The world has rarely seen a time where two powers dominate the entire globe - almost utterly and completely - like in the latter half of the 20th Century with the United States and the Soviet Union, as our guest Thomas777 tonight points out. After the end of the Cold War in 1991, it also became easy to feel like the era of major global conflict was over, and forget just how deadly and potentially catastrophic with nuclear weapons the preceding eras had become. During the post World War II era, with the Axis powers having been thoroughly defeated, the (former) allies, replete with their battle tested armies and massive armaments and industrial bases, aligned against each other into capitalist and communist blocs. With the stakes never before this high, and the entire world hoping to avoid another cataclysmic 100 million dead, the United States began funding think tanks to come up with ways to do this - most notably at the RAND Corporation. During their early years, and up until the height of the Cold War, RAND attracted thousands of famous and highly influential intellects from the fields of physics, mathematics, statistics, economics and more, many of who went on to win Nobel prizes, focusing on war strategy, production planning, and predictive modeling of adversaries using theoretical and computerized simulations. But as the Vietnam War demonstrated the limits of these approaches in entrenched nationalist struggles, and as general sentiment for military research soured, the organization today is a shadow of its former self, and stands amidst a crowded field of beltway adjacent think tanks, going through the white paper motions without demonstrating anything of true note - perhaps like much of the rest of the broader US military establishment.
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-- References --
- On War, Clausewitz (1832)
- Cybernetics, Wiener (1948)
- On Thermonuclear War, Kahn (1960)
- The Pentagon Papers, New York Times (1971) - https://www.nytimes.com/spotlight/the-pentagon-papers
- The Terror Network, Sterling (1981)
- Inside the Soviet Army, Suvarov (1982)
- WarGames, Badham (1983)
- Beautiful Mind, Howard (2001)
- Soldiers of Reason, Abella (2008)
- The Fog of War, Morris (2008)
- TMBS Doc - Private Gov - The Rand Corp Meritocracy, Bessner (2020) -
- Zeihan - After Dark - the Collapse of Globalization, Myth of the 20th Century (2022) - https://myth20c.wordpress.com/2022/10/31/zeihan-after-dark-the-collapse-of-globalization/
- Episode 1079: Trump is Targeted w/ Thomas777 and Dark Enlightenment, The Pete Quiñones Show (2024) - https://www.spreaker.com/episode/episode-1079-trump-is-targeted-w-thomas777-and-dark-enlightenment--60686297
- Proud Prophet - Reagan's Nuclear War Briefing Declassified - https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/nuclear-vault/2016-12-22/reagans-nuclear-war-briefing-declassified
- Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Pournelle's_laws
- Arrow’s impossibility theorem - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem
- Nash Equilibrium - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium
- Shoe-banging incident - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoe-banging_incident
- Simplex algorithm - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplex_algorithm
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