RAND Totally Explained

Everything about the Rand Corporation totally explained

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. The organization has since expanded to working with other governments, private foundations, international organizations, and commercial organizations. Reportedly, it's known for rigorous, often-quantitative, and non-partisan analysis and policy recommendations.
RAND has approximately 1,600 employees and four principal 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); and Cambridge, United Kingdom (RAND Europe).
   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. In 2003, it 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.

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.

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."

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

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)

Lewis "Scooter" Libby — Dick Cheney's former Chief of Staff

Ray Mabus — Former ambassador, governor

Harry Markowitz — economist, developed the Portfolio Selection model that's 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

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 in the late 1990s

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 RAND Corporation from 1981–1986 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

Herbert Simon — Nobel prize-winning economist

Peter Szanton — the policy analyst and former President of New York Rand

Katsuaki L. Terasawa — economist

James Thomson — RAND CEO, 1989–present

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: Frank Carlucci, Lovida Coleman, Timothy Geithner, Rita Hauser, Karen House, Jen-Hsun Huang, Paul Kaminski, Lydia H. Kennard, Ann Korologos, Philip Lader, Bonnie McElveen-Hunter, Ronald Olson, Paul O'Neill, Michael Powell, Donald Rice, James Rohr, James Rothenberg, Ratan Tata, James Thomson, and Marta Tienda.
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, and Jerry Speyer.

Criticism

The RAND Corporation has been criticized as militarist. Due to the nature of its work, the RAND corporation also frequently plays a role in conspiracy theories.
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 fruitless review of its recent work to see if there was anything that could have been misunderstood to spark the rumor.

Further Information

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