“Hey, who’s the wimp you’re hanging out with now? Einstein?” says a dumb-jock type to a pretty girl about the nerd who’s accompanying her. It’s 1962, as portrayed in George Lucas’ 1973 American Graffiti. We don’t know where the wimp will be a few years later, though. Perhaps advising the Pentagon on Operation Rolling Thunder, by which the US sought to coerce North Vietnam to stop its support for the Viet Cong through a calibrated series of bombings, which didn’t work.
There’s an odd historical role-reversal, in that the late-1950s and early-1960s were a golden age for strategic-intellectual types, consulting on policy from academia or think tanks. Such figures have dwindled and retreated into obscurity today. The Vietnam War began with serious, albeit flawed, analyses, as with Thomas Schelling, later winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics, game-theorizing how bombings could bring Hanoi to heel. The Iran War commenced on the fly, with a shortfall of planning and strategy, just bicep-flexing stupidity, which amounted to a similar blunder.
The role-reversal extends to the broader culture. Despite the carve-out for Cold War consultants, the US of 1962 tended to disdain or downplay cognitive skills, not imagining the wimpy kid might become a tech innovator with earnings and social standing the other guy (barring an unlikely star turn in pro sports) couldn’t approach. Today’s America’s aware of such revenge-of-the-nerd scenarios, though AI companies’ overreaching is now undermining the cachet of tech founders. Vietnam showed policy intellectuals are no guarantee against folly, whereas Iran shows their absence ensures it.
In 1970, Schelling led a dozen Harvard professors to Washington to meet with Henry Kissinger, their former colleague, now President Nixon’s national security adviser. These professors, who’d advised the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, were angry Nixon was bombing Cambodia, an escalation. The meeting marked a break between government and prominent Cold War strategists, cutting off a source of advice, however mixed in quality, and the professors’ motivations included evading their own hawkish history.
Kissinger’s been cited as an inspiration for Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 Dr. Strangelove, though that effect’s likely marginal at best, as he wasn’t well-known at that time. Others who fed into the character could’ve included the polymathic John von Neumann, H-bomb inventor Edward Teller, rocket engineer Wernher von Braun, and strategist-futurist Herman Kahn. It’s difficult to think of anyone today with a comparable mix of intellectual standing and influence on policy decisions as any of these. Kubrick’s mockery of such figures was also an elevation into the cultural spotlight and an acknowledgement of their importance.
The pendulum might swing again. The disaster in Iran could, and certainly should, lead to some re-engagement by the federal government with strategy-oriented institutes. That won’t happen during the Trump administration, which has shown disdain for expert advice across a broad range of policy matters, including by downgrading the Office of Net Assessment, the Pentagon’s own think tank. But future administrations will need to avoid massive blunders, such as starting a war without a plan for what to do if the enemy closes a strategic waterway (something of which there’d been warnings since 1979), or recognition that drone warfare has evolved in a way inimical to nations relying on expensive weapons.
There will be many strategic issues to address. One is the danger of chokepoints in space coming under the control of hostile powers. A recent article by space journalist Leonard David raised the possibility that cislunar space, a set of orbits around the Earth and the moon, could become the focus of a confrontation. “Just as the Strait of Hormuz is a narrow waterway, cislunar space, though seemingly large, actually contains a few unique and exclusive points of transit through which all lunar travel must pass,” said Marc Feldman, executive director of the Center for the Study of Space Crime, Piracy & Governance.