(1) We propose the establishment, under executive order of the
President, of a permanent War/Peace Research Agency, empowered and
mandated to execute the programs describe in (2) and (3) below.
This
agency,
(a) will be provided with
non-accountable funds sufficient to
implement its responsibilities and decisions at its own discretion
(b) will have authority to preempt and utilize, without
restriction, any and all facilities of the executive branch of the
government in pursuit of its objectives.
It will be organized along
the lines of the National Security Council, except that none of its
governing, executive, or operating personnel will hold other public
office or governmental responsibility.
Its directorate will be drawn
from the broadest practicable spectrum of scientific disciplines,
humanistic studies, applied creative arts, operating technologies,
and otherwise unclassified professional occupations.
It will be
responsible solely to the President, or to other officers of
government temporarily deputized by him. Its operation will be
governed entirely by its own rules of procedure.
Its authority will
expressly include the unlimited right to withhold information on its
activities and its decisions, from anyone except the President,
whenever it deems such secrecy to be in the public interest.
(2) The first of the War/Peace Research Agency’s two principal
responsibilities will be to determine all that can be known,
including what can reasonably be inferred in terms of relevant
statistical probabilities, that may bear on an eventual transition
to a general condition of peace.
The findings in this Report may be
considered to constitute the beginning of this study and to indicate
its orientation; detailed records of the investigations and findings
of the Special Study Group on which this Report is based, will be
furnished the agency, along with whatever clarifying data the agency
deems necessary. This aspect of the agency’s work will hereinafter
be referred to as "Peace Research."
The Agency’s Peace Research activities will necessarily include, but
not be limited to, the following:
(a) The creative development of possible substitute institutions for
the principal nonmilitary functions of war.
(b) The careful matching of such institutions against the criteria
summarized in this Report, as refined, revised, and extended by the
agency.
(c) The testing and evaluation of substitute institutions, for
acceptability, feasibility, and credibility, against hypothecated
transitional and postwar conditions; the testing and evaluation of
the effects of the anticipated atrophy of certain unsubstituted
functions.
(d) The development and testing of the correlativity of multiple
substitute institutions, with the eventual objective of establishing
a comprehensive program of compatible war substitutes suitable for a
planned transition to peace, if and when this is found to be
possible and subsequently judged desirable by appropriate political
authorities.
(e) The preparation of a wide-ranging schedule of partial,
uncorrelated, crash programs of adjustment suitable for reducing the
dangers of an unplanned transition to peace effected by force majeure.
Peace research methods will include but not be limited to, the
following:
(a) The comprehensive interdisciplinary application of historical,
scientific, technological, and cultural data.
(b) The full utilization of modern methods of mathematical modeling,
analogical analysis, and other, more sophisticated, quantitative
techniques in process of development that are compatible with
computer programming.
(c) The heuristic "peace games" procedures developed during the
course of its assignment by the Special Study Group, and further
extensions of this basic approach to the testing of institutional
functions.
(3) The War/Peace Research Agency’s other principal responsibility
will be "War Research." Its fundamental objective will be to ensure
the continuing viability of the war system to fulfill its essential
nonmilitary functions for as long as the war system is judged
necessary to or desirable for the survival of society.
To achieve
this end, the War Research groups within the agency will engage in
the following activities:
(a) Quantification of existing application of the nonmilitary
functions of war. Specific determinations will include, but not be
limited to:
1) the gross amount and the net proportion of
nonproductive military expenditures since World War II assignable to
the need for war as an economic stabilizer;
2) the amount and
proportion of military expenditures and destruction of life,
property, and natural resources during this period assignable to the
need for war as an instrument for political control;
3) similar
figures, to the extent that they can be separately arrived at,
assignable to the need for war to maintain social cohesiveness;
4)
levels of recruitment and expenditures on the draft and other forms
of personnel deployment attributable to the need for military
institutions to control social disaffection;
5) the statistical
relationship of war casualties to world food supplies;
6) the
correlation of military actions and expenditures with cultural
activities and scientific advances (including necessarily, the
development of mensurable standards in these areas).
(b) Establishment of a priori modern criteria for the
execution of
the nonmilitary functions of war. These will include, but not be
limited to:
1) calculation of minimum and optimum ranges of military
expenditure required, under varying hypothetical conditions, to
fulfill these several functions, separately and collectively;
2)
determination of minimum and optimum levels of destruction of life,
property, and natural resources prerequisite to the credibility of
external threat essential to the political and motivational
functions;
3) development of a negotiable formula governing the
relationship between military recruitment and training policies and
the exigencies of social control.
(c) Reconciliation of these criteria with prevailing economic,
political, sociological, and ecological limitations. The ultimate
object of this phase of War Research is to rationalize the
heretofore informal operations of the war system. It should provide
practical working procedures through which responsible governmental
authority may resolve the following war-function problems, among
others, under any given circumstances:
1) how to determine the
optimum quantity, nature, and timing of military expenditures to
ensure a desired degree of economic control;
2) how to organize the
recruitment, deployment, and ostensible use of military personnel to
ensure a desired degree of acceptance of authorized social values;
3) how to compute on a short-term basis, the nature and extent of
the loss of life and other resources which should be suffered and/or
inflicted during any single outbreak of hostilities to achieve a
desired degree of internal political authority and social
allegiance;
4) how to project, over extended periods, the nature and
quality of overt warfare which must be planned and budgeted to
achieve a desired degree of contextual stability for the same
purpose; factors to be determined must include frequency of
occurrence, length of phase, intensity of physical destruction,
extensiveness of geographical involvement, and optimum mean loss of
life;
5) how to extrapolate accurately from the foregoing, for
ecological purposes, the continuing effect of the war system, over
such extended cycles, on population pressures, and to adjust the
planning of casualty rates accordingly.
War Research procedures will necessarily include, but not be limited
to, the following:
(a) The collation of economic, military, and other relevant data
into uniform terms, permitting the reversible translation of
heretofore discrete categories of information. [45]
(b) The development and application of appropriate forms of
cost-effectiveness analysis suitable for adapting such new
constructs to computer terminology, programming, and projection.
[46]
(c) Extension of the "war games" methods of systems testing to
apply, as a quasi-adversary proceeding, to the nonmilitary functions
of war. [47]
(4) Since both programs of the
War/Peace Research Agency will share
the same purpose - to maintain governmental freedom of choice in
respect to war and peace until the direction of social survival is
no longer in doubt - it is of the essence of this proposal that the
agency be constituted without limitation of time.
Its examination of
existing and proposed institutions will be self-liquidating when its
own function shall have been superseded by the historical
developments it will have, at least in part, initiated.