Ridiculed in Dr. Strangelove (as the “Bland Corporation”), castigated by Pravda (as the American “academy of science and death”), and thrust into the spotlight when the Pentagon Papers were stolen from it, the RAND Corporation has played a somewhat mysterious role in U.S. public policy since its founding in 1946. In Soldiers of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire, Alex Abella surveys the organization’s history and its “extraordinarily wide-ranging influence” on the world stage. Indeed, the author argues that RAND analysts have been “the advocates, planners, and courtiers of an ever-expanding America.”

How did this come about? At the end of World War II, the Air Force recognized that it would need the same sort of scientific and economic expertise that it had called upon during the conflict to conceive new weapons, analyze costs, evaluate training and combat procedures, and select targets. To that end, it developed a nonprofit, civilian advisory outfit—“Project RAND,” an infelicitous acronym for “Research and Development”—to conduct long-range studies. The hard-charging and brilliant (if politically retrograde) General Curtis LeMay nurtured the organization and protected it from interfering bureaucrats and top brass, insisting that it be free to determine its own research agenda.

In 1948, with the help of a grant from the Ford Foundation, RAND became an independent, nonprofit corporation, able to conduct any nonproprietary research it chose. Still, the Air Force remained its premiere client: throughout the 1950s, military policy and defense budgeting emphasized nuclear forces, and the Air Force was in charge of those glamorous strategic weapons. From the think tank’s point of view, the flyboys were an enlightened and exceedingly generous patron, even after RAND began to carry out studies for various Pentagon offices during the Kennedy administration.

I worked for RAND as a national...

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