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-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. 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
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
- Dana Goldman, health economist
- Henry H. "Hap" Arnold — General, United States Air Force
- Kenneth Arrow — economist, Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, developed the impossibility theorem in social choice theory
- Arturo G. Munoz Ph.D — 30-year CIA Veteran, Former CIA Operative and COPS of Counter-Terrorism Center at the CIA National Clandestine Service, PsyOp Strategist, Pakistan/Afghanistan Expert, Senior Political Analyst of the RAND Corporation, and author of Afghanistan's Local War: Building Local Defense Forces and The Long Shadow of 9/11: America's Response to Terrorism
- Bruno Augenstein — V.P., physicist, mathematician and space scientist
- Robert Aumann — mathematician, game theorist, Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.
- 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
- Richard Bellman — Mathematician known for his work on dynamic programming
- 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[citation needed]
- 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[17]
- 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 U.S. 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. — mathematician, winner of Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel
- 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 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel
- W.V. Quine — philosopher and logician
- 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 President and Chief Executive Officer, Nov. 1, 2011–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 M. Salter — advocate of the vactrain maglev train concept
- Paul Samuelson — economist, Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel
- Thomas C. Schelling — economist, winner of 2005 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel
- 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[18]
- Herbert Simon — award-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 president and CEO, 1989–Oct. 31, 2011
- 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
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]
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.
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.[19]
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.[19]
Cultural references
The firm was spoofed in the film Dr. Strangelove (1964) as "The Bland Corporation."
In the Simpsons episode "Grampa vs. Sexual Inadequacy" (1994), the character Milhouse includes RAND in a series of overlapping conspiracies that the children believe are causing their parents to disappear for long stretches of time.
See also
References
- ^ About the RAND Corporation — RAND at a Glance, http://www.rand.org/about/glance.html, retrieved 2009-02-09
- ^ a b c d The Rand Corporation. "History and Mission". RAND Corporation. http://www.rand.org/about/history/. Retrieved 2008-04-15.
- ^ http://www.rand.org/about/glance.html RAND's private endowment
- ^ http://www.rand.org/about/clients_grantors.html#industry Corporate contributors on RAND's website
- ^ Major Clients and Grantors of RAND Research | RAND
- ^ http://www.rand.org/about/glance.html for RAND's individual contributions see Finance
- ^ RAND Gulf States Policy Institute website
- ^ RAND Europe website
- ^ RAND-Qatar Policy Institute website
- ^ Brigette Sarabi, "Oregon: The Rand Report on Measure 11 is Finally Available", Partnership for Safety and Justice (formerly Western Prison Project), January 1, 2005. Retrieved on April 15, 2008.
- ^ Harvard University Institute of Politics. "Guide for Political Internships". Harvard University. http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/iop/students_internships_db.php?action=id&id=551. Retrieved 2008-04-18.
- ^ RAND History and Mission. Accessed 13 April 2009.
- ^ Twing, Steven W. (1998). Myths, models & U.S. foreign policy. Lynne Rienner Publishers. ISBN 1555877664. http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=wS4A2jJph_cC&pg=PA163&dq.
- ^ Hanks, Robert (19 December 2007). "The Week In Radio: The think tank for unthinkable thoughts". The Independent. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/reviews/the-week-in-radio-the-think-tank-for-unthinkable-thoughts-765975.html. Retrieved 2009-06-24.
- ^ Kaplan, Fred (10 October 2004). "Truth Stranger Than 'Strangelove'". New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/10/movies/10kapl.html?_r=1&pagewanted=1. Retrieved 2009-06-24.
- ^ Life Magazine, 25th February 1957, Passing of a Great Mind, by Clay Bair JR. pages 89-104
- ^ "Habitable Planets for man (6.4 MB PDF)". RAND Corporation (free PDFs). http://rand.org/pubs/commercial_books/CB179-1/.
- ^ Seymour M. Hersh (12 May 2003). "Selective Intelligence — Donald Rumsfeld has his own special sources. Are they reliable?". The New Yorker. http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/05/12/030512fa_fact.
- ^ a b Poundstone, W. (1992). Prisoner's Dilemma. Doubleday.
Further reading
Books
- Alex Abella. Soldiers of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire (2008, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt hardcover; ISBN 0-15101-081-1 / 2009, Mariner Books paperback reprint edition; ISBN 0-15603-344-5).
- S.M. Amadae. Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism (2003, University Of Chicago Press paperback; ISBN 0-22601-654-4 / hardcover; ISBN 0-22601-653-6).
- 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 0-26208-285-3 / 2011, paperback reprint edition; ISBN 0-26251-604-7).
- Fred Kaplan. The Wizards of Armageddon (1983, Simon and Schuster hardcover, first printing; ISBN 0-67142-444-0 / 1991, Stanford University Press paperback, part of the Stanford Nuclear Age Series; ISBN 0-80471-884-9).
- 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 0-67474-850-6).
- Mark Trachtenberg. History and Strategy (1991, Princeton University Press paperback; ISBN 0-69102-343-3 / hardcover; ISBN 0-69107-881-5).
Articles
External links
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