Postmodern Wars Imaginary and Real: World War III - Chris Hables ...

[ 152 ] The Past
Detailed histories of U.S. strategic doctrine show that many factors
(ranging from political to technical) have helped shape it. Among the most
significant was, and is, the use of scientific justifications such as SA and game
theory. The careful hunt for "worst case" scenarios, combined with the
inevitable bias toward measuring enemy capabilities (usually much exaggerated)
instead of opponents' intentions, meant the extraordinary proliferation
of nuclear weapons, nuclear platforms, and nuclear missions.
In his book Think Tanks, Paul Dickson credits RAND with numerous
innovations in these areas in its attempts to answer what RAND itself called
"the unsolved problem of modern total war." He lists scenario writing, heuristic
programing, computer modeling, linear programming, dynamic programming,
problems scheduling, nonlinear programming, the Monte Carlo method, the
Planning, Programing and Budgeting System (introduced in the DoD in 1960
and the rest of the federal government in 1965), and SA itself (1971, pp.
61-64). Most of these techniques were borrowed directly or metaphorically
from computer science. What makes them particularly interesting—and postmodern—is
that they are all ways of simulating (gaming, predicting, calculating)
possible futures so as to justify constructing one in particular. Their
effectiveness can only be judged by their results. They have supplied the
rationale for the growth of the U.S. nuclear arsenal from 40 weapons to over
25,000.
Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara admitted that U.S. nuclear
policy has been "war-fighting with nuclear weapons" from the beginning
(quoted in Herken, 1985, p. 306). The original Strategic Air Command
(SAC) plan of massive attack on the Soviet Union was soon attacked itself
by the RAND consultants. Using systems analysis, Albert Wohlstetter
claimed he had proven that the Soviets could "Pearl Harbor" the U.S.
nuclear bombers. This threat and a parade of others usually labeled "gaps,"
as in the bomber gap and the missile gap, have all been shown to have been
nonexistent—after the election was won or the new weapons were built. But
before being proven fallacious, they helped to create and elaborate the
nuclear arsenal of the United States.
Other think tank contributions to fighting nuclear war include RAND's
development of the "distributed network concept" to make a communication
system capable of continued operation during a nuclear attack and the
development by a RAND spin-off, System Development Corp. (SDC), of
the software for various air defense systems, including work on SAGE
(Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) and BUIC (Back-Up Interceptor
Control). One of the first of the 1,000 military jobs performed by SDC
involved more than 500 programmers writing over a quarter of a million
computer commands for the nation's air defense system, the biggest program
of its time. SDC also designed the Navy's Space Surveillance System, and it
has produced numerous nuclear war games for the Pentagon. The Pentagon's