The Report From Iron Mountain
"The organizing principle of any society is for war. The
basic authority of a modern state over its people resides in
its war powers."
Table of Contents
Introduction
Section 1: Scope of the Study
Section 2: Disarmament and the Economy
Section 3: Disarmament Scenarios
Section 4: War and Peace as Social Systems
Section 5: The Functions of War
Section 6: Substitutes for the Functions of War
Section 7: Summary and Conclusions
Section 8: Recommendations
Footnote Section
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 us 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 far-reaching 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 finding, we
do not recommend that this Report be released for publication.
It is our affirmative judgement that such actions 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 acknowledgement of our gratitude to the many persons
in and out of government who contributed so greatly to our work.
For the Special Study Group
[signature withheld]
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
a 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 the 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 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 word
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 so-called "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 eighth we set forth our
recommendations for what we believe to be a practical and necessary
course of action.
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 answered 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 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. [1] 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 criticized 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?'" [2] And, as 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." [3] Surely it should 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 esthetic
and moral judgments." [4] 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." [5] 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." [6] 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 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 economies 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 determining 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 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.
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- measurable quality of economic
manifestations has given rise to more detailed speculation in
this area than in any other.
General agreement prevails with 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 [7] 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." [8] 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 high 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 goods and service 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 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 retraining
of labor for nonarmaments occupation. 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, discussion of the problems 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.
[9] 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." [10]
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 commonly 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 laissez-faire economists)
that unprecedented government assistance (and concomitant government
control) will be needed to solve the "structural"
problems of 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, low-cost 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 nonmilitary system equally
remote from the market economy. What the "pyramid-builders"
frequently suggest is the expansion of space-research programs
to the dollar level of current armaments 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.
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.
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 guess-work. 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
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 fail-safe 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. [11] Others emphasize, on the contrary, the magnitude
(and the opposite advantages) of the savings to be achieved
from disarmament. One widely read analysis [12] estimates the
annual cost 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 nonmilitary 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.
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 program, 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 Abbe 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 our 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 cliches 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 exists no conceivable conflict of interest,
real or imaginary, between nations or between social forces
within nation, 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 cliche is not true, and the problems of
transition are indeed substantive rather than merely procedural.
Although war 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 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 for 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 war-making 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 war-making 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 "national
interest" - economic, political, ideological; to maintain
or increase 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.
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 more easily and fully comprehended.
We propose in this section to examine these nonmilitary, implied,
and usually invisible functions of war, to the extent they 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 regular "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."
[13]
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 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. "[14] 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." [15]
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 the various forms of fiscal 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.)" [16] This is not "ironic or revealing,"
but essentially a simple statement of fact.
It should also be noted that war production has a dependable
stimulation effect outside itself. Far from constituting a "wasteful"
drain on the economy, 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." [17] 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 the "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." [18] 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.
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 word "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 no 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, of 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. [19]
) On a day-to-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.
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 cliches - "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 not been foreseen and 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 nonmilitary
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 time-tested 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 are
now called 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." [20] 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 social-welfare
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 "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.
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. [21] 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 for individual human violence,
but itself in turn serves to rationalize most nonmilitary killing.
It also provides the precedent for collective willingness of
members of a society to pay a blood price for institutions far
less central to social organization than 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." [22] 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."
[23] The point may seem too obvious for iteration, but 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 with
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 real 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.
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
Man, 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 [24] 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 effect of war has been often noted [25]
and equally often deplored, even when it confuses biological
and cultural factors. [26] 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 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 [27] 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. [28] 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 it remain especially relevant, however. The first
is obvious: current rates of population growth, compounded by
environmental threat of 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 formally self-liquidating 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 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 so-call "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 if 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's 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 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," an amplifier
of body motions invented for military use in difficult terrain,
is now making it possible for many previously confined 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 tropical parasitic diseases; it is hard to estimate
how long this work would 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 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 characterizes
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 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 foregone 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.
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 [29] 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 self-defeating, as with a runaway locomotive. The analogy,
though crude, [30] 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 unfinished
business - proposed but still unexecuted - in this field, the
assumption seems plausible. Let us examine briefly the following
list, which is more or less typical of general social welfare
programs. [31]
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 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" wold 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.
[32] Our objection 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 costing as much
as xhospitals or yschools or zhomes takes on a very different
meaning if there are to be no 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 space-research
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.
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
and 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 reduce the 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 armies, and
their technical equipment 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. Peacekeeping 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. [33] 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 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 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 postmilitary 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 central
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
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 [34] 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 improbable that a program of deliberate environmental
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
probable, in our judgment, that such a threat will have to be
invented, rather than developed from unknown conditions. For
this 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 work at
home or abroad. We could encourage other countries to do the
same." [35]
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.
It seems clear that Mr. McNamara and other proponents of the
peace-corps surrogate for this war 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 work" 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 substitute 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 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 [36] 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's "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 [37] 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 historical periods.
[38]
Ecological
Considering the 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 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 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 probable 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. [39] 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 war 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 blocked universal adoption
of simple birth-control 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.
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 effect
of this withdrawal to be felt. During 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 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 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,
[40] 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 space-research 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 low-keyed 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. [41] 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 not 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 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.
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 will 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.
1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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 group of institutions,
in modern societies, has successfully served these functions.
4. 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.
5. 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.
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:
1. 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.
2. Political . A viable political substitute for 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.
3. 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 an individual human life.
4. 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 relation to environmental supply.
5. 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.
1. Economic . a) A comprehensive social-welfare program, directed
toward maximum improvement of general conditions of human life.
b) A giant open-end space research program, aimed at unreachable
targets. c) A permanent, ritualized, ultra-elaborate disarmament
inspection system, and variants of such a system.
2. 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.
3. 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 religious or other mythologies. c) Socially
oriented blood games. d) Combination forms.
4. Ecological . A comprehensive program of applied eugenics.
5. 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 correlation as were tested as statistically
inadequate. [42]
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
capital-investment phase; its value in this function can therefore
be only temporary. 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 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 environmental-pollution 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 war 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 involves 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. 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 at 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 then-Senator 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."
Nor, simply because we have not discussed them, do we minimize
the massive reconciliation of conflicting interest which 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 appear 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 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." [43] The qualification
and the bias 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.
A 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 circumstance, 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 peace-transition
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.
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 inarguable 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 ever been conducted to determine, for example:
optimum levels of armament production, for purposes of economic
control, at any given series of chronological points and under
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, [44] 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 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.
SECTION 8: Recommendations
(1) We propose the establishment, under executive order of the
President, of a permanent War/Peace Research Agency, empowered
and mandated to execute the programs describe 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 operation 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.
(2) 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.
(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 unsubstituted functions.
(d)
The development and testing of the correlativity 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 an 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.
(3) 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 nonmilitary
functions of war . Specific determinations will include, but
not be limited to: 1) 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; 2) 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;
3) similar figures, to the extent that they can be separately
arrived at, assignable to the need for war to maintain social
cohesiveness; 4) 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;
5) the statistical relationship of war casualties to world food
supplies; 6) 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: 1) calculation of minimum and optimum ranges
of military expenditure required, under varying hypothetical
conditions, to fulfill these several functions, separately and
collectively; 2) 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; 3) 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: 1) how to determine the optimum
quantity, nature, and timing of military expenditures to ensure
a desired degree of economic control; 2) how to organize the
recruitment, deployment, and ostensible use of military personnel
to ensure a desired degree of acceptance of authorized social
values; 3) 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; 4) 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; 5) 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 data
into uniform terms, permitting the reversible translation of
heretofore discrete categories of information. [45]
(b)
The development and application of appropriate forms of cost-effectiveness
analysis suitable for adapting such new constructs to computer
terminology, programming, and projection. [46]
(c)
Extension of the "war games" methods of systems testing
to apply, as a quasi-adversary proceeding, to the nonmilitary
functions of war. [47]
(4) 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
time. Its examination of existing and proposed institutions
will be self-liquidating when its own function shall have been
superseded by the historical developments it will have, at least
in part, initiated.
Notes
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, 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).
7. 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 and Row, 1963).
8. McNamara, in ASNE Montreal address cited.
9. Report of the Committee on the Economic Impact of Defense
and Disarmament (Washington: USGPO, July 1965).
10. Sumner M. Rosen, "Disarmament and the Economy,"
War/Peace Report (March 1966).
11. Vide William D. Grampp, "False Fears of Disarmament,"
Harvard Business Review (Jan.-Feb. 1964) for a concise example
of this reasoning.
12. Seymour Melman, "The Cost of Inspection for Disarmament,"
in Benoit and Boulding, op .cit .
13. 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 Congressmen
in 1965; it was later given limited distribution among other
persons engaged in related projects.)
14. David T. Bazelon, "The Politics of the Paper Economy,"
Commentary (November 1962), p. 409.
15. The Economic Impact of Disarmament (Washington: USGPO, January
1962).
16. David T. Bazelon, "The Scarcity Makers," Commentary
(October 1962), p. 298.
17. Frank Pace, Jr., in an address before the American Bankers'
Association, September 1957.
18. A random example, taken in this case from a story by David
Deitch in the New York Herald Tribune (9 February 1966).
19. Vide L. Gumplowicz, in Geschichte der Staatstheorien (Innsbruck:
Wagner, 1905) and earlier writings.
20. K. Fischer, Das Militaer (Zurich: Steinmetz Verlag, 1932),
pp. 42-43.
21. 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.
22. Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1960), p. 42.
23. John D. Williams, "The Nonsense about Safe Driving,"
Fortune (September 1958).
24. Vide most recently K. Lorenz, in Das Sogenannte Boese: zur
Naturgeschichte der Aggression (Vienna: G. Borotha-Schoeler
Verlag, 1964).
25. Beginning with Herbert Spencer and his contemporaries, but
largely ignored for nearly a century.
26. 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."
27. G. Bouthoul, in La Guerre (Paris: Presses universitaires
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.
28. 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.
29. This round figure is the median taken from our computations,
which cover varying contingencies, but it is sufficient for
the purpose of general discussion.
30. 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.
31. Typical in generality, scope, and rhetoric. We have not
used any published program as a model; similarities are unavoidably
coincidental rather than tendentious.
32. 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.
33. Waskow, op .cit .
34. 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.
35. In ASNE Montreal address cited.
36. The Tenth Victim .
37. 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).
38. 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.
39. 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.
40. Expressed in the writings of H. Marshall McLuhan, in Understanding
Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964) and
elsewhere.
41. 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.)
42. 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 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.
43. Edward Teller, quoted in War/Peace Report (December 1964).
44. 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).
45. 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."
46. Again, an overdue extension of an obvious application of
techniques up to now limited to 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 criticized elsewhere.
47. 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 1963). But 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 nonmilitary functions of war.
New York Times Book Review: March 19, 1972
"Report From Iron Mountain"
'The Guest Word' - By LEONARD LEWIN
The book came out in November, 1967, and generated controversy
as soon as it appeared. It purported to be the secret report
of an anonymous "Special Study Group," set up, presumably
at a very high level of government, to determine the consequences
to American society of a "permanent" peace, and to
draft a program to deal with them. Its conclusions seemed shocking.
This commission found: that even in the unlikely event that
a lasting peace should prove "attainable," it would
almost surely be undesirable; that the "war system"
is essential to the functioning of a stable society; that until
adequate replacement for it might be developed, wars and an
"optimum" annual number of war deaths must be methodically
planned and budgeted. And much more. Most of the Report deals
with the "basic" functions of war (economic, political,
sociological, ecological, etc.) and with possible substitutes
to serve them, which were examined and found wanting. The text
is preceded by my foreword, along with other background furnished
by the "John Doe" who made the Report available.
The first question raised, of course, was that of its authenticity.
But government spokesmen were oddly cautious in phrasing their
denials, and for a short time, at least in Washington, more
speculation was addressed to the Group's members and of their
sponsorship than to whether the Report was an actual quasi-official
document. (The editors of Trans-action magazine, which ran an
extensive round-up of opinion on the book, noted that government
officials, as a class, were those most likely to accept it as
the real thing.)
Eventually, however, in the absence of definitive confirmation
either way, commentators tended to agree that it must be a political
satire. In that case, who could have written it? Among the dozens
of names mentioned, those of J. K. Galbraith and myself appeared
most often, along with a mix of academics, politicians, think-tank
drop-outs, and writers.
Most reviewers, relatively uncontaminated by overexposure to
real-politik, were generous to what they saw as the author's
intentions: to expose a kind of thinking in high places that
was all too authentic, influential, and dangerous, and to stimulate
more public discussion of some of the harder questions of war
and peace. But those who felt their own oxen gored-who could
identify themselves in some way with the government, the military,
"systems analysis", the established order of power-were
not. They attacked, variously, the substance of the Report;
the competence of those who praised its effectiveness; and the
motives of whomever they assigned the obloquy of authorship,
often charging him with an disingenuous sympathy for the Report's
point of view. The more important think-tankers, not unreasonably
seeing the book as an indictment of their own collective moral
sensibilities and intellectual pretensions, proffered literary
as well as political judgements: very bad satire, declared Herman
Kahn; lacking in bite, wrote Henry Rowen, of Rand. Whoever wrote
it is an idiot, said Henry Kissinger. A handful of far-right
zealots and eccentrics predictably applauded the Report's conclusions.
That's as much background as I have room for, before destroying
whatever residuum of suspense may still persist about the book's
authorship. I wrote the "Report," all of it. (How
it came about and who was privy to the plot I'll have to discuss
elsewhere.) But why as a hoax?
What I intended was simply to pose the issues of war and peace
in a provocative way. To deal with the essential absurdity of
the fact that the war system, however much deplored, is nevertheless
accepted as part of the necessary order of things. To caricature
the bankruptcy of the think-tank mentality by pursuing its style
of scientistic thinking to its logical ends. And perhaps, with
luck, to extend the scope of public discussion of "peace
planning" beyond its usual, stodgy limits.
Several sympathetic critics of the book felt that the guessing-games
it set off tended to deflect attention from those objectives,
and thus to dilute its effects. To be sure. Yet if the "argument"
of the Report had not been hyped up by its ambiguous authenticity-is
it just possibly for real?-its serious implications wouldn't
have been discussed either. At all. This may be a brutal commentary
on what it sometimes takes to get conspicuous exposure in the
supermarket of political ideas, or it may only exemplify how
an oblique approach may work when directed engagement fails.
At any rate, the who-done-it aspect of the book was eventually
superseded by sober critiques.
At this point it became clear that whatever surviving utility
the Report might have, if any, would be as a point-of-departure
book-for the questions it raises, not for the specious "answers"
it purports to offer. And it seemed to me that unless a minimum
of uncertainty about its origins could be sustained-i.e., so
long as I didn't explicitly acknowledge writing it-its value
as a model for this kind of "policy analysis" might
soon be dissipated. So I continued to play the no-comment game.
Until now. The charade is over, whatever is left of it. For
the satirical conceit of Iron Mountain, like so many others,
has been overtaken by the political phenomena it attacked. I'm
referring to those other documents-real ones, and verifiable-that
have appeared in print. The Pentagon papers were not written
by someone like me. Neither was the Defense Department's Pax
Americana study (how to take over Latin America). Nor was the
script of Mr. Kissinger's "Special Action Group,"
reported by Jack Anderson (how to help Pakistan against India
while pretending to be neutral).
So far as I know, no one has challenged the authenticity of
these examples of high-level strategic thinking. I believe a
disinterested reader would agree that sections of them are as
outrageous, morally, and intellectually, as any of the Iron
Mountain inventions. No, the revelations lay rather in the style
of the reasoning-the profound cynicism, the contempt for public
opinion. Some of the documents read like parodies of Iron Mountain,
rather than the reverse.
These new developments may have helped fuel the debates the
book continues to ignite, but they raised a new problem for
me. It was that the balance of uncertainty about the book's
authorship could "tilt," as Kissinger might say, the
other way. (Was that Defense order for 5,000-odd paperbacks,
someone might ask, really for routine distribution to overseas
libraries-or was it for another, more sinister, purpose?) I'm
glad my own Special Defense Contingency Plan included planting
two nonexistent references in the book's footnotes to help me
prove, if I ever have to, that the work is fictitious.