The RAND Corporation and the Center (Some History)

["Dave Farber" <dave () farber net>]

 ---------- Forwarded message ---------
 From: Thomas Lipscomb <tomlipscomb () mindspring com>
 Date: Fri, Jan 19, 2018 at 12:49 PM
 Subject: RE: DL- The RAND Corporation and the Center (Some History)
 To: Dave <dave () farber net>
 
 A few additions to Mark's excellent summary on RAND and Kahn:
 
 Rand was famous in its early days for, as Mark points out, out of the box
 studies.
 
 Early on RAND was fascinated with game theory and did some interesting
 studies applying it to the new theories on nuclear warfare of great
 interest to its financiers at USAF.
 
 Herman Kahn continued on at Hudson with his much misunderstood studies on
 nuclear war, which were often very unpopular with the Air Force, since he
 was far from being a Lemay "bomb them back into the stone age" fan. Herman
 was an early exponent of both "flexible response" and "High Frontier."
 
 Herman believed in doing everything possible to strongly alter the
 effectiveness of "first strikes" in nuclear war to make them, to borrow the
 title of a famous early RAND study, "games not worth playing."
 
 He also supported my father's work on the neutron bomb which was primarily
 directed towards the NATO standoff. The Communists hated it... it was, they
 said with some justice, "the ultimate capitalist weapon. It destroys the
 proletariat while preserving the means of production intact."
 
 Which amused Herman no end when applied to the square miles of Warsaw Pact
 tanks he foresaw abandoned on the European plain in perfect working order,
 once you hosed the remains of their irradiated crews out through the escape
 hatch in the bottom decks.
 
 FYI... I may be wrong, but the campus of Hudson at Croton, high on a hill
 was not simply "a mansion." It was a series of buildings and out buildings
 left over from what used to be a psychiatric facility. Something Herman
 never hesitated pointing out to visitors.
 
 THOMAS H. LIPSCOMB
 
 646-625-9700
 
 -----Original Message-----
 From: Mark [mailto:mark () tmtstrategies com]
 Sent: Friday, January 19, 2018 8:33 AM
 To: tomlipscomb () mindspring com
 Subject: DL- The RAND Corporation and the Center (Some History)
 
 DLers:
 
 The RAND Corporation is ultimately the "parent" to the Center.
 Briefly, this is the history --
 
 What became RAND began as "Project Air Force" when, just after WW II, it
 was recognized that the "genius mobilization" of that war was now being
 disassembled and that something had to be done to retain some of the
 smartest people and apply them to the *new* technological problem of
 "atomic" weapons.
 
 The fit between the up-all-night eggheads and the workaday engineers at
 Douglas Aircraft in SoCal (where the Project was first housed) was
 considerable and plans were made to separate them.  RAND -- which stands
 for Research and Development (or R and D, plus/minus a few
 letters) -- was launched "as far as possible from the Pentagon" in Santa
 Monica.
 
 Among it's first cadre were Chicago-trained statistician Andrew Marshall
 and Caltech-trained physicist Herman Kahn -- who then became best friends,
 with Marshall serving as best-man at Kahn's wedding (and ultimately
 delivering the eulogies at both RAND and the Pentagon when he died in
 1983).  Perhaps the best book about what happened at the early RAND is Herb
 Goldhammer's "The Adviser."
 
 https://www.amazon.com/Adviser-Herbert-Goldhamer/dp/0444990402
 
 This was a group of what Marshall would later call "outlying thinkers"
 (i.e. beyond "outside-the-box" to the point where there wasn't even any
 "box" anymore) and the RAND building was constructed so that people would
 have to walk through a courtyard to get from one side to the other, in the
 hopes of encouraging chance interactions.
 
 Kahn went on to write "On Thermonuclear Warfare" (1960) and to coin the
 term "thinking the unthinkable" &.  His popularity (and
 personality) led a group of New Yorkers to convince him to move East to
 form the Hudson Institute -- in a mansion-on-a-hill in Westchester (which
 was likely used by Stan Lee as a model for his "X-Men" series about a group
 of *mutant* "gifted youngsters").  The mortgage was secured, in part, by a
 loan from Thomas Watson Jr (head of IBM), which was later forgiven and,
 more broadly, Hudson became a hub for NYC-based "think-tanking." (I have a
 PDF of a history of Hudson, if anyone wants a copy.)
 
 Tom Lipscomb's military father was drawn into all this and so was Tom.
   As a result, the then book publisher, Tom was drawn into related
 intellectual and policy circles, including the Council on Foreign Relations
 &c.  Tom later tried to start a group at Hudson (which by then had moved to
 Indianapolis after Kahn's death) that focused on the impact of *digital*
 technology on politics/economics, that he later moved to USC Annenberg in
 LA.  I met Tom in the 1990s when he showed up at a meeting to discuss
 "Silicon Alley" (a term that I had coined, along with "New Media" &c. after
 I retired, the first time, from Wall
 Street.)
 
 Andy Marshall stuck around at RAND until the mid-60s, when he left SoCal
 for the Nixon National Security Council under Henry Kissinger (who some of
 us saw at 92Y on Weds night).  As events around Vietnam swirled, James
 Schlesinger (first head of the Dept of Energy, which took over the US
 nuclear arsenal as well as once head of the CIA), pushed through the
 formation of a *new* RAND (since the original of which was no longer
 supported by a blank-check from the Air Force and had become a "job shop")
 inside the Pentagon.
 
 It was formed in 1973 and was headed by Andy Marshall -- called the Office
 of Net Assessment (ONA) reporting directly to the Secretary of Defense
 (Sec-Def).  It became the premier long-range strategy organization in the
 US government and was run by Andy -- who is now 95, just a little older
 than Kissinger -- until he retired in 2015.
 
 In the 1990s, retired Naval Intelligence officer Phil Midland began to work
 with ONA on China.  One of my oldest friends from Madison WI, Steve Mikol,
 happened to tell me that he was gong to China to develop an "eco-hotel" and
 was working with some of the early Chinese environmentalists, a leader of
 which happened to be the sister of a man that Phil worked closely with
 there.  I asked Steve to introduce me to Phil and the result was a trip in
 1997 that took me first to Wuhan (where the Chinese MIT/Caltech are
 located) and then on to Beijing and Shanghai (where Debbie Newman joined
    .
 
 Andy is now a Fellow at the Center, which was initially conceived with Phil
 and Tom's &al's help as the *digital* successor to RAND/Hudson/ONA -- where
 we are now putting together funding (absent a blank-check from anyone) for
 our "Project 2050," which recapitulates a 1960s Hudson Institute &al
 project called the "Commission on the Year 2000" (from which the field of
 "futurism" was spanned in the 1970s).
 
 Like the early RAND, we are "outliers" and have no interest in being
 "popular" (which, in their case, meant doing classified work).  Also like
 the early RAND, we are focused on the impact of technology on society -- in
 their case nuclear, in our case digital.
 
 Unlike the early RAND, which was more-or-less a part of the "standard"
 social science of its times, we have taken a deliberately "outlier"
 stance re: our approach and, as a result, we also consider McLuhan's 1960s
 "Centre for Culture and Technology" as another of our "parents."
 We have *grounded* our analysis in the work of the McLuhans (Marshall and
 Eric, who is also a Fellow) -- which, as it turns out, is *not* widely
 followed today by the 100s of "McLuhanite" scholars today (largely because
 they avoid Marshall's Thomist grounding).
 
 The same groups who funded Marshall McLuhan &al in the 1950s -- in
 particular the Ford Foundation -- where also deeply involved at RAND.
 In fact, the SF lawyer, H. Rowan Gaither, who set up the real-estate
 transaction for the RAND building, was also the man who wrote the report
 that established the modern Ford Foundation (which then funded McLuhan in
 1953).
 
 The Ford Foundation also set up the Center for the Study of Democratic
 Institutions (CSDI) in Santa Barbara -- headed by one-time head of the
 University of Chicago (where both I and Andy Marshall studied), Robert
 Hutchins.  In 1965, Hutchins invited McLuhan and many others to a meeting
 on "Technology & Society" and, in the 1970s, when the Univ of Toronto had
 grown tired of Marshall (or, alternately, based on how he behaved in
 faculty meetings, he had grown tired of academia), Marshall tried to get
 Hutchins to hire him at CSDI (where Tom was also scouting for new book
 ideas) but, alas, Hutchins died in 1977 (and then Marshall had his final
 stroke in 1979).
 
 Today, RAND does everyday contract work -- like their "Truth Decay"
 report &c.  Hudson is a plain-vanilla DC think-tank without any "outliers"
 and where Scooter Libby is EVP.  ONA is no longer doing ground-breaking
 work, either, and the Toronto Centre is run by a post-colonial feminist.
 
 All that is left of the earlier heritage of RAND/Hudson/ONA/CCT is our
 Center for the Study of Digital Life -- with our ties through Phil and Tom
 &al to this once illustrious past.
 
 And, we like it that way (as if we have any choice) . . . <g>
 
 Mark
 
 P.S.  My father was a protege of Norbert Wiener at MIT and, over a bottle of
 Chianti late one night in Cambridge MA (c. 1946), they coined the term
 "cybernetics."  Wiener was one of the few "serious people" McLuhan would
 identify in the 1950s and Cybernetics was also an important topic at RAND.
 In 2014, I delivered a presentation at an IEEE conference on Wiener, titled
 "Wiener's 'Genius Project'"
 (attached) and that could also another name for the Center.  Yes,
 "geniuses" are also sometimes thought of as "outliers" and we like it that
 way.
 



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