4,249 works (including 483 books, 3,406 articles and 357 historical documents), 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable.
Weapons can take years to develop, yet the political conditions governing their use may change before they enter service. In this March 1968 research report, Klaus Knorr and Oskar Morgenstern confront military planning’s dependence on forecasts that cannot reliably predict wars, revolutions, or shifts in alliances. Their answer is not greater predictive confidence but disciplined conjecture: explicit, criticizable reasoning from incomplete evidence. Declining access to overseas bases provides a concrete test, linking political pressures to choices about range, transport, and infrastructure without predicting the fate of any single installation. Equally important is their institutional argument: political expertise must help shape military requirements, not merely comment on technical decisions already made. The report shows how acknowledging uncertainty can change both what planners prepare for and whose judgment counts.
Conjecture is reasoned inference from admittedly defective evidence.