[SIGCIS-Members] details sought on Paul Werbos work on Vietnam for RAND

[Moritz Feichtinger]

Hey Bernard,

Some of RAND's work is accessible via the  Vietnam Center and Sam Johnson Vietnam Archive<https://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/>, and I would believe the report to which Werbos contributed might be this one: Rand Document, the Relative Impact of U.S. Military Action on Viet Cong / North Vietnamese Attacks in South Vietnam: Preliminaries to A Computer Simulation<https://vva.vietnam.ttu.edu/repositories/2/digital_objects/198329>

To locate the NY Times article, the exact date would be useful.

Hope that helps, glad to chat for further exchange.

All the best,

Moritz

Am 30.03.26 um 10:44 schrieb Bernard Geoghegan via Members:
Dear colleagues with RAND and Vietnam War expertise!

In an interview in the book Talking Nets, Paul Werbos, an earlier developer of backpropagation algorithms, tells a story (excerpted below) about a project he worked on for RAND that got leaked to the New York Times. I've emailed with Werbos, but he doesn't seem to have a handy citation for the NY Times report. Does anyone happen to know the report he has in mind or tips on how to locate the report or a gloss on his work for RAND? There are a few comments in Boden's two volume study of AI, but it appears her reconstruction is imprecise. Alternately, I'm not planning a RAND archives deep-dive or site visit, but maybe someone has advice for a well targeted remote search request I could file? This is just a little footnote for a larger project, so I'm trying to not get too sidetracked.

Werbos reports: “I went back to Harvard to get a PhiD. in applied math. Having been fortified with humanity from London, I then descended into the bowels of the machine , stopping off at the RAND Corporation for the summer of 1968 along the way....Actually, I did learn a thing that summer that surprised me. It turned out one of their problems was coming up with a measure of success in the Vietnam War....I looked for stable invariants , and they were things like Vietcong attacks on Americans. That was the best stable invariant underlying measure. I used that as a success measure and came to the conclusion that we' should radically change our policy and do things like small unit actions instead of these large sweeps...Of course , it was all classified , and I read it on the front page of the New York Times two weeks later, which immediately made me very cynical about American security. The minute it’s useful , it’s on the front page of the New York Times. That made me very cynical- that event plus a few other things that happened at the RAND Corporation.”

Best wishes, Bernard



_______________________________________________
This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org


--
Dr. Moritz J. Feichtinger
Universität Basel | Departement Geschichte
SNF-Ambizione Fellow
Hirschgässlein 21 | CH-4051 Basel
moritz.feichtinger at unibas.ch<mailto:moritz.feichtinger at unibas.ch>
moritzfeichtinger.net
computingthesocial.net
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1260-8884

Offline Fridays!
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/attachments/20260330/18c5cb98/attachment.htm>