RAND

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RAND Corporation

Founder(s)	Henry H. "Hap" Arnold, Donald Wills Douglas, Sr.
Type	Global policy think tank
Founded	1948
Location	Santa Monica, California Arlington, Virginia Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Origins	United States Army Air Forces, Project RAND
Key people	Michael D. Rich
Area served	Predominantly United States of America
Focus	Policy Analysis
Revenue	$247.29 million (FY10)[1]
Employees	c. 1,700
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 and 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-defence 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. Michael D. Rich is president and chief executive officer of the RAND Corporation.

RAND has approximately 1,700 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, Abu Dhabi, The United Arab Emirates, and Mexico City, Mexico, a representative office.

RAND is also 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 aims to have practical value 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.^{[citation needed]}

RAND publishes The RAND Journal of Economics, a 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]

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.

History

Since the 1950s, the RAND has been instrumental in defining U.S. 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-Defense 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]

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]

Achievements and expertise

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RAND Corporation, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

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. 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 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 participants

John von Neumann, consultant to the RAND Corporation.^[16]

• Abram Shulsky — former Director of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans^[17]

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 U.S. had demanded unconditional surrender of its enemies, asking whether or not this had been a more favorable outcome to U.S. interests than an earlier, negotiated surrender would have been.^[18]

See also

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

References

Further reading

Books

• Alex Abella. Soldiers of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire (2008, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt hardcover; ISBN 0-15-101081-1 / 2009, Mariner Books paperback reprint edition; ISBN 0-15-603344-5).
• S.M. Amadae. Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism (2003, University Of Chicago Press paperback; ISBN 0-226-01654-4 / hardcover; ISBN 0-226-01653-6).
• Martin J. Collins. Cold War Laboratory: RAND, the Air Force, and the American State, 1945-1950 (2002, Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press hardcover, part of the Smithsonian History of Aviation and Spaceflight Series; ISBN 1-58834-086-4)
• Agatha C. Hughes and Thomas P. Hughes (editors). Systems, Experts, and Computers: The Systems Approach in Management and Engineering, World War II and After (2000, The MIT Press hardcover, part of the Dibner Institute Studies in the History of Science and Technology; ISBN 0-262-08285-3 / 2011, paperback reprint edition; ISBN 0-262-51604-7).
• Fred Kaplan. The Wizards of Armageddon (1983, Simon and Schuster hardcover, first printing; ISBN 0-671-42444-0 / 1991, Stanford University Press paperback, part of the Stanford Nuclear Age Series; ISBN 0-8047-1884-9).
• Edward S. Quade and Wayne I. Boucher (editors), Systems Analysis and Policy Planning: Applications in Defense (1968, American Elsevier hardcover).
• Bruce L.R. Smith. The RAND Corporation: Case Study of a Nonprofit Advisory Corporation (1966, Harvard University Press / 1969; ISBN 0-674-74850-6).
• Mark Trachtenberg. History and Strategy (1991, Princeton University Press paperback; ISBN 0-691-02343-3 / hardcover; ISBN 0-691-07881-5).

Articles

• 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 15 April 2008.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: RAND Corporation

• Official website
• The Research and Development (RAND) Corporation from the Smithsonian Institution Archives