REPORT FROM IRON MOUNTAIN: ON THE POSSIBILITY AND DESIRABILITY OF PEACE

REPORT FROM IRON MOUNTAIN:

ON THE POSSIBILITY AND DESIRABILITY

OF PEACE

http://stopthecrime.net/docs/Report_from_Iron_Mountain.pdf

With introductory material by Leonard C. Lewin

The Dial Press, Inc. 1967, New York

Library of Congress Catalog card Number 67-27553 Printed in the U.S.

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CONTENTS:

Foreword 3

Background Information 8

Statement by "John Doe" 16

The Report of the Special Study Group 18

Letter of Transmittal 18

Introduction 19

Section 1. Scope of the Study 21

Section 2. Disarmament and the Economy 24

Section 3. Disarmament Scenarios 28

Section 4. War & Peace as Social Systems 30

Section 5. The Functions of War 33

Section 6. Substitutes for the Functions of War 46

Section 7. Summary and Conclusions 59

Section 8. Recommendations 69

NOTES 74

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FOREWORD

"John Doe," as I will call him in this book for reasons that will be made clear, is

a professor at a large university in the Middle West. His field is one of the

social sciences, but I will not identify him beyond this. He telephoned me one

evening last winter, quite unexpectedly; we had not been in touch for several

years. He was in New York for a few days, he said, and there was something

important he wanted to discuss with me. He wouldn't say what it was. We met

for lunch the next day at a midtown restaurant.

He was obviously disturbed. He made small talk for half an hour, which was

quite out of character, and I didn't press him. Then, apropos of nothing, he

mentioned a dispute between a writer and a prominent political family that had

been in the headlines. What, he wanted to know, were my views on "freedom of

information"? How would I qualify them? And so on. My answers were not

memorable, but they seemed to satisfy him. Then, quite abruptly, he began to

tell me the following story:

Early in August of 1963, he said, he found a message on his desk that a "Mrs.

Potts" had called him from Washington. When he returned the call, a MAN

answered immediately, and told Doe, among other things, that he had been

selected to serve on a commission "of the highest importance." Its objective was

to determine, accurately and realistically, the nature of the problems that would

confront the United States if and when a condition of "permanent peace" should

arrive, and to draft a program for dealing with this contingency. The man

described the unique procedures that were to govern the commission's work and

that were expected to extend its scope far beyond that of any previous

examination of these problems.

Considering that the caller did not precisely identify either himself or his

agency, his persuasiveness must have been a truly remarkable order. Doe

entertained no serious doubts of the bona fides of the project, however, chiefly

because of his previous experience with the excessive secrecy that often

surrounds quasi-governmental activities. In addition, the man at the other end of

the line demonstrated an impressively complete and surprisingly detailed

knowledge of Doe's work and personal life. He also mentioned the names of

others who were to serve with the group; most of them were known to Doe by

reputation. Doe agreed to take the assignment --- he felt he had no real choice in

the matter --- and to appear the second Saturday following at Iron Mountain,

New York. An airline ticket arrived in his mail the next morning.

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The cloak-and-dagger tone of this convocation was further enhanced by the

meeting place itself. Iron Mountain, located near the town of Hudson, is like

something out of Ian Fleming or E. Phillips Oppenheim. It is an underground

nuclear hideout for hundreds of large American corporations. Most of them use

it as an emergency storage vault for important documents. But a number of

them maintain substitute corporate headquarters as well, where essential

personnel could presumably survive and continue to work after an attack. This

latter group includes such firms as Standard Oil of New Jersey, Manufacturers

Hanover Trust, and Shell.

I will leave most of the story of the operations of the Special Study Group, as

the commission was formally called, for Doe to tell in his own words

("Background Information"). At this point it is necessary to say only that it met

and worked regularly for over two and a half years, after which it produced a

Report. It was this document, and what to do about it, that Doe wanted to talk to

me about.

The Report, he said, had been suppressed --- both by the Special Study Group

itself and by the government INTERAGENCY committee to which it had been

submitted. After months of agonizing, Doe had decided that he would no longer

be party to keeping it secret. What he wanted from me was advice and

assistance in having it published. He gave me his copy to read, with the express

understanding that if for any reason I were unwilling to become involved, I

would say nothing about it to anyone else.

I read the Report that same night. I will pass over my own reactions to it, except

to say that the unwillingness of Doe's associates to publicize their findings

became readily understandable. What had happened was that they had been so

tenacious in their determination to deal comprehensively with the many

problems of transition to peace that the original questions asked of them were

never quite answered. Instead, this is what they concluded:

Lasting peace, while no theoretically impossible, is probably unattainable; even

if it could be achieved it would almost certainly not be in the best interests of a

stable society to achieve it.

That is the gist of what they say. Behind their qualified academic language runs

this general argument: War fills certain functions essential to the stability of our

society; until other ways of filling them are developed, the war system must be

maintained -- and improved in effectiveness.

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It is not surprising that the Group, in its Letter of Transmittal, did not choose to

justify its work to "the lay reader, unexposed to the exigencies of higher

political or military responsibility." Its Report was addressed, deliberately, to

unnamed government administrators of high rank; it assumed - considerable

political sophistication from this select audience. To the general reader,

therefore, the substance of the document may be even more unsettling than its

conclusions. He may not be prepared for some of its assumptions -- for instance,

that most medical advances are viewed more as problems than as progress; or

that poverty is necessary and desirable, public postures by politicians to the

contrary notwithstanding; or that standing armies are, among other things

social-welfare institutions in exactly the same sense as are old-people's homes

and mental hospitals. It may strike him as odd to find the probably explanation

of "flying saucer" incidents disposed of en passant in less than a sentence. He

may be less surprised to find that the space program and the "controversial

antimissile missile and fallout shelter programs are understood to have the

spending of vast sums of money, not the advancement of science or national

defense, as their principal goals, and to learn that "military" draft policies are

only remotely concerned with defense.

He may be offended to find the organized repression of minority groups, and

even the reestablishment of slavery, seriously (and on the whole favorably

discussed as possible aspects of a world at peace. He is not likely to take kindly

to the notion of the deliberate intensification of air and water pollution (as part

of a program leading to peace), even when the reason for considering it is made

clear. That a world without war will have to turn sooner rather than later to

universal test-tube procreation will be less disturbing, if no more appealing. But

few readers will not be taken aback, at least, by a few lines in the Report's

conclusions, repeated in its formal recommendations, that suggest that the longrange

planning--and "budgeting" -- of the "optimum" number of lives to be

destroyed annually in overt warfare is high on the Group's list of priorities for

government action.

I cite these few examples primarily to warn the general reader what he can

expect. The statesmen and strategists for whose eyes the Report was intended

obviously need no such protective admonition.

This book, of course, is evidence of my response to Doe's request. After

carefully considering the problems that might confront the publisher of the

Report, we took it to The Dial Press. There, its significance was immediately

recognized, and, more important, we were given firm assurances that no outside

pressures of any sort would be permitted to interfere with its publication.

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It should be made clear that Doe does not disagree with the substance of the

Report, which represents as genuine consensus in all important respects. He

constituted a minority of one -- but only on the issue of disclosing it to the

general public. A look at how the Group dealt with this question will be

illuminating

The debate took place at the Group's last full meeting before the Report was

written, late in March, 1966, and again at Iron Mountain. Two facts must be

kept in mind, by way of background. The first is that the Special Study Group

had never been explicitly charged with or sworn to secrecy, either when it was

convened or at any time thereafter. The second is that the Group had

nevertheless operated as if it had been. This was assumed from the

circumstances of its inception and from the tone of its instructions. (The Group's

acknowledgment of help from "the many persons....who contributed so greatly

to our work" is somewhat equivocal; these persons were not told the nature of

the project for which their special resources of information were solicited.)

Those who argued the case for keeping the Report secret were admittedly

motivated by fear of the explosive political effects that could be expected from

publicity. For evidence, they pointed to the suppression of the far less

controversial report of then-Senator Hubert Humphrey's subcommittee on

disarmament in 1962. (Subcommittee members had reportedly feared that it

might be used by Communist propagandists, as Senator Stuart Symington put it,

to "back up the Marxian theory that was production was the reason for the

success of capitalism.") Similar political precautions had been taken with the

better-known Gaither Report in 1957, and even with the so-called Moynihan

Report in 1965.

Furthermore, they insisted, a distinction must be made between serious studies,

which are normally classified unless and until policy makers decide to release

them, and conventional "showcase" projects, organized to demonstrate a

political leadership's concerns about an issue and to deflect the energy of those

pressing for action on it. (The example used, because some of the Group had

participated in it, was a "While House Conference" on intended cooperation,

disarmament, etc., which had been staged late in 1965 to offset complaints

about escalation of Vietnam War.)

Doe acknowledges this distinction, as well as the strong possibility of public

misunderstanding. But he feels that if the sponsoring agency had wanted to

mandate secrecy it could have done so at the outset. It could also have assigned

the project to one of the government's established "think tanks," which normally

work on a classified basis. He scoffed at fear of public reaction, which could 

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have no lasting effect on long-range measures that might be taken to implement

the Group's proposals, and derided the Group's abdication of responsibility for

its opinions and conclusions. So far as he was concerned, there was such a thing

as a public right to know what was being done on its behalf; the burden of proof

was on those who would abridge it.

If my account seems to give Doe the better of the argument, despite his failure

to convince his colleagues, so be it. My participation in this book testifies that I

am not neutral. In my opinion, the decision of the Special Study Group to

censor its own findings was not merely timid but presumptuous. But the refusal,

as of this writing, of the agencies for which the Report was prepared to release

it themselves raises broader questions of public policy. Such questions center on

the continuing use of self-serve definitions of "security" to avoid possible

political embarrassment. It is ironic how often this practice backfires.

I should state, for the record, that I do not share the attitudes toward war and

peace, life and death, and survival of the species manifested in the Report. Few

readers will. In human terms, it is an outrageous document. But it does

represent a serious and challenging effort to define an enormous problem. And

it explains, or certainly appears to explain, aspects of American policy

otherwise incomprehensible by the ordinary standards of common sense. What

we may think of these explanations is something else, but it seems to me that

we are entitled to know not only what they are but whose they are.

By "whose" I don't mean merely the names of the authors of the Report. Much

more important, we have a right to know to what extent their assumptions of

social necessity are shared by the decision-makers in our government. Which do

they accept and which do they reject? However disturbing the answers, only full

and frank discussion offers any conceivable hope of solving the problems raised

by the Special Study Group in their Report from Iron Mountain.

L.C.L. New York June 1967

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BACKGROUND INFORMATION

[The following account of the workings of the Special Study Group is taken

verbatim from a series of tape recorded interviews I had with "John Doe." The

transcript has been edited to minimize the intrusion of my questions and

comments, as well as for length, and the sequence has been revised in the

interest of continuity. L.C.L.]

HOW WAS THE GROUP FORMED?

...The general idea for it, for this kind of study dates back at least to 1961. It

started with some of the new people who came in with the Kennedy

administration, mostly, I think, with McNamara, Bundy, and Rusk. They were

impatient about many things....One of them was that no really serious work had

been done about planning for peace---a long-range peace, that is, with longrang

planning.

Everything that had been written on the subject [before 1961] was superficial.

There was insufficient appreciation of the scope of the problem. The main

reason for this, of course, was that the idea of a real peace in the world, general

disarmament and so on, was looked on as utopian. Or even crack- pot. This is

still true, and it's easy enough to understand when you look at what's going on

in the world today....It was reflected in the studies that had been made up to that

time. They were not realistic...

The idea of the Special Study, the exact form it would take, was worked out

early in '63...The settlement of the Cuban missile affair had something to do

with it, but what helped most to get it moving were the big changes in military

spending that were being planned.....Plants being closed, relocations, and so

forth. Most of it wasn't made public until much later....

[I understand] it took a long time to select the people for the Group. The calls

didn't go out until the summer......

WHO MADE THE SELECTION?

That's something I can't tell you. I wasn't involved with the preliminary

planning. The first I knew of it was when I was called myself. But three of the

people had been in on it, and what the rest of us know we learned from them,

about what went on earlier. I do know that it started very informally. I don't

know what particular government agency approved the project.

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WOULD YOU CARE TO MAKE A GUESS?

All right---I think it was an ad hoc committee, at the cabinet level, or near it. It

had to be. I suppose they gave the organizational job--making arrangements,

paying the bills, and so on---to somebody from the State or Defense of the

National Security Council. Only one of us was in touch with Washington, and I

wasn't the one. But I can tell you that very, very few people knew about

us....For instance, there was the Ackley Committee. It was set up after we were.

If you read their report---the same old tune---economic reconversion, turning

sword plants into plowshare factories...I think you'll wonder if even the

President knew about our Group. The Ackley Committee certainly didn't.

IS THAT POSSIBLE, REALLY? I MEAN THAT NOT EVEN THE

PRESIDENT KNEW OF YOUR COMMISSION?

Well, I don't think there's anything odd about the government attacking a

problem at two different levels. Or even about two or three [government]

agencies working at cross-purposes. It happens all the time. Perhaps the

President did know. And I don't mean to denigrate the Ackley Committee, but it

was exactly that narrowness of approach that we were supposed to get away

from.......

You have to remember -- you've read the Report---that what they wanted from

us was a different kind of thinking. It was a matter of approach. Herman Kahn

calls is "Byzantine"--no agonizing over cultural and religious values. No moral

posturing. It's the kind of thinking that Rand and the Hudson Institute and

I.D.A. (Institute for Defense Analysis.) brought into war planning...What they

asked up to do, and I think we did it, was to give the same kind of treatment to

the hypothetical nuclear war...We may have gone further than they expected,

but once you establish your premises and your logic you can't turn back....

Kahn's books, for example, are misunderstood, at least by laymen. They shock

people. But you see, what's important about them is not his conclusions, or his

opinions. It's the method. He has done more than anyone else I can think of to

get the general public accustomed to the style of modern military

thinking.....Today it's possible for a columnist to write about "counterforce

strategy" and "minimum deterrence" and "credible first strike capability" without

having to explain every other word. He can write about war and strategy

without getting bogged down in questions or morality.......

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The other big difference about or work is breadth. The Report speaks for itself. I

can't say that we took every relevant aspect of life and society into account, but

I don't think we missed anything essential...

WHY WAS THE PROJECT GIVEN TO AN OUTSIDE COMMISSION?

WHY COULDN'T IT HAVE BEEN HANDLED BY AN APPROPRIATE

GOVERNMENT AGENCY?

I think that's obvious, or should be. The kind of thinking wanted from our

Group just isn't to be had in a formal government operation. Too many

constraints. Too many inhibitions. This isn't a new problem. Why else would

outfits like Rand and Hudson stay in business? Any assignment that's at all

sophisticated is almost always given to an outside group. This is true even in the

State Department, in the "gray" operations, those that are supposed to be

unofficial, but are really as official as can be. Also with the C.I.A....

For our study, even the private research centers were too institutional... A lot of

thought went into making sure that our thinking would be unrestricted. All

kinds of little things. The way we were called into the Group, the places we

met, all kinds of subtle devices to remind us. For instance, even our name, the

Special Study Group. You know government names. Wouldn't you think we'd

have been called "Operation Olive Branch," or "Project Pacifica," or something

like that? Nothing like that for us---too allusive, too suggestive. And no minutes

of our meetings---too inhibiting.... About who might be reading them. Of

course, we took notes for our own use. And among ourselves, we usually called

ourselves "The Iron Mountain Boys," or "Our Thing," or whatever came to

mind........

WHAT CAN YOU TELL ME ABOUT THE MEMBERS OF THE

GROUP?

I'll have to stick to generalities....There were fifteen of us. The important thing

was that we represented a very wide range of disciplines. And not all academic.

People from the natural sciences, the social sciences, even the humanities. We

had a lawyer and a businessman. Also, a professional war planner. Also, you

should know that everyone in the Group had done work of distinction in at least

two different fields. The interdisciplinary element was built in.....

It's true that there were no women in the Group, but I don't think that was

significant.....We were all American citizens, of course. And all, I can say, in

very good health, at least when we began.... You see, the first order of business,

at the first meeting, was the reading of dossiers. They were very detailed, and 

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not just professional, but also personal. They included medical histories. I

remember one very curious thing, for whatever it's worth. Most of us, and that

includes me, had a record of abnormally high uric acid concentrations in the

blood...... None of us had ever had this experience, of a public inspection of

credentials, or medical reports. It was very disturbing...

But it was deliberate. The reason for it was to emphasize that we were supposed

to make ALL our own decisions on procedure, without outside rules. This

included judging each other's qualifications and making allowances for possible

bias. I don't think it affected our work directly, but it made the point it was

supposed to make...... That we should ignore absolutely nothing that might

conceivably affect our objectivity.

[At this point I persuaded Doe that a brief occupational description of the

individual members of the Group would serve a useful purpose for readers of

the Report. The list which follows was worked out on paper. (It might be more

accurate to say it was negotiated)/. The problem was to give as much relevant

information as possible without violating Doe's commitment to protect his

colleagues' anonymity. It turned out to be very difficult, especially in the cases

of those members who are very well known. For this reason, secondary areas of

achievement or reputations are usually not shown.

The simple alphabetical "names" were assigned by Doe for convenient

reference; they bear no intended relation to actual names. "Able" was the

Group's Washington contact. It was he who brought and read the dossiers, and

who most often acted as chairman. He, "Baker," and "Cox" were the three who

had been involved in the preliminary planning. There is no other significance to

the order of listing.

"Arthur Able" is an historian and political theorist, who has served in

government.

"Bernard Baker: is a professor of international law and a consultant on

government operations.

"Charles Cox" is an economist, social critic, and biographer.

"John Doe."

"Edward Ellis" is a sociologist often involved in public affairs.

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"Frank Fox" is a cultural anthropologist.

"George Green" is a psychologist, educator, and developer of personnel testing

systems.

"Harold Hill" is a psychiatrist, who has conducted extensive studies of the

relationship between individual and group behavior.

"John Jones" is a scholar and literary critic.

"Martin Miller" is a physical chemist, whose work has received inter- national

recognition at the highest level.

"Paul Peters" is a biochemist, who has made important discoveries bearing on

reproductive processes.

"Richard Roe" is a mathematician affiliated with an independent West Coast

research institution.

"Samuel Smith" is an astronomer, physicist, and communications theorist.

"Thomas Taylor" is a systems analyst and war planner, who has written

extensively on war, peace, and international relations.

"William White" is an industrialist, who has undertaken many special

government assignments.]

HOW DID THE GROUP OPERATE? I MEAN, WHERE AND WHEN

DID YOU MEET, AND SO FORTH?

We met on the average of once a month. Usually it was on weekends, and

usually for two days. We had a few longer sessions, and one that lasted only

four hours. .... We met all over the country, always at a different place, except

for the first and last times, which were at Iron Mountain. It was like a traveling

seminar....Sometimes at hotels, sometimes at universities. Twice we met at

summer camps, and once at a private estate, in Virginia. We used a business

place in Pittsburgh, and another in Poughkeepsie, [New York]....We never met

in Washington, or on government property anywhere....Able would announce

the times and places two meetings ahead. They were never changed.....

We didn't divide into subcommittees, or anything else that formal. But we all

took individual assignments between meetings. A lot of it involved getting 

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information from other people.... Among the fifteen of us, I don't thing there

was anybody in the academic or professional world we couldn't call on if we

wanted to, and we took advantage of it..... We were paid a very modest per

diem. All of it was called "expenses" on the vouchers. We were told not to

report it on our tax returns.... The checks were drawn on a special account of

Able's at a New York bank. He signed them....I don't know what the study cost.

So far as our time and travel were concerned, it couldn't have come to more

than the low six-figure range. But the big item must have been computer time,

and I have no idea how high this ran......

YOU SAY THAT YOU DON'T THINK YOUR WORK WAS AFFECTED

BY PROFESSIONAL BIAS. WHAT ABOUT POLITICAL AND

PHILOSOPHICAL BIAS? IS IT POSSIBLE TO DEAL WITH

QUESTIONS OF WAR AND PEACE WITHOUT REFLECTING

PERSONAL VALUES?

Yes, it is. I can understand your skepticism. But if you had been at any of our

meetings you'd have had a very hard time figuring out who were the liberals and

who were the conservatives, or who were hawks and who were doves. There IS

such a thing as objectivity, and I think we had it... I don't say no one had any

emotional reaction to what we were doing. We all did, to some extent. As a

matter of fact, two members had heart attacks after we were finished, and I'll be

the first to admit it probably wasn't a coincidence.

YOU SAID YOU MADE UP YOUR OWN GROUND RULES. WHAT

WERE THESE GROUND RULES?

The most important were informality and unanimity . By informality I mean

that our discussions were open-ended. We went as far afield as any one of us

thought we had to. For instance, we spent a lot of time on the relationship

between military recruitment policies and industrial employment. Before we

were finished with it, we'd gone through the history of western penal codes and

any number of comparative psychiatric studies [of draftees and volunteers]. We

looked over the organization of the Inca empire. We determined the effects of

automation on underdeveloped societies....It was all relevant....

By unanimity, I don't mean that we kept taking votes, like a jury. I mean that we

stayed with every issue until we had what the Quakers call a "sense of the

meeting." It was time-consuming. But in the long run it saved time. Eventually

we all got on the same wavelength, so to speak.....

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Of course we had differences, and big ones, especially in the beginning... For

instance, in Section I you might think we were merely clarifying our

instructions. Not so; it took a long time before we all agreed to a strict

interpretation.... Roe and Taylor deserve most of the credit for this... There are

many things in the Report that look obvious now, but didn't seem so obvious

then. For instance, on the relationship of war to social systems. The original

premise was conventional, from Clausewitz. .... That war was an "instrument"

of broader political values. Able was the only one who challenged this, at first.

Fox called his position "perverse." Yet it was Fox who furnished most of the

data that led us all to agree with Able eventually. I mention this be- cause I

think it's a good example of the way we worked. A triumph of method over

cliché...... I certainly don't intend to go into details about who took what side

about what, and when. But I will say, to give credit where due, that only Roe,

Able, Hill and Taylor were able to see, at the beginning, where our method was

taking us.

BUT YOU ALWAYS REACHED AGREEMENT, EVENTUALLY?

Yes. It's a unanimous report... I don't mean that our sessions were always

harmonious. Some of them were rough. The last six months there was a lot of

quibbling about small points... We'd been under pressure for a long time, we'd

been working together too long. It was natural.....that we got on each other's

nerves. For a while Able and Taylor weren't speaking to each other. Miller

threatened to quit. But this all passed. There were no important differences...

HOW WAS THE REPORT ACTUALLY WRITTEN? WHO DID THE

WRITING?

We all had a hand in the first draft. Jones and Able put it together, and then

mailed it around for review before working out a final version... The only

problems were the form it should take and whom we were writing it for. And, of

course, the question of disclosure.... [Doe's comments on this point are

summarized in the introduction.]

YOU MENTIONED A "PEACE GAMES" MANUAL. WHAT ARE

PEACE GAMES?

I wanted to say something about that. The Report barely mentions it. "Peace

games" is a method we developed during the course of the study. It's a

forecasting technique, an information system. I'm very excited about it. Even if

nothing is done about our recommendations--which is conceivable--this is

something that can't be ignored. It will revolutionize the study of social

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problems. It's a by-product of the study. We needed a fast, dependable

procedure to approximate the effects of disparate social phenomena on other

social phenomena. We got it. It's in a primitive phase, but it works.

HOW ARE PEACE GAMES PLAYED? ARE THEY LIKE RAND'S WAR

GAMES?

You don't "play" peace games, like chess or Monopoly, any more than you play

war games with toy soldiers. You use computers. It's a programming system. A

computer "language," like Fortran, or Algol, or Jovial.... Its advantage is its

superior capacity to interrelate data with no apparent common points of

reference.... A simple analogy is likely to be misleading. But I can give you

some examples. For instance, supposing I asked you to figure out what effect a

moon landing by U.S. astronauts would have on an election in, say, Sweden. Or

what effect a change in the draft law--a specific change--would have on the

value of real estate in downtown Manhattan? Or a certain change in college

entrance requirements in the United States on the British shipping industry?

You would probably say, first, that there would be no effect to speak of, and

second, that there would be no way of telling. But you'd be wrong on both

counts. In each case there would be an effect, and the peace games method

could tell you what it would be, quantitatively. I didn't take these examples out

of the air. We used them in working out the method....Essentially, it's an

elaborate high-speed trial-and-error system for determining working algorithms.

Like most sophisticated types of computer problem-solving...

A lot of the "games" of this kind you read about are just glorified and

conversational exercises. They really are games, and nothing more. I just saw

one reported in the Canadian Computer Society Bulletin, called a "Vietnam

Peace Game." They use simulation techniques, but the programming hypotheses

are speculative....

The idea of a problem-solving system like this is not original with us. ARPA

(the Advanced Research Projects Agency, of the Department of Defense DoD.)

has been working on something like it. So has General Electric, in California.

There are others..... We were successful not because we know more than they

do about programming, which we don't, but because we leaned how to

formulate the problems accurately. It goes back to the old saw. You can always

find the answer if you know the right question.....

SUPPOSING YOU HADN'T DEVELOPED THIS METHOD. WOULD

YOU HAVE COME TO THE SAME CONCLUSIONS IN THE REPORT?

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Certainly. But it would have taken many times longer. But please don't

misunderstand my enthusiasm [about the peace games method]. With all due

respect to the effects of computer technology on modern thinking, basic

judgments must still be made by human beings. The peace games technique isn't

responsible for our Report. We are.

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STATEMENT BY "JOHN DOE"

Contrary to the decision of the Special Study Group, of which I was a member,

I have arranged for the general release of our Report. I am grateful to Mr.

Leonard C. Lewin for his invaluable assistance in making this possible, and to

The Dial Press for accepting the challenge of publication. Responsibility for

taking this step, however, is mine and mine alone.

I am well aware that my action may be taken as a breach of faith by some of my

former colleagues. But in my view my responsibility to the society for which I

am a part supersedes any self-assumed obligation on the part of fifteen

individual men. Since our Report can be considered on its merits, it is not

necessary for me to disclose their identity to accomplish my purpose. Yet I

gladly abandon my own anonymity it is were possible to do so without at the

same time comprising theirs, to defend our work publicly if and when they

release me from this personal bond.

But this is secondary. What is needed now, and needed badly, is widespread

public discussion and debate about the elements of war and the problems of

peace. I hope that publication of this Report will serve to initiate it.

18

THE REPORT OF THE SPECIAL STUDY GROUP

LETTER OF TRANSMITTAL

To the convener of this Group:

Attached is the Report of the Special Study Group established by you in

August, 1963, 1) to consider the problems involved in the contingency of a

transition to a general condition of peace, and 2) to recommend procedures for

dealing with this contingency. For the convenience of nontechnical readers we

have elected to submit our statistical supporting data, totaling 604 exhibits,

separately, as well as a preliminary manual of the "peace games" method

devised during the course of our study.

We have completed our assignment to the best of our ability, subject to the

limitations of time and resources available to us. Our conclusions of fact and

our recommendations are unanimous; those of use who differ in certain

secondary respects from the findings set forth herein do not consider these

differences sufficient to warrant the filing of a minority report. It is our earnest

hope that the fruits of our deliberations will be of value to our government in its

efforts to provide leadership to the nation in solving the complex and farreaching

problems we have examined, and that our recommendations for

subsequent Presidential action in this area will be adopted.

Because of the unusual circumstances surrounding the establishment of this

Group, and in view of the nature of its findings, we do not recommend that this

Report be released for publication. It is our affirmative judgment that such

action would not be in the public interest. The uncertain advantages of public

discussion of our conclusions and recommendations are, in our opinion, greatly

outweighed by the clear and predictable danger of a crisis in public confidence

which untimely publication of this Report might be expected to provoke. The

likelihood that a lay reader, unexposed to the exigencies of higher political or

military responsibility, will misconstrue the purpose of this project, and the

intent of its participants, seems obvious. We urge that circulation of this Report

be closely restricted to those whose responsibilities require that they be apprised

of its contents.

We deeply regret that the necessity of anonymity, a prerequisite to our Group's

unhindered pursuit of its objectives, precludes proper acknowledgment of our

gratitude to the many persons in and out of government who contributed so

greatly to our work.

19

FOR THE SPECIAL STUDY GROUP

[signature withheld for publication]

30 SEPTEMBER, 1966

INTRODUCTION

The Report which follows summarizes the results of a two-and-a-half-year

study of the broad problems to be anticipated in the event of general transformation

of American society to a condition lacking its most critical current

characteristics: its capability and readiness to make war when doing so is

judged necessary or desirable by its political leadership.

Our work has been predicated on the belief that some kind of general peace may

soon be negotiable. The de facto admission of Communist China into the United

Nations now appears to be only a few years away at most. It has become

increasingly manifest that conflicts of American national interest with those of

China and the Soviet Union are susceptible of political solution, despite the

superficial contraindications of the current Vietnam war, of the threats of an

attack on China, and of the necessarily hostile tenor of day-to-day foreign

policy statements. It is also obvious that differences involving other nations can

be readily resolved by the three great powers whenever they arrive at a stable

peace among themselves. It is not necessary, for the purposes of our study, to

assume that a general detente of this sort will come about---and we make no

such argument--but only that it may.

It is surely no exaggeration to say that a condition of general world peace would

lead to changes in the social structures of the nations of the world of

unparalleled and revolutionary magnitude. The economic impact of general

disarmament, to name only the most obvious consequence of peace, would

revise the production and distribution patterns of the globe to a degree that

would make changes of the past fifty years seem insignificant. Political,

sociological, cultural, and ecological changes would be equally far-reaching.

What has motivated our study of these contingencies has been the growing

sense of thoughtful men in and out of government that the world is totally

unprepared to meet the demands of such a situation.

We had originally planned, when our study was initiated, to address ourselves

to these two broad questions and their components: What can be expected if

peace comes? What should we be prepared to do about it? But as our

investigation proceeded, it became apparent that certain other questions had to 

20

be faced. What, for instance, are the real functions of war in modern societies,

beyond the ostensible ones of defending and advancing the "national interests"

of nations? In the absence of war, what other institutions exist or might be

devised to fulfill these functions? Granting that a "peaceful" settlement of

disputes is within the range of current international relationships, is the

abolition of war, in the broad sense, really possible? If so, is it necessarily

desirable, in terms of social stability? If not, what can be done to improve the

operation of our social system in respect to its war-readiness?

The word peace, as we have used it in the following pages, describes a

permanent, or quasi-permanent, condition entirely free from the national

exercise, or contemplation, of any form of the organized social violence, or

threat of violence, generally known as war. It implies total and general

disarmament. It is not used to describe the more familiar condition of "cold

war," "armed peace," or other mere respite, long or short, from armed conflict.

Nor is it used simply as a synonym for the political settlement of international

differences. The magnitude of modern means of mass destruction and the speed

of modern communications require the unqualified working definition given

above; only a generation ago such an absolute description would have seemed

utopian rather than pragmatic. Today, any modification of this definition would

render it almost worthless for our purpose. By the same standard, we have used

the work war to apply interchangeably to conventional ("hot") war, to the

general condition of war preparation or war readiness, and to the general "war

system." The sense intended is made clear in context.

The first section of our Report deals with its scope and with the assumptions on

which our study was based. The second considers the effects of disarmament on

the economy, the subject of most peace research to date. The third takes up socalled

"disarmament scenarios" which have been proposed. The fourth, fifth,

and sixth examine the nonmilitary functions of war and the problems they raise

for a viable transition to peace; here will be found some indications of the true

dimensions of the problem, not previously coordinated in any other study. In the

seventh section we summarize our findings, and in the eight we set forth our

recommendations for what we believe to be a practical and necessary course of

action.

21

SECTION 1 - SCOPE OF THE STUDY

When The Special Study Group was established in August, 1963, its members

were instructed to govern their deliberations in accordance with three principal

criteria. Briefly stated, they were these: 1) military-style objectivity; 2)

avoidance of preconceived value assumptions; 3) inclusion of all relevant areas

of theory and data.

These guideposts are by no means as obvious as they may appear at first glance,

and we believe it necessary to indicate clearly how they were to inform our

work. For they express succinctly the limitations of previous "peace studies,"

and imply the nature of both government and unofficial dissatisfaction with

these earlier efforts. It is not our intention here to minimize the significance of

the work of our predecessors, or to belittle the quality of their contributions.

What we have tried to do, and believe we have done, is extend their scope. We

hope that our conclusions may serve in turn as a starting point for still broader

and more detailed examinations of every aspect of the problems of transition to

peace and of the questions which must be answer- ed before such a transition

can be allowed to get under way.

It is a truism that objectivity is more often an intention expressed than an

attitude achieved, but the intention---conscious, unambiguous, and constantly

self-critical -- is a precondition to its achievement. We believe it no accident

that we were charged to use a "military contingency" model for our study, and

we owe a considerable debt to the civilian war planning agencies for their

pioneering work in the objective examination of the contingencies of nuclear

war. There is no such precedent in the peace studies. Much of the usefulness of

even the most elaborate and carefully reasoned programs for economic

conversion to peace, for example, has been vitiated by a wishful eagerness to

demonstrate that peace is not only possible, but even cheap or easy. One official

report is replete with references to the critical role of "dynamic optimism" on

economic developments, and goes on to submit, as evidence, that it "would be

hard to imagine that the American people would not respond very positively to

an agreed and safeguarded program to substitute an international rule of law and

order," etc. Another line of argument frequently taken is that disarmament

would entail comparatively little disruption of the economy, since it need only

be partial; we will deal with this approach later. Yet genuine objectivity in war

studies is often critized as inhuman. As Herman Kahn, the writer on strategic

studies best known to the general public, put it: "Critics frequently object to the

icy rationality of the Hudson Institute, the Rand Corporation, and other such

organizations. I'm always tempted to ask in reply, `Would you prefer a warm,

human error? Do you feel better with a nice emotional mistake.'" And, as

22

Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara has pointed out, in reference to

facing up to the possibility of nuclear war, "Some people are afraid even to look

over the edge. But in a thermonuclear war we cannot afford any political

acrophobia." Surely it would be self-evident that this applies equally to the

opposite prospect, but so far no one has taken more than a timid glance over the

brink of peace.

An intention to avoid preconceived value judgments is if anything even more

productive of self-delusion. We claim no immunity, as individuals, from this

type of bias, but we have made a continuously self-conscious effort to deal with

the problems of peace without, for example, considering that a condition of

peace is per se "good" or "bad." This has not been easy, but it has been

obligatory; to our knowledge, it has not been done before. Previous studies have

taken the desirability of peace, the importance of human life, the superiority of

democratic institutions, the greatest "good" for the greatest number, the

"dignity" of the individual, the desirability of maximum health and longevity,

and other such wishful premises as axiomatic values necessary for the

justification of a study of peace issues. We have not found them so. We have

attempted to apply the standards of physical science to our thinking, the

principal characteristic of which is not quantification, as is popularly believed,

but that, in Whitehead's words, "...it ignores all judgments of value; for instance,

all aesthetic and moral judgments." Yet it is obvious that any serious

investigation of a problem, however "pure," must be informed by some

normative standard. In this case it has been simply the survival of human

society in general, of American society in particular, and, as a corollary to

survival, the stability of this society.

It is interesting, we believe, to note that the most dispassionate planners of

nuclear strategy also recognize that the stability of society is the one bedrock

value that cannot be avoided. Secretary McNamara has defended the need for

American nuclear superiority on the grounds that it "makes possible a strategy

designed to preserve the fabric of our societies if war should occur." A former

member of the Department of State policy planning staff goes further. "A more

precise word for peace, in terms of the practical world, is stability. ... Today the

great nuclear panoplies are essential elements in such stability as exists. Our

present purpose must be to continue the process of learning how to live with

them." We, of course, do not equate stability with peace, but we accept it as the

one common assumed objective of both peace and war.

The third criterion-breadth-has taken us still farther afield from peace studies

made to date. It is obvious to any layman that the economic patterns of a

warless world will be drastically different from those we live with today, and it

23

is equally obvious that the political relationships of nations will not be those we

have learned to take for granted, sometimes described as a global version of the

adversary system of our common law. But the social implications of peace

extend far beyond its putative effects on national economics and international

relations. As we shall show, the relevance of peace and war to the internal

political organization of societies, to the sociological relationships of their

members, to psychological motivations, to ecological processes, and to cultural

values is equally profound. More important, it is equally critical in assaying the

consequences of a transition to peace, and in deter- mining the feasibility of any

transition at all.

It is not surprising that these less obvious factors have been generally ignored in

peace research. They have not lent themselves to systematic analysis. They have

been difficult, perhaps impossible, to measure with any degree of assurance that

estimates of their effects could be depended on. They are "intangibles," but only

in the sense that abstract concepts in mathematics are intangible compared to

those which can be quantified. Economic factors, on the other hand, can be

measured, at least superficially; and international relationships can be

verbalized, like law, into logical sequences.

We do not claim that we have discovered an infallible way of measuring these

other factors, or of assigning them precise weights in the equation of transition.

But we believe we have taken their relative importance into account to this

extent: we have removed them from the category of the "intangible," hence

scientifically suspect and therefore somehow of secondary importance, and

brought them out into the realm of the objective. The result, we believe,

provides a context of realism for the discussion of the issues relating to the

possible transition to peace which up to now has been missing.

This is not to say that we presume to have found the answers we were seeking.

But we believe that our emphasis on breadth of scope has made it at least

possible to begin to understand the questions.

24

SECTION 2 - DISARMAMENT AND THE ECONOMY

In this section we shall briefly examine some of the common features of the

studies that have been published dealing with one or another aspect of the

expected impact of disarmament on the American economy. Whether

disarmament is considered as a by-product of peace or as its precondition, its

effect on the national economy will in either case be the most immediately felt

of its consequences. The quasi-mensurable quality of economic manifestations

has given rise to more detailed speculation in this area than in any other.

General agreement prevails in respect to the more important economic problems

that general disarmament would raise. A short survey of these problems, rather

than a detailed critique of their comparative significance, is sufficient for our

purposes in this Report.

The first factor is that of size. The "world war industry," as one writer has aptly

called it, accounts for approximately a tenth of the output of the world's total

economy. Although this figure is subject to fluctuation, the causes of which are

themselves subject to regional variation, it tends to hold fairly steady. The

United States, as the world's richest nation, not only accounts for the largest

single share of this expense, currently upward of $60 billion a year, but also

"...has devoted a higher proportion [emphasis added] of its gross national

product to its military establishment than any other major free world nation.

This was true even before our increased expenditures in Southeast Asia." Plans

for economic conversion that minimize the economic magnitude of the problem

do so only by rationalizing, however persuasively, the maintenance of a

substantial residual military budget under some euphemized classification.

Conversion of military expenditures to other purposes entails a number of

difficulties. The most serious stems from the degree of rigid specialization that

characterizes modern war production, best exemplified in nuclear and missile

technology. This constituted no fundamental problem after World War II, nor

did the question of free-market consumer demand for "conventional" items of

consumption---those good and services consumers had already been

conditioned to require. Today's situation is qualitatively different in both

respects.

This inflexibility is geographical and occupational, as well as industrial, a fact

which has led most analysts of the economic impact of disarmament to focus

their attention on phased plans for the relocation of war industry personnel and

capital installations as much as on proposals for developing new patterns of

consumption. One serious flaw common to such plans is the kind called in the

25

natural sciences the "macroscopic error." An implicit presumption is made that

a total national plan for conversion differs from a community program to cope

with the shutting down of a "defense facility" only in degree. We find no reason

to believe that this is the case, nor that a general enlargement of such local

programs, however well thought out in terms of housing, occupational

retraining, and the like, can be applied on a national scale. A national economy

can absorb almost any number of subsidiary reorganizations within its total

limits, providing there is no basic change in its own structure. General

disarmament, which would require such basic changes, lends itself to no valid

smaller-scale analogy.

Even more questionable are the models proposed for the retaining labor for

nonarmaments occupations. Putting aside for the moment the unsolved

questions dealing with the nature of new distribution patterns---retraining for

what?-- the increasingly specialized job skills associated with war industry

production are further depreciated by the accelerating inroads of the industrial

techniques loosely described as "automation." It is not too much to say that

general disarmament would require the scrapping of a critical proportion of the

most highly developed occupational specialties in the economy. The political

difficulties inherent in such an "adjustment" would make the outcries resulting

from the closing of a few obsolete military and naval installations in 1964 sound

like a whisper.

In general, discussions of the problem of conversion have been characterized by

an unwillingness to recognize its special quality. This is best exemplified by the

1965 report of the Ackley Committee. One critic has tellingly pointed out that it

blindly assumes that "...nothing in the arms economy--neither its size, nor its

geographical concentration, nor its highly specialized nature, nor the

peculiarities of its market, nor the special nature of much of its labor force---

endows it with any uniqueness when the necessary time of adjustment comes."

Let us assume, however, despite the lack of evidence that a viable program for

conversion can be developed in the framework of the existing economy, that the

problems noted above can be solved. What proposals have been offered for

utilizing the productive capabilities that disarmament would presumably

release?

The most common held theory is simply that general economic reinvestment

would absorb the greater part of these capabilities. Even though it is now

largely taken for granted (and even by today's equivalent of traditional laissezfaire

economists) that unprecedented government assistance (and concomitant

government control) will be needed to solve the "structural" problems of

26

transition, a general attitude of confidence prevails that new consumption

patterns will take up the slack. What is less clear is the nature of these patterns.

One school of economists has it that these patterns will develop on their own. It

envisages the equivalent of the arms budget being returned, under careful

control, to the consumer, in the form of tax cuts. Another, recognizing the

undeniable need for increased "consumption" in what is generally considered

the public sector of the economy, stresses vastly increased government spending

in such areas of national concern as health, education, mass transportation, lowcost

housing, water supply, control of the physical environment, and, stated

generally, "poverty."

The mechanisms proposed for controlling the transition to an arms-free

economy are also traditional--changes in both sides of the federal budget,

manipulation of interest rates, etc. We acknowledge the undeniable value of

fiscal tools in a normal cyclical economy, where they provide leverage to

accelerate or brake an existing trend. Their more committed proponents,

however, tend to lose sight of the fact that there is a limit to the power of these

devices to influence fundamental economic forces. They can provide new

incentives in the economy, but they cannot in themselves transform the

production of a billion dollars' worth of missiles a year to the equivalent in food,

clothing, prefabricated houses, or television sets. At bottom, they reflect the

economy; they do not motivate it.

More sophisticated, and less sanguine, analysts contemplate the diversion of the

arms budget to a non-military system equally remote from the market economy.

What the "pyramid-builders" frequently suggest is the expansion of spaceresearch

programs to the dollar level of current expenditures. This approach has

the superficial merit of reducing the size of the problem of transferability of

resources, but introduces other difficulties, which we will take up in section 6.

Without singling out any one of the several major studies of the expected

impact of disarmament on the economy for special criticism, we can summarize

our objections to them in general terms as follows:

No proposed program for economic conversion to disarmament sufficiently

takes into account the unique magnitude of the required adjustments it would

entail.

27

Proposals to transform arms production into a beneficent scheme of public

works are more the products of wishful thinking than of realistic understanding

of the limits of our existing economic system.

Fiscal and monetary measures are inadequate as controls for the process of

transition to an arms-free economy.

Insufficient attention has been paid to the political acceptability of the

objectives of the proposed conversion models, as well as of the political means

to be employed in effectuating a transition.

No serious consideration has been given, in any proposed conversion plan, to

the fundamental nonmilitary function of war and armaments in modern society,

nor has any explicit attempt been made to devise a viable substitute for it. This

criticism will be developed in sections 5 and 6.

28

SECTION 3 - DISARMAMENT SCENARIOS

SCENARIOS, as they have come to be called, are hypothetical constructions of

future events. Inevitably, they are composed of varying proportions of

established fact, reasonable inference, and more or less inspired guesswork.

Those which have been suggested as model procedures for effectuating

international arms control and eventual disarmament are necessarily

imaginative, although closely reasoned; in this respect they resemble the "war

games" analyses of the Rand Corporation, with which they share a common

conceptual origin.

All such scenarios that have been seriously put forth imply a dependence on

bilateral or multilateral agreement between the great powers. In general, they

call for a progressive phasing out of gross armaments, military forces, weapons,

and weapons technology, coordinated with elaborate matching procedures of

verification, inspection, and machinery for the settlement of international

disputes. It should be noted that even proponents of unilateral disarmament

qualify their proposals with an implied requirement of reciprocity, very much in

the manner of a scenario of graduated response in nuclear war. The advantage

of unilateral initiative lies in its political value as an expression of good faith, as

well as in its diplomatic function as a catalyst for formal disarmament

negotiations.

The READ model for disarmament (developed by the Research Program on

Economic Adjustments to Disarmament) is typical of these scenarios. It is a

twelve-year program, divided into three-year stages. Each stage includes a

separate phase of: reduction of armed forces; cutbacks of weapons production,

inventories, and foreign military bases; development of international inspection

procedures and control conventions; and the building up of a sovereign

international disarmament organization. It anticipates a net matching decline in

U.S. defense expenditures of only somewhat more than half the 1965 level, but

a necessary redeployment of some five-sixths of the defense-dependent labor

force.

The economic implications assigned by their authors to various disarmament

scenarios diverge widely. The more conservative models, like that cited above,

emphasize economic as well as military prudence in postulating elaborate failsafe

disarmament agencies, which themselves require expenditures substantially

substituting for those of the displaced war industries. Such programs stress the

advantages of the smaller economic adjustment entailed. Others emphasize, on

the contrary, the magnitude (and the opposite advantages) of the savings to be

achieved from disarmament. One widely read analysis estimates the annual cost

29

of the inspection function of general disarmament throughout the world as only

between two and three percent of current military expenditures. Both types of

plan tend to deal with the anticipated problem of economic reinvestment only in

the aggregate. We have seen no proposed disarmament sequence that correlates

the phasing out of specific kinds of military spending with specific new forms

of substitute spending.

Without examining disarmament scenarios in greater detail, we may

characterize them with these general comments:

Given genuine agreement of intent among the great powers, the scheduling of

arms control and elimination presents no inherently insurmountable procedural

problems. Any of several proposed sequences might serve as the basis for

multilateral agreement or for the first step in unilateral arms reduction.

No major power can proceed with such a program, however, until it has

developed an economic conversion plan fully integrated with each phase of

disarmament. No such plan has yet been developed in the United States.

Furthermore, disarmament scenarios, like proposals for economic conversion,

make no allowance for the non-military functions of war in modern societies,

and offer no surrogate for these necessary functions. One partial exception is a

proposal for the "unarmed forces of the United States," which we will consider

in section 6.

30

SECTION 4 - WAR AND PEACE AS SOCIAL SYSTEMS

We have dealt only sketchily with proposed disarmament scenarios and

economic analyses, but the reason for our seemingly casual dismissal of so

much serious and sophisticated work lies in no disrespect for its competence. It

is rather a question of relevance. To put it plainly, all these programs, however

detailed and well developed, are abstractions. The most carefully reasoned

disarmament sequence inevitably reads more like the rules of a game or a

classroom exercise in logic than like a prognosis of real events in the real world.

This is as true of today's complex proposals as it was of the Abbé de St. Pierre's

"Plan for Perpetual Peace in Europe" 250 years ago.

Some essential element has clearly been lacking in all these schemes. One of

our first tasks was to try to bring this missing quality into definable focus, and

we believe we have succeeded in doing so. We find that at the heart of every

peace study we have examined--from the modest technological proposal (e.g.,

to convert a poison gas plant to the production of "socially useful" equivalents)

to the most elaborate scenario for universal peace in out time--lies one common

fundamental misconception. It is the source of the miasma of unreality

surrounding such plans. It is the incorrect assumption that war, as an institution,

is subordinate to the social systems it is believed to serve.

This misconception, although profound and far-reaching, is entirely

comprehensible. Few social clichés are so unquestioningly accepted as the

notion that war is an extension of diplomacy (or of politics, or of the pursuit of

economic objectives). If this were true, it would be wholly appropriate for

economists and political theorists to look on the problems of transition to peace

as essentially mechanical or procedural---as indeed they do, treating them as

logistic corollaries of the settlement of national conflicts of interest. If this were

true, there would be no real substance to the difficulties of transition. For it is

evident that even in today's world there exist no conceivable conflict of interest,

real or imaginary, between nations or between social forces within nations, that

cannot be resolved without recourse to war--if such resolution were assigned a

priority of social value. And if this were true, the economic analyses and

disarmament proposals we have referred to, plausible and well conceived as

they may be, would not inspire, as they do, an inescapable sense of indirection.

The point is that the cliché is not true, and the problems of transition are indeed

substantive rather than merely procedural. Although was is "used" as an

instrument of national and social policy, the fact that a society is organized for

any degree of readiness for war supersedes its political and economic structure.

War itself is the basic social system, within which other secondary modes of

31

social organization conflict or conspire. It is the system which has governed

most human societies of record, as it is today.

Once this is correctly understood, the true magnitude of the problems entailed in

a transition to peace---itself a social system, but without precedent except in a

few simple preindustrial societies---becomes apparent. At the same time, some

of the puzzling superficial contradictions of modern societies can then be

readily rationalized. The "unnecessary" size and power of the world war

industry; the preeminence of the military establishment in every society,

whether open or concealed; the exemption of military or paramilitary

institutions from the accepted social and legal standards of behavior required

elsewhere in the society; the successful operation of the armed forces and the

armaments producers entirely outside the framework of each nation's economic

ground rules: these and other ambiguities closely associated with the

relationship of war to society are easily clarified, once the priority of warmaking

potential as the principal structuring force in society is accepted.

Economic systems, political philosophies, and corpora jures serve and extend

the war system, not vice versa.

It must be emphasized that the precedence of a society's war-making potential

over its other characteristics is not the result of the "threat" presumed to exist at

any one time from other societies. This is the reverse of the basic situation;

"threats" against the "national interest" are usually created or accelerated to

meet the changing needs of the war system. Only in comparatively recent times

has it been considered politically expedient to euphemize war budgets as

"defense" requirements. The necessity for governments to distinguish between

"aggression" (bad) and "defense" (good) has been a by-product of rising literacy

and rapid communication. The distinction is tactical only, a concession to the

growing inadequacy of ancient war-organizing political rationales.

Wars are not "caused" by international conflicts of interest. Proper logical

sequence would make it more often accurate to say that war-making societies

require---and thus bring about---such conflicts. The capacity of a nation to make

war expresses the greatest social power it can exercise; war-making, active or

contemplated, is a matter of life and death on the greatest scale subject to social

control. It should therefore hardly be surprising that the military institutions in

each society claim its highest priorities.

We find further that most of the confusion surrounding the myth that warmaking

is a tool of state policy stems from a general misapprehension of the

functions of war. In general, these are conceived as: to defend a nation from

military attack by another, or to deter such an attack; to defend or advance a

32

"national interest"--economic, political, ideological; to maintain or in- crease a

nation's military power for its own sake. These are the visible, or ostensible,

functions of war. If there were no others, the importance of the war

establishment in each society might in fact decline to the subordinate level it is

believed to occupy. And the elimination of war would indeed be the procedural

matter that the disarmament scenarios suggest.

But there are other, broader, more profoundly felt functions of war in modern

societies. It is these invisible, or implied, functions that maintain war-readiness

as the dominant force in our societies. And it is the unwillingness or inability of

the writers of disarmament scenarios and reconversion plans to take them into

account that has so reduced the usefulness of their work, and that has made it

seem unrelated to the world we know.

33

SECTION 5 - THE FUNCTIONS OF WAR

As we have indicated, the preeminence of the concept of war as the principal

organizing force in most societies has been insufficiently appreciated. This is

also true of its extensive effects throughout the many nonmilitary activities of

society. These effects are less apparent in complex industrial societies like our

own than in primitive cultures, the activities of which can be more easily and

fully comprehended.

We propose in this section to examine these nonmilitary, implied, and usually

invisible functions of war, to the extent that they bear on the problems of

transition to peace for our society. The military, or ostensible, function of the

war system requires no elaboration; it serves simply to defend or advance the

"national interest" by means of organized violence. It is often necessary for a

national military establishment to create a need for its unique powers--to

maintain the franchise, so to speak. And a healthy military apparatus requires

"exercise," by whatever rationale seems expedient, to prevent its atrophy.

The nonmilitary functions of the war system are more basic. They exist not

merely to justify themselves but to serve broader social purposes. If and when

war is eliminated, the military functions it has served will end with it. But its

nonmilitary functions will not. It is essential, therefore, that we understand their

significance before we can reasonably expect to evaluate whatever institutions

may be proposed to replace them.

ECONOMIC

The production of weapons of mass destruction has always been associated with

economic "waste." The term is pejorative, since it implies a failure of function.

But no human activity can properly be considered wasteful if it achieves its

contextual objective. The phrase "wasteful but necessary," applied not only to

war expenditures but to most of the "unproductive" commercial activities of our

society, is a contradiction in terms. "...The attacks that have since the time of

Samuel's criticism of King Saul been leveled against military expenditures as

waste may well have concealed or misunderstood the point that some kinds of

waste may have a larger social utility."

In the case of military "waste," there is indeed a larger social utility. It derives

from the fact that the "wastefulness" of war production is exercised entirely

outside the framework of the economy of supply and demand. As such, it

provides the only critically large segment of the total economy that is subject to

complete and arbitrary central control. If modern industrial societies can be

34

defined as those which have developed the capacity to produce more than is

required for their economic survival (regardless of the equities of distribution of

goods within them), military spending can be said to furnish the only balance

wheel with sufficient inertia to stabilize the advance of their economies. The

fact that war is "wasteful" is what enables it to serve this function. And the

faster the economy advances, the heavier this balance wheel must be.

This function is often viewed, oversimply, as a device for the control of

surpluses. One writer on the subject puts it this way: "Why is war so wonderful?

Because it creates artificial demand...the only kind of artificial demand,

moreover, that does not raise any political issues: war, and only war, solves the

problem of inventory." The reference here is to shooting war, but it applies

equally to the general war economy as well. "It is generally agreed," concludes,

more cautiously, the report of a panel set up by the U.S. Arms Control and

Disarmament Agency, "that the greatly expanded public sector since World War

II, resulting from heavy defense expenditures, has provided additional

protection against depressions, since this sector is not responsive to contraction

in the private sector and has provided a sort of buffer or balance wheel

in the economy."

The principal economic function of war, in our view, is that it provides just such

a flywheel. It is not to be confused in function with the various forms of fiscal

control, none of which directly engages vast numbers of control, none of which

directly engages vast numbers of men and units of production. It is not to be

confused with massive government expenditures in social welfare programs;

once initiated, such programs normally become integral parts of the general

economy and are no longer subject to arbitrary control.

But even in the context of the general civilian economy war cannot be

considered wholly "wasteful." Without a long-established war economy, and

without its frequent eruption into large-scale shooting war, most of the major

industrial advances known to history, beginning with the development of iron,

could never have taken place. Weapons technology structures the economy.

According to the writer cited above, "Nothing is more ironic or revealing about

our society than the fact that hugely destructive war is a very progressive force

in it. ... War production is progressive because it is production that would not

otherwise have taken place. (It is not so widely appreciated, for example, that

the civilian standard of living rose during World War II.)" This is not "ironic or

revealing," but essentially a simple statement of fact.

It should also be noted that the war production has a dependably stimulating

effect outside itself. Far from constituting a "wasteful" drain on the economy,

35

war spending, considered pragmatically, has been a consistently positive factor

in the rise of gross national product and of individual productivity. A former

Secretary of the Army has carefully phrased it for public consumption thus: "If

there is, as I suspect there is, a direct relation between the stimulus of large

defense spending and a substantially increased rate of growth of gross national

product, it quite simply follows that defense spending per se might be

countenanced on economic grounds alone [emphasis added] as a stimulator of

the national metabolism." Actually, the fundamental nonmilitary utility of war

in the economy is far more widely acknowledged than the scarcity of such

affirmations as that quoted above would suggest.

But negatively phrased public recognitions of the importance of war to the

general economy abound. The most familiar example is the effect of "peace

threats" on the stock market, e.g., "Wall Street was shaken yesterday by news of

an apparent peace feeler from North Vietnam, but swiftly recovered its

composure after about an hour of sometimes indiscriminate selling." Savings

banks solicit deposits with similar cautionary slogans, e.g., "If peace breaks out,

will you be ready for it?" A more subtle case in point was the recent refusal of

the Department of Defense to permit the West German government to substitute

nonmilitary goods for unwanted armaments in its purchase commitments from

the United States; the decisive consideration was that the German purchases

should not affect the general (nonmilitary) economy. Other incidental examples

are to be found in the pressures brought to bear on the Department when it

announces plans to close down an obsolete facility (as a "wasteful" form of

"waste"). and in the usual coordination of stepped-up military activities (as in

Vietnam in 1965) with dangerously rising unemployment rates.

Although we do not imply that a substitute for war in the economy cannot be

devised, no combination of techniques for controlling employment, production,

and consumption has yet been tested that can remotely compare to it in

effectiveness. It is, and has been, the essential economic stabilizer of modern

societies.

POLITICAL

The political functions of war have been up to now even more critical to social

stability. It is not surprising, nevertheless, that discussions of economic

conversion for peace tend to fall silent on the matter of political

implementation, and that disarmament scenarios, often sophisticated in their

weighing of international political factors, tend to disregard the political

functions of the war system within individual societies.

36

These functions are essentially organizational. First of all, the existence of a

society as a political "nation" requires as part of its definition an attitude of

relationship toward other "nations." This is what we usually call a foreign

policy. But a nation's foreign policy can have no substance if it lacks the means

of enforcing its attitude toward other nations. It can do this in a credible manner

only if it implies the threat of maximum political organization for this purpose--

which is to say that it is organized to some degree for war. War, then, as we

have defined it to include all national activities that recognize the possibility of

armed conflict, is itself the defining element of any nation's existence vis-a-vis

any other nation. Since it is historically axiomatic that the existence of any form

of weaponry insures its use, we have used the work "peace" as virtually

synonymous with disarmament. By the same token, "war" is virtually

synonymous with nationhood. The elimination of war implies the inevitable

elimination of national sovereignty and the traditional nation-state.

The war system not only has been essential to the existence of nations as

independent political entities, but has been equally indispensable to their stable

internal political structure. Without it, no government has ever been able to

obtain acquiescence in its "legitimacy," or right to rule its society. The

possibility of war provides the sense of external necessity without which nor

government can long remain in power. The historical record reveals one

instance after another where the failure of a regime to maintain the credibility of

a war threat led to its dissolution, by the forces of private interest, or reactions

to social injustice, or of other disintegrative elements. The organization of a

society for the possibility of war is its principal political stabilizer. It is ironic

that this primary function of war has been generally recognized by historians

only where it has been expressly acknowledged--in the pirate societies of the

great conquerors.

The basic authority of a modern state over its people resides in its war powers.

(There is, in fact, good reason to believe that codified law had its origins in the

rules of conduct established by military victors for dealing with the defeated

enemy, which were later adapted to apply to all subject populations.) On a dayto-day

basis, it is represented by the institution of police, armed organizations

charged expressly with dealing with "internal enemies" in a military manner.

Like the conventional "external" military, the police are also substantially

exempt from many civilian legal restraints on their social behavior. In some

countries, the artificial distinction between police and other military forces does

not exist. On the long-term basis, a government's emergency war powers --

inherent in the structure of even the most libertarian of nations -- define the

most significant aspect of the relation between state and citizen.

37

In advanced modern democratic societies, the war system has provided political

leaders with another political-economic function of increasing importance: it

has served as the last great safeguard against the elimination of necessary social

classes. As economic productivity increases to a level further and further above

that of minimum subsistence, it becomes more and more difficult for a society

to maintain distribution patterns insuring the existence of "hewers of wood and

drawers of water". The further progress of automation can be expected to

differentiate still more sharply between "superior" workers and what Ricardo

called "menials," while simultaneously aggravating the problem of maintaining

an unskilled labor supply.

The arbitrary nature of war expenditures and of other military activities make

them ideally suited to control these essential class relationships. Obviously, if

the war system were to be discarded, new political machinery would be needed

at once to serve this vital subfunction. Until it is developed, the continuance of

the war system must be assured, if for no other reason, among others, than to

preserve whatever quality and degree of poverty a society requires as an

incentive, as well as to maintain the stability of its internal organization of

power.

SOCIOLOGICAL

Under this heading, we will examine a nexus of functions served by the war

system that affect human behavior in society. In general, they are broader in

application and less susceptible to direct observation than the economic and

political factors previously considered.

The most obvious of these functions is the time-honored use of military

institutions to provide antisocial elements with an acceptable role in the social

structure. The disintegrative, unstable social movements loosely described as

"fascist" have traditionally taken root in societies that have lacked adequate

military or paramilitary outlets to meet the needs of these elements. This

function has been critical in periods of rapid change. The danger signals are

easy to recognize, even though the stigmata bear different names at different

times. The current euphemistic clichés--"juvenile delinquency" and "alienation"

-- have had their counterparts in every age. In earlier days these conditions were

dealt with directly by the military without the complications of due process,

usually through press gangs or outright enslavement. But it is not hard to

visualize, for example, the degree of social disruption that might have taken

place in the United States during the last two decades if the problem of the

socially disaffected of the post-World War II period had been foreseen and 

38

effectively met. The younger, and more dangerous, of these hostile social

groupings have been kept under control by the Selective Service System.

This system and its analogues elsewhere furnish remarkably clear examples of

disguised military utility. Informed persons in this country have never accepted

the official rationale for a peacetime draft--military necessity, preparedness, etc.

--as worthy of serious consideration. But what has gained credence among

thoughtful men is the rarely voiced, less easily refuted, proposition that the

institution of military service has a "patriotic" priority in our society that must

be maintained for its own sake. Ironically, the simplistic official justification for

selective service comes closer to the mark, once the non-military functions of

military institutions are understood. As a control device over the hostile,

nihilistic, and potentially unsettling elements of a society in transition, the draft

can again be defended, and quite convincingly, as a "military" necessity.

Nor can it be considered a coincidence that overt military activity, and thus the

level of draft calls, tend to follow the major fluctuations in the unemployment

rate in the lower age groups. This rate, in turn, is a timetested herald of social

discontent. It must be noted also that the armed forces in every civilization have

provided the principal state-supported haven for what we now call the

"unemployable." The typical European standing army (of fifty years ago)

consisted of "...troops unfit for employment in commerce, industry, or

agriculture, led by officers unfit to practice any legitimate profession or to

conduct a business enterprise." This is still largely true, if less apparent. In a

sense, this function of the military as the custodian of the economically or

culturally deprived was the forerunner of most contemporary civilian socialwelfare

programs, from the W.P.A. to various forms of "socialized" medicine

and social security. It is interesting that liberal sociologists currently proposing

to use the Selective Service System as a medium of cultural upgrading of the

poor consider this a novel application of military practice.

Although it cannot be said absolutely that such critical measures of social

control as the draft require a military rationale, no modern society has yet been

willing to risk experimentation with any other kind. Even during such periods of

comparatively simple social crisis as the so-called Great Depression of the

1930s, it was deemed prudent by the government to invest minor make-work

projects, like the "Civilian" Conservation Corps, with a military character, and

to place the more ambitious National Recovery Administration under the

direction of a professional army officer at its inception. Today, at least one

small Northern European country, plagued with uncontrollable unrest among its

"alienated youth," is considering the expansion of its armed forces, despite the

problem of making credible the expansion of a non-existent external threat.

39

Sporadic efforts have been made to promote general recognition of broad

national values free of military connotation, but they have been ineffective. For

example, to enlist public support of even such modest programs of social

adjustment as "fighting inflation" or "maintaining physical fitness" it has been

necessary for the government to utilize a patriotic (i.e. military) incentive. It

sells "defense" bonds and it equates health with military preparedness. This is

not surprising; since the concept of "nationhood" implies readiness for war, a

"national" program must do likewise.

In general, the war system provides the basic motivation for primary social

organization. In so doing, it reflects on the societal level the incentives of

individual human behavior. The most important of these, for social purposes, is

the individual psychological rationale for allegiance to a society and its values.

Allegiance requires a cause; a cause requires an enemy. This much is obvious;

the critical point is that the enemy that defines the cause must seem genuinely

formidable. Roughly speaking, the presumed power of the "enemy" sufficient to

warrant an individual sense of allegiance to a society must be proportionate to

the size and complexity of the society. Today, of course, that power must be one

of unprecedented magnitude and frightfulness.

It follows, from the patterns of human behavior, that the credibility of a social

"enemy" demands similarly a readiness of response in proportion to its menace.

In a broad social context, "an eye for an eye" still characterizes the only

acceptable attitude toward a presumed threat of aggression, despite contrary

religious and moral precepts governing personal conduct. The remoteness of

personal decision from social consequence in a modern society makes it easy

for its members to maintain this attitude without being aware of it. A recent

example is the war in Vietnam; a less recent one was the bombing of Hiroshima

and Nagasaki. In each case, the extent and gratuitousness of the slaughter were

abstracted into political formulae by most Americans, once the proposition that

the victims were "enemies" was established. The war system makes such an

abstracted response possible in nonmilitary contexts as well. A conventional

example of this mechanism is the inability of most people to connect, let us say,

the starvation of millions in India with their own past conscious political

decision-making. Yet the sequential logic linking a decision to restrict grain

production in America with an eventual famine in Asia is obvious,

unambiguous, and unconcealed.

What gives the war system its preeminent role in social organization, as

elsewhere, is its unmatched authority over life and death. It must be emphasized

again that the war system is not a mere social extension of the presumed need 

40

for individual human violence, but itself in turn serves to rationalize most

nonmilitary killing. It also provides the precedent for the collective willingness

of members of a society to pay a blood price for institutions far less central to

social organization that war. To take a handy example..."rather than accept

speed limits of twenty miles an hour we prefer to let automobiles kill forty

thousand people a year." A Rand analyst puts it in more general terms and less

rhetorically: "I am sure that there is, in effect, a desirable level of automobile

accidents---desirable, that is, from a broad point of view; in the sense that it is a

necessary concomitant of things of greater value to society." The point may

seem too obvious for iteration, but it is essential to an understanding of the

important motivational function of war as a model for collective sacrifice.

A brief look at some defunct premodern societies is instructive. One of the most

noteworthy features common to the larger, more complex, and more successful

of ancient civilizations was their widespread use of the blood sacrifice. If one

were to limit consideration to those cultures whose regional hegemony was so

complete that the prospect of "war" had become virtually inconceivable ---as

was the case with several of the great pre-Columbian societies of the Western

Hemisphere---it would be found that some form of ritual killing occupied a

position of paramount social importance in each. Invariably, the ritual was

invested with mythic or religious significance; as will all religious and totemic

practice, however, the ritual masked a broader and more important social

function.

In these societies, the blood sacrifice served the purpose of maintaining a

vestigial "earnest" of the society's capability and willingness to make war-- i.e.,

kill and be killed---in the event that some mystical--i.e., unforeseen --

circumstance were to give rise to the possibility. That the "earnest" was not an

adequate substitute for genuine military organization when the unthinkable

enemy, such as the Spanish conquistadores, actually appeared on the scene in

no way negates the function of the ritual. It was primarily, if not exclusively, a

symbolic reminder that war had once been the central organizing force of the

society, and that this condition might recur.

It does not follow that a transition to total peace in modern societies would

require the use of this model, even in less "barbaric" guise. But the historical

analogy serves as a reminder that a viable substitute for war as a social system

cannot be a mere symbolic charade. It must involve risk of real personal

destruction, and on a scale consistent with the size and complexity of modern

social systems. Credibility is the key. Whether the substitute is ritual in nature

or functionally substantive, unless it provides a believable life- and-death threat

it will not serve the socially organizing function of war.

41

The existence of an accepted external menace, then, is essential to social

cohesiveness as well as to the acceptance of political authority. The menace

must be believable, it must be of a magnitude consistent with the complexity of

the society threatened, and it must appear, at least, to affect the entire society.

ECOLOGICAL

Men, like all other animals, is subject to the continuing process of adapting to

the limitations of his environment. But the principal mechanism he has utilized

for this purpose is unique among living creatures. To forestall the inevitable

historical cycles of inadequate food supply, post-Neolithic man destroys surplus

members of his own species by organized warfare.

Ethologists have often observed that the organized slaughter of members of

their own species is virtually unknown among other animals. Man's special

propensity to kill his own kind (shared to a limited degree with rats) may be

attributed to his inability to adapt anachronistic patterns of survival (like

primitive hunting) to his development of "civilizations" in which these patterns

cannot be effectively sublimated. It may be attributed to other causes that have

been suggested, such as a maladapted "territorial instinct," etc. Nevertheless, it

exists and its social expression in war constitutes a biological control of his

relationship to his natural environment that is peculiar to man alone.

War has served to help assure the survival of the human species. But as an

evolutionary device to improve it, war is almost unbelievably inefficient. With

few exceptions, the selective processes of other living creatures promote both

specific survival and genetic improvement. When a conventionally adaptive

animal faces one of its periodic crises of insufficiency, it is the "inferior"

members of the species that normally disappear. An animal's social response to

such a crisis may take the form of a mass migration, during which the weak fall

by the wayside. Or it may follow the dramatic and more efficient pattern of

lemming societies, in which the weaker members voluntarily disperse, leaving

available food supplies for the stronger. In either case, the strong survive and

the weak fall. In human societies, those who fight and die in wars for survival

are in general its biologically stronger members. This is natural selection in

reverse.

The regressive genetic effort of war has been often noted and equally often

deplored, even when it confuses biological and cultural factors. The

disproportionate loss of the biologically stronger remains inherent in traditional

warfare. It serves to underscore the fact that survival of the species, rather than 

42

its improvement, is the fundamental purpose of natural selection, if it can be

said to have a purpose, just as it is the basic premise of this study.

But as the polemologist Gaston Bouthoul has pointed out, other institutions that

were developed to serve this ecological function have proved even less

satisfactory. (They include such established forms as these: infanticide,

practiced chiefly in ancient and primitive societies; sexual mutilation;

monasticism; forced emigration; extensive capital punishment, as in old China

and eighteenth-century England; and other similar, usually localized, practices.)

Man's ability to increase his productivity of the essentials of physical life

suggests that the need for protection against cyclical famine may be nearly

obsolete. It has thus tended to reduce the apparent importance of the basic

ecological function of war, which is generally disregarded by peace theorists.

Two aspects of its remain especially relevant, however. The first is obvious:

current rates of population growth, compounded by environmental threat to

chemical and other contaminants, may well bring about a new crisis of

insufficiency. If so, it is likely to be one of unprecedented global magnitude, not

merely regional or temporary. Conventional methods of warfare would almost

surely prove inadequate, in this event, to reduce the consuming population to a

level consistent with survival of the species.

The second relevant factor is the efficiency of modern methods of mass

destruction. Even if their use is not required to meet a world population crisis,

they offer, perhaps paradoxically, the first opportunity in the history of man to

halt the regressive genetic effects of natural selection by war. Nuclear weapons

are indiscriminate. Their application would bring to an end the disproportionate

destruction of the physically stronger members of the species (the "warriors") in

periods of war. Whether this prospect of genetic gain would offset the

unfavorable mutations anticipated from postnuclear radioactivity we have not

yet determined. What gives the question a bearing on our study is the possibility

that the determination may yet have to be made.

Another secondary ecological trend bearing on projected population growth is

the regressive effect of certain medical advances. Pestilence, for example, is no

longer an important factor in population control. The problem of increased life

expectancy has been aggravated. These advances also pose a potentially more

sinister problem, in that undesirable genetic traits that were formerly selfliquidating

are now medically maintained. Many diseases that were once fatal at

preprocreational ages are now cured; the effect of this development is to

perpetuate undesirable susceptibilities and mutations. It seems clear that a new

quasi-eugenic function of war is now in process of formation that will have to 

43

be taken into account in any transition plan. For the time being, the Department

of Defense appears to have recognized such factors, as has been demonstrated

by the planning under way by the Rand Corporation to cope with the breakdown

in the ecological balance anticipated after a thermonuclear war. The Department

has also begun to stockpile birds, for example, against the expected proliferation

of radiation-resistant insects, etc.

CULTURAL AND SCIENTIFIC

The declared order of values in modern societies gives a high place to the socalled

"creative" activities, and an even higher one to those associated with the

advance of scientific knowledge. Widely held social values can be translated

into political equivalents, which in turn may bear on the nature of a transition to

peace. The attitudes of those who hold these values must be taken into account

in the planning of the transition. The dependence, therefore, of cultural and

scientific achievement on the war system would be an important consideration

in a transition plan even is such achievement had no inherently necessary social

function.

Of all the countless dichotomies invented by scholars to account for the major

differences in art styles and cycles, only one has been consistently unambiguous

in its application to a variety of forms and cultures. However it may be

verbalized, the basic distinction is this: Is the work war-oriented or is it not?

Among primitive peoples, the war dance is the most important art form.

Elsewhere, literature, music, painting, sculpture, and architecture that has won

lasting acceptance has invariably dealt with a theme of war, expressly or

implicitly, and has expressed the centricity of war to society. The war in

question may be national conflict, as in Shakespeare plays, Beethoven's music,

or Goya's paintings, or it may be reflected in the form of religious, social, or

moral struggle, as in the work of Dante, Rembrandt, and Bach. Art that cannot

be classified as war-oriented is usually described as "sterile," "decadent," and so

on. Application of the "war standard" to works of art may often leave room for

debate in individual cases, but there is no question of its role as the fundamental

determinant of cultural values. Aesthetic and moral standards have a common

anthropological origin, in the exaltation of bravery, the willingness to kill and

risk death in tribal warfare.

It is also instructive to note that the character of a society's culture has borne a

close relationship to its war-making potential, in the context of its times. It is no

accident that the current "cultural explosion" in the United States is taking place

during an era marked by an unusually rapid advance in weaponry. This

relationship is more generally recognized than the literature on the subject

44

would suggest. For example, many artists and writers are now beginning to

express concern over the limited creative options they envisage in the warless

world they think, or hope, may be soon upon us. They are currently preparing

for this possibility by unprecedented experimentation with meaningless forms;

their interest in recent years has been increasingly engaged by the abstract

pattern, the gratuitous emotion, the random happening, and the unrelated

sequence.

The relationship of war to scientific research and discovery is more explicit.

War is the principal motivational force for the development of science at every

level, from the abstractly conceptual to the narrowly technological. Modern

society places a high value on "pure" science, but it is historically inescapable

that all the significant discoveries that have been made about the natural world

have been inspired by the real or imaginary military necessities of their epochs.

The consequences of the discoveries have indeed gone far afield, but war has

always provided the basic incentive.

Beginning with the development of iron and steel, and proceeding through the

discoveries of the laws of motion and thermodynamics to the age of the atomic

particle, the synthetic polymer, and the space capsule, no important scientific

advance has not been at least indirectly initiated by an implicit requirement of

weaponry. More prosaic examples include the transistor radio (an outgrowth of

military communications requirements), the assembly line (from Civil War

firearms needs), the steel-frame building (from the steel battleship), the canal

lock, and so on. A typical adaptation can be seen in a device as modest as the

common lawnmower; it developed from the revolving scythe devised by

Leonardo da Vinci to precede a horse-powered vehicle into enemy ranks.

The most direct relationship can be found in medical technology. For example,

a giant "walking machine," and amplifier of body motions invented for military

use in difficult terrain, is now making it possible for many previously con- fined

to wheelchairs to walk. The Vietnam war alone has led to spectacular

improvements in amputation procedures, blood-handling techniques, and

surgical logistics. It has stimulated new large-scale research on malaria and

other typical parasite diseases; it is hard to estimate how long this t? Amoould

otherwise have been delayed, despite its enormous nonmilitary importance to

nearly half the world's population.

OTHER

We have elected to omit from our discussion of the nonmilitary functions of war

those we do not consider critical to a transition program. This is not to say they 

45

are unimportant, however, but only that they appear to present no special

problems for the organization of a peace-oriented social system. They include

the following:

War as a general social release. This is a psychosocial function, serving the

same purpose for a society as do the holiday, the celebration, and the orgy for

the individual---the release and redistribution of undifferentiated tensions. War

provides for the periodic necessary readjustment of standards of social behavior

(the "moral climate") and for the dissipation of general boredom, one of the

most consistently undervalued and unrecognized of social phenomena.

War as a generational stabilizer. This psychological function, served by other

behavior patterns in other animals, enables the physically deteriorating older

generation to maintain its control of the younger, destroying it if necessary.

War as an ideological clarifier. The dualism that characterized the traditional

dialectic of all branches of philosophy and of stable political relationships stems

from war as the prototype of conflict. Except for secondary considerations,

there cannot be, to put it as simply as possible, more than two sides to a

question because there cannot be more than two sides to a war.

War as the basis for the international understanding. Before the development

of modern communications, the strategic requirements of war provided the only

substantial incentive for the enrichment of one national culture with the

achievements of another. Although this is still the case in many international

relationships, the function is obsolescent.

We have also forgone extended characterization of those functions we assume

to be widely and explicitly recognized. An obvious example is the role of war as

controller of the quality and degree of unemployment. This is more than an

economic and political subfunction; its sociological, cultural, and ecological

aspects are also important, although often teleonomic. But none affect the

general problem of substitution. The same is true of certain other functions;

those we have included are sufficient to define the scope of the problem.

46

SECTION 6 - SUBSTITUTES FOR THE FUNCTIONS OF WAR

By now it should be clear that the most detailed and comprehensive master plan

for a transition to world peace will remain academic if it fails to deal

forthrightly with the problem of the critical nonmilitary functions of war. The

social needs they serve are essential; if the war system no longer exists to meet

them, substitute institutions will have to be established for the purpose. These

surrogates must be "realistic," which is to say of a scope and nature that can be

conceived and implemented in the context of present-day social capabilities.

This is not the truism it may appear to be; the requirements of radical social

change often reveal the distinction between a most conservative projection and

a wildly utopian scheme to be fine indeed.

In this section we will consider some possible substitutes for these functions.

Only in rare instances have they been put forth for the purposes which concern

us here, but we see no reason to limit ourselves to proposals that address

themselves explicitly to the problem as we have outlined it. We will disregard

the ostensible, or military, functions of war; it is a premise of this study that the

transition to peace implies absolutely that they will no longer exist in any

relevant sense. We will also disregard the noncritical functions exemplified at

the end of the preceding section.

ECONOMIC

Economic surrogates for war must meet two principal criteria. They must be

"wasteful," in the common sense of the word, and they must operate outside the

normal supply-demand system. A corollary that should be obvious is that the

magnitude of the waste must be sufficient to meet the needs of a particular

society. An economy as advanced and complex as our own requires the planned

average annual destruction of not less than 10 percent of gross national product

if it is effectively to fulfill its stabilizing function. When the mass of a balance

wheel is inadequate to the power it is intended to control, its effect can be selfdefeating,

as with a runaway locomotive. The analogy, though crude, is

especially apt for the American economy, as our record of cyclical depressions

shows. All have taken place during periods of grossly inadequate military

spending.

Those few economic conversion programs which by implication acknowledge

the nonmilitary economic function of war (at least to some extent) tend to

assume that so-called social-welfare expenditures will fill the vacuum created

by the disappearance of military spending. When one considers the backlog of

un- finished business---proposed but still unexecuted---in this field, the

47

assumption seems plausible. Let us examine briefly the following list, which is

more or less typical of general social welfare programs.

HEALTH. Drastic expansion of medical research, education, and training

facilities; hospital and clinic construction; the general objective of complete

government-guaranteed health care for all, at a level consistent with current

developments in medical technology.

EDUCATION. The equivalent of the foregoing in teacher training; schools and

libraries; the drastic upgrading of standards, with the general objective of

making available for all an attainable educational goal equivalent to what is

now considered a professional degree.

HOUSING. Clean, comfortable, safe, and spacious living space for all, at the

level now enjoyed by about 15 percent of the population in this country (less in

most others).

TRANSPORTATION. The establishment of a system of mass public

transportation making it possible for all to travel to and from areas of work and

recreation quickly, comfortably, and conveniently, and to travel privately for

pleasure rather than necessity.

PHYSICAL ENVIRONMENT. The development and protection of water

supplies, forests, parks, and other natural resources; the elimination of chemical

and bacterial contaminants from air, water, and soil.

POVERTY. The genuine elimination of poverty, defined by a standard

consistent with current economic productivity, by means of a guaranteed annual

income or whatever system of distribution will best assure its achievement.

This is only a sampler of the more obvious domestic social welfare items, and

we have listed it in a deliberately broad, perhaps extravagant, manner. In the

past, such a vague and ambitious-sounding "program" would have been

dismissed out of hand, without serious consideration; it would clearly have

been, prima facie, far too costly, quite apart from its political implications. Our

objective to it, on the other hand, could hardly be more contradictory. As an

economic substitute for war, it is inadequate because it would be far too cheap.

If this seems paradoxical, it must be remembered that up to now all proposed

social-welfare expenditures have had to be measured within the war economy,

not as a replacement for it. The old slogan about a battleship or an ICBM

48

costing as much as x hospitals or y schools or z homes takes on a very different

meaning if there are to be more battleships or ICBM's.

Since the list is general, we have elected to forestall the tangential controversy

that surrounds arbitrary cost projections by offering no individual cost

estimates. But the maximum program that could be physically effected along

the lines indicated could approach the established level of military spending

only for a limited time--in our opinion, subject to a detailed cost-and-feasibility

analysis, less than ten years. In this short period, at this rate, the major goals of

the program would have been achieved. Its capital-investment phase would

have been completed, and it would have established a permanent comparatively

modest level of annual operating cost--within the framework of the general

economy.

Here is the basic weakness of the social-welfare surrogate. On the short-term

basis, a maximum program of this sort could replace a normal military spending

program, provided it was designed, like the military model, to be subject to

arbitrary control. Public housing starts, for example, or the development of

modern medical centers might be accelerated or halted from time to time, as the

requirements of a stable economy might dictate. But on the long-term basis,

social-welfare spending, no matter how often redefined, would necessarily

become an integral, accepted part of the economy, of no more value as a

stabilizer than the automobile industry or old age and survivors' insurance.

Apart from whatever merit social-welfare programs are deemed to have for their

own sake, their function as a substitute for war in the economy would thus be

self-liquidating. They might serve, however, as expedients pending the

development of more durable substitute measures.

Another economic surrogate that has been proposed is a series of giant "space

research" programs. These have already demonstrated their utility in more

modest scale within the military economy. What has been implied, although not

yet expressly put forth, is the development of a long-range sequence of spaceresearch

projects with largely unattainable goals. This kind of program offers

several advantages lacking in the social welfare model. First, it is unlikely to

phase itself out, regardless of the predictable "surprises" science has in store for

us: the universe is too big. In the event some individual project unexpectedly

succeeds there would be no dearth of substitute problems. For example, if

colonization of the moon proceeds on schedule, it could then become

"necessary" to establish a beachhead on Mars or Jupiter, and so on. Second, it

need be no more dependent on the general supply-demand economy than its

military prototype. Third, it lends itself extraordinarily well to arbitrary control.

49

Space research can be viewed as the nearest modern equivalent yet devised to

the pyramid-building, and similar ritualistic enterprises, of ancient societies. It

is true that the scientific value of the space program, even of what has already

been accomplished, is substantial on its own terms. But current programs are

absurdly obviously disproportionate, in the relationship of the knowledge

sought to the expenditures committed. All but a small fraction of the space

budget, measured by the standards of comparable scientific objectives, must be

charged de facto to the military economy. Future space research, projected as a

war surrogate, would further research, projected as a war surrogate, would

further reduce the "scientific" rationale of its budget to a minuscule percentage

indeed. As a purely economic substitute for war, therefore, extension of the

space program warrants serious consideration.

In Section 3 we pointed out that certain disarmament models, which we called

conservative, postulated extremely expensive and elaborate inspection systems.

Would it be possible to extend and institutionalize such systems to the point

where they might serve as economic surrogates for war spending? The

organization of failsafe inspection machinery could well be ritualized in a

manner similar to that of established military processes. "Inspection teams"

might be very like weapons. Inflating the inspection budget to military scale

presents no difficulty. The appeal of this kind of scheme lies in the comparative

ease of transition between two parallel systems.

The "elaborate inspection" surrogate is fundamentally fallacious, however.

Although it might be economically useful, as well as politically necessary,

during the disarmament transition, it would fail as a substitute for the economic

function of war for one simple reason. Peace-keeping inspection is part of a war

system, not of a peace system. It implies the possibility of weapons

maintenance or manufacture, which could not exist in a world at peace as here

defined. Massive inspection also implies sanctions, and thus war-readiness.

The same fallacy is more obvious in plans to create a patently useless "defense

conversion" apparatus. The long-discredited proposal to build "total" civil

defense facilities is one example; another is the plan to establish a giant

antimissile missile complex (Nike-X, et al.). These programs, of course, are

economic rather than strategic. Nevertheless, they are not substitutes for

military spending but merely different forms of it.

A more sophisticated variant is the proposal to establish the "Unarmed Forces"

of the United States. This would conveniently maintain the entire institutional

military structure, redirecting it essentially toward social-welfare activities on a

global scale. It would be, in effect, a giant military Peace Corps. There is

50

nothing inherently unworkable about this plan, and using the existing military

system to effectuate its own demise is both ingenious and convenient. But even

on a greatly magnified world basis, social-welfare expenditures must sooner or

later reenter the atmosphere of the normal economy. The practical transitional

virtues of such a scheme would thus be eventually negated by its inadequacy as

a permanent economic stabilizer.

POLITICAL

The war system makes the stable government of societies possible. It does this

essentially by providing an external necessity for a society to accept political

rule. In so doing, it establishes the basis for nationhood and the authority of

government to control its constituents. What other institution or combination of

programs might serve these functions in its place?

We have already pointed out that the end of the war means the end of national

sovereignty, and thus the end of nationhood as we know it today. But this does

not necessarily mean the end of nations in the administrative sense, and internal

political power will remain essential to a stable society. The emerging "nations"

of the peace epoch must continue to draw political authority from some source.

A number of proposals have been made governing the relations between nations

after total disarmament; all are basically juridical in nature. They contemplate

institutions more or less like a World Court, or a United Nations, but vested

with real authority. They may or may not serve their ostensible post-military

purpose of settling international disputes, but we need not discuss that here.

None would offer effective external pressure on a peace-world nation to

organize itself politically.

It might be argued that a well-armed international police force, operating under

the authority of such a supranational "court," could well serve the function of

external enemy. This, however, would constitute a military operation, like the

inspection schemes mentioned, and, like them, would be inconsistent with the

premise of an end to the war system. It is possible that a variant of the

"Unarmed Forces" idea might be developed in such a way that its "constructive"

(i.e., social welfare) activities could be combined with an economic "threat" of

sufficient size and credibility to warrant political organization. Would this kind

of threat also be contradictory to our basic premise?--that is, would it be

inevitably military? Not necessarily, in our view, but we are skeptical of its

capacity to evoke credibility. Also, the obvious destabilizing effect of any

global social welfare surrogate on politically necessary class relationships

51

would create an entirely new set of transition problems at least equal in

magnitude.

Credibility, in fact, lies at the heart of the problem of developing a political

substitute for war. This is where the space-race proposals, in many ways so well

suited as economic substitutes for war, fall short. The most ambitious and

unrealistic space project cannot of itself generate a believable external menace.

It has been hotly argued that such a menace would offer the "last, best hope of

peace," etc., by uniting mankind against the danger of destruction by "creatures"

from other planets or from outer space. Experiments have been proposed to test

the credibility of an out-of-our-world invasion threat; it is possible that a few of

the more difficult-to-explain "flying saucer" incidents of recent years were in

fact early experiments of this kind. If so, they could hardly have been judged

encouraging. We anticipate no difficulties in making a "need" for a giant super

space program credible for economic purposes, even were there not ample

precedent; extending it, for political purposes, to include features unfortunately

associated with science fiction would obviously be a more dubious undertaking.

Nevertheless, an effective political substitute for war would require "alternate

enemies," some of which might seem equally farfetched in the context of the

current war system. It may be, for instance, that gross pollution of the

environment can eventually replace the possibility of mass destruction by

nuclear weapons as the principal apparent threat to the survival of the species.

Poisoning of the air, and of the principal sources of food and water supply, is

already well advanced, and at first glance would seem promising in this respect;

it constitutes a threat that can be dealt with only through social organization and

political power. But from present indications it will be a generation to a

generation and a half before environmental pollution, however severe, will be

sufficiently menacing, on a global scale, to offer a possible basis for a solution.

It is true that the rate of pollution could be increased selectively for this

purpose; in fact, the mere modifying of existing programs for the deterrence of

pollution could speed up the process enough to make the threat credible much

sooner. But the pollution problem has been so widely publicized in recent years

that it seems highly improbably that a program of deliberate environ- mental

poisoning could be implemented in a politically acceptable manner.

However unlikely some of the possible alternate enemies we have mentioned

may seem, we must emphasize that one must be found, of credible quality and

magnitude, if a transition to peace is ever to come about without social

disintegration. It is more probably, in our judgement, that such a threat will

have to be invented, rather than developed from unknown conditions. For this

52

reason, we believe further speculation about its putative nature ill-advised in

this context. Since there is considerable doubt, in our minds, that any viable

political surrogate can be devised, we are reluctant to compromise, by

premature discussion, any possible option that may eventually lie open to our

government.

SOCIOLOGICAL

Of the many functions of war we have found convenient to group together in

this classification, two are critical. In a world of peace, the continuing stability

of society will require: 1) an effective substitute for military institutions that can

neutralize destabilizing social elements and 2) a credible motivational surrogate

for war that can insure social cohesiveness. The first is an essential element of

social control; the second is the basic mechanism for adapting individual human

drives to the needs of society.

Most proposals that address themselves, explicitly or otherwise, to the postwar

problem of controlling the socially alienated turn to some variant of the Peace

Corps or the so-called Job Corps for a solution. The socially disaffected, the

economically unprepared, the psychologically unconformable, the hard-core

"delinquents," the incorrigible "subversives," and the rest of the unemployable

are seen as somehow transformed by the disciplines of a service modeled on

military precedent into more or less dedicated social service workers. This

presumption also informs the otherwise hardheaded ratiocination of the

"Unarmed Forces" plan.

The problem has been addressed, in the language of popular sociology, by

Secretary McNamara. "Even in our abundant societies, we have reason enough

to worry over the tensions that coil and tighten among underprivileged young

people, and finally flail out in delinquency and crime. What are we to expect..

where mounting frustrations are likely to fester into eruptions of violence and

extremism?" In a seemingly unrelated passage, he continues: "It seems to me

that we could move toward remedying that inequity [of the Selective Service

System] by asking every young person in the United States to give two years of

service to his country--whether in one of the military services, in the Peace

Corps, or in some other volunteer developmental w? Am at home or abroad. We

could encourage other countries to do the same." Here, as elsewhere throughout

this significant speech, Mr. McNamara has focused, indirectly but

unmistakably, on one of the key issues bearing on a possible transition to peace,

and has later indicated, also indirectly, a rough approach to its resolution, again

phrased in the language of the current war system.

53

It seems clear that Mr. McNamara and other proponents of the peace-corps

surrogate for this tar function lean heavily on the success of the paramilitary

Depression programs mentioned in the last section. We find the precedent

wholly inadequate in degree. Neither the lack of relevant precedent, however,

nor the dubious social welfare sentimentality characterizing this approach

warrant its rejection without careful study. It may be viable --- provided, first,

that the military origin of the Corps format be effectively rendered out of its

operational activity, and second, that the transition from paramilitary activities

to "developmental w? A" can be effected without regard to the attitudes of the

Corps personnel or to the "value" of the work it is expected to perform.

Another possible surrogate for the control of potential enemies of society is the

reintroduction, in some form consistent with modern technology and political

processes, of slavery. Up to now, this has been suggested only in fiction,

notably in the works of Wells, Huxley, Orwell, and others engaged in the

imaginative anticipation of the sociology of the future. But the fantasies

projected in Brave New World and 1984 have seemed less and less implausible

over the years since their publication. The traditional association of slavery with

ancient preindustrial cultures should not blind us to its adaptability to advanced

forms of social organization, nor should its equally traditional incompatibility

with Western moral and economic values. It is entirely possible that the

development of a sophisticated form of slavery may be an absolute prerequisite

for social control in a world at peace. As a practical matter, conversion of the

code of military discipline to a euphemized form of enslavement would entail

surprisingly little revision; the logical first step would be the adoption of some

form of "universal" military service.

When it comes to postulating a credible substitute for war capable of directing

human behavior patterns in behalf of social organization, few options suggest

themselves. Like its political function, the motivational function of war requires

the existence of a genuinely menacing social enemy. The principal difference is

that for purposes of motivating basic allegiance, as distinct from accepting

political authority, the "alternate enemy" must imply a more immediate,

tangible, and directly felt threat of destruction. It must justify the need for

taking and paying a "blood price" in wide areas of human concern.

In this respect, the possible enemies noted earlier would be insufficient. One

exception might be the environmental-pollution model, if the danger to society

it posed was genuinely imminent. The fictive models would have to carry the

weight of extraordinary conviction, underscored with a not inconsiderable

actual sacrifice of life; the construction of an up-to-date mythological or

54

religious structure for this purpose would present difficulties in our era, but

must certainly be considered.

Games theorists have suggested, in other contexts, the development of "blood

games" for the effective control of individual aggressive impulses. It is an ironic

commentary on the current state of war and peace studies that it was left not to

scientists but to the makers of a commercial film to develop a model for this

notion, on the implausible level of popular melodrama, as a ritualized manhunt.

More realistically, such a ritual might be socialized, in the manner of the

Spanish Inquisition and the less formal witch trials of other periods, for

purposes of "social purification," "state security," or other rationale both

acceptable and credible to postwar societies. The feasibility of such an updated

version of still another ancient institution, though doubtful, is considerably less

fanciful than the wishful notion of many peace planners that a lasting condition

of peace can be brought about without the most painstaking examination of

every possible surrogate for the essential functions of war. What is involved

here, in a sense, is the quest for William James' "moral equivalent of war."

It is also possible that the two functions considered under this heading may be

jointly served, in the sense of establishing the antisocial, for whom a control

institution is needed, as the "alternate enemy" needed to hold society together.

The relentless and irreversible advance of unemployability at all levels of

society, and the similar extension of generalized alienation from accepted

values may make some such program necessary even as an adjunct to the war

system. As before, we will not speculate on the specific forms this kind of

program might take, except to note that there is again ample precedent, in the

treatment meted out to disfavored, allegedly menacing, ethnic groups in certain

societies during certain historical periods.

ECOLOGICAL

Considering the shortcomings of war as a mechanism of selective population

control, it might appear that devising substitutes for this function should be

comparatively simple. Schematically this is so, but the problem of timing the

transition to a new ecological balancing device makes the feasibility of

substitution less certain.

It must be remembered that the limitation of war in this function is entirely

eugenic. War has not been genetically progressive. But as a system of gross

population control to preserve the species it cannot fairly be faulted. And, as has

been pointed out, the nature of war is itself in transition. Current trends in

warfare--the increased strategic bombing of civilians and the greater military 

55

importance now attached to the destruction of sources of supply (as opposed to

purely "military" bases and personnel)---strongly suggest that a truly qualitative

improvement is in the making. Assuming the war system is to continue, it is

more than probably that the regressively selective quality of war will have been

reversed, as its victims become more genetically representative of their

societies.

There is no question but that a universal requirement that procreation be limited

to the products of artificial insemination would provide a fully adequate

substitute control for population levels. Such a reproductive system would, of

course, have the added advantage of being susceptible of direct eugenic

management. Its predictable further development---conception and embryonic

growth taking place wholly under laboratory conditions--would extend these

controls to their logical conclusion. The ecological function of war under these

circumstances would not only be superseded but surpassed in effectiveness.

The indicated intermediate step--total control of conception with a variant of the

ubiquitous "pill," via water supplies or certain essential foodstuffs, offset by a

controlled "antidote"---is already under development. There would appear to be

no foreseeable need to revert to any of the outmoded practices referred to in the

previous section (infanticide, etc.) as there might have been if the possibility of

transition to peace had arisen two generations ago.

The real question here, therefore, does not concern the viability of this war

substitute, but the political problems involved in bringing it about. It cannot be

established while the war system is still in effect. The reason for this is simple:

excess population is tar material. As long as any society must contemplate even

a remote possibility of war, it must maintain a maximum supportable

population, even when so doing critically aggravates an economic liability. This

is paradoxical, in view of war's role in reducing excess population, but it is

readily understood. War controls the general population level, but the ecological

interest of any single society lies in maintaining its hegemony vis-a-vis other

societies. The obvious analogy can be seen in any free-enterprise economy.

Practices damaging to the society as a whole--both competitive and

monopolistic--are abetted by the conflicting economic motives of individual

capital interests. The obvious precedent can be found in the seemingly irrational

political difficulties which have blacked universal adoption of simple birthcontrol

methods. Nations desperately in need of increasing unfavorable

production-consumption ratios are nevertheless unwilling to gamble their

possible military requirements of twenty years hence for this purpose. Unilateral

population control, as practiced in ancient Japan and in other isolated societies,

is out of the question in today's world.

56

Since the eugenic solution cannot be achieved until the transition to the peace

system takes place, why not wait? One must qualify the inclination to agree. As

we noted earlier, a real possibility of an unprecedented global crisis of

insufficiency exists today, which the war system may not be able to forestall. If

this should come to pass before an agreed-upon transition to peace were

completed, the result might be irrevocably disastrous. There is clearly no

solution to this dilemma; it is a risk which must be taken. But it tends to support

the view that if a decision is made to eliminate the war system, it were better

done sooner than later.

CULTURAL AND SCIENTIFIC

Strictly speaking, the function of war as the determinant of cultural values and

as the prime mover of scientific progress may not be critical in a world without

war. Our criterion for the basic nonmilitary functions of war has been: Are they

necessary to the survival and stability of society? The absolute need for

substitute cultural value-determinants and for the continued advance of

scientific knowledge is not established. We believe it important, however, in

behalf of those for whom these functions hold subjective significance, that it be

known what they can reasonably expect in culture and science after a transition

to peace.

So far as the creative arts are concerned, there is no reason to believe they

would disappear, but only that they would change in character and relative

social importance. The elimination of war would in due course deprive them of

their principal conative force, but it would necessarily take some time for the

transition, and perhaps for a generation thereafter, themes of sociomoral conflict

inspired by the war system would be increasingly transferred to the idiom of

purely personal sensibility. At the same time, a new aesthetic would have to

develop. Whatever its name, form, or rationale, its function would be to express,

in language appropriate to the new period, the once discredited philosophy that

art exists for its own sake. This aesthetic would reject unequivocally the classic

requirement of paramilitary conflict as the substantive content of great art. The

eventual effect of the peace-world philosophy of art would be democratizing in

the extreme, in the sense that a generally acknowledged subjectivity of artistic

standards would equalize their new, content-free "values."

What may be expected to happen is that art would be reassigned the role it once

played in a few primitive peace-oriented social systems. This was the function

of pure decoration, entertainment, or play, entirely free of the burden of

expressing the sociomoral values and conflicts of a war-oriented society. It is

57

interesting that the groundwork for such a value-free aesthetic is already being

laid today, in growing experimentation in art without content, perhaps in

anticipation of a world without conflict. A cult has developed around a new

kind of cultural determinism, which proposes that the technological form of a

cultural expression determines its values rather than does its ostensibly

meaningful content. Its clear implication is that there is no "good" or "bad" art,

only that which is appropriate to its (technological) times and that which is not.

Its cultural effect has been to promote circumstantial constructions and

unplanned expressions; it denies to art the relevance of sequential logic. Its

significance in this context is that it provides a working model of one kind of

value-free culture we might reasonably anticipate in a world at peace.

So far as science is concerned, it might appear at first glance that a giant spaceresearch

program, the most promising among the proposed economic surrogates

for war, might also serve as the basic stimulator of scientific research. The lack

of fundamental organized social conflict inherent in space work, however,

would rule it out as an adequate motivational substitute for war when applied to

"pure" science. But it could no doubt sustain the broad range of technological

activity that a space budget of military dimensions would require. A similarly

scaled social-welfare program could provide a comparable impetus to lowkeyed

technological advances, especially in medicine, rationalized construction

methods, educational psychology, etc. The eugenic substitute for the ecological

function of war would also require continuing research in certain areas of the

life sciences.

Apart from these partial substitutes for war, it must be kept in mind that the

momentum given to scientific progress by the great wars of the past century,

and even more by the anticipation of World War III, is intellectually and

materially enormous. It is our finding that if the war system were to end

tomorrow this momentum is so great that the pursuit of scientific knowledge

could reasonably be expected to go forward without noticeable diminution for

perhaps two decades. It would then continue, at a progressively decreasing

tempo, for at least another two decades before the "bank account" of today's

unresolved problems would become exhausted. By the standards of the

questions we have learned to ask today, there would no longer be anything

worth knowing still unknown; we cannot conceive, by definition, of the

scientific questions to ask once those we can now comprehend are answered.

This leads unavoidably to another matter: the intrinsic value of the unlimited

search for knowledge. We of course offer no independent value judgments here,

but it is germane to point out that a substantial minority of scientific opinion

feels that search to be circumscribed in any case. This opinion is itself a factor

58

in considering the need for a substitute for the scientific function of war. For the

record, we must also take note of the precedent that during long periods of

human history, often covering thousands of years, in which no intrinsic social

value was assigned to scientific progress, stable societies did survive and

flourish. Although this could not have been possible in the modern industrial

world, we cannot be certain it may not again be true in a future world at peace.

59

SECTION 7 - SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

THE NATURE OF WAR

War is not, as is widely assumed, primarily an instrument of policy utilized by

nations to extend or defend their expressed political values or their economic

interests. On the contrary, it is itself the principal basis of organization on which

all modern societies are constructed. The common proximate cause of war is the

apparent interference of one nation with the aspirations of another. But at the

root of all ostensible differences of national interest lie the dynamic

requirements of the war system itself for periodic armed conflict. Readiness for

war characterizes contemporary social systems more broadly than their

economic and political structures, which it subsumes.

Economic analyses of the anticipated problems of transition to peace have not

recognized the broad preeminence of war in the definition of social systems.

The same is true, with rare and only partial exceptions, of model disarmament

"scenarios." For this reason, the value of this previous work is limited to the

mechanical aspects of transition. Certain features of these models may perhaps

be applicable to a real situation of conversion to peace; this till depend on their

compatibility with a substantive, rather than a procedural, peace plan. Such a

plan can be developed only from the premise of full understanding of the nature

of the war system it proposes to abolish, which in turn presupposes detailed

comprehension of the functions the war system performs for society. It will

require the construction of a detailed and feasible system of substitutes for those

functions that are necessary to the stability and survival of human societies.

THE FUNCTIONS OF WAR

The visible, military function of war requires no elucidation; it is not only

obvious but also irrelevant to a transition to the condition of peace, in which it

will by definition be superfluous. It is also subsidiary in social significance to

the implied, nonmilitary functions of war; those critical to transition can be

summarized in five principal groupings.

ECONOMIC. War has provided both ancient and modern societies with a

dependable system for stabilizing and controlling national economies. No

alternate method of control has yet been tested in a complex modern economy

that has shown itself remotely comparable in scope or effectiveness.

60

POLITICAL. The permanent possibility of war is the foundation for stable

government; it supplies the basis for general acceptance of political authority. It

has enabled societies to maintain necessary class distinctions, and it has ensured

the subordination of the citizen to the state, by virtue of the residual war powers

inherent in the concept of nationhood. No modern political ruling group has

successfully controlled its constituency after failing to sustain the continuing

credibility of an external threat of war.

SOCIOLOGICAL. War, through the medium of military institutions, has

uniquely served societies, throughout the course of known history, as an

indispensable controller of dangerous social dissidence and destructive

antisocial tendencies. As the most formidable of threats to life itself, and as the

only one susceptible to mitigation by social organization alone, it has played

another equally fundamental role: the war system has provided the machinery

through which the motivational forces governing human behavior have been

translated into binding social allegiance. It has thus ensured the degree of social

cohesion necessary to the viability of nations. No other institution, or groups of

institutions, in modern societies, has successfully served these functions.

ECOLOGICAL. War has been the principal evolutionary device for maintaining

a satisfactory ecological balance between gross human population and supplies

available for its survival. It is unique to the human species.

CULTURAL AND SCIENTIFIC. War-orientation has determined the basic

standards of value in the creative arts, and has provided the fundamental

motivational source of scientific and technological progress. The concepts that

the arts express values independent of their own forms and that the successful

pursuit of knowledge has intrinsic social value have long been accepted in

modern societies; the development of the arts and sciences during this period

has been corollary to the parallel development of weaponry.

SUBSTITUTES FOR THE FUNCTIONS OF WAR: CRITERIA

The foregoing functions of war are essential to the survival of the social systems

we know today. With two possible exceptions they are also essential to any kind

of stable social organization that might survive in a warless world. Discussion

of the ways and means of transition to such a world are meaningless unless

a)substitute institutions can be devised to fill these functions, or b) it can

reasonably be hypothecated that the loss or partial loss of any one function need

not destroy the viability of future societies.

61

Such substitute institutions and hypotheses must meet varying criteria. In

general, they must be technically feasible, politically acceptable, and potentially

credible to the members of the societies that adopt them. Specifically, they must

be characterized as follows:

ECONOMIC. An acceptable economic surrogate for the war system will require

the expenditure of resources for completely nonproductive purposes at a level

comparable to that of the military expenditures otherwise demanded by the size

and complexity of each society. Such a substitute system of apparent "waste"

must be of a nature that will permit it to remain independent of the normal

supply-demand economy; it must be subject to arbitrary political control.

POLITICAL. A viable political substitute fir war must posit a generalized

external menace to each society of a nature and degree sufficient to require the

organization and acceptance of political authority.

SOCIOLOGICAL. First, in the permanent absence of war, new institutions must

be developed that will effectively control the socially destructive segments of

societies. Second, for purposes of adapting the physical and psychological

dynamics of human behavior to the needs of social organization, a credible

substitute for war must generate an omnipresent and readily understood fear of

personal destruction. This fear must be of a nature and degree sufficient to

ensure adherence to societal values to the full extent that they are acknowledged

to transcend the value of individual human life.

ECOLOGICAL. A substitute for war in its function as the uniquely human

system of population control must ensure the survival, if not necessarily the

improvement, of the species, in terms of its relations to environmental supply.

CULTURAL AND SCIENTIFIC. A surrogate for the function of war as the

determinant of cultural values must establish a basis of sociomoral conflict of

equally compelling force and scope. A substitute motivational basis for the

quest for scientific knowledge must be similarly informed by a comparable

sense of internal necessity.

SUBSTITUTES FOR THE FUNCTIONS OF WAR: MODELS

The following substitute institutions, among others, have been proposed for

consideration as replacements for the nonmilitary functions of war. That they

may not have been originally set forth for that purpose does not preclude or

invalidate their possible application here.

62

ECONOMIC. a) A comprehensive social-welfare program, directed toward

maximum improvement of general conditions of human life. b) A giant openend

space research program, aimed at unreachable targets. c) A permanent,

ritualized, ultra-elaborate disarmament inspection system, and variants of such a

system.

POLITICAL a) An omnipresent, virtually omnipotent international police force.

b) An established and recognized extraterrestrial menace. c) Massive global

environmental pollution. d) Fictitious alternate enemies.

SOCIOLOGICAL: CONTROL FUNCTION. a) Programs generally derived from

the Peace Corps model. b) A modern, sophisticated form of slavery.

MOTIVATIONAL FUNCTION. a) Intensified environmental pollution. b) New

religions or other mythologies. c) Socially oriented blood games. d)

Combination forms.

ECOLOGICAL. A comprehensive program of applied eugenics.

CULTURAL. No replacement institution offered. SCIENTIFIC. The secondary

requirements of the space research, social welfare, and / or eugenics programs.

SUBSTITUTES FOR THE FUNCTIONS OF WAR: EVALUATION

The models listed above reflect only the beginning of the quest for substitute

institutions for the functions of war, rather than a recapitulation of alternatives.

It would be both premature and inappropriate, therefore, to offer final

judgments on their applicability to a transition to peace and after. Furthermore,

since the necessary but complex project of correlating the compatibility of

proposed surrogates for different functions could be treated only in exemplary

fashion at this time, we have elected to withhold such hypothetical correlations

as were tested as statistically inadequate.

Nevertheless, some tentative and cursory comments on these proposed functional

"solutions" will indicate the scope of the difficulties involved in this area of

peace planning.

ECONOMIC. The social-welfare model cannot be expected to remain outside

the normal economy after the conclusion of its predominantly capitalinvestment

phase; its value in this function can therefore be only temporary.

63

The space-research substitute appears to meet both major criteria, and should be

examined in greater detail, especially in respect to its probable effects on other

war functions. "Elaborate inspection" schemes, although superficially attractive,

are inconsistent with the basic premise of a transition to peace. The "unarmed

forces" variant, logistically similar, is subject to the same functional criticism as

the general social-welfare model.

POLITICAL. Like the inspection-scheme surrogates, proposals for

plenipotentiary international police are inherently incompatible with the ending

of the war system. The "unarmed forces" variant, amended to include unlimited

powers of economic sanction, might conceivably be expanded to constitute a

credible external menace. Development of an acceptable threat from "outer

space," presumably in conjunction with a space-research surrogate for economic

control, appears unpromising in terms of credibility. The environmentalpollution

model does not seem sufficiently responsive to immediate social

control, except through arbitrary acceleration of current pollution trends; this in

turn raises questions of political acceptability. New, less regressive, approaches

to the creation of fictitious global "enemies" invite further investigation.

SOCIOLOGICAL: CONTROL FUNCTION. Although the various substitutes

proposed for this function that are modeled roughly on the Peace Corps appear

grossly inadequate in potential scope, they should not be ruled out without

further study. Slavery, in a technologically modern and conceptually

euphemized form, may prove a more efficient and flexible institution in this

area. MOTIVATIONAL FUNCTION. Although none of the proposed substitutes

for war as the guarantor of social allegiance can be dismissed out of hand, each

presents serious and special difficulties. Intensified environmental threats may

raise ecological dangers; mythmaking dissociated from tar may no longer be

politically feasible; purposeful blood games and rituals can far more readily be

devised than implemented. An institution combining this function with the

preceding one, based on, but not necessarily imitative of, the precedent of

organized ethnic repression, warrants careful consideration.

ECOLOGICAL. The only apparent problem in the application of an adequate

eugenic substitute for war is that of timing; it cannot be effectuated until the

transition to peace has been completed, which involved a serious temporary risk

of ecological failure.

CULTURAL. No plausible substitute for this function of war has yet been

proposed. It may be, however, that a basic cultural value-determinant is not

necessary to the survival of a stable society. SCIENTIFIC. The same might be

said for the function of war as the prime mover of the search for knowledge.

64

However, adoption of either a giant space-research program, a comprehensive

social-welfare program, or a master program of eugenic control would provide

motivation for limited technologies.

GENERAL CONCLUSIONS

It is apparent, from the foregoing, that no program or combination of programs

yet proposed for a transition to peace has remotely approached meeting the

comprehensive functional requirements of a world without war. Although one

projected system for filling the economic function of war seems promising,

similar optimism cannot be expressed in the equally essential political and

sociological areas. The other major nonmilitary functions of war---ecological,

cultural, scientific---raise very different problems, but it is least possible that

detailed programming of substitutes in these areas is not prerequisite to

transition. More important, it is not enough to develop adequate but separate

surrogates for the major war functions; they must be fully compatible and in no

degree self-canceling.

Until such a unified program is developed, at least hypothetically, it is

impossible for this or any other group to furnish meaningful answers to the

questions originally presented to us. When asked how best to prepare for the

advent of peace, we must first reply, as strongly as we can, that the war system

cannot responsibly be allowed to disappear until 1) we know exactly what it is

we plan to put in its place, and 2) we are certain, beyond reasonable doubt, that

these substitute institutions will serve their purposes in terms of the survival and

stability of society. It will then be time enough to develop methods for

effectuating the transition; procedural programming must follow, not precede,

substantive solutions.

Such solutions, if indeed they exist, will not be arrived at without a

revolutionary revision of the modes of thought heretofore considered

appropriate to peace research. That we have examined the fundamental

questions involved from a dispassionate, value-free point of view should not

imply that we do not appreciate the intellectual and emotional difficulties that

must be overcome on all decision-making levels before these questions are

generally acknowledged by others for what they are. They reflect, on an

intellectual level, traditional emotional resistance to new (more lethal and thus

more "shocking") forms of weaponry. The understated comment of thenSenator

Hubert Humphrey on the publication of ON THERMONUCLEAR WAR

is still very much to the point: "New Thoughts, particularly those which appear

to contradict current assumptions, are always painful for the mind to

contemplate."

65

Nor, simple because we have not discussed them, do we minimize the massive

reconciliation of conflicting interests with domestic as well as international

agreement on proceeding toward genuine peace presupposes. This factor was

excluded from the purview of our assignment, but we would be remiss if we

failed to take it into account. Although no insuperable obstacle lies in the path

of reaching such general agreements, formidable short-term private-group and

general-class interest in maintaining the war system is well established and

widely recognized. The resistance to peace stemming from such interest is only

tangential, in the long run, to the basic functions of war, but it will not be easily

overcome, in this country or elsewhere. Some observers, in fact, believe that it

cannot be overcome at all in our time, that the price of peace is, simply, too

high. This bears on our overall conclusions to the extent that timing in the

transference to substitute institutions may often be the critical factor in their

political feasibility.

It is uncertain, at this time, whether peace will ever be possible. It is far more

questionable, by the objective standard of continued social survival rather than

that of emotional pacifism, that it would be desirable even if it were

demonstrably attainable. The war system, for all its subjective repugnance to

important sections of "public opinion" has demonstrated its effectiveness since

the beginning of recorded history; it has provided the basis for the development

of many impressively durable civilizations, including that which is dominant

today. It has consistently provided unambiguous social priorities. It is, on the

whole, a known quantity. A viable system of peace, assuming that the great and

complex questions of substitute institutions raised in this Report are both

soluble and solved, would still constitute a venture into the unknown, with the

inevitable risks attendant on the unforeseen, however small and however well

hedged.

Government decision-makers tend to choose peace over war whenever a real

option exists, because it usually appears to be the "safer" choice. Under most

immediate circumstances they are likely to be right. But in terms of long-range

social stability, the opposite is true. At our present state of knowledge and

reasonable inference, it is the war system that must be identified with stability,

the peace system that must be identified with social speculation, however

justifiable the speculation may appear, in terms of subjective moral or

emotional values. A nuclear physicist once remarked, in respect to a possible

disarmament agreement: "If we could change the world into a world in which

no weapons could be made, that would be stabilizing. But agreements we can

expect with the Soviets would be destabilizing." The qualification and the bias

66

are equally irrelevant; any condition of genuine total peace, however achieved,

would be destabilizing until proved otherwise.

If it were necessary at this moment to opt irrevocably for the retention or for the

dissolution of the war system, common prudence would dictate the former

course. But it is not yet necessary, late as the hour appears. And more factors

must eventually enter the war-peace equation than even the most determined

search for alternative institutions for the functions of war can be expected to

reveal. One group of such factors has been given only passing mention in this

Report; it centers around the possible obsolescence of the war system itself. We

have noted, for instance, the limitations of the war system in filling its

ecological function and the declining importance of this aspect of war. It by no

means stretches the imagination to visualize comparable developments which

may compromise the efficacy of war as, for example, an economic controller or

as an organizer of social allegiance. This kind of possibility, however remote,

serves as a reminder that all calculations of contingency not only involve the

weighing of one group of risks against another, but require a respectful

allowance for error on both sides of the scale.

More expedient reason for pursuing the investigation of alternate ways and

means to serve the current functions of war is narrowly political. It is possible

that one or more major sovereign nations may arrive, through ambiguous

leadership, at a position in which a ruling administrative class may lose control

of basic public opinion or of its ability to rationalize a desired war. It is not hard

to imagine, in such circumstances, a situation in which such governments may

feel forced to initiate serious full-scale disarmament proceedings (perhaps

provoked by "accidental" nuclear explosions), and that such negotiations may

lead to the actual disestablishment of military institutions. As our Report has

made clear, this could be catastrophic. It seems evident that, in the event an

important part of the world is suddenly plunged without sufficient warning into

an inadvertent peace, even partial and inadequate preparation for the possibility

may be better than none. The difference could even be critical. The models

considered in the preceding chapter, both those that seem promising and those

that do not, have one positive feature in common--an inherent flexibility of

phasing. And despite our strictures against knowingly proceeding into peacetransition

procedures without thorough substantive preparation, our government

must nevertheless be ready to move in this direction with whatever limited

resources of planning are on hand at the time---if circumstances so require>. An

arbitrary all-or-nothing approach is no more realistic in the development of

contingency peace programming than it is anywhere else.

67

But the principal cause for concern over the continuing effectiveness of the war

system, and the more important reason for hedging with peace planning, lies in

the backwardness of current war-system programming. Its controls have not

kept pace with the technological advances it has made possible. Despite its

unarguable success to date, even in this era of unprecedented potential in mass

destruction, it continues to operate largely on a laissez-faire basis. To the best of

our knowledge, no serious quantified studies have even been conducted to

determine, for example:

---optimum levels of armament production, for purposes of economic control, at

any given relationship between civilian production and consumption patterns:

---correlation factors between draft recruitment policies and mensurable social

dissidence;

---minimum levels of population destruction necessary to maintain war-threat

credibility under varying political conditions;

---optimum cyclical frequency of "shooting" wars under varying circumstances

of historical relationship.

These and other war-function factors are fully susceptible to analysis by today's

computer-based systems, but they have not been so treated; modern analytical

techniques have up to now been relegated to such aspects of the ostensible

functions of war as procurement, personnel deployment, weapons analysis, and

the like. We do not disparage these types of application, but only deplore their

lack of utilization to greater capacity in attacking problems of broader scope.

Our concern for efficiency in this context is not aesthetic, economic, or

humanistic. It stems from the axiom that no system can long survive at either

input or output levels that consistently or substantially deviate from an optimum

range. As their data grow increasingly sophisticated, the war system and its

functions are increasingly endangered by such deviations.

Our final conclusion, therefore, is that it will be necessary for our government

to plan in depth for two general contingencies. The first, and lesser, is the

possibility of a viable general peace; the second is the successful continuation

of the war system. In our view, careful preparation for the possibility of peace

should be extended, not because we take the position that the end of war would

necessarily be desirable, if it is in fact possible, but because it may be thrust

upon us in some form whether we are ready for it or not. Planning for

rationalizing and quantifying the war system, on the other hand, to ensure the

68

effectiveness of its major stabilizing functions, is not only more promising in

respect to anticipated results, but is essential; we can no longer take for granted

that it will continue to serve our purposes well merely because it always has.

The objective of government policy in regard to war and peace, in this period of

uncertainty, must be to preserve maximum options. The recommendations

which follow are directed to this end.

69

SECTION 8

RECOMMENDATIONS

We propose the establishment, under executive order of the President, of a

permanent WAR/PEACE Research Agency, empowered and mandated to

execute the programs described in (2) and (3) below. This agency (a) will be

provided with nonaccountable funds sufficient to implement its responsibilities

and decisions at its own discretion, and (b) will have authority to preempt and

utilize, without restriction, any and all facilities of the executive branch of the

government in pursuit of its objectives. It will be organized along the lines of

the National Security Council, except that none of its governing, executive, or

operating personnel will hold other public office or governmental responsibility.

Its directorate will be drawn from the broadest practicable spectrum of scientific

disciplines, humanistic studies, applied creative arts, operating technologies,

and otherwise unclassified professional occupations. It will be responsible

solely to the President, or to other officers of government temporarily deputized

by him. Its operations will be governed entirely by its own rules of procedure.

Its authority will expressly include the unlimited right to withhold information

on its activities and its decisions, from anyone except the President, whenever it

deems such secrecy to be in the public interest.

The first of the War/Peace Research Agency's two principal responsibilities will

be to determine all that can be known, including what can reasonably be

inferred in terms of relevant statistical probabilities, that may bear on an

eventual transition to a general condition of peace. The findings in this Report

may be considered to constitute the beginning of this study and to indicate its

orientation; detailed records of the investigations and findings of the Special

Study Group on which this Report is based, will be furnished the agency, along

with whatever clarifying data the agency deems necessary. This aspect of the

agency's work will hereinafter be referred to as "Peace Research."

The Agency's Peace Research activities will necessarily include, but not be

limited to, the following:

(a) The creative development of possible substitute institutions for the principal

nonmilitary functions of war.

(b) The careful matching of such institutions against the criteria summarized in

this Report, as refined, revised, and extended by the agency.

70

(c) The testing and evaluation of substitute institutions, for acceptability,

feasibility, and credibility, against hypothecated transitional and postwar

conditions; the testing and evaluation of the effects of the anticipated atrophy of

certain unsubstantiated functions.

(d) The development and testing of the corelativity of multiple substitute

institutions, with the eventual objective of establishing a comprehensive

program of compatible war substitutes suitable for a planned transition to peace,

if and when this is found to be possible and subsequently judged desirable by

appropriate political authorities.

(e) The preparation of a wide-ranging schedule of partial, uncorrelated, crash

programs of adjustment suitable for reducing the dangers of unplanned

transition to peace effected by force majeure.

Peace Research methods will include but not be limited to, the following:

(a) The comprehensive interdisciplinary application of historical, scientific,

technological, and cultural data.

(b) The full utilization of modern methods of mathematical modeling,

analogical analysis, and other, more sophisticated, quantitative techniques in

process of development that are compatible with computer programming.

(c) The heuristic "peace games" procedures developed during the course of its

assignment by the Special Study Group, and further extensions of this basic

approach to the testing of institutional functions.

The WAR/PEACE Research Agency's other principal responsibility will be

"War Research." Its fundamental objective will be to ensure the continuing

viability of the war system to fulfill its essential nonmilitary functions for as

long as the war system is judged necessary to or desirable for the survival of

society. To achieve this end, the War Research groups within the agency will

engage in the following activities:

(a) Quantification of existing application of the non-military functions of war.

Specific determinations will include, but not be limited to:

the gross amount and the net proportion of nonproductive military expenditures

since World War II assignable to the need for war as an economic stabilizer;

71

the amount and proportion of military expenditures and destruction of life,

property, and natural resources during this period assignable to the need for war

as an instrument for political control;

similar figures, to the extent that they can be separately arrived at, assignable to

the need for war to maintain social cohesiveness;

levels of recruitment and expenditures on the draft and other forms of personnel

deployment attributable to the need for military institutions to control social

disaffection;

the statistical relationship of war casualties to world food supplies;

the correlation of military actions and expenditures with cultural activities and

scientific advances (including necessarily the development of mensurable

standards in these areas).

(b) Establishment of a priori modern criteria for the execution of the nonmilitary

functions of war. These will include, but not be limited to:

calculation of minimum and optimum ranges of military expenditure required,

under varying hypothetical conditions, to fulfill these several functions,

separately and collectively;

determination of minimum and optimum levels of destruction of LIFE,

PROPERTY, and NATURAL RESOURCES prerequisite to the credibility of

external threat essential to the political and motivational functions;

development of a negotiable formula governing the relationship between

military recruitment and training policies and the exigencies of social control.

(c) Reconciliation of these criteria with prevailing economic, political,

sociological, and ecological limitations. The ultimate object of this phase of

War Research is to rationalize the heretofore informal operations of the war

system. It should provide practical working procedures through which

responsible governmental authority may resolve the following war-function

problems, among others, under any given circumstances:

72

how to determine the optimum quantity, nature, and timing of military

expenditures to ensure a desired degree of economic control;

how to organize the recruitment, deployment, and ostensible use of military

personnel to ensure a desired degree of acceptance of authorized social values;

how to compute on a short-term basis, the nature and extent of the LOSS OF

LIFE and other resources which SHOULD BE SUFFERED and/or INFLICTED

DURING any single outbreak of hostilities to achieve a desired degree of

internal political authority and social allegiance;

how to project, over extended periods, the nature and quality of overt warfare

which must be planned and budgeted to achieve a desired degree of contextual

stability for the same purpose; factors to be determined must include frequency

of occurrence, length of phase, INTENSITY OF PHYSICAL DESTRUCTION,

extensiveness of geographical involvement, and OPTIMUM MEAN LOSS OF

LIFE;

how to extrapolate accurately from the foregoing, for ecological purposes, the

continuing effect of the war system, over such extended cycles, on population

pressures, and to adjust the planning of casualty rates accordingly.

War Research procedures will necessarily include, but not be limited to, the

following:

(a) The collation of economic, military, and other relevant date into uniform

terms, permitting the reversible translation of heretofore discrete categories of

information.

(b) The development and application of appropriate forms of cost-effectiveness

analysis suitable for adapting such new constructs to computer terminology,

programming, and projection.

(c) Extension of the "war games" methods of systems testing to apply, as a

quasi-adversary proceeding, to the nonmilitary functions of war.

Since Both Programs of the WAR/PEACE RESEARCH Agency will share the

same purpose---to maintain governmental freedom of choice in respect to war

and peace until the direction of social survival is no longer in doubt -- it is of the

essence of this proposal that the agency be constituted without limitation of

73

time. Its examination of existing and proposed institutions will be selfliquidating

when its own function shall have been superseded by the historical

developments it will have, at least in part, initiated.

74

NOTES

SECTION 1

1. The Economic and Social Consequences of Disarmament: U.S. Reply to the

Inquiry of the Secretary-General of the United Nations (Washington, D.C.:

USGPO, June 1964), pp. 8-9.

2. Herman Kahn, Thinking About the Unthinkable (New York: Horizon, 1962),

p.35.

3. Robert S. McNamara, in an address before the American Society of Newspaper

Editors, in Montreal, P.Q., Canada, 18 May 1966.

4. Alfred North Whitehead, in "The Anatomy of Some Scientific Ideas,"

included in The Aims of Education (New York: Macmillan, 1929).

5. At Ann Arbor, Michigan, 16 June 1962.

6. Louis J. Halle, "Peace in Our Time? Nuclear Weapons as a Stabilizer," The

New Republic (28 December 1963).

SECTION 2

1. Kenneth E. Boulding, "The World War Industry as an Economic Problem," in

Emile Benoit and Kenneth E. Boulding (eds.), Disarmament and the Economy

(New York: Harper & Row, 1963).

2. McNamara, in ASNE Montreal address cited.

3. Report of the Committee on the Economic Impact of Defense and

Disarmament (Washington: USGPO, July 1965).

4. Sumner M. Rosen, "Disarmament and the Economy," War/Peace Report

(March 1966).

SECTION 3

1. Vide William D. Grampp, "False Fears of Disarmament," Harvard Business

Review (Jan.-Feb.1964) for a concise example of this reasoning.

75

2. Seymour Melman, "The Cost of Inspection for Disarmament," in Benoit and

Boulding, op. cit.

SECTION 5

1. Arthur I. Waskow, Toward the Unarmed Forces of the United States

(Washington: Institute for Policy Studies, 1966), p.9. (This is the unabridged

edition of the text of a report and proposal prepared for a seminar of strategists

and Congressman in 1965; it was later given limited distribution among other

persons engaged in related projects.)

2. David T. Bazelon, "The Politics of the Paper Economy," Commentary

(November 1962), p.409.

3. The Economic Impact of Disarmament (Washington: USGPO, January

1962), p.409.

4. David T. Bazelon, "The Scarcity Makers," Commentary (October 1962), p.

298.

5. Frank Pace, Jr., in an address before the American Banker's Association,

September 1957.

6. A random example, taken in this case from a story by David Deitch in the

New York Herald Tribune (9 February 1966).

7. Vide L. Gumplowicz, in Geschichte der Staatstheorien (Innsbruck: Wagner,

1905) and earlier writings.

8. K. Fischer, Das Militar (Zurich: Steinmetz Verlag, 1932), pp.42-43.

9. The obverse of this phenomenon is responsible for the principal combat

problem of present-day infantry officers: the unwillingness of otherwise

"trained" troops to fire at an enemy close enough to be recognizable as an

individual rather than simply as a target.

10. Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War (Princeton, N.J., Princeton

University Press, 1960), p.42. 11. John D. Williams, "The Nonsense about Safe

Driving," Fortune (September 1958).

12. Vide most recently K. Lorenz, in Das Sogenannte Bose: zur

Naturgeschichte der Aggression (Vienna: G. Borotha-Schoeler Verlag, 1964).

76

13. Beginning with Herbert Spencer and his contemporaries, but largely ignored

for nearly a century.

14. As in recent draft-law controversy, in which the issue of selective deferment

of the culturally privileged is often carelessly equated with the preservation of

the biologically "fittest."

15. G. Bouthol, in La Guerre (Paris: Presses universitairies de France, 1953)

and many other more detailed studies. The useful concept of "polemology," for

the study of war as an independent discipline, is his, as is the notion of

"demographic relaxation," the sudden temporary decline in the rate of

population increase after major wars.

16. This seemingly premature statement is supported by one of our own test

studies. But it hypothecates both the stabilizing of world population growth and

the institution of fully adequate environmental controls. Under these two

conditions, the probability of the permanent elimination of involuntary global

famine is 68 percent by 1976 and 95 percent by 1981.

SECTION 6

1. This round figure is the median taken from our computations, which cover

varying contingencies, but it is sufficient for the purpose of general discussion.

2. But less misleading than the more elegant traditional metaphor, in which war

expenditures are referred to as the "ballast" of the economy but which suggests

incorrect quantitative relationships.

3. Typical in generality, scope, and rhetoric. We have not used any published

program as a model; similarities are unavoidably coincidental rather than

tendentious.

4. Vide the reception of a "Freedom Budget for all Americans," proposed by A.

Philip Randolph et al; it is a ten-year plan, estimated by its sponsors to cost

$185 billion.

5. Waskow, op. cit.

6. By several current theorists, most extensively and effectively by Robert R.

Harris in "The Real Enemy," an unpublished doctoral dissertation made available

to this study.

77

7. In ASNE, Montreal address cited.

8. The Tenth Victim.

9. For an examination of some of its social implications, see Seymour

Rubenfeld, Family of Outcasts: A New Theory of Delinquency (New York:

Free Press, 1965).

10. As in Nazi Germany; this type of "ideological" ethnic repression, directed to

specific sociological ends, should not be confused with traditional economic

exploitation, as of Negroes in the U.S., South Africa, etc.

11. By teams of experimental biologists in Massachusetts, Michigan, and

California, as well as in Mexico and the U.S.S.R. Preliminary test applications

are scheduled in Southeast Asia, in countries not yet announced.

12. Expressed in the writings of H. Marshall McLuhan, in Understanding

Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964) and

elsewhere.

13. This rather optimistic estimate was derived by plotting a three-dimensional

distribution of three arbitrarily defined variables; the macro-structural, relating

to the extension of knowledge beyond the capacity of conscious experience; the

organic, dealing with the manifestations of terrestrial life as inherently

comprehensible; and the infra-particular, covering the subconceptual

requirements of natural phenomena. Values were assigned to the known and

unknown in each parameter, tested against data from earlier chronologies, and

modified heuristically until predictable correlations reached a useful level of

accuracy. "Two decades" means, in this case, 20.6 years, with a standard

deviation of only 1.8 years. (An incidental finding, not pursued to the same

degree of accuracy, suggests a greatly accelerated resolution of issues in the

biological sciences after 1972.)

SECTION 7

1. Since they represent an examination of too small a percentage of the eventual

options, in terms of "multiple mating," the subsystem we developed for this

application. But an example will indicate how one of the most frequently

recurring correlation problems--chronological phasing--was brought to light in

this way. One of the first combinations tested showed remarkably high

coefficients of compatibility, on a post hoc static basis, but no variations of

78

timing, using a thirty-year transition module, permitted even marginal

synchronization. The combination was thus disqualified. This would not rule

out the possible adequacy of combinations using modifications of the same

factors, however, since minor variations in a proposed final condition may have

disproportionate effects on phasing.

2. Edward Teller, quoted in War/Peace Report (December 1964).

3. E.g., the highly publicized "Delphi Technique" and other, more sophisticated

procedures. A new system, especially suitable for institutional analysis, was

developed during the course of this study in order to hypothecate mensurable

"peace games"; a manual of this system is being prepared and will be submitted

for general distribution among appropriate agencies. For older, but still useful,

techniques, see Norman C. Dalkey's Games and Simulations (Santa Monica,

Calif.:Rand, 1964).

SECTION 8

1. A primer-level example of the obvious and long overdue need for such

translation is furnished by Kahn (in Thinking About the Unthinkable,p.102).

Under the heading "Some Awkward Choices" he compares four hypothetical

policies: a certain loss of $3,000; a .1 chance of loss of $300,000; a.01 chance

of loss of $30,000,000; and a .001 chance of loss of $3,000,000,000. A

government decision-maker would "very likely" choose in that order. But what

if "lives are at stake rather than dollars?" Kahn suggests that the order of choice

would be reversed, although current experience does not support this opinion.

Rational war research can and must make it possible to express, without

ambiguity, lives in terms of dollars and vice versa; the choices need not be, and

cannot be, "awkward."

2. Again, an overdue extension of an obvious application of techniques up to

now limited such circumscribed purposes as improving kill-ammunition ratios

determining local choice between precision and saturation bombing, and other

minor tactical, and occasionally strategic, ends. The slowness of Rand, I.D.A.,

and other responsible analytic organizations to extend cost-effectiveness and

related concepts beyond early-phase applications has already been widely remarked

on and critized elsewhere.

3. The inclusion of institutional factors in war-game techniques has been given

some rudimentary consideration in the Hudson Institute's Study for

Hypothetical Narratives for Use in Command and Control Systems Planning

(by William Pfaff and Edmund Stillman; Final report published in 1963). But

79

here, as with other war and peace studies to date, what has blocked the logical

extension of new analytic techniques has been a general failure to understand

and properly evaluate the non-military functions of war.

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