Herman Kahn - Hudson Institute

Hudson Institute

In 1961 Kahn, Max Singer and Oscar Ruebhausen, founded the Hudson Institute, a policy research organization then located in Croton-on-Hudson, New York which was also where Kahn was living at the time. Luminaries such as sociologist Daniel Bell, the French political philosopher Raymond Aron and novelist Ralph Ellison, author of the 1952 classic Invisible Man, were recruited by the institute. Stung by the vociferousness of his critics, Kahn softened his tone somewhat, responding to their points in Thinking About the Unthinkable (1962) and a further work on military strategy, On Escalation (1965). Between 1966 and 1968, during the peak of the Vietnam War, Kahn served as a consultant to the Department of Defense and opposed the growing pressure to negotiate directly with North Vietnam, arguing that the only military solution was sharp escalation. Failing that, he said, the U.S. government had to have an exit strategy, and Kahn claimed credit for introducing the term "Vietnamization". Herman Kahn and the Hudson Institute advised against starting a counterinsurgency war in Vietnam, but once it was going, they were of course willing to give advice on how to wage it. He said in an interview that he and the Hudson Institute preferred not to give advice to e.g. the Secretary of Defense, because disagreement at such a high level was regarded as treason, whereas disagreement with, say, the deputy undersecretary was regarded as only technical. Their criticism of the US plan seems almost prophetic now. The US brought in British advisers having experience from their successful counterinsurgency war in Malaya and constructed a plan with their help. But Kahn and the Institute judged that Vietnam was different from Malaya because the British had an effective rural constabulary in Malaya. They did a study of the major counterinsurgency wars in recent history and found a 100% correlation between successful wars and effective police forces. Kahn said "the purpose of an army is to protect your police force. We had an army in Vietnam without a purpose."