RAND CORPORATION

The RAND Corporation (short for Research and Development) became the world’s first “think tank”. It was created in stages. At the end of 1945, in Santa Monica, US Army Generals Arnold, Boles, Norstad and Douglas created a unique experimental institution called “Project RAND” within the Douglas Aviation Company with the aim of supporting the country’s national security.

The acronym RAND is an acronym for Research and Development. In May 1948, RAND began its independent existence when it separated from the Douglas Company and became an independent, private, non-profit, non-partisan organization. Since then, RAND’s mission has been to help shape policy and decision making. One of RAND’s primary goals remains ensuring U.S. national security by conducting research and analyzing the most pressing issues facing the U.S. government. The corporation closely cooperates with the Pentagon and also conducts research on social and international issues.

During the first decades, RAND was mainly engaged in solving technical problems – designing aircraft, rocket technology and satellites. In the early 60s, RAND specialists were actively engaged in computer technology and programming. But already from the early 50s, RAND began to work on orders from other American government organizations, conducting research on national security issues. At first, exclusively on military-technical, and then on strategic aspects. At the same time, RAND remained a non-profit organization, its entire budget was and is spent on current projects.

Over time, the research center acquired specialists in the social sciences — political science, economics, sociology, psychology, etc. — and RAND began to fulfill orders from the U.S. government on an ever-widening range of issues. Today, RAND publishes reports on a wide range of topics — from health care and drug control to labor market research, regional integration, ecology, international relations, and security issues in both the U.S. and other countries.

The corporate headquarters are still located in Santa Monica, California (corporate headquarters), but over time RAND has opened offices in New York (Council for Aid to Education), Washington (Arlington, Virginia (just outside Washington, D.C.)), Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and, since the early 1990s, outside the United States — in Leiden, The Netherlands (RAND Europe headquarters), the United Kingdom (Cambridge, United Kingdom), Germany (Berlin, Germany), and Qatar (Doha, Qatar). In addition to its branches, RAND also has three field sites: in Langley (home to the CIA), in Boulder, Colorado, and, most recently, in Moscow.

The RAND Corporation has 11 research departments: the Washington Defense Research Office, management sciences, resources analysis, engineering sciences, environmental sciences, social sciences, physics, systems science, mathematics, computer science, and economics (i.e., the departments correspond to academic disciplines rather than to research nomenclature; the divisions are professional rather than functional).

The main organizational principle of RAND is a high degree of decentralization

The department has considerable freedom of action not only in selecting employees, but also in determining the research program. It is also an independent unit in financial terms – each department has an independent budget, annually approved by the management of the corporation; from these funds the work of any employee of the department is paid, regardless of whether he performs work within the department or participates in an interdisciplinary project.

The work of the RAND Corporation is carried out either within a department or in an interdisciplinary group created specifically for the implementation of a particular project. Work on a project begins with the appointment of a group leader. The leader works alone for some time, trying to formulate a clear statement of the problem, the purpose of the research, and the means of achieving it. Having completed the preparatory work, he begins to select a group, and this selection is mainly on a voluntary basis. The size of the group may vary – from one or two people to several dozen. A fairly typical case is when a group includes three or four specialists in different fields of knowledge.

The result of work on any task is a report. Initially, the group develops a draft report for internal use only (sometimes at this stage a decision may be made on the inappropriateness of further work on the topic and the dissolution of the group). Then the material is finalized and sent to the customer in the form of a final report, and each report is traditionally considered an expression of the personal opinion of its authors, and not of the entire corporation as a whole (the corporation is responsible only for the overall professional level and deadlines for completing the work). Only in particularly important cases – when it comes to either a problem of vital importance to the country or an extremely controversial issue – can RAND management make an official recommendation to the customer on behalf of the entire corporation.

Цели и задачи

Officially, the RAND Corporation is “a nonprofit institution dedicated to improving the policies of [American] society through research and analysis.”

The organization’s goals are defined briefly but broadly – to advance and promote scientific, educational, and charitable activities in the interests of the public welfare and national security of the United States.

RAND also sets the task of developing and identifying new methods for analyzing strategic problems and new strategic concepts.

To achieve its goals, the corporation organizes conferences (international and national), symposia and seminars, briefings; issues press releases; participates in the creation of radio and television programs; organizes briefings and presentations for members of the government, opposition political forces, political and industrial organizations, and conducts educational and training programs.

Rand also has a “fully accredited” graduate school, which has the right to award a doctorate (Ph. D.) in social and political science.

History of RAND’s development

During the war, the United States mobilized a large group of civilians, primarily scientists and engineers, to fight on the “technological front.” In a relatively short time, this group created such innovations as the atomic bomb, radar, and the proximity fuse. It also developed and refined a new analytical method, operations research, which was successfully applied to improve the effectiveness of air defense, bombing, and naval operations.

At the end of the war, when this team began to disintegrate, the War Department decided to retain some of the most talented employees so that they would continue to develop military technology in the coming years, and in particular to continue their work in the field of operations research. It was with this in mind that General H. H. Arnold, Commander-in-Chief of the Army Air Forces, submitted to higher authorities a proposal for an agreement between the Air Force and the Douglas aircraft manufacturer. The proposal was approved, and in accordance with it, a unique experimental institution was created, which received the name “Project RAND”. The acronym RAND was composed of the first letters of the English words Research and Development. “Project RAND” was created as a division of the Douglas firm under a contract worth $ 10 million.

The organization began operations in 1946 with the stated goal of conducting “a broad-based research program devoted to intercontinental warfare in all aspects except ground operations.” The stated mission also included recommending to the Air Force “preferred methods and means.” Project RAND personnel were immediately tasked with examining new and unexplored possibilities that might interest the military.

His first major work was a study entitled “Preliminary Design for an Experimental Earth-Circling Spacecraft.” Although artificial satellites were then considered mostly the stuff of science fiction, this 1946 document provided a detailed assessment of the prospects for scientific satellites and space exploration by 50 scientists. Because the study proved remarkably prescient, it later contributed greatly to RAND’s prestige. (RAND’s space studies were not the only ones to prove prescient. When the proposed launch date for Sputnik I was announced in mid-1957, it later turned out to be off by only two weeks.)

Other early RAND research covered such entirely new areas as the use of rocket engines for strategic weapons (missiles), nuclear propulsion, game theory as applied to warfare, new air defense concepts, new aircraft design, metal fatigue, and high-energy radiation.

In its first year, RAND began adding policy experts, economists, and psychologists to its staff so that its theoretical research would not be limited to the hard sciences.

As the RAND Corporation grew, it became clear to its founders that the experiment had been a success

Not only was the talented scientific staff created during the war partially preserved, but the War Department also had at its disposal a creative apparatus of a scale and scope that would have been impossible to create in any other way at any price. The RAND Corporation provided long-term theoretical research in a wide variety of fields, recommendations that could not have been developed in the offices of official government agencies whose employees had adapted their thinking to the needs of the day and the solution of narrow problems.

It also became apparent that an organization like the RAND Corporation was more flexible and manageable than any university center, where there were too many problems associated with security and departmental boundaries in recruiting large research teams to study problems across disciplines.

The RAND Corporation did a great deal of work on nuclear proliferation, analyzing the economic, political, and technical aspects of developing nuclear capabilities in various countries.

The Corporation also carried out a number of secret programs to develop military technology, including a rotating scanning camera for aerial reconnaissance, over-the-horizon radar, a “silent” aircraft for night aerial reconnaissance, and new methods of bombing.

The Corporation did a great deal of work for the Atomic Energy Commission on nuclear weapons design and performance. At least one of the new, high-yield nuclear bombs now in the U.S. arsenal was created using ideas that arose from research conducted by the RAND Corporation.

Another computer-based technique developed by the RAND Corporation is electronic modeling, or creating a computer-based system that simulates the operation of another system, which could be anything from a model of the human heart to a planned weapons system.

The RAND Corporation has developed a number of very complex and subtle mathematical methods, in particular linear programming, dynamic programming, problem sequencing, nonlinear programming, the Monte Carlo method, game theory, etc. The RAND Corporation is also the developer of the concept of “flexible response”, “counterforce”, etc. RAND also develops new approaches in the field of futurology and technical forecasting methods. The most famous method is known as “Delphi”.

Indeed, this organization can be designated as a phenomenon among all specialized research centers. It stands out sharply in the intellectual abilities of its employees, providing long-term theoretical research in various fields, and these recommendations cannot be developed in the offices of official government agencies, since the unique methodology of the RAND corporation allows finding non-standard and the most effective solutions to various problems in a short time. Thus, we can give a fairly simple example: RAND received a request from a certain administrative agency to solve a problem that consisted of an insufficient number of elevators in the building. Consequently, employees constantly complained that they had to wait for the elevator for a long time. Increasing the number of elevators implied high costs. Therefore, RAND specialists came to the following solution. They proposed hanging mirrors on each floor. Thus, women could look at themselves while waiting for the elevator, and men, in turn, had the opportunity to look at women in the mirrors. Such an unconventional way out of the situation. Thus, the problem was solved by changing the goal, which was not to reduce the waiting time, but to create the impression that it had become shorter. As for more serious problems, it is also possible that completely new means are developed, which are not at all new goals are achieved. For example, the data from one of the war games, which was conducted to study the military capabilities of the United States, served to adopt a number of measures to delineate powers between law enforcement agencies and national security agencies, which, in turn, ensured a higher quality defense of the country in the future.