Download Soldiers of Reason: The Rand Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire AudioBook Free

The first-ever popular history of the RAND Corporation, written with full usage of its archives, Troops of Reason is a page-turning chronicle of the go up of the secretive think container that has been the driving power behind American federal for sixty years.

Blessed in the wake of World Conflict II as an idea factory to recommend the air power how to wage and succeed wars, RAND quickly became the originator of America’s anti-Soviet nuclear strategy. A magnet to discover the best and the brightest, its rates included Cold Conflict luminaries such as Albert Wohlstetter, Bernard Brodie, and Herman Kahn, who probably preserved us from nuclear annihilation and unquestionably created Eisenhower’s “military-industrial complex.”

In the Kennedy era, RAND experts became McNamara’s Whiz Kids and their ideas of rational warfare steered our conduct in Vietnam. Those same ideas drove our invasion of Iraq forty-five years later, championed by RAND affiliated stars such as Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, and Zalmay Khalilzad. But RAND’s best contribution might be its least known: rational choice theory, a model describing all human tendencies through self-interest. Through it RAND sparked the Reagan-led change of our communal and financial system but also unleashed a resurgence of exactly the forces whose living it rejected— religious beliefs, patriotism, tribalism.

With Troops of Reason, Alex Abella has rewritten the history of America’s previous 50 % century and cast a new light on our difficult present.