Cold War Laboratory

Reviewed by: Cold War Laboratory: RAND, the Air Force, and the American State, 1945–1950 Rebecca S. Lowen (bio) Cold War Laboratory: RAND, the Air Force, and the American State, 1945–1950. By Martin J. Collins. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002. Pp. xviii+278. $34.95. In March 1946, the U.S. Army Air Forces placed a contract with Douglas Aircraft for a study to determine the best system for conducting long-range air warfare. Project RAND, as it was then called, was conceived by General Henry "Hap" Arnold and his special consultant, former MIT engineering professor Edward Bowles, as part of their vision for a reconfigured air force closely bound to industry and cognizant of the centrality of scientific and technological innovations to developing war technology and preparedness. Within two years, RAND was established as a nonprofit corporation committed to developing an interdisciplinary "science" of air warfare and employing systems analysis to solve problems of military organization and weapons development. [End Page 886] Cold War Laboratory is a close, well-written study of these developments in RAND's early history. As with other recent work in the history of cold war relationships between academia, industry, and the state, this history of RAND does not assume inevitability; rather, Martin Collins nicely describes the competing ideas and the confusion regarding how best to link science, industry, and the air force in the postwar world, as well as the bureaucratic infighting and individual personalities that complicated implementation of particular plans. The first three chapters focus on the roles and ideas of Arnold and Bowles in adumbrating administrative structures suitable to a postwar air force and in the creation of RAND. The last two chapters shift focus to those working for RAND, and particularly their efforts to employ systems analysis in the study of long-range bombing. Collins seeks to overcome the disjunction between the two topics by suggesting that the initiators of RAND and the principal scientific investigators for RAND were really concerned with the same fundamental issues: how to integrate science and technology into air force planning and how to link research, industrial production, and the military in the nuclear age. This is only partially successful. In the book's later chapters one wishes especially for the close attention shown in the earlier chapters to those conceptualizing and organizing RAND. We learn, for example, that Rowan Gaither is the person who proposed that RAND become a nonprofit corporation and who arranged for its funding. But we are never told why RAND turned to Gaither, a wealthy San Francisco attorney with no obvious interest or expertise in air warfare or the air force, or why Gaither became involved with RAND. This intriguing development calls for more exploration. Cold War Laboratory is at its best when it sticks close to its source material and explicates the thinking of those involved with RAND. It is on less sure ground when it ventures to link the developments it describes to the scholarly literature on the "organizational synthesis" and the "associative state." For example, Bowles's conception of RAND is repeatedly described as following Herbert Hoover's thinking regarding relationships between industry and the state. Yet Bowles is never shown to have had any actual awareness of Hoover's ideas. More problematic is that Bowles's ideas, as presented in Cold War Laboratory, do not bear much resemblance to those that historians attribute to Hoover. Hoover's aim was to encourage private industry to engage in self-regulating behavior as a way both to soften the worst excesses of capitalism and also, and perhaps more importantly, to derail any plans for government action. The state's role was to assist industry in this effort; once industry was self-regulating, state involvement would be, in Hoover's scheme, unnecessary. Bowles's vision was clearly different. At its center was the state, in the form of the military; his goal was to bring industry [End Page 887] into service with the state, binding its interests to those of the air force. Although both Hoover's and Bowles's thinking involved state-industry cooperation, the resemblance ends there. Still, Collins deserves credit for seeking to broaden the

Bureaucracy · Cold war · Corporation · Economics · Management · Military history · Operations research · Political science · Politics · Rand corporation · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · State (computer science) · World War II · Computer Science · Engineering · Law · Twentieth Century Scientific Developments