RAND

The RAND Corporation (Research ANd Development) is a nonprofit global policy think tank first formed to offer research and analysis to the United States armed forces by Douglas Aircraft Company and currently financed predominantly by the U.S. government, a private endowment, predominantly pharmaceutical corporations, universities and private individuals. 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, is Michael D. Rich.

RAND has approximately 1,600 employees and three principal U.S. locations: Santa Monica, California (headquarters); Washington, D.C. (currently located in Arlington, Virginia); Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (adjacent to Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh); a fourth office is located in Boston, Massachusetts. There are also several smaller offices of RAND in the United States, including the RAND Gulf States Policy Institute in Jackson, Mississippi and New Orleans, Louisiana. RAND Europe's offices are in Cambridge, United Kingdom and Brussels, Belgium. In 2003, RAND opened the RAND-Qatar Policy Institute in Doha.

RAND is also the home to the Frederick S. Pardee RAND Graduate School, one of the original graduate programs in public policy and the first to offer a Ph.D. The program is unique in that students work alongside RAND analysts on real-world 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.

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 affiliated with RAND at some point in their career.

Project RAND

RAND was set up in 1946 by the United States Army Air Forces as Project RAND, 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.

History

Since the 1950s, the RAND has been instrumental in defining US military strategy. 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. 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.

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."

Achievements and expertise

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 principles that were used to build the Internet. Numerous analytical techniques were invented at RAND, including aspects of dynamic programming, game theory, the Delphi method, linear programming, systems analysis, and exploratory modeling. RAND also contributed to the development and use of wargaming.

Current areas of expertise include: child policy, civil and criminal justice, education, environment and energy, 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 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.

Notable RAND participants

Over the last 60 years, more than 30 Nobel Prize winners have been affiliated with the RAND Corporation at some point in their careers.

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
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
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
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 book ''Habitable Planets for Man"
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, developed the Capital asset pricing model that is still widely used in modern finance
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
Lloyd Shapley — mathematician and game theorist
David A. Shephard — Chairman of the Board, 1967-1970
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

Governance

The organization's governance structure includes a board of trustees. Current 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 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.

Criticism

In 1958, 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.

In April 1970, a Newhouse News Service story reported that Richard Nixon had commissioned RAND to study the feasibility of canceling the 1972 election. This was denied by RAND, which subsequently undertook a review of its recent work to see if there was anything that could have been misunderstood to spark the rumor. They didn't identify any actions as such, and so it is their claim that the review was fruitless.

Translation

The word "RAND" occurs as such in the following languages: English, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, Ukrainian.

Translation(s) in other languages: Arabic: معهد راند قطر للسياسات, German: Rand Corporation, French: RAND Corporation, Italian: RAND Corporation, Hebrew: תאגיד ראנד, Dutch: RAND Corporation, Japanese: ランド研究所, Polish: RAND Corporation, Russian: RAND (корпорация), Slovak: RAND Corporation, Swedish: RAND Corporation, Turkish: Rand Şirketi, Chinese: 兰德公司.