Victor Hunt was perhaps the only person at RAND whom nobody disliked. He scored very highly in the game of composing blistering critiques of reports he deemed inadequate, a favorite RAND pastime; but unlike almost everyone else who competed at this sport, Hunt could do so without personally offending the objects of his wrath. Colleagues commonly referred to him as “a prince of a man.” So it was that when, in 1952, Hunt wrote and circulated a six-page internal memorandum outlining the ideas that he and Marshall had discussed with Brodie, and adding to them his own anti-military, or “counterforce,” targeting twist, the memo was closely read and widely commented on.
Targeting had been a topic of great interest at RAND since the late 1940s. RAND hired several targeteers from World War II strategic-bombing campaigns as consultants or full-time employees. Most notable were Charlie Hitch from Princes Risborough, now head of the RAND economics division, and John Williams from the New York Applied Mathematics Panel, now head of the math division. But there were also Carl Kaysen from the Economic Objectives Unit of the OSS, Burt Klein from the postwar U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, and others. They led several projects that attempted to quantify data from the war and to assess various theories of strategic bombing, calculating whether it was more efficient to attack concentrated industries or urban-industrial complexes, devising measures by which to judge what sorts of bombs were best to use against specific targets, figuring out how to locate the most vulnerable bottlenecks in a national economy.
When he first came to RAND in the summer of 1950, Andy Marshall worked on some of these studies, calculating the effects of a strategic-bombing campaign against the Soviet economy. And two years later, with RAND economist Jack Hershleifer, he undertook an enormously elaborate campaign analysis, simulating an actual bombing attack, laying out a Soviet target system and air defenses, routing the planes from base to target in such a way to go around or destroy the defenses, flying the remaining bombers back to base, doing reconnaissance on what targets were not hit the first time, flying the surviving bombers back over those targets and striking them again, and so forth.
These sorts of studies focused on war as a problem of arithmetic, calculus and probability. They served as inputs to many of the broader “systems analyses” turned out by Ed Paxson, E. S. Quade and, later, Albert Wohlstetter—the studies that asked what was the best type of bomber or the best basing mode in terms of which system could destroy the most targets for a given amount of money or which would cost less given a certain number of targets destroyed.
Victor Hunt’s short memorandum interested the specialists in this tradition of RAND analysis because it dealt with targeting. But it especially grabbed their attention because it suggested two ways in which their discipline could be expanded in scope: first, it talked about targeting the enemy’s military forces, whereas virtually all previous RAND efforts in this field concentrated on economic targeting; second, through Bernard Brodie’s insight, it attached the whole question of targeting to the broader questions of war objectives and strategy—connecting the intensity with which the war is waged to the task of bringing the war to a successful conclusion with minimal damage done, in the process, to American cities.
Within a few months of the Hunt memo’s dissemination, some of the analysts within RAND’s strategic community began to meet on a fairly formal basis every two or three weeks to discuss the relationship between nuclear weapons and strategy, strategy and war, war and deterrence. Calling themselves the Strategic Objectives Committee, they included Bernard Brodie, Andy Marshall and Victor Hunt of the social science division, John Williams of the math division, Jimmy Lipp of the missiles division, Herman Kahn of physics on the periphery and, as rapporteur for the group, a young engineer named James Digby. Charlie Hitch, head of the economics division, also sat in occasionally.
Among the specific issues discussed were those that had been raised by Bernard Brodie and Victor Hunt. In the spring of 1953, Brodie wrote a paper called “Must We Shoot from the Hip?,” arguing for a reduction in the vulnerability of the Strategic Air Command. His reasoning was not so much to make it more difficult for the Soviets to launch a successful first-strike but to allow the United States to use nuclear weapons, if it had to, with deliberation and restraint, to make possible the retention of a reserve force as a bargaining lever without having to worry that the Soviets might knock out the reserve force. It was essentially the same argument that Brodie had made in his Air Staff report for General Vandenberg. Brodie, Charlie Hitch and Andy Marshall also wrote a paper called “The Next Ten Years,” which laid out these ideas.
At this stage, however, ruminations on counterforce were fairly theoretical; the concept was explored, but not its feasibility. That task was taken up late in 1954 by Jim Digby, the engineer who served as rapporteur in the Strategic Objectives Committee and who became increasingly intrigued with the practical side of the Brodie-Hunt-Marshall-Hitch thinking. A few years earlier, Digby had worked with fellow RAND engineer Ed Barlow on an air-defense study commissioned by the Air Force—an elaborate systems analysis simulating a Soviet bomber attack, running their planes (on paper) along various flight paths, testing through various statistical techniques the effectiveness of proposed U.S. fighter-interceptor planes and surface-to-air missiles in their attempts to shoot down the approaching bombers, and then assessing how much industrial capital the penetrating bombers would destroy and how many people they would kill.
The main conclusion of the Barlow-Digby study was that air defense could not cope with a large-scale concentrated attack, that enough bombers would get through and inflict devastating damage. Digby was interested in counterforce as an alternative method of destroying Soviet bombers before they could destroy American cities. Or, if counterforce could not permanently destroy the bombers, then perhaps it could delay and disrupt their operations so heavily that the Soviets would have to divide their attack into several waves, each containing a much smaller number of bombers so that air defenses might shoot down a much higher percentage of the bombers that did survive the counterforce strike.
For the counterforce study, Digby assembled a large team of technical analysts to do a systems analysis similar to that done for the air-defense study, but running the simulation in reverse—from U.S. bombers taking off in the United States to their dropping bombs over airfields in the Soviet Union. The purpose was to discover just how effective a counterforce campaign might be. They took Air Force Intelligence data on the general area where Soviet forces were believed to be located, laid out map exercises on flight tactics to avoid Soviet defenses and when to refuel, calculated how many bombers and weapons were needed given the performance of the airplanes and bombs of the day. It had earlier been believed that if SAC tried to attack the Soviet long-range air force, the Soviet planes would merely take off. One discovery that Digby made, through talking with Air Force Intelligence officers, was that Soviet planes were not on alert at all, that moving them would take a great deal of time, and that in any event they would have to fly back somewhere to reload and refuel if they wanted to make subsequent attacks.