RAND Corporation
The RAND Corporation is an influential US think-tank with extremely close links to the US military and the corporate sector. It emerged out of the alliance between big business and the state during the Second World War and played an important role in developing Cold War strategy. Today it conducts research into many areas of public policy but has a strong focus on security and international relations.
Contents
Origins and history
The RAND Corporation grew out of the merging of the corporate and state sectors in the United States that occurred during the Second World War – what President Eisenhower later famously dubbed the ‘Military-Industrial Complex’. As RAND itself states on its website: “There were discussions among people in the War Department, the Office of Scientific Research and Development, and industry who saw a need for a private organization to connect military planning with research and development decisions.” [1]
RAND began life as a project of the Douglas Aircraft Company, which had made enormous profits from the war, producing thousands of American bombers. It was conceived at a meeting on 1 October 1945 between Henry Arnold, Commanding General of the Army Air Force; MIT's Edward Bowles, a consultant to the Secretary of War; Donald Douglas, of Douglas Aircraft Company; Douglas' Chief Engineer Arthur Raymond, and his assistant Frank Collbohm. Then known as Project RAND, its name was taken from the term research and development. [2] By early 1948 Project RAND had grown to 200 staff members and on 14 May 1948 it broke off from Douglas Aircraft Company to become an independent, non-profit organisation. On 1 November 1948, the Project RAND contract was formally transferred from the Douglas Aircraft Company to the RAND Corporation. The Ford Foundation provided $1 million for the new corporation, [3] and the new think-tank also had $5 million in remaining funds from Project RAND at its disposal. [4]
Cold War Strategy
Denis Healey, probably the most important figure in the development of American style 'strategic thinking' in Britain, makes the following comments on RAND in his memoires:
[RAND] had established itself as the leading think-tank for Pentagon, and had access to all its secrets. They were mainly economists by training, and had developed a vocabulary for 'thinking about the unthinkable' which had all the weaknesses of economic jargon. The universe of nuclear strategy was so difficult to comprehend, and the horrors it contained were so repugnant to normal people, that its study required the same clinical detachment as the study of venereal disease. But that very detachment tended to blind the experts to the human realities, and to enslave them to abstract concepts, the validity of which had never been tested.[5]
Locations
"RAND has four principal locations, Santa Monica, California; Arlington, Virginia (just outside Washington, D.C.); Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and RAND Europe headquarters in Leiden, The Netherlands. RAND Europe also has offices in Berlin, Germany, and Cambridge, the United Kingdom." Since 2003, RAND has also operated the RAND-Qatar Policy Institute in Doha, Qatar.
Board of Directors
Notable RAND participants
- David L. Aaron — Deputy National Security Advisor under Carter and drafter of the NATO treaty
- 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
- David S. C. Chu — Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, 2001–present
- 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
- James F. Digby — American Military Strategist, author of first treatise on precision guided munitions 1949 - 2007
- Stephen H Dole — Author of the pivotal work "Habitable Planets for man." [7]
- 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
- 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— US 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 Portfolio Selection 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 trustee 1991–1997 and current Secretary of State for the United States (as of May 2006), former intern
- 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 economist
- Frank Stanton — Chairman of the Board, 1961-1967
- Peter Szanton — the policy analyst and former President of New York Rand
- Katsuaki L. Terasawa — economist
- James Thomson — RAND CEO, 1989–present
- William Webster — Chairman of the Board, 1959-1960
- Albert Wohlstetter — Mathematician and Cold-War Strategist
- Roberta Wohlstetter — Policy analyst and military historian
Governance
The organization's governance structure includes a board of trustees. Current members of the board include: Francis Fukuyama, Timothy Geithner, John W. Handy, Rita Hauser, Karen House, Jen-Hsun Huang, Paul Kaminski, John M. Keane, Lydia H. Kennard, Ann Korologos, Philip Lader, Peter Lowy, Charles N. Martin, Jr., Bonnie McElveen-Hunter, Ronald Olson, Paul O'Neill, Michael Powell, Donald Rice, James Rohr, James Rothenberg, Donald Tang, James Thomson, and Robert C. Wright.
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, Frank Carlucci, Lovida Coleman, Ratan Tata, Marta Tienda and Jerry Speyer.
Contact, References and Resources
Contact
- RAND
- P.O. Box 2138
- 1776 Main Street
- Santa Monica, CA 90407-2138
- Email: correspondence@rand.org
- Website: www.rand.org
Resources, external links, notes
Resources
- Terrorexpertise:RAND Corporation a seperate page focusing on RAND's terrorism related work
- Edward S. Herman and Gerry O'Sullivan, Rand Corporation, extract from The "Terrorism" Industry, New York: Pantheon, 1989.
- Rand Europe
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 Institute, 2002).
- Paul Dickson Think Tanks, New York: Atheneum, 1971. - Contains a chapter and much other discussion of Rand.
- 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).
- 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.
- Bruce L. R. Smith The Rand Corporation: Case Study of a Nonprofit Advisory Corporation, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard university Press, 1966.
- Mark Trachtenberg. History & Strategy (Princeton University Press, 1991).
External links
- RAND Electronic Documents. Search by category.
- record at namebase.org
References
- ↑ RAND Corporation website, A Brief History of RAND, (accessed 24 October 2008)
- ↑ RAND Corporation website, A Brief History of RAND, (accessed 24 October 2008)
- ↑ RAND Corporation website, A Brief History of RAND, (accessed 24 October 2008)
- ↑ Donald E. Abelson, A Capitol Idea: Think-Tanks and US Policy (McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP, 2006) p.75
- ↑ Denis Healey, The Time of My Life (London: Penguin, 1989) p.246
- ↑ About Rand Rand Corporation
- ↑ RAND Corporation Habitable Planets for man (6.4 MB PDF)
