THE REPORT OF THE SPECIAL STUDY GROUP

 > 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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