RAND Corporation

• 1. Introduction

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  The RAND Corporation was born from a single urgent conversation in September 1945, weeks after the end of World War II. General Henry H. "Hap" Arnold pulled aside Douglas Aircraft executive Franklin R. Collbohm and learned that both men shared the same fear: the United States was about to lose control of the scientific brainpower it had spent years assembling to win the war. "I know just what you're going to tell me," Arnold said. "It's the most important thing we can do."

  What followed was one of the most consequential institutional decisions in modern American history. Within days, the two men convened with Donald Douglas at Hamilton Army Airfield to sketch a general outline for a new kind of organization. It would not be a weapons lab. It would not be a university. It would be something that did not yet have a name. The organization that emerged would eventually give the English language a new word: think tank. RAND was the first institution to be regularly called by that name.

  By the 2024 fiscal year, RAND's revenues and other support reached $514 million. Thirty-two Nobel Prize recipients have been associated with it at some point in their careers. And its fingerprints are on some of the most consequential decisions in American history, from nuclear strategy to health insurance to the Vietnam War. The question worth asking is how a wartime conversation at a California airfield produced all of that.

• 2. Project RAND to Corporation

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  On the 1st of October 1945, Project RAND was set up under a special contract with the Douglas Aircraft Company and began operations in December of that year. Douglas engineer Arthur Emmons Raymond came up with the name, drawing on the phrase "research and development." Collbohm proposed himself as its first director, expecting the role to be temporary while he searched for a permanent replacement. He would end up serving as RAND's first president until his retirement in 1967.

  In May 1946, less than a year after operations began, the project released the Preliminary Design of an Experimental World-Circling Spaceship. This was years before Sputnik. Long before any satellite had ever left the atmosphere, RAND was quietly recommending to the U.S. government a major effort to design a human-made satellite capable of photographing from space, along with the rockets needed to put it there.

  By late 1947, however, an awkward problem had emerged. Douglas Aircraft executives worried that their close relationship with RAND might create conflict of interest problems on future military hardware contracts. In February 1948, the chief of staff of the newly created United States Air Force approved a solution: Project RAND would become an independent nonprofit corporation. On the 14th of May 1948, RAND was incorporated under California law. On the 1st of November 1948, the Project RAND contract was formally transferred from Douglas to RAND. Initial capital for the spin-off came from the Ford Foundation.

• 3. Nuclear Strategy and the Cold War

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  RAND's most defining early work took shape in the shadow of the atomic bomb. Its researchers contributed to the doctrine of nuclear deterrence by mutually assured destruction, the strategy known by its apt acronym MAD. This work was developed under the guidance of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and drew heavily on game theory, a field in which RAND would attract some of the most important mathematical minds of the twentieth century.

  Not everyone at RAND accepted that deterrence was enough. Herman Kahn, one of the organization's chief strategists, argued in his 1960 book On Thermonuclear War that a nuclear exchange could be "winnable." The idea was disturbing enough that Kahn became one of the models for the title character in the 1964 film Dr. Strangelove, in which RAND itself was satirized as the "BLAND Corporation."

  The Cold War work extended well beyond nuclear theory. Even in the late 1940s and early 1950s, RAND was secretly advising the government on satellite reconnaissance. That push predated Sputnik by years, placing RAND at the origin of the space race well before it became public knowledge. Albert Wohlstetter, a mathematician who became one of RAND's most influential Cold War strategists, and Roberta Wohlstetter, a policy analyst and military historian, both worked within this tradition of connecting mathematical analysis to the highest levels of national security decision-making.

• 4. Inside the Roster

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  The list of people who passed through RAND reads like a roll call of twentieth-century intellectual life. John Forbes Nash Jr., whose work on game theory later won the Nobel Prize in Economics, was among them. So was John von Neumann, a pioneer of the modern digital computer. Herbert Simon, who won the 1978 Nobel Prize in Economics, worked there as a political scientist and psychologist. Kenneth Arrow developed his impossibility theorem in social choice theory during his time at RAND.

  The organization's reach extended far beyond academia. Henry Kissinger, who served as United States Secretary of State from 1973 to 1977 and National Security Advisor from 1969 to 1975, was associated with RAND. Condoleezza Rice was first a RAND intern and later a trustee from 1991 to 1997 before becoming Secretary of State. Donald Rumsfeld chaired RAND's board from 1981 to 1986 and again from 1995 to 1996, around the same time as his two stints as Secretary of Defense.

  Not all the notable names were from defense and diplomacy. Daniel Ellsberg, the economist who leaked the Pentagon Papers, worked at RAND. Albert S. Ruddy began there as a programmer trainee before going on to produce The Godfather and Million Dollar Baby, winning Academy Awards for both. Margaret Mead, the anthropologist, was associated with the organization. Paul Baran, one of the developers of packet switching, the foundational technology behind ARPANET and later the Internet, worked at RAND. Thomas C. Schelling, who won the 2005 Nobel Prize in Economics, rounded out a community whose breadth of influence was matched by few institutions of comparable size.

• 5. Health, Cities, and Social Policy

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  RAND's domestic policy work has at times been as consequential as its defense research, and far more controversial in different ways. Between 1974 and 1982, RAND designed and conducted what became known as the RAND Health Insurance Experiment, one of the largest and most important studies of health insurance in American history. Funded by the then-U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, it established an insurance corporation to compare demand for health services with their cost to the patient.

  In the 1970s, RAND's computer models were used by New York City to determine which fire stations to close. Most of the stations that were shut down were in relatively poor areas, including South Bronx and the Lower East Side, a decision that drew lasting criticism.

  In 2018, RAND launched its Gun Policy in America initiative. The second expanded review, released in 2020, analyzed almost 13,000 relevant studies on guns and gun violence published since 1995 and selected 123 as having sufficient methodological rigor for inclusion. Those studies were used to evaluate scientific support for eighteen classes of gun policy. The review found supportive evidence that child-access prevention laws reduce firearm self-injuries, firearm homicides, and unintentional firearm injuries and deaths among youth. It also found that stand-your-ground laws increase firearm homicides and that shall-issue concealed carry laws increase total and firearm homicides. Both proponents and opponents of various gun control measures have cited the initiative, a reflection of RAND's stated emphasis that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

• 6. Independence Under Scrutiny

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  RAND's reputation rests on a claim to rigorous independence, and that claim has been tested. In recent years, employees expressed concerns to Politico about the organization's objectivity after it emerged that RAND had helped draft the Executive Order on AI. The concern was tied to more than $15 million in funding from Open Philanthropy, an organization backed by a Facebook founder. RAND was accused of working too closely with Open Philanthropy at the risk of losing its independence.

  In December 2023, the House Science Committee sent a bipartisan letter to the National Institute of Standards and Technology raising concerns over RAND research that had, in the committee's words, "failed to go through robust review processes, such as academic peer review." On the 13th of September 2024, the ranking member of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation sent a letter to RAND seeking to better understand its involvement in the AI Executive Order and the administration's other actions related to online speech.

  The $575 million Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching initiative, funded by the Gates Foundation to increase teacher effectiveness, was analyzed by RAND. Its finding was stark: the interventions had no significant effect on student achievement. Whether that willingness to deliver uncomfortable findings to major funders represents genuine independence, or whether the AI-related concerns signal a pattern of institutional drift, is now a live question for the organization. Jason Gaverick Matheny was selected as RAND's president and CEO in 2022, inheriting an institution whose standing in Washington depends on the answer.