colleague Herman Kahn, a Rand physicist with whom he had discussed it. In his 1960 book On Thermonuclear War, Kahn wrote that he would be able to design such a device. It could be produced within ten years and would be relatively cheap— since it could be placed in one’s own country or in the ocean. It would not depend on sending warheads halfway around the world. But, he said, the machine was obviously undesirable. It would be too difficult to control— too inflexible and automatic—and its failure “kills too many people”— everyone, in fact, an outcome that the philosopher John Somerville later termed “omnicide.” Kahn was sure in 1961 that no such system had been built, nor would it be, by either the United States or the Soviet Union. -
Strategic Posture Commission
Perry and Schlesinger and Perry America’s Strategic Posture Americ a’s ow to secure the nuclear peace remains one of the most profound questions of the modern era. Twenty years after the end of the Cold War Hand with the arrival of a new administration in Washington, it is time to think through fundamental questions about the purposes of nuclear deterrence Strategic and the character of the U.S. strategic posture. While the existential threat to the United States has decreased, the rising threat of catastrophic terrorism, the possession and spread of nuclear weapons by other states, and a general worldwide nuclear renaissance continue to influence decisions about America’s Posture strategic posture. Recognizing the changing character of these threats, Congress formed a The Final Report of the commission in 2008 to examine the United States’ long-term strategic posture and make recommendations. For more than eleven months this bipartisan Congressional Commission commission of leading experts on national security, arms control, and nuclear America’s Strategic Posture technology met with Congressional leaders, military officers, high-level officials of several countries, arms control groups, and technical experts to assess the on the Strategic Posture appropriate roles for nuclear weapons, nonproliferation programs, and missile defenses. This official edition contains a discussion of key questions and issues of the United States as well as the Commission’s findings and recommendations for tailoring U.S. strategic posture to new and emerging requirements -
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SIX DECADES OF GUIDED MUNITIONS AND BATTLE NETWORKS: PROGRESS AND PROSPECTS Barry D. Watts Thinking Center for Strategic Smarter and Budgetary Assessments About Defense www.csbaonline.org Six Decades of Guided Munitions and Battle Networks: Progress and Prospects by Barry D. Watts Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments March 2007 ABOUT THE CENTER FOR STRATEGIC AND BUDGETARY ASSESSMENTS The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) is an independent, nonprofit, public policy research institute established to make clear the inextricable link between near-term and long- range military planning and defense investment strategies. CSBA is directed by Dr. Andrew F. Krepinevich and funded by foundations, corporations, government, and individual grants and contributions. This report is one in a series of CSBA analyses on the emerging military revolution. Previous reports in this series include The Military-Technical Revolution: A Preliminary Assessment (2002), Meeting the Anti-Access and Area-Denial Challenge (2003), and The Revolution in War (2004). The first of these, on the military-technical revolution, reproduces the 1992 Pentagon assessment that precipitated the 1990s debate in the United States and abroad over revolutions in military affairs. Many friends and professional colleagues, both within CSBA and outside the Center, have contributed to this report. Those who made the most substantial improvements to the final manuscript are acknowledged below. However, the analysis and findings are solely the responsibility of the author and CSBA. 1667 K Street, NW, Suite 900 Washington, DC 20036 (202) 331-7990 CONTENTS ACKNOWLEGEMENTS .................................................. v SUMMARY ............................................................... ix GLOSSARY ………………………………………………………xix I. INTRODUCTION ..................................................... 1 Guided Munitions: Origins in the 1940s............. 3 Cold War Developments and Prospects ............ -
How Scenarios Became Corporate Strategies: Alternative Futures and Uncertainty in Strategic Management
HOW SCENARIOS BECAME CORPORATE STRATEGIES: ALTERNATIVE FUTURES AND UNCERTAINTY IN STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT Bretton Fosbrook A Dissertation submitted to The Faculty of Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in Science and Technology Studies York University Toronto, Ontario December 2017 © Bretton Fosbrook, 2017 ABSTRACT How Scenarios Became Corporate Strategies tracks the transformation of scenario planning, a non-calculative technique for imagining alternative futures, from postwar American thermonuclear defense projects to corporate planning efforts beginning in the late 1960s. Drawing on archival research, the dissertation tells a history of how different corporate strategists in the second half of the twentieth century attempted to engage with future uncertainties by drawing heterogeneous and sometimes contradictory rational and intuitive techniques together in their developments of corporate scenario planning. By tracing the heterogeneity of methodologies and intellectual influences in three case studies from corporate scenario planning efforts in the United States and Britain, the dissertation demonstrates how critical and countercultural philosophies that emphasized ‘irrational’ human capacities like imagination, consciousness, and intuition—often assumed to be antithetical to the rule- bound, quantitative rationalities of corporate planning efforts—became crucial tools, rather than enemies, of corporate strategy under uncertainty after 1960. The central argument -
The Game Theory Narrative and the Myth of the National Security State
Game Theory Narrative | 333 The Game Theory Narrative and the Myth of the National Security State Steven Belletto With the Soviet Union, you did get the sense that they were operating on a model that we could comprehend in terms of, they don’t want to be blown up, we don’t want to be blown up, so you do game theory and calculate ways to contain. —Barack Obama, September 2004 ou can never underestimate the willingness of the state to act out its own massive fantasies.” So says Eric Deming in the novel Underworld (1997), Don DeLillo’s weighty stocktaking of postwar “Y 1 U.S. culture. As Matt Shay listens, Eric, stoned and introspective, repeats this statement: “You can never unterestimate the villingness of the shtate . to ahkt out its own massif phantasies.” The accented repetition signals that this is a clichéd phrase, likely lifted from some half-remembered antifascist B movie. But the following day, as Matt thinks about the phrase, he wonders if it was not “paying tribute” to “all those émigrés from Middle Europe [who] came to do science in New Mexico during the war.” This speculation is occasioned by a rambling reference Eric wedges between the first statement and its rep- etition: “Eric went on in his stupid voice, talking about problem boxes and minimax solutions, all the kriegspielish stuff they’d studied in grad school, theory of games and patterns of conflict, heads I win, tails you lose.” With this pairing, DeLillo implies a connection between game theory—“minimax solutions, all the kriegspielish stuff”—and fantasies of state control. -
"Fat Man," the New Yorker (2005): on Herman Kahn and Nuclear Strategy
3/8/2017 Fat Man - The New Yorker BOOKS JUNE 27, 2005 IUE FAT MAN Herman Kahn and the nuclear age. By Louis Menand erman Kahn was the heavyweight of the Megadeath Intellectuals, the men who, H in the early years of the Cold War, made it their business to think about the unthinkable, and to design the game plan for nuclear war—how to prevent it, or, if it could not be prevented, how to win it, or, if it could not be won, how to survive it. The collective combat experience of these men was close to nil; their diplomatic experience was smaller. Their training was in physics, engineering, political science, mathematics, and logic, and they worked with the latest in assessment technologies: operational research, computer science, systems analysis, and game theory. The type of war they contemplated was, of course, never waged, but whether this was because of their work or in spite of it has always been a matter of dispute. Exhibit A in the case against them is a book by Kahn, published in 1960, “On Thermonuclear War.” Kahn was a creature of the Corporation, and was a creature of the Air Force. In 1945, when the United States dropped atomic bombs nicknamed Little Boy and Fat Man on Japan, the Air Force was still a branch of the Army. The bomb changed that. An independent Department of the Air Force was created in 1947; the nation’s nuclear arsenal was put under its command; and the Air Force displaced the Army as the prima donna of national defense. -
INNOVATION Under Austerity
Issue 68, 1st Quarter 2013 INNOVATION Under Austerity European Missile Defense Military Values JOINT FORCE QUARTERLY Inside Issue 68, 1st Quarter 2013 Editor Col William T. Eliason, USAF (Ret.), Ph.D. JFQ Dialogue Executive Editor Jeffrey D. Smotherman, Ph.D. Supervisory Editor George C. Maerz Letters 2 Production Supervisor Martin J. Peters, Jr. From the Chairman Senior Copy Editor Calvin B. Kelley 4 Copy Editor/Office Manager John J. Church, D.M.A Bridging the Basics By Bryan B. Battaglia 6 Internet Publications Editor Joanna E. Seich Director, NDU Press Frank G. Hoffman Forum Design Chris Dunham, Guy Tom, and Jessica Reynolds U.S. Government Printing Office Executive Summary 8 Printed in St. Louis, Missouri by 10 Russia and European Missile Defenses: Reflexive Reset? By Stephen J. Cimbala Military Wisdom and Nuclear Weapons By Ward Wilson 18 NDU Press is the National Defense University’s Managing Foreign Assistance in a CBRN Emergency: The U.S. Government cross-component, professional military and 25 academic publishing house. It publishes books, Response to Japan’s “Triple Disaster” By Suzanne Basalla, William Berger, journals, policy briefs, occasional papers, and C. Spencer Abbot monographs, and special reports on national security strategy, defense policy, interagency 32 Operationalizing Mission Command: Leveraging Theory to Achieve cooperation, national military strategy, regional Capability By Kathleen Conley security affairs, and global strategic problems. Special Feature This is the official U.S. Department of Defense edition of JFQ. Any copyrighted portions of this The 600-pound Gorilla: Why We Need a Smaller Defense Department journal may not be reproduced or extracted without 36 permission of the copyright proprietors. -
Albert J. and Roberta Wohlstetter Papers
http://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt1489q8rg Online items available Register of the Albert J. and Roberta Wohlstetter papers Finding aid prepared by Aparna Mukherjee, David Jacobs, Natalia Porfirenko, and Ronald Bulatoff Hoover Institution Library and Archives © 2001, 2007, 2020 434 Galvez Mall Stanford University Stanford, CA 94305-6003 [email protected] URL: http://www.hoover.org/library-and-archives Register of the Albert J. and 97076 1 Roberta Wohlstetter papers Title: Albert J. and Roberta Wohlstetter papers Date (inclusive): 1929-2007 Collection Number: 97076 Contributing Institution: Hoover Institution Library and Archives Language of Material: English Physical Description: 846 manuscript boxes, 5 card file boxes, 8 oversize boxes(343.4 Linear Feet) Abstract: Speeches and writings, correspondence, notes, memoranda, reports, studies, and printed matter relating to American military and national security policy, nuclear warfare strategic planning, and nuclear proliferation issues. Includes the papers of Roberta Wohlstetter, wife of Albert J. Wohlstetter. Digital copies of select records also available at https://digitalcollections.hoover.org. Creator: Wohlstetter, Albert Creator: Wohlstetter, Roberta Hoover Institution Library & Archives Access "Boxes 1-61, 201-354, 385-754, 815-821, and 838-859 closed. The remainder of the collection is open for research; materials must be requested at least two business days in advance of intended use." Publication Rights For copyright status, please contact the Hoover Institution Library & Archives. Acquisition Information Materials were acquired by the Hoover Institution Library & Archives in 1997. Preferred Citation [Identification of item], Albert J. and Roberta Wohlstetter papers, [Box no., Folder no. or title], Hoover Institution Library & Archives. Alternate Forms Available Digital copies of select records also available at https://digitalcollections.hoover.org. -
Nuclear-Conventional-Firebreaks
NUCLEAR-CONVENTIONAL FIREBREAKS AND THE NUCLEAR TABOO BARRY D. WATTS NUCLEAR-COnVEnTIOnAL FIREBREAKS AnD THE NUCLEAR TABOO BY BARRy D. WATTS 2013 Acknowledgments The idea of exploring systematically why the leaders of various nations have chosen to maintain, or aspire to acquire, nuclear weapons was first suggested to me by Andrew W. Marshall. In several cases, the motivations attributed to national leaders in this report are undoubtedly speculative and open to debate. Nevertheless, it is a fact that the rulers of at least some nations entertain strong reasons for maintaining or acquiring nuclear weapons that have nothing to do with the nuclear competition between the United States and the former Soviet Union, either before or after 1991. Eric Edelman provided valuable suggestions on both substance and sources. At the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, Abby Stewart and Nick Setterberg did the majority of the editing. I am especially grateful to Nick for vetting the footnotes. Last but not least, Andrew Krepinevich’s suggestions on the narrative flow and the structure of the paper’s arguments greatly clarified the original draft. © 2013 Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. All rights reserved. COnTEnTS 1 INTRODUCTION AND SUMMARY 5 THE AMERICAN SEARCH FOR ALTERNATIVES TO GENERAL NUCLEAR WAR 5 Context 7 Atomic Blackmail and Massive Nuclear Retaliation 11 Flexible Response and Assured Destruction 15 The Long Range Research and Development Planning Program 19 Selective Nuclear Options and Presidential Directive/NSC-59 23 The Strategic Defense Initiative 26 The Soviet General Staff, LNOs and Launch on Warning 29 POST-COLD WAR DEVELOPMENTS IN THE UNITED STATES AND RUSSIA 29 Evolving U.S.