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SECTION 8
Recommendations
(1)
We propose the establishment, under executive order of the President, of a
permanent War/Peace Research Agency, empowered and mandated to execute the
programs describe in (2) and (3) below.
This
agency,
(a)
will be provided with 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.
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