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