The scientific empire

In his review of Soldiers of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire, Chalmers Johnson notes that RAND sells interventionism as the extension of social engineering by other means:

Much of RAND's work was always ideological, designed to support the American values of individualism and personal gratification as well as to counter Marxism, but its ideological bent was disguised in statistics and equations, which allegedly made its analyses "rational" and "scientific." Abella writes:

"If a subject could not be measured, ranged, or classified, it was of little consequence in systems analysis, for it was not rational. Numbers were all – the human factor was a mere adjunct to the empirical."

In my opinion, Abella here confuses numerical with empirical. Most RAND analyses were formal, deductive, and mathematical but rarely based on concrete research into actually functioning societies.

In other words, RAND makes its bucks by packaging the dominant American ideology of triumphalism, materialism, and the mastery of nature for the military-industrial complex. That ideology was what the Twelve Southerners referred to in "I'll Take My Stand," as the "gospel of Progress." In his contribution to that ever-useful work, John Crowe Ransom denounced this cult as an endless war against nature, against human nature itself:

Progress never defines its ultimate objective, but thrusts its victims at once into an infinite series. Our vast industrial machine, with its laboratory centers of experimentation, and its far-flung organs of mass production, is like a Prussianized state which is organized strictly for war and can never consent to peace. Or, returning to the original figure, our progressivists are the latest version of those pioneers who conquered the wilderness, except that they are pioneering on principle, or from force of habit, and without any recollection of what pioneering was for. p. 8

How fitting then, that an ideology based on eternal war as an ideal should guide the war machine -- even if it guides it toward inevitable ruin.

After all, that's exactly what happened in the Empire's most disastrous war (to date), Vietnam. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara was an expert in statistical control, which he relied on to predict the outcome of American operations. He'd served with distinction as a systems analyst for the Air Force during World War II. As Barbara Tuchman described him in his capacity as the architect of the Vietnam War, "his genius for statistics left little respect for human variables and no room for unpredictables." [The March of Folly, p. 252] His statistical analysis PROVED that American firepower was killing more insurgents than Vietnam could long sustain, making eventual American success "assured."

And we all know how that went. DC puzzled over Vietnamese stubbornness. "We anticipated that they would respond like reasonable people," said one Defense Department official. Instead of responding reasonably, the Vietnamese responded like people, like human beings driven by deep-seated loyalties and emotions, and won despite the odds.

But Iraq will be different. Just ask General Odom.