Rand Corporation
From dKosopedia
The RAND Corporation is an American think tank first formed to offer research and analysis to the U.S. military. The organization has since expanded to working with other governments and commercial organizations. RAND has around 1100 employees based at six sites: Santa Monica (California), Arlington (Virginia), Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania), and in Europe: Leiden (The Netherlands), Berlin (Germany) and Cambridge (United Kingdom).
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Background
Project RAND
RAND was set up in 1945 by the United States Air Force as Project RAND, under contract to the Douglas Aircraft Company, and in 1945 they released the Preliminary Design of an Experimental World-Circling Spaceship a proposal for a US satellite program. In May 1948, Project RAND was separated from Douglas and became an independent organization.
Mission Statement
RAND was incorporated as a nonprofit organization to "further promote scientific, educational, and charitable purposes, all for the public welfare and security of the United States of America."
The RAND Corporation, according to the corporate web site, is a "nonprofit institution that helps improve policy and decisionmaking through research and analysis."
Covert foreign policy became the standard mode of operation after World War II, which was also when Ford Foundation became a major player for the first time. The institute most involved in classified research was Rand Corporation, set up by the Air Force in 1948. The interlocks between the trustees at Rand, and the Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie foundations were so numerous that the Reece Committee listed them in its report (two each for Carnegie and Rockefeller, and three for Ford). Ford gave one million dollars to Rand in 1952 alone, at a time when the chairman of Rand was simultaneously the president of Ford Foundation."[Rene Wormser, Foundations: Their Power and Influence, p65-66 (Sevierville TN: Covenant House Books, 1993), 412 pages. First published in 1958 by Devin-Adair in New York, and reprinted in 1977 by Angriff Press.] -- Philanthropists at War by Daniel Brandt; From NameBase NewsLine, No. 15, October-December 1996
Two-thirds of Rand's research involves national security issues. This is divided into Project Air Force, the Arroyo Center (serving the needs of the Army), and the National Defense Research Institute (providing research and analysis for the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff, and the defense agencies). The other third of Rand's research is devoted to issues involving health, education, civil and criminal justice, labor and population studies, and international economics." 1994 Annual Report[1]
- RAND Electronic Documents. Search by category.
- record at namebase.org
Achievements and Expertise
The achievements of RAND stem from its development of systems analysis. Important contributions are claimed in space systems and America's space program, in computing and in artificial intelligence. RAND researchers developed many of the principles that were used to build the Internet.
Current areas of expertise, including that of RAND's education-related division — the Institute on Education and Training — are: child policy, civil and criminal justice, education, environment and energy, health, international policy, labor markets, national security, population and regional studies, science and technology, social welfare, terrorism, and transportation.
RAND oversaw one of the largest and most important studies of health insurance. 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 1994 annual report "two-thirds of Rand's research involves national security issues."
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 headquarters.
Notable RAND participants
- Henry H. Arnold - General USAF - Founder
- Donald Wills Douglas, Sr. - President, Douglas Aircraft Company - Founder
- Arthur E. Raymond - Chief Engineer, Douglas Aircraft Company - Founder
- 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
- George Dantzig - Mathematician, creator of the simplex algorithm for linear programming
- Cecil Hastings (programmer, wrote software engineering classic, Approximations for Digital Computers Princeton 1955 )
- Allen Newell
- Paul O'Neill - Chairman in the late 1990s
- Daniel Ellsberg - leaker of the Pentagon Papers
- John Von Neumann - mathematician
- John Forbes Nash - mathematician
- Herman Kahn - theorist on nuclear war and one of the founders of scenario planning
- Katsuaki L. Terasawa - economist
- Donald Rumsfeld - Chairman of RAND Corporation from 1981-1986 and current Secretary of Defense for the United States
- Condoleezza Rice - Former Trustee 1991-1997 and current Secretary of State for the United States
- Francis Fukuyama - Academic, Author
- Ronald L. Olson, Chairman
- Carl Bildt
- Harold Brown
- Frank Charles Carlucci III
- Lovida H. Coleman, Jr.
- Robert Curvin
- Pedro Jose Greer, Jr.
- Rita E. Hauser
- Karen Elliott House
- Jen-Hsun Huang
- Paul G. Kaminski
- Bruce Karatz
- Lydia H. Kennard
- Ann McLaughlin Korologos
- Philip Lader
- Arthur Levitt
- Lloyd N. Morrisett
- Paul H. O'Neill
- Amy B. Pascal
- Patricia Salas Pineda
- John Edward Porter
- John S. Reed
- Donald B. Rice
- James E. Rohr
- Jerry I. Speyer
- James A. Thomson
- James Q. Wilson
Contact
General information
RAND
P.O. Box 2138
1776 Main Street
Santa Monica, CA 90407-2138
correspondence@rand.org
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