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 forth-rightly 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 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 I here, but we see no reason to 
limit ourselves to proposals that address themselves explicitly to 
the problem as we I 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 will no 
longer exist in any relevant sense. We will also disregard the non 
critical 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 
subject to arbitrary control. Public housing starts, to meet the 
needs of a particular society. An economy as advanced and complex 
as our own requirements of a stable economy might dictate. An 
economy as advanced and complex as our own requites the planned 
average annual destruction of not less than 10 percent of gross 
national product1 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 crude2, 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.3

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 a 
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" would 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.4  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 programs 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 
requirement 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 
"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 fail  
safe 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. Peace-keeping 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. 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 re-enter 
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 post 
military 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 and economic "threat" of sufficient size and credibility to 
warrant political organization.  Would this kind of threat also be 
contradictory of our basic premise? --that is, 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 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 far-
fetched 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 Corp. 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 discipline 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." 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 our 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 anticitution 
is needed, as the "alternate enemy" needed to 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 
pre industrial 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 pre-requisite 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 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 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 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 certain historical periods.



Ecological


Considering 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 
is 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 developmental  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-à-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 socio-moral 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 social 
systems. This was the function of pure decoration, entertainment, 
or play, entirely free of the burden of expressing the socio-moral 
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, 
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 reference of sequential logic. 
Its significance in this context is that it provides al 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. 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 now 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 pre-eminence 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 
groups 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 
modem 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: Criterion


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 economic control, 
appears unpromising in terms 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 
substitutes proposed for this function that are modeled 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 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.

a. 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. a) A modern sophisticated form of 
slavery. Motivational function. a)Intensified environmental 
pollution. b) New religions or other mythologies. c) Socially 
oriented blood games. d) Combination forms.

4. Ecological. A comprehensive welfare program, or a master 
program of eugenic control.

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. More important, it is not enough to 
develop 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 correlations as were tested as statistically 
inadequate.

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; 
myth making 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 can-not 
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 to 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 interests 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 I over war 
whenever a real option exists, because it usually appears 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 I 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." 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 
unarguable 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, 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 described in (2) and (3) below. 
This agency (a) will be provided with non accountable 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 operations 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 non-military 
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 I 
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.'

(b)The development and application of appropriate forms of cost-
effectiveness analysis suitable for adapting such new constructs 
to computer terminology, programming, and projection.

(c) Extension of the "war games" methods of systems testing to 
apply, as a quasi-adversary proceeding to the nonmilitary 
functions of war.

(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



Section 1

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, in 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).



Section 2

1. 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 & Row, 1963).

2 McNamara, in ASNE Montreal address cited.

3. Report of the Committee on the Economic Impact of Defense and 
Disarmament (Washington: USGPO, July 1965).

4. Sumner M. Rosen, "Disarmament and the Economy," War/Peace 
Report (March 1966).



Section 3

1. Vide William D. Grampp, "False Fears of Disarmament," Harvard 
Business Review (Jan.-Feb. 1964) for a concise example of this 
reasoning.

2. Seymour Melman, "The Cost of Inspection for Disarmament," in 
Benoit and Boulding, op. cit.



Section 5

1. 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.)

2. David T. Bazelon, "The Politics of the Paper" Commentary 
(November 1962), p. 409.

3. The Economic Impact of Disarmament (Washington: USGPO, January 
1962).

4. David T. Bazelon, "The Scarcity Makers," Commentary (October 
1962), p. 298.

5. Frank Pace, Jr., in an address before the American Bankers' 
Association, September 1957.

6. A random example, taken in this case from a story by David 
Deitch in the New York Herald Tribune (9 February 1966).

7. Vide L. Gumplowicz, in Geschichte der Staatstheorien 
(Innsbruck: Wagner, 1905) and earlier writings.

8. K. Fischer, Das Militar (Zurich: Steinmetz Verlag, 1932), pp. 
42-43.

9. 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.

10. Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton 
University Press, 1960), p. 42.

11. John D. Williams, "The Nonsense about Safe Driving," Fortune 
(September 1958).

12. Vide most recently K. Lorenz, in Das Sogenannte Bose: zur 
Naturgeschichts der Aggression (Vienna: G. Borotha-Schoeler 
Verlag, 1964)

13. Beginning with Herbert Spencer and his contemporaries, but 
largely ignored for nearly a century.

14. 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."

15. 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.

16. 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 control . Under these two conditions, the 
probability of the permanent elimination of involuntary global 
famine is 88 percent by 1978 and g5 percent by 1981.



Section 6

1. This round figure is the median taken from our computations, 
which cover varying contingencies, but it is sufficient for the 
purpose of general discussion.

2. 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.

3. Typical in generality, scope, and rhetoric. We have not used 
any published program as a model; similarities are unavoidably 
coincidental rather than tendentious.

4. Read 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

5. Waskow, op. cit.

6. 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.

7. In ASNE Montreal address cited.

8. The Tenth Victim.

9. For an examination of some of its social implications, see 
Seymour Rubenfeld, Family of Outcasts: A New Theory of Delinquency 
(New York: Free Press, 196S).

10. 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.

11. 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.

12. Expressed in the writings of H. Marshall McLuhan, in 
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 
1964) and elsewhere.

13. 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 
sub conceptual 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.)



Section 7

1. 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 huge 
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.

2. Edwald Teller, quoted in War/Peace Report (December 1984).

3. 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).



Section 8

1. A primer-level example of the obvious and long over-
due need for such translation is furnished by Kahl (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."

2. 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. 

3. 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 non-military functions of 
war.


Report from Iron Mountain