Konrad Kellen

Konrad Kellen was a Rand Corporation analyst and Second World War psychological warfare veteran who was brought in to provide an independent second assessment of the Viet Cong Motivation and Morale Study after internal dissent within Rand's research team raised questions about the direction of the study under Leon Gouré. Working from the same interview transcripts Gouré had used, Kellen reached conclusions diametrically opposed to the prevailing analytical framework and documented them in formal Rand reports that were published but functionally ignored during the period of maximum policy relevance.¹

Counter-Findings on VC Morale

Kellen identified a distinction that Gouré's analysis had missed. Bombing and military operations produced two distinct categories of affected civilians: those who were physically near explosions and survived injured, weakened, and temporarily demoralized ("near miss" victims), and those whose homes and families were destroyed while they themselves survived physically intact ("remote miss" victims). Gouré's analysis had treated both groups as similarly degraded in morale and motivation. Kellen found that the second group, far more numerous, emerged from the destruction of their communities with intensified hatred of Americans and a deepened commitment to the war. The net effect of the air campaign was not the VC morale collapse Gouré's reports described but a self-reinforcing cycle of civilian loss and combatant hardening.¹

Kellen documented these findings in two Rand reports: A View of the VC: Elements of Cohesion in the Enemy Camp in 1966-1967 (RM-5462-1, November 1969) and Conversations with Enemy Soldiers in Late 1968/Early 1969: A Study of Motivation and Morale (RM-6131-1, September 1970). Both concluded that enemy organizational cohesion was high, that ideological commitment was durable among core cadres, and that the war was unwinnable on the terms being pursued. Policymakers who had found Gouré's work useful, including National Security Advisor Walt Rostow, did not adopt Kellen's framework.¹

Later Career

Kellen remained at Rand after the Vietnam controversy and became the organization's leading analyst of terrorism and political violence. His characteristic "contrarian or independent view," as Rand's obituary described it, was the same quality that had led him to reach contrary findings from identical interview data. He and Gouré died within days of each other in April 2007. Anthony Russo's complaints about Gouré, and Kellen's counter-findings, were both vindicated by Rand's commissioned institutional history (RAND in Southeast Asia, 2010), which confirmed that Gouré had functioned as an air power promoter rather than an independent analyst.¹