RAND Corporation

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RAND Corporation

Founders	Henry H. Arnold, Donald Wills Douglas, Sr.
Type	Global policy think tank
Founded	1948
Headquarters	Santa Monica, California (headquarters)
Origins	United States Army Air Forces, Project RAND
Key people	James Thomson (executive), Michael D. Rich, Brian Michael Jenkins, James Dobbins, Beth McGlynn, Arie Kapteyn
Area served	Predominantly United States of America
Revenue	$230.07 million (FY08) [1]
Employees	c. 1,600
Motto	"To help improve policy and decisionmaking through research and analysis."
Website	www.rand.org

RAND Corporation (Research ANd Development^[2]) is a nonprofit global policy think tank first formed to offer research and analysis to the United States armed forces by Douglas Aircraft Company. It is currently financed by the U.S. government, a private endowment,^[3] corporations ^[4] including the healthcare industry, universities^[5] and private individuals.^[6] The organization has long since expanded to working with other governments, private foundations, international organizations, and commercial organizations on a host of non-defense issues. RAND aims for interdisciplinary and quantitative problem solving via translating theoretical concepts from formal economics and the hard sciences into novel applications in other areas; that is, via applied science and operations research. RAND has been led since 1989 by Dr. James Thomson, a physicist. The second in command of the organization since 1993 has been Michael D. Rich.

RAND has approximately 1,600 employees and three principal North American locations: Santa Monica, California (headquarters); Arlington, Virginia; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The RAND Gulf States Policy Institute^[7] has offices in New Orleans, Louisiana, and Jackson, Mississippi. RAND Europe ^[8] is located in Cambridge, United Kingdom, and Brussels, Belgium. The RAND-Qatar Policy Institute^[9] is in Doha, Qatar. RAND's newest offices are in Boston, Massachusetts and Mexico City, Mexico, a representative office.

RAND is also the home to the Frederick S. Pardee RAND Graduate School, one of the original^{[clarification needed]} graduate programs in public policy and the first^{[citation needed]} to offer a Ph.D. The program is unique^{[peacock term]} in that students work alongside RAND analysts on real-world^{[clarification needed]} problems. The campus is at RAND's Santa Monica research facility. The Pardee RAND School is the world's largest Ph.D.-granting program in policy analysis^{[citation needed]}.

RAND publishes The RAND Journal of Economics, a scholarly peer-reviewed journal of economics.

To date, 32 recipients of the Nobel Prize, primarily in the fields of economics and physics, have been involved or associated with RAND at some point in their career.^[2][10][11]

Contents 1 Project RAND 2 History 3 Mission statement 4 Achievements and expertise 5 Notable RAND participants 5.1 Governance 6 Criticism 7 See also 8 References 9 Further reading 10 External links

[edit] Project RAND

RAND was set up in 1946 by the United States Army Air Forces as Project RAND,^[12] under contract to the Douglas Aircraft Company, and in May 1946 they released the Preliminary Design of an Experimental World-Circling Spaceship. In May 1948, Project RAND was separated from Douglas and became an independent non-profit organization. Initial capital for the split came from the Ford Foundation.

[edit] History

Since the 1950s, the RAND has been instrumental in defining US military strategy.^{[citation needed]} Their most visible contribution is the doctrine of nuclear deterrence by Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), developed under the guidance of then defence secretary Robert McNamara and based upon their work with game theory.^[13] Chief strategist Herman Kahn also posited the idea of a "winnable" nuclear exchange in his 1960 book On Thermonuclear War. This led to Kahn being one of the models for the titular character of the film Dr. Strangelove.^[14][15]

[edit] Mission statement

RAND was incorporated as a non-profit organization to "further promote scientific, educational, and charitable purposes, all for the public welfare and security of the United States of America." Its self-declared mission is "to help improve policy and decision making through research and analysis", using its "core values of quality and objectivity."^[2]

[edit] Achievements and expertise

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The achievements of RAND stem from its development of systems analysis. Important contributions are claimed in space systems and the United States' space program, in computing and in artificial intelligence. RAND researchers developed many of the^{[weasel words]} principles that were used to build the Internet. RAND also contributed to the development and use of wargaming.

Current areas of expertise include: child policy, civil and criminal justice, education, health, international policy, labor markets, national security, infrastructure, energy, environment, corporate governance, economic development, intelligence policy, long-range planning, crisis management and disaster preparation, population and regional studies, science and technology, social welfare, terrorism, arts policy, and transportation.

RAND designed and conducted one of the largest and most important studies of health insurance between 1974 and 1982. The RAND Health Insurance Experiment, funded by the then-U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, established an insurance corporation to compare demand for health services with their cost to the patient.

According to the 2005 annual report, "about one-half of RAND's research involves national security issues."

Many of the^{[weasel words]} events in which RAND plays a part are based on assumptions which are hard to verify because of the lack of detail on RAND's highly classified work for defense and intelligence agencies.

The RAND Corporation posts all of its unclassified reports, in full, on its official website.

[edit] Notable RAND participants

Over the last 60 years, more than 30 Nobel Prize winners have been involved or associated with the RAND Corporation at some point in their careers.^[2]

• Henry H. Arnold — General, United States Air Force — RAND founder
• Kenneth Arrow — economist, Nobel Laureate, developed the impossibility theorem in social choice theory
• Bruno Augenstein — V.P., physicist, mathematician and space scientist
• Robert Aumann — mathematician, game theorist, Nobel Laureate in Economics.
• J. Paul Austin — Chairman of the Board, 1972–1981
• Paul Baran — one of the developers of packet switching which was used in Arpanet and later networks like the Internet
• Barry Boehm — software economics expert, inventor of COCOMO
• Harold L. Brode — physicist, leading nuclear weapons effects expert
• Bernard Brodie — Military strategist and nuclear architect
• James R. Huber (PhD international relations), former contributing editor;
• Amir Farshad Ebrahimi — PhD Master of Middle East security areas
• Samuel Cohen — inventor of the neutron bomb in 1958
• Franklin R. Collbohm — Aviation Engineer, Douglas Aircraft Company — RAND founder and former director and trustee
• Walter Cunningham — astronaut
• George Dantzig — mathematician, creator of the simplex algorithm for linear programming
• Linda Darling-Hammond — co-director, School Redesign Network
• James F. Digby — American Military Strategist, author of first treatise on precision guided munitions 1949 - 2007
• Stephen H Dole — Author of the pivotal^{[according to whom?]} book Habitable Planets for Man^[16]
• Donald Wills Douglas, Sr. — President, Douglas Aircraft Company — RAND founder
• Daniel Ellsberg — leaker of the Pentagon Papers
• Francis Fukuyama — academic and author of The End of History and the Last Man
• H. Rowen Gaither, Jr. — Chairman of the Board, 1949–1959; 1960–1961
• David Galula, French officer and scholar
• James J. Gillogly — cryptographer and computer scientist
• Cecil Hastings — programmer, wrote software engineering classic, Approximations for Digital Computers (Princeton 1955)
• William E. Hoehn — Senior Policy Advisor to Senator Sam Nunn, Visiting Professor at the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs and the Coca-Cola Foundation Eminent Practitioner in Residence at Georgia Institute of Technology
• Brian Michael Jenkins — terrorism expert, Senior Advisor to the President of the RAND Corporation, and author of Unconquerable Nation
• Herman Kahn — theorist on nuclear war and one of the founders of scenario planning
• Zalmay Khalilzad — U.S. Ambassador to United Nations
• Henry Kissinger— United States Secretary of State (1973–1977); National Security Advisor (1969–1975); Nobel Peace Prize Winner (1973)
• Ann McLaughlin Korologos — Chairman of the Board, April 2004–present
• Lewis "Scooter" Libby — Dick Cheney's former Chief of Staff
• Ray Mabus — Former ambassador, governor
• Harry Markowitz — economist, greatly advanced finanical portfolio theory by devising mean variance analysis
• Andrew W. Marshall — military strategist, director of the US DoD Office of Net Assessment
• Margaret Mead — U.S. anthropologist
• Douglas Merrill — Former Google CIO & President of EMI's digital music division
• Newton N. Minow — Chairman of the Board, 1970–1972
• Lloyd N. Morrisett — Chairman of the Board, 1986–1995
• John Forbes Nash, Jr. — Nobel Prize-winning mathematician
• John von Neumann — mathematician, pioneer of the modern digital computer
• Allen Newell — artificial intelligence
• Paul O'Neill — Chairman of the Board, 1997–2000
• Ron Olson — Chairman of the Board, 2001–2004
• Edmund Phelps — winner of 2006 Nobel Prize in Economics
• W.V. Quine — philosopher
• Arthur E. Raymond — Chief Engineer, Douglas Aircraft Company — RAND founder
• Condoleezza Rice — former intern, former trustee (1991–1997), and former Secretary of State for the United States
• Michael D. Rich — RAND Executive Vice President, 1993–present
• Leo Rosten — academic and humorist
• Donald Rumsfeld — Chairman of Board from 1981–1986; 1995–1996 and Secretary of Defense for the United States from 1975 to 1977 and 2001 to 2006.
• Robert F. Salter — advocate of the vactrain maglev train concept
• Paul Samuelson — economist, Nobel Laureate
• Thomas C. Schelling — economist, winner of 2005 Nobel Prize in Economics
• James Schlesinger — former Secretary of Defense and former Secretary of Energy
• Norman Shapiro — mathematician, co-author of the Rice–Shapiro theorem, MH Email and RAND-Abel co-designer
• Lloyd Shapley — mathematician and game theorist
• David A. Shephard — Chairman of the Board, 1967–1970
• Abram Shulsky — former Director of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans^[17]
• Herbert Simon — Nobel prize-winning psychologist
• Frank Stanton — Chairman of the Board, 1961–1967
• James Steinberg — Deputy National Security Advisor to Bill Clinton
• Peter Szanton — the policy analyst and former President of New York Rand
• Katsuaki L. Terasawa — economist
• James Thomson — RAND CEO, 1989–present
• William H. Webster — Chairman of the Board, 1959–1960
• Albert Wohlstetter — Mathematician and Cold-War Strategist
• Roberta Wohlstetter — Policy analyst and military historian
• Ratan Tata — Chairman of Tata Sons
• Oliver Williamson — economist

[edit] Governance

The organization's governance structure includes a board of trustees. Current^[when?] members of the board include: Paul G. Kaminski (Chairman), Karen Elliott House (Vice Chairman), Richard J. Danzig, Francis Fukuyama, Richard Gephardt, John W. Handy, Jen-Hsun Huang, John M. Keane, Lydia H. Kennard, Philip Lader, Peter Lowy, Michael Lynton, Charles N. Martin, Jr., Ronald Olson, Paul O'Neill, Michael Powell, Donald B. Rice, James E. Rohr, James F. Rothenberg, Hector Ruiz, Carlos Slim Helu, Donald Tang, James Thomson, and Robert C. Wright.

Trustees Emeriti include: Harold Brown, Frank C. Carlucci

Former members of the board include: Walter Mondale, Condoleezza Rice, Newton Minow, Brent Scowcroft, Amy Pascal, John Reed, Charles Townes, Caryl Haskins, Walter B. Wriston, Frank Stanton, Carl Bildt, Donald Rumsfeld, Harold Brown, Robert Curvin, Pedro Greer, Arthur Levitt, Lloyd Morrisett, Lovida Coleman, Ratan Tata, Marta Tienda, Jerry Speyer, Timothy Geithner, Rita Hauser, Ann Korologos, and Bonnie McElveen-Hunter.

[edit] Criticism

In 1958, Democratic Senator Stuart Symington accused the RAND Corporation of defeatism for studying how the United States might strategically surrender to an enemy power. This led to the passage of a prohibition on the spending of tax dollars on the study of defeat or surrender of any kind. However, the senator had apparently misunderstood, as the report was a survey of past cases in which the US had demanded unconditional surrender of its enemies, asking whether or not this had been a more favorable outcome to US interests than an earlier, negotiated surrender would have been.^[18]

In April 1970, Newhouse News Service reported that Richard Nixon had commissioned RAND to study the feasibility of canceling the 1972 election. RAND denied it and reviewed its recent work for possible sources of the story. They said that the review was fruitless.^[18]

[edit] See also

• A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates (published by RAND)
• Pentagon Papers
• Daniel Ellsberg
• Brookings Institution
• Council on Foreign Relations
• Hudson Institute
• Trilateral Commission
• Kepner-Tregoe
• Rational choice theory
• Amron Harry Katz

[edit] References

[edit] Further reading

• Abella, Alex. "Soldiers of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire" (Harcourt, 2008). ISBN 978-0-15-101081-3.
• S.M. Amadae. "Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism" (University of Chicago Press, 2003).
• Martin Collins. "Cold War Laboratory: RAND, The Air Force and the American State" (Smithsonian Institution, 2002).
• Thomas and Agatha Hughes, eds. "Systems, Experts, and Computers: The Systems Approach in Management and Engineering After World War II" (The MIT Press. Dibner Institute Studies in the History of Science and Technology, 2000).
• Fred Kaplan. The Wizards of Armageddon" (Stanford University Press, 1991).
• Mark Trachtenberg. "History & Strategy" (Princeton University Press, 1991).
• Edward S. Quade and Wayne I. Boucher (eds.), "Systems Analysis and Policy Planning: Applications in Defense" (American Elsevier, 1968).
• Bruce R. Smith. The RAND Corporation: Case Study of a Nonprofit Advisory Corporation" (Harvard University Press, 1966).
• Clifford, Peggy, ed. "RAND and The City: Part One". Santa Monica Mirror, October 27, 1999 – November 2, 1999. Five-part series includes: 1; 2; 3; 4; & 5. Accessed April 15, 2008.

[edit] External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: RAND Corporation

• RAND Official web site
• Frederick S. Pardee RAND Graduate School.
• "The Air Force Creates a Think Tank" Chalmers Johnson's review of "Soldiers of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire", Harcourt Trade Publishers, Alex Abella