REPORT FROM IRON MOUNTAIN ON THE POSSIBILITY
AND DESIRABILITY OF PEACE

  WITH INTRODUCTORY  MATERIAL BY    
  LEONARD C. LEWIN

"A BOOK THAT SHOOK THE WHITE HOUSE."
          --US. NEWS AND WORLD REPORT


Report from Iron Mountain unveils a hitherto top-secret report of 
a government commission that was requested to explore the 
consequences of lasting peace on American society. The shocking 
results of the study, as revealed in this report, led the government 
to conceal the existence of the commission--they had found that, 
among other things, peace may never be possible; that even if it 
were, it would probably be un-desirable, that "defending the 
national interest" is not the real purpose of war; that war is 
necessary; that war deaths should be planned and budgeted. 
REPORT FROM IRON MOUNTAIN tells the story of how the 
project was formed, how it operated, What happened to it. It 
includes the complete verbatim text of the commission's hitherto 
classified report.         

". . . so elaborate and ingenious and so substantively original, 
acute, interesting and horrifying, that it will receive serious 
attention regardless of its origin."      
--The New York Times

"The first major result of the transformation of the war game 
into the peace game."
--Irving Louis Horowitz,
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

"Should be the occasion for new public demand for a 
penetrating examination and evaluation of government reports on 
strategic planning for disarmament and peace."
--The Editors of Trans-action

Leonard C. Lewin is a critic and satirist whose work has 
appeared in many newspapers and magazines here and abroad.  
He is the editor of A  Treasury of American Political Humor.


FOREWORD


"John Doe," as I will call him in this book for reasons that will 
be made clear, is a professor at a large university in the Middle 
West. His field is one of the social sciences, but I will not 
identify him beyond this. He telephoned me one evening last 
winter, quite unexpectedly; we had not been in touch for several 
years. He was in New York for a few days, he said, and there was 
something important he wanted to discuss with me. He wouldn't say 
what it was. We met for lunch the next day at a midtown 
restaurant.

He was obviously disturbed.  He made small talk for half an hour, 
which was quite out of character, and I didn't press him. Then, 
apropos of nothing, he mentioned a dispute between a writer and a 
prominent political family that had been in the headlines.  What, 
he wanted to know, were my views on "freedom of information."  How 
would I qualify them? And so on. My answers were not memorable, 
but they seemed to satisfy him. Then quite abruptly, he began to 
tell me the following story:

Early in August of 1963, he said, he found a message on his desk 
that a "Mrs. Potts" had called him from Washington. When he 
returned the call, a man answered immediately, and told Doe, among 
other things, that he had been selected to serve on a commission 
"of the high importance." Its objective was to determine, 
accurately and realistically, the nature of the problems that 
would confront the United States if and when a condition 
"permanent peace" should arrive, and to draft a program for 
dealing with this contingency. The man described the unique 
procedures that were to govern the commission's work and that were 
expected to extend its scope far beyond that of any previous 
examination of the problems.

Considering that the caller did not precisely identify either 
himself or his agency, his persuasiveness must have been of a 
truly remarkable order.  Doe entertained no serious doubts of the 
bona fides of the project, however, chiefly because of his 
previous experience with excessive secrecy that often surrounds 
quasi-governmental activities.  In addition, the man at the other 
end of the line demonstrated an impressively complete and 
surprisingly detailed knowledge of Doe's word and personal life.  
He also mentioned the names of others who were to serve with the 
group; most of them were known to Doe by reputation. Doe agreed to 
take the assignment --he felt he had no real choice in the matter-
-and to appear the second Saturday following at Iron Mountain, New 
York. An airline ticket arrived in his mail the next morning.

The cloak-and-dagger tone of this convocation was further enhanced 
by the meeting place itself. Iron Mountain, located near the town 
of Hudson, is like something out of Ian Fleming or E. Phillips 
Oppenheim. It is an underground nuclear hideout for hundreds of 
large American corporations. Most of them use it as am emergency 
storage vault for important documents. But a number of them 
maintain substitute corporate headquarters as well where essential 
personnel could presumably survive and continue to work after an 
attack. This latter group included such firms as Standard Oil of 
New Jersey, Manufacturers Hanover Trust, and Shell.

I will leave most of the story of the operations of the Special 
Study Group, as the commission was formerly called, for Doe to 
tell in his own words ("Background Information"). At this point it 
is necessary to say only that it met and worked regularly for over 
two and a half years, after which it produced a report. It was 
this document, and what to do about it, that Doe wanted to talk to 
me about.

The Report, he said, had been suppressed--both by the Special 
Study Group itself and by the government interagency committee to 
which it had been submitted. After months of agonizing, Doe had 
decided that he would no longer be party to keeping it secret. 
What he wanted from me was advice and assistance in having it 
published. He gave me his copy to read, with the express 
understanding that if for any reason I were unwilling to become 
involved, I would say nothing about it to anyone else.

I read the Report that same night. I will pass over my own 
reactions to it, except to say that the unwillingness of Doe's 
associates to publicize their findings became readily 
understandable. What had happened was that they had been so 
tenacious in their determination to deal comprehensively with the 
many problems of transition to peace that the original questions 
asked of them were never quite answered. Instead, this is what 
they concluded:

Lasting peace, while not theoretically impossible, is probably 
unattainable; even if it could be achieved it would almost 
certainly not be in the best interests of a stable society to 
achieve it.

That is the gist of what they say. Behind their qualified academic 
language runs this general argument: War fills certain functions 
essential to the stability of our society; until other ways of 
filling them are developed, the war system must be maintained--and 
improved in effectiveness.

It is not surprising that the Group, in its Letter of Transmittal, 
did not choose to justify its work to "the lay reader, unexposed 
to the exigencies of higher political or military responsibility." 
Its Report was addressed, deliberately, to unnamed government 
administrators of high rank; it assumed considerable political 
sophistication from this select audience. To the general reader, 
therefore, the substance of the document may be even more 
unsettling than its conclusions. He may not be prepared for some 
of its assumptions--for instance, that most medical advances are 
viewed more as problems than as progress; or that poverty is 
necessary and desirable, public posture by politicians to the 
contrary notwithstanding; or that standing armies are, among other 
things, social-welfare institutions in exactly the same sense as 
are old-people's bones and mental hospitals. It may strike him as 
odd to find the probable explanation of "flying saucer" incidents 
disposed of en passant in less than a sentence. He may be less 
surprised to find that the space program and the controversial 
antimissile missile and fallout shelter programs are understood to 
have the spending of vast sums of money, not the advancement of 
science or national defense, as their principal goals, and to 
learn that "military" draft policies are only remotely concerned 
with defense.

He may be offended to find the organized repression of minority 
groups, and even the re-establishment of slavery, seriously (and 
on the whole favorably) discussed as possible aspects of a world 
at peace. He is not likely to take kindly to the notion of the 
deliberate intensification of air and water pollution (as part of 
a program leading to peace), even when the reason for considering 
it is made clear. That a world without war will have to turn 
sooner rather than later to universal test-tube procreation will 
be less disturbing, if no more appealing.  But few readers will 
not be taken aback, at least, by a few lines in the Report's 
conclusions, repeated in its for recommendations, that suggest 
that the long-range planning--and "budgeting"--of the "optimum" 
number lives to be destroyed annually in overt warfare is high on 
the Group's list of priorities for government action.

I cite these few examples primarily to warn the general reader 
what he can expect. The statesmen and strategists for whose eyes 
the Report was intended obviously need no such protective 
admonition.

This book of course, is evidence of my response to Doe's request. 
After carefully considering the problems that might confront the 
publisher of the Report, we took it to The Dial Press. There, its 
significance was immediately recognized, and, more important, we 
were given firm assurances that no outside pressures of any sort 
would be permitted to interfere with its publication.

It should be made clear that Doe does not disagree with the 
substance of the Report, which represents a genuine consensus in 
all important respects. He constituted a minority of one--but only 
on the issue of disclosing it to the general public. A look at how 
the Group dealt with this question will be illuminating.

The debate took place at the Group's last full meeting before the 
Report was written, late in March, 1966, and again at Iron 
Mountain. Two facts must be kept in mind, by way of background. 
The first is that the Special Study Croup had never been 
explicitly charged with or sworn to secrecy, either when it was 
convened or at any time thereafter. The second is that the Group 
had nevertheless operated as if it had been. This was assumed from 
the circumstances of its inception and from the tone of its 
instructions. (The Group's acknowledgment of help from "the many 
persons . . . who contributed so greatly to our work" is somewhat 
equivocal; these persons were not told the nature of the project 
for which their special resources of information were solicited. )

Those who argued the case for keeping the Report secret were 
admittedly motivated by fear of the explosive political effects 
that could be expected from publicity. For evidence, they pointed 
to the suppression of the far less controversial report of then-
Senator Hubert Humphrey's subcommittee on disarmament in l962. 
(Subcommittee members had reportedly feared that it might be used 
by Communist propagandists, as Senator Stuart Symington put it, to 
"back up the Marxian theory that war production was the reason for 
the success of capitalism.") Similar political precautions had 
been taken with the better-known Gaither Report in 1957, and even 
with the so-called Moynihan Report in 1965.

Furthermore, they insisted, a distinction must be made between 
serious studies, which are normally classified unless and until 
policy makers decide to release them, and conventional "showcase" 
projects, organized to demonstrate a political leadership's 
concern about an issue and to deflect the energy of those pressing 
for action on it. (The example used, because some of the Croup had 
participated in it, was a "White House Conference" on 
international cooperation, disarmament, etc., which had been 
staged late in 1965 to offset complaints about escalation of the 
Vietnam war.)

Doe acknowledges this distinction, as well as the strong 
possibility of public misunderstanding. But he feels that if the 
sponsoring agency had wanted to mandate secrecy it could have done 
so at the outset. It could also have assigned the project to one 
of the government's established "think tanks," which normally work 
on a classified basis. He scoffed at fear of public reaction, 
which could have no lasting effect on long-range measures that 
might be taken to implement the Group's proposals, and derided the 
Group's abdication of responsibility for its opinions and 
conclusions. So far as he was concerned, there was such a thing as 
a public right to know what was being done on its behalf; the 
burden of proof was on those who would abridge it.

If my account seems to give Doe the better of the argument, 
despite his failure to convince his colleagues, so be it. My 
participation in this book testifies that I am not neutral. In my 
opinion, the decision of the Special Study Group to censor its own 
findings was not merely timid but presumptuous. But the refusal, 
as of this writing, of the agencies for which the Report was 
prepared to release it themselves raises broader questions of 
public policy. Such questions center on the continuing use of 
self-serving definitions of "security" to avoid possible political 
embarrassment. It is ironic how often this practice backfires.

I should state, for the record, that I do not share the attitudes 
toward war and peace, life and death, and survival of the species 
manifested in the Report. Few readers will. In human terms, it is 
an outrageous document. But it does represent a serious and 
challenging effort to define an enormous problem. And it explains, 
or certainly appears to explain, aspects of American policy 
otherwise incomprehensible by the ordinary standards of common 
sense. What we may think of these explanations is something else, 
but it seems to me that we are entitled to know not only what they 
are but whose they are.

By "whose" I don't mean merely the names of the authors of the 
Report. Much more important, we have a right to know to what 
extent their assumptions of social necessity are shared by the 
decision-makers in our government. Which do they accept and which 
do they reject.  However disturbing the answers, only full and 
frank discussion offers any conceivable hope of solving the 
problems raised by the Special Study Croup in their Report from 
Iron Mountain.



								L.C.L.

 New York, June 1967



BACKGROUND INFORMATION



[The following account of the workings of the Special Study Group 
is taken verbatim from a series of tape-recorded interviews I had 
with "John Doe." The transcript has been edited to minimize the 
intrusion of my questions and comments, as well as for length, and 
the sequence has been revised in the interest of continuity.  
L.C.L]



How was the Group formed?

.,, The general idea for it, for this kind of study, dates back at 
least to l96l. It started with some of the new people who came in 
with the Kennedy administration, mostly, I think, with McNamara, 
Bundy, and Rusk.  They were impatient about many things.... One of 
them was that no really serious work had been done about planning 
for peace--a long-range peace, that is, with long-
range planning.

Everything that had been written on the subject [before l96l] was 
superficial. There was insufficient appreciation of the scope of 
the problem. The main reason for this, of course, was that the 
idea a of a real peace in the world, general disarmament and so 
on, was looked on as utopian. Or even crackpot. This is still 
true, and it's easy enough to understand when you look at what's 
going on in the world today.... It was reflected in the studies 
that had been made up to that time. They were not realistic.. . .

The idea of the Special Study, the exact form it would take, was 
worked out early in '63.... The settlement of the Cuban missile 
affair had something to do with it, but what helped most to get it 
moving were the big changes in military spending that were being 
planned.... Plants being closed, relocations, and so forth. Most 
of it wasn't made public until much later....

[I understand] it took a long time to select the people for the 
Group. The calls didn't go out until the summer....



Who made the selection?

That's something I can't tell you. I wasn't involved with the 
preliminary planning. The first I knew of it was when I was called 
myself. But three of the people had been in on it, and what the 
rest of us know we learned from them, about what went on earlier. 
I do know that it started very informally. I don't know what 
particular government agency approved' the project.



Would you care to make a guess?

All right--I think it was an ad hoc committee, at the cabinet 
level, or near it. It had to be. I suppose they gave the 
organizational job--making arrangements, paying the bills, and so 
on--to somebody from State or Defense or the National Security 
Council. Only one of us was in touch with Washington, and I wasn't 
the one. But I can tell you that very, very few people knew about 
us. ., . For instance, there was the Ackley Committee. It was set 
up after we were. If you read their report-- the same old tune--
economic re conversion, turning sword plants into plowshare 
factories--I think you'll wonder if even the President knew about 
our Group. The Ackley Committee certainly didn't.



Is that possible, really?

I mean that not even the President knew of your commission?

Well, I don't think there's anything odd about the government 
attacking a problem at two different levels.

Or even about two or three government agencies working at cross-
purposes. It happens all the time. Perhaps the President did know. 
And I don't mean to denigrate the Ackley Committee1, but it was 
exactly that narrowness of approach that we were supposed to get 
away from. . You have to remember--
you've read the Report-- that what they wanted from us was a 
different kind thinking. It was a matter of approach. Herman Kal 
calls it "Byzantine"--no agonizing over cultural and I religious 
values. No moral posturing.  It's the kind of thinking that Rand 
and the Hudson Institute and I.D.A.2  brought into war 
planning.... What they asked us to do, and I think; we did it, was 
to give the same kink of treatment to the hypothetical  problems 
of peace as they give to a hypothetical nuclear war....We may have 
gone further than they expected, but once you establish your 
premises and your logic you can't turn back....

Kahn's books3, for example, are misunderstood, at least by laymen. 
They shock people. But you see, what's important about them is not 
his conclusions, or his opinions. It's the method. He has done 
more than anyone else I can think of to get the general public 
accustomed to the style of modern military thinking....Today it's 
possible for a columnist to write about "counter force strategy" 
and "minimum deterrence" and "credible first-strike capability" 
without having to explain every other word. He can write about war 
and strategy without   getting bogged down in questions of 
morality....

The other big difference about our work is breadth.  The Report 
speaks for itself.  I can't say that we took every relevant aspect 
of life and society into account,  but I don't think we missed 
anything essential . . .



Why was the project given to an outside commission?

Why couldn't it have been handled directly by an appropriate 
government agency?



I think that's obvious, or should be. The kind of  thinking wanted 
from our Group just isn't to be had in a formal government 
operation. Too many constraints.  Too many inhibitions. This isn't 
a new problem.  Why else would outfits like Rand and Ingersol stay 
in business?  Any assignment that's at all sophisticated is almost 
always given to an outside group. This is true even in the State 
Department, in the "gray"  operations, those that arc supposed to 
be unofficial, but are really as official as can be. Also with the 
C.l.A....

For our study, even the private research centers were too 
institutional.... A lot of thought went into making sure that our 
thinking would be unrestricted. All kinds of little things. The 
way we were called into the Group, the places we met, all kinds of 
subtle devices to remind us. For instance, even our name, the 
Special Study Group. You know government names. Wouldn't you think 
we'd have been called "Operation Olive Branch," or "Project 
Pacifica," or something like that? Nothing like that for us--too 
allusive, too suggestive. And no minutes of our--meetings--too 
inhibiting.... About who might be reading them. Of course, we took 
notes for our own use. And among ourselves, we usually called 
ourselves "The Iron Mountain Boys' or "Our Thing," or whatever 
came to mind....



What can you tell me about the members of the Group ?

I'll have to stick to generalities.... There were fifteen  of us. 
The important thing was that we represented a very wide range of 
disciplines. And not all academic. People from the natural 
sciences, the social sciences, even the humanities. We had a 
lawyer and a businessman. Also, a professional war planner. Also, 
you should know that everyone in the Group had done work of 
distinction in at least two different fields. The 
interdisciplinary element was built in....

It's true that there were no women in the Group, but I don't think 
that was significant.... We were all American citizens, of course. 
And all, I can say, in very good health, at least when we 
began.... You see, the first order of business, at the first 
meeting, was the reading of dossiers. They were very detailed, and 
not just professional, but also personal. They included medical 
histories.  I remember one very curious thing, for whatever it's 
worth. Most of us, and that includes me, had a record of 
abnormally high uric acid concentrations in the blood... None of 
us had ever had this experience, of a public inspection of 
credentials, or medical reports. It was very disturbing....

But it was deliberate. The reason for it was to emphasize that we 
were supposed to make all our own decisions on procedure, without 
outside rules. This include judging each others qualifications and 
making allowances for possible bias.  I don't think it affected 
our work directly, but it made the point it was supposed to 
make...That we should ignore absolutely nothing that might 
conceivably affect our objectivity.





[At this point I persuaded Doe that a brief occupational 
description of the individual members of the Group would serve a 
useful purpose for readers of the Report. The list which follows 
was worked out on paper. (It might be more accurate to say it was 
negotiated.) The problem was to give as much relevant information 
as possible without violating Doe's commitment to protect his 
colleagues' anonymity. It turned out to be very difficult, 
especially in the cases of those members who are very well known. 
For this reason, secondary areas of achievement or reputation are 
usually not shown,

The simple alphabetical "names" were assigned by Doe for 
convenient reference; they bear no intended relation to actual 
names. "Able" was the Camp's Washington contact. It was he who 
brought and read the dossiers, and who most often acted as 
chairman. He, "Baker" and "Cox" were the three who had been 
involved in the preliminary planning There is no other 
significance to the order of listing.

"Arthus Able" is an historian and political theorist, who has 
served in government.

"Bernard Baker" is a professor of international law and a 
consultant on government operations.

"Charles Cox" is an economist, social critic; and biographer.

"John Doe."

"Edward Ellis" is a sociologist often involved in public affairs.

"Frank Fox" is a cultural anthropologist

"George Green" is a psychologist, educator, and developer of 
personnel testing systems.

"Harold Hill" is a psychiatrist, the has conducted extensive 
studies of the relationship between individual and group behavior.

"John Jones is a scholar and literary critic.

'Martin Miller" is a physical chemist, whose work has received 
international recognition at the highest level.

"Paul Peters" is a biochemist, who has made important discoveries 
bearing on reproductive processes.

"Richard Roe" is a mathematician affiliated with

an independent West Coast research institution.

"Samuel Smith" is an astronomer, physicist, and communications 
theorist.

"Thomas Taylor" is a systems analyst and war planner, who has 
written extensively on war, peace, and international relations.

"William White" is an industrialist, who has under-taken many 
special government assignments.]



How did the Group operate? I mean, where and when did you meet, 
and so forth?

We met on the average of once a month. Usually was on weekends, 
and usually for two days. We had few longer sessions, and one that 
lasted only four hours . . . We met all over the country, always 
at a different place, except for the first and last times, which 
were a Iron Mountain. It was like a traveling seminar.... 
Sometimes at hotels, sometimes at universities. Twice we met at 
summer camps, and once at a private estate, in Virginia. We used a 
business place in Pittsburgh, and another in Poughkeepsie [New 
York].... We never met in Washington, or on government property 
anywhere....Able would announce the times and places two meetings 
ahead. They were never changed....

We didn't divide into subcommittees, or anything else that formal. 
But we all took individual assignments between meetings. A lot of 
it involved getting information from other people.... Among the 
fifteen of us, I don-t think there was anybody in the academic or 
professional world we couldn't call on if we wanted to, and we 
took advantage of it.... We were paid a very modest per diem. All 
of it was called "expenses" on the vouchers. We were told not to 
report it on our tax returns.... The checks were drawn on a 
special account of Able's at a New York bank. He signed them.... I 
don't know what the study cost. So far as our time and travel were 
concerned, it couldn't have come to more than the low tax-figure 
range. But the big item must have been computer time, and I have 
no idea how high this ran....



You say that you don't think your work was affected by 
professional bias. What about political and philosophical bias? Is 
it possible to deal with questions of war and peace without 
reflecting personal values?

Yes, it is. I can understand your skepticism. But if you had been 
at any of our meetings you'd have had a very hard time figuring 
out who were the liberals and who were the conservatives, or who 
were hawks and who were doves. There is such a thing as 
objectivity, and I think we had it.... I don't say no one had any 
emotional





reaction to what we were doing. We all did, to some extent. As a 
matter of fact, two members had heart attacks after we were 
finished, and I'll be the first to admit it probably wasn't a 
coincidence.



You said you made your own ground rules.  What were these ground 
rules?

The most important were informality and unanimity.  By informality 
I mean that our discussions were open ended. We went as far afield 
as any one of us thought we had to. For instance, we spent a lot 
of time on the relationship between military recruitment policies 
and industrial employment. Before we were finished with it, we'd 
one through the history of western penal codes and any number of 
comparative psychiatric studies [of draftees and volunteers]. We 
looked over the organization of the Inca empire. We determined the 
effects of automation on underdeveloped societies.... It was all 
relevant...

By unanimity, I don't mean that we kept taking votes; like a jury. 
I mean that we stayed with every issue until we had what the 
Quakers call a "sense of the meeting " It was time-consuming.  But 
in the long run it saved time.  Eventually we all got on the same 
wavelength, so to speak....

Of course we had differences, and big ones especially in the 
beginning.... For instance, in Section 1 you might think we were 
merely clarifying our instructions.  Not so;  it took a long time 
before we all agreed to a strict interpretation....Roe and Taylor 
deserve most of the credit for this.... There are many things in 
the Report that look obvious now, but didn't seem so obvious then. 
For instance, on the relationship of war to social systems. The 
original premise was conventional, from Clausewitz. . . That war 
was an "instrument" of broader political values. Able was the only 
one who challenged this, at first. Fox called his position 
"perverse." Yet it was Fox who furnished most of the data that led 
us all to agree with Able eventually. I mention this because I 
think it's good example of the way we worked. A triumph of method 
over cliché.... I certainly don't intend to go into details about 
who took what side about what, and when. But I will say, to give 
credit where due, that only Roe, Able, Hill, and Taylor were able 
to see, at the beginning, where our method was taking us.



But you always reached agreement, eventually.

Yes. It's a unanimous report.... I don't mean that our sessions 
were always harmonious. Some of them were rough. The last six 
months there was a lot of quibbling about small points.... We'd 
been under pressure for a long time, we'd been working together 
too long. It was natural . . . that we got on each other's nerves. 
For a while Able and Taylor weren't speaking to each other. Miller 
threatened to quit. But this all passed. There were no important 
differences....



How was the Report actually written? Who did the writing?

We all had a hand in the first draft. Jones and Able put it 
together, and then mailed it around for review before working out 
a final version.... The only problems were the form it should take 
and whom we were writing it for. And, of course, the question of 
disclosure....[Doe's comments on this point are summarized in the 
introduction.]



You mentioned a "peace games" manual. What are peace games?

I wanted to say something about that. The Report barely mentions 
it. "Peace games' is a method we developed during the course of 
the study. It's a forecast technique, an information system. I'm 
very excited about it. Even if nothing is done about our 
recommendations--which is conceivable--this is something that 
can't be ignored. It will revolutionize the study social problems. 
It's a by-product of the study. We needed a fast, dependable 
procedure to approximate the effects of disparate social phenomena 
on other social phenomena. We got it. It's in a primitive phase, 
but works.



How are peace games played? Are they like Rand's war games?

You don't "play" peace games, like chess or Monopoly any more than 
you play war games with toy soldiers. You use computers. Its a 
programming system. A compute "language," like FORTRAN, or ALGOL, 
or Jovial.... Its advantage is its superior capacity to 
interrelate data with no apparent common points of reference.... A 
simple analogy is likely to be misleading. But I can give you some 
examples. For instance, supposing I asked you to figure out what 
effect a moon landing by U.S. astronauts would have on an election 
in, say, Sweden. Or what effect a change in the draft law--a 
specific change-- I'd have on the value of real estate in downtown 
Manhattan? Or a certain change in college entrance requirements  
in the United States on the British shipping industry?

You would probably say, first, that there would be no effect to 
speak of, and second, that there would be no way of telling. But 
you'd be wrong on both counts. In each case there would be an 
effect, and the peace games method could tell you what it would 
be, quantitatively.  I didn't take these examples out of the air. 
We used them working out the method.... Essentially, it's an 
elaborate, high-speed trial-and-error system for determining 
working algorithms. Like most sophisticated types of computer 
problem-solving....

A lot of the "games" of this kind you read about are just 
glorified conversational exercises. They really are games, and 
nothing more. I just saw one reported in the Canadian Computer 
Society Bulletin, called a "Vietnam Peace Game." They use 
simulation techniques, but the programming hypotheses are 
speculative....

The idea of a problem-solving system like this is not original 
with us. ARPA4 has been working on something like it.   So has 
General Electric, in California.  There are others.... We were 
successful not because we know more than they do about 
programming, which we don't but because we learned how to 
formulate the problem accurately. It goes back to the old saw. You 
can find the answer if you know the right question....



Supposing you hadn't developed this method.  Would you have come 
to the same conclusions in the Report?

Certainly. But it would have taken many times longer.... But 
please don't misunderstand my enthusiasm [about the peace games 
method]. With all due respect to the effects of computer 
technology on modern thinking, basic judgments must still be made 
by human beings. The peace games technique isn't responsible for 
our Report. We are....



1. This was a "Committee on the Economic Impact of Defense and 
Disarmament," headed by Gardner Ackley, of the Council of Economic 
Advisers.   It was established by Presidential order in December, 
1963, and issued a report in July, 1965.

2. The Institute for Defense Analysis

3. On Thermonuclear War, Thinking About the Unthinkable, On 
Escalation

4. The Advanced Research Projects Agency, of the  Department of 
Defense.



STATEMENT BY "JOHN DOE"



CONTRARY to the decision of the Special Study Croup, of which I 
was a member, I have arranged for the general release of our 
Report. I am grateful to Mr. Leonard C. Lewin for his invaluable 
assistance in making this possible, and to The Dial Press for 
accepting the challenge of publication. Responsibility for taking 
this step, however is mine and mine alone.

I am well aware that my action may be taken as a breach of faith 
by some of my former colleagues. But my view my responsibility to 
the society of which am a part supersedes any self-assumed 
obligation on the part of fifteen individual men. Since our Report 
can be considered on its merits, it is not necessary for me to 
disclose their identity to accomplish my purpose. Yet I would 
gladly abandon my own anonymity if it were possible to do so 
without at the same time compromising theirs, to defend our work 
publicly if and when they release me from this personal bond.

But this is secondary. What is needed now, and needed badly, is 
widespread public discussion and debate about the elements of war 
and the problems of peace. I hope that publication of this Report 
will serve to initiate it.













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 non technical 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 findings, we do 
not recommend that this Report be released for publication. It is 
our affirmative judgment that such action 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 acknowledgment 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 for publication]



30 September, 1966











INTRODUCTION



THE REPORT which follows summarizes the results of a two-and--
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 
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 détente 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 of peace comes? What should me 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 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 I 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, l963, 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 official 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 so popularly believed, but 
that, in Whitehead's words, "...it ignores all judgment 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 normal positive standard. In this case it has 
been simply the sum of human society in general, of American 
society in particular, and, as a corollary to survival, the 
stability of society.

It is interesting, we believe, to note that the most passionate 
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 press 
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 exists. Our present purpose 
must be to continue I 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 wish 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 quantified. Economic 
actors, on the other hand, 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 in 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' 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, e 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 A its military 
establishment than any other major free world nation. This was 
true even before our increased expenditures in Southeast Asia." 
Plans for economic con-version 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 
rigid specialization that characterizes modern war production, 
best exemplified in nuclear and missile technology. This 
constituted no fundamental problem after World War 11, nor did the 
question of free-market consumer demand for "conventional" items 
of consumption--those goods and services 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 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 time retraining 
of labor for non armaments occupations. 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 few obsolete military and naval installations in 1964 
sound like a whisper.

In general, discussions 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. 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."'

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" problem of 
transition, a general attitude of confidence prevail 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 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, when 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 COD-template the 
diversion of the arms budget to a non military 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 product 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.

S. 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 re 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, al-though 
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 a 
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 re deployment 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 Others emphasize, on the contrary, the magnitude (and the 
opposite advantages) of the savings to be achieved from 
disarmament. One widely read analysis' 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 non-military 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 r 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 programs, 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 do 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 clichés 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 nations, that can-not 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 cliché 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 of behavior required elsewhere in the society; the 
successful operation of the armed forces and the armaments 
producers entirely outside the frame-work 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 re conversion 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 easily and fully comprehended.

We propose in this section to examine these nonmilitary, implied, 
and usually invisible functions of war, to the extent that 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."

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 modem 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, over-simply, 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." 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 11, 
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 o balance wheel in the economy."

The principal economic function of war, in our view, that it 
provides just such a flywheel. It is not to be confused in 
function with 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.)"  This 
is not "ironic or revealing," but essentially a simple statement 
of fact.

It should also be noted that war production has a dependably 
stimulating 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."  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 "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."' 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 foreign policy. But a nation's 
foreign policy can have I 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-à-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 eternal 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.7) 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 sub function. 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 clichés "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 finish 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 non-
military 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 we now call 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."8 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 l930s, it 
was deemed prudent by the government to invest minor make-work 
projects, like the "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 great 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.9 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 the 
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 I limits of twenty miles an hour we prefer to let 
automobiles kill forty thousand people a year."l0 A Rand I 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." The point may seem too obvious for iteration, 
but it 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 Hemispheric 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 conquistadors, 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.

Ethologistsl2 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 notedl3 and 
equally often deplored, even when it confuses biological and 
cultural factors.l3 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 Bouthoull5 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." 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 I 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 post nuclear 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 
formerly 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-called "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 I 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: I Is the work war-oriented or is it not? 
Among primitive

peoples, the war dance is the most important art form. I 
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 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 I 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 relation  ship 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 I 
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 parasite 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 I unimportant, however, but 
only that they appear to present no special problems for the 
organization of a I peace-oriented social system. They include the 
following:

War as a general social release. This is a psycho social 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 forgone 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 sub 
function; 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 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