Hacker Chronicles 2/HACKER2.BIN/829.IRNMOUNT.TXT

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> The organizing principle of any society is for war.  The
> basic authority of a modern state over its people resides
> in its war powers.

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-mensurable
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:

1. No proposed program for economic conversion to disarmament
   sufficiently takes into account the unique magnitude of the
   required adjustments it would entail.

2. 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.

3. Fiscal and monetary measures are inadequate as controls for the
   process of transition to an arms-free economy.

4. 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.

5. 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:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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 {x} hospitals or {y} schools
or {z} homes 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.

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