THE ARTS This PDF document was made available from www.rand.

org as a public
CHILD POLICY
service of the RAND Corporation.
CIVIL JUSTICE

EDUCATION
Jump down to document6
ENERGY AND ENVIRONMENT

HEALTH AND HEALTH CARE

INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS

NATIONAL SECURITY
The RAND Corporation is a nonprofit research
POPULATION AND AGING organization providing objective analysis and effective
PUBLIC SAFETY solutions that address the challenges facing the public
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
and private sectors around the world.
SUBSTANCE ABUSE

TERRORISM AND
HOMELAND SECURITY

TRANSPORTATION AND
INFRASTRUCTURE
Support RAND
WORKFORCE AND WORKPLACE Browse Books & Publications
Make a charitable contribution

For More Information

Visit RAND at www.rand.org
Learn more about the RAND Corporation
View document details

This product is part of the RAND Corporation reprint series. RAND reprints
present previously published journal articles, book chapters, and reports with
the permission of the publisher. RAND reprints have been formally reviewed
in accordance with the publisher’s editorial policy, and are compliant with
RAND’s rigorous quality assurance standards for quality and objectivity.
 How RAND Invented the Postwar World
SATELLITES, SYSTEMS ANALYSIS, COMPUTING, THE INTERNET—ALMOST ALL THE DEFINING FEATURES
OF THE INFORMATION AGE WERE SHAPED IN PART AT THE RAND CORPORATION BY VIRGINIA CAMPBELL

TO SOME FIRST- RATE ANALYTICAL MINDS , HAVING INTELLEC - Centralized, That was the genesis of the original
tual elbow room in which to carry out advanced research can decentralized, and “think tank,” Project RAND, the name
be a greater lure than money, power, or position. Academic distributed networks, being short for Research and Develop-

LEONARD MCCOMBE/TIME LIFE PICTURES/GETTY IMAGES

institutions understand this, as do certain sectors of the cor- from Paul Baran’s ment. (The term think tank was coined
L E F T: C O U RT E S Y O F T H E R A N D C O R P O R AT I O N ; R I G H T:
porate world. But military organizations, with their emphasis prescient 1964 book. in Britain during World War II and
on hierarchy, discipline, and protocol, have traditionally been then imported to the United States to
the least likely to provide the necessary freedom. describe RAND’s mission.) The project officially got under way
During World War II, however, the Commanding General in December 1945, and in March 1946 RAND was launched as
of the U.S. Army Air Forces, H. H. (“Hap”) Arnold, saw crea- a freestanding division within the Douglas Aircraft Com-
tive engineers and scientists come up with key inventions such pany of Santa Monica, California (whose founder, David Doug-
as radar, the proximity fuze, and, of course, the atomic bomb. las, was a longtime close friend of Hap Arnold). A number of
He knew that research and development would be even more other aeronautical enterprises had sprung up or flourished in
important in the battles of the future. So before the war end- Southern California during the war, turning the region into
ed, he began taking steps to ensure that the wartime spirit of a hotbed of aircraft, space, and missile development, so it
innovation would continue after it was over—and made sure was a natural location. Arnold made sure that RAND’s agree-
to put a premium on creating a flexible and innovative intel- ment with the Air Force gave it two remarkable freedoms: It
lectual environment. could initiate its own research as well as respond to Air Force

50 INVENTION & TECHNOLOGY SUMMER 2004

Exemplifying RAND’s
mix of seriousness and
informality, scientists
in suits and ties sit
on the floor discussing
postnuclear strategy
with Albert Wohlstetter
(center foreground) at
his home in 1958.
A MYSTIQUE HAS ALWAYS SURROUNDED RAND, WITH VIRTUALLY LIMITLESS

requests, and it could turn down Air Force proposals that it As a result, a certain mystique has always surrounded the
believed were inappropriate to the strengths of its 200 staff RAND Corporation, with both supporters and detractors attrib-
researchers. uting to it virtually limitless influence and achievements. What
Today the RAND Corporation, as it has been known since is undeniable is that RAND has played a central role in the crea-
it became independent of Douglas in May 1948, is a nonprofit tion of critical technological developments since World War II,
organization with more than 800 researchers. It performs re- most prominently during the nail-biting era of the Cold War.
search for many sponsors besides the Air Force, most of them The extraordinary feature of RAND that emerged quickly
nonmilitary. Throughout its history it has conducted innu- after its creation was its interdisciplinary approach to identify-
merable studies, often with world-changing results, involving ing, evaluating, and applying technology. The organization was
technologies both military and civilian. Some of its most ex- structured along conventional academic lines, with departments
ceptional work, though, has gone unsung, for a number of rea- of mathematics, physics, engineering, economics, psychology,
sons. First, RAND’s work consists of ideas and assessments, chemistry, and aerodynamics. But under the leadership of Frank
rather than inventions or manufactured goods. Second, a good Collbohm, a former Douglas test pilot and engineer, and excep-
part of its most technologically interesting research has been tional division heads like John Williams of the mathematics
done under secret classification. And third, RAND’s preferred department, RAND sought to cross those lines at every oppor-
public stance has always been one of understatement. tunity. Its mathematicians and physicists were urged to be con-
versant with the concepts its engineers and
economists were pursuing, and vice versa.
As Arthur Raymond, the chief engineer
Franklin R. Collbohm, a of Douglas Aircraft, said in 1947, RAND
former Douglas engineer studied “systems and ways of doing things,
and RAND’s first rather than particular devices, particular
president, in his office. instrumentalities, particular weapons, and
we are concerned not merely with the phys-
ical aspects of these systems but with the
human behavior side as well.” The result-
ing intellectual crossbreeding bore epochal
results. And the fact that all ideas were fo-
cused on concrete military challenges put
a firmly pragmatic tug on RAND’s creative
intellectual freedom.
The organization’s very first report, “Pre-
liminary Design of an Experimental World-
Circling Spaceship,” was issued in May of

BOTH: LEONARD MCCOMBE/TIME LIFE PICTURES/GETTY IMAGES

1946, within months of RAND’s creation.
It set an immediate precedent, serving as
a model of how orchestrated ideas could
forcefully shape the development of tech-
nology in several different areas. The report
was a detailed engineering feasibility study
for a proposed satellite. It spelled out why
such a vehicle should be developed: Space
was the future; the Air Force should con-
sider space its natural habitat; space offered
tremendous advantages in reconnaissance,
communications, and weather forecasting.
It noted that technologies for launching into
space, conducting activities in space, and de-
orbiting were within reach.

52 INVENTION & TECHNOLOGY SUMMER 2004

INFLUENCE ATTRIBUTED TO IT.

The report was solid in its engineering,

recommending parallel studies on alcohol–
liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen–liquid
oxygen as propellants, specifying a max-
imum desirable acceleration rate, and
making a case for multiple-stage rockets.
It was prophetic in other respects as
well: It specifically defined areas of utility
and speculated, for example, that in the
future, satellites would be used to guide missiles to targets. RAND’s Santa Monica the operation occurs. It’s widely taken
“Preliminary Design for a World-Circling Spaceship” was headquarters, designed for granted today, but until the concept
so direct and clear that it jump-started the minds of those to promote interaction of systems analysis was defined and re-
within the Air Force who would, in the crucial years to come, between disciplines. peatedly demonstrated, people didn’t
push a host of space initiatives through the natural resistance think that way, especially people in
that radical and expensive proposals engender. In a follow-up military institutions. The mathematical logician who would be-
paper, the RAND analyst James Lipp remarked: “Since mas- come RAND’s most influential analyst, Albert Wohlstetter, put
tery of the elements is a reliable index of material progress, systems analysis to work in a study that realigned U.S. defense
the nation which first makes significant achievements in space policy and determined the direction in which defense-driven
travel will be acknowledged as the world leader in both mili- technological inquiry would turn.
tary and scientific techniques. To visualize the impact on the The Air Force had asked RAND to define the best possible
world, one can imagine the consternation and admiration that basing scheme for the planes that would drop nuclear bombs
would be felt here if the United States were to discover sud- on the Soviet Union in the event of war. In its request, the Air
denly that some other nation had already put up a success- Force was assuming that its bombers would be striking pre-
ful satellite.” This is, of course, what happened a decade later, emptively in response to an extremely imminent threat. But sup-
when the Soviet Union launched its Sputnik satellites. Fortu- pose, said Wohlstetter, you start by looking at how you would
nately, RAND’s first report had provoked the developments that survive a first strike from the Soviet Union and then see what
let the United States respond quickly after the Soviet Union’s that means for bombers, bases, and the long list of other fac-
initial success in space. tors that suddenly come into play. America’s overwhelming—
but short-lived—nuclear superiority was probably part of the

R
AND ’ S INTERDISCIPLINARY PHILOSOPHY WAS SO ESSEN - reason the Air Force had ignored the danger of a surprise attack
tial to its functioning that it became the driving concern so soon after Pearl Harbor. In any case, Wohlstetter (whose
in the architecture of the purpose-built facility RAND wife, Roberta, was a RAND researcher and historian working
moved into in 1953. John Williams had planned the layout of on what would be a classic early study of Pearl Harbor) wrote
the building to heighten the probability that researchers from a report that provoked a huge change, affecting everything from
different fields would come face-to-face in the course of their specific mechanical procedures to the entire orientation of
daily activities. From the outside, RAND’s headquarters had a strategic policy.
functional, unremarkable mid-century look. Inside, however, On the simplest level, it established aerial refueling of the
the small, quiet offices in which analysts worked (there were strategic bomber force as a routine practice. Wohlstetter’s
no traditional laboratories, since RAND was devoted to pencil- study made clear that strategic bombers should be based se-
and-paper research) were arranged in a two-floor grid around curely within the continental United States and not in Europe,
a set of square outdoor courtyards. It was impossible for any where they would be vulnerable to attack themselves. This
economist or psychologist to go far without encountering a made in-flight refueling a must. Wohlstetter’s work also gave
physicist or engineer, which meant that theoretical constructs high-profile urgency to technologies that enhanced the surviva-
got steadily confronted with the shaping forces of economic bility of military assets, including communications.
reality, human behavior, and utilitarian concerns. In work that ran parallel to Wohlstetter’s, the RAND analyst
Meanwhile, the interdisciplinary approach was yielding con- Bruno Augenstein, who had come to Santa Monica in 1949 from
crete results. A researcher named Ed Paxson used the term sys- Purdue University, established the technical foundation for the
tems analysis to describe the process of analyzing not just a Air Force’s accelerated development of intercontinental ballistic
military operation but the entire complex of activities in which missiles (ICBMs). Essentially, he joined the idea of the nuclear

SUMMER 2004 INVENTION & TECHNOLOGY 53

THE JOHNNIAC WAS BUILT AFTER ANALYSTS DISCOVERED THAT THEY COULDN’T

blast to the idea of rocket propulsion. At that time nuclear bombs in mathematical terms. Under his influence, RAND researchers
were heavy and unwieldy, and rockets were imprecise. But Au- added game theory to their arsenal of techniques, using it, for
genstein realized that if you could achieve more precision in example, to predict the outcome of various scenarios involving
missile guidance, you would need a less powerful blast at the nuclear confrontations.
target, which meant a smaller warhead that could be carried While most of RAND’s researchers shunned experimental
by a smaller rocket needing a smaller amount of propulsion. work, it was the mathematicians, of all people, who got their
Augenstein and his team worked out the calculations cover- hands dirty by building a computer, which they affectionately
ing precision guidance, rocket technology, high-yield weapons, named the Johnniac in honor of Von Neumann. It was simple
re-entry techniques, and strategic reconnaissance to arrive at justice for the computer to be so named, because it was one of
a set of feasibility alternatives and design tradeoffs. They then fewer than 10 “Princeton-type” parallel scientific computers
gave a four-hour briefing to a Department of Defense commit- built to the logic Von Neumann had developed at the Institute
tee chaired by the mathematician John Von Neumann, which for Advanced Study.
made recommendations based on RAND’s results. Augenstein

T
reported his work in a 1954 memorandum that is widely re- HE MACHINE , WHICH BECAME OPERATIONAL IN 1953 —
garded as the most important document of the missile age. The four years after Williams and others had determined that
Air Force’s ballistic-missile program would never have received they couldn’t simply buy what they wanted—was custom-
top priority as early as 1955 without it, and since this program built at RAND with a slate of features that made it groundbreak-
helped develop the basic space-launch capability that is used ing and ruggedly adaptable to the most practical concerns. It used
to this day, America’s space program would have proceeded punch-card input and output devices, and it was designed to al-
more slowly as well. low easy access to all of its 80 vacuum tubes for ready mainte-
Though systems analysis was the grand concept behind nance. So thorough were the efforts to keep its moving parts cool
RAND’s highest-profile work, the most important key to RAND’s and operational (most pioneer computers could run without

L E F T: C O U RT E S Y O F T H E R A N D C O R P O R AT I O N ; R I G H T: L E O N A R D M C C O M B E / T I M E L I F E P I C T U R E S / G E T T Y I M A G E S
overall creativity was the sheer intellectual force of its mathe- interruption for only painfully short times) that researchers who
matics department, with people like Williams, Von Neumann were exposed to the closed-cycle air cooling system during main-
(who served as a consultant), and Willis Ware (who came to tenance began referring to the Johnniac as the Pneumoniac. The
RAND in 1952 from Princeton University). At the Institute for Johnniac was remarkably reliable for its time; the IBM 701 that
Advanced Study, in Princeton, New Jersey, Von Neumann had RAND soon acquired never matched it in this respect.
pioneered the discipline of game theory, which formalizes the Because RAND needed increasingly complex calculations to
human decisions involved in games, negotiations, and so forth attack the problems it had defined through systems analysis,
the Johnniac was continually being improved. When
storage tubes made by RCA proved too troublesome,
RAND had the International Telemeter Corporation
develop the first commercially produced magnetic-
core memory. The Johnniac also served as a test bed
for advances that were later adopted by commercial
computer makers, such as the first 140-column-wide,
high-speed impact printer and a swapping drum to
support multiple users of one of the first online time-
sharing systems.
For a think tank like RAND, which deals in analy-
sis, the production of an actual concrete object is
a collateral, if not accidental, occurrence. It is for
good reason that RAND’s researchers as well as
the users of its output have
Left: The Johnniac’s long joked that RAND stands
console. Right: for Research and No Devel-
Analysts play a war opment. The Johnniac was one
game, with bomb major exception to this rule.
bursts and planes. Another was the 1955 volume A
JUST BUY WHAT THEY WANTED.
COLD WAR CONSIDERATIONS PLAYED DIRECTLY INTO RAND’S ROLE IN DEVEL

Million Random Digits With 100,000 Normal Deviates. The technologies involved in bringing this off—including
(According to RAND legend, the latter half of the title caused rocket propulsion, television cameras, and electronic trans-
the book to be catalogued under Psychology by the New York mission—were in various stages of development, some suffi-
Public Library.) ciently short of maturity to give the Air Force pause. In gen-
RAND developed its collection of random numbers by first eral the Pentagon put far greater trust in spy planes, but the
building a machine, basically an electronic roulette wheel, to Air Force allowed RAND to continue its work on space re-
generate them and then subjecting the results to rerandom- connaissance.
ization and severe testing to weed out any unintentional pat-

O
terns. RAND needed the numbers for the vast assortment of NE IMPORTANT ELEMENT THAT PROJECT FEED BACK
probability procedures that its research called for. The rest envisioned was the use of magnetic-tape storage to hold
of the world needed them too, for everything from polling video images until the satellite flew over a point where
to sociological surveys. In a slightly more esoteric application, they could be transmitted back to earth. As part of the study,
there is the story of the submarine commander who kept A Mil- RAND contracted with a small California company called
lion Random Digits next to him when his sub was on patrol Ampex Corporation that was doing groundbreaking work on
duty for use in setting his evasion courses. The book went video recording and magnetic tape. RAND’s support spurred
through three printings by 1971, stood the test of time as a on Ampex’s efforts, which proved crucial to the development
standardized text, and was reprinted anew in 2001. Within of the commercial video-recording industry we have today.
RAND, the joke about this surprise classic is that it is perhaps The RAND researchers Amrom Katz and Merton Davies tire-
the only case in which a random misprint would not be con- lessly briefed decision makers on Project Feed Back, continu-
sidered an error. ing to argue in favor of space as a recon-
RAND’s work on reconnaissance, which began in its earli- An illustration from naissance arena for the Air Force. RAND’s
est years and continued for decades, resulted in some of its RAND’s first report, 1954 Project Feed Back report became
most impressive accomplishments. The organization’s stud- on a “world-circling the blueprint for the development of an
ies in infrared detection in the early 1950s led directly to the spaceship,” in 1946. Air Force space reconnaissance vehicle,
space-based early-warning sys- and the contract for the vehicle,
tem against Soviet attack. RAND identified as WS-117L, went to
researchers verified by calcula- Lockheed in 1956.
tion that sensors could detect Back at RAND, Katz and Da-
the exhaust plume of a rocket vies watched as electronic trans-
sitting on a launch pad. mission difficulties began to bog
Only since the mid-1990s, with down progress on WS-117L. But
the declassification of work from their colleague Richard Raymond
the 1950s, has RAND’s most in- had suggested a design that did
teresting work in space reconnais- not use a video camera and hence
sance been put in perspective. did not require video storage or
LEONARD MCCOMBE/TIME LIFE PICTURES/GETTY IMAGES
Back in 1946 RAND was avidly transmission. It used conventional L E F T: C O U RT E S Y O F T H E R A N D C O R P O R AT I O N ; R I G H T:

touting the importance of space photography and depended on

vehicles when the rest of the a re-entry vehicle that would be
world looked upon such notions deorbited to bring film back for
as mere fodder for Hollywood. midair retrieval. As outlandish as
In the early 1950s the RAND re- the idea sounded, it required only
searcher James Lipp led Project technologies that were already de-
Feed Back, which made a pas- veloped. Re-entry technology—
sionate case for the feasibility of basically the search for an ade-
a reconnaissance system in which quate heat shield—had progressed
orbiting television cameras would quickly under the impetus of
transmit back to earth electronic ICBM research. And the midair
data, giving the Air Force real- film-retrieval procedure had al-
time images of enemy assets. ready been shown to work in the

56 INVENTION & TECHNOLOGY SUMMER 2004

OPING THE CONCEPT BEHIND WHAT WE NOW KNOW AS THE INTERNET.

upper atmosphere with weather and reconnaissance balloons. RAND to look into the survivability of command-and-control
The Air Force objected to Raymond’s idea, mostly because structures in a nuclear war, he joined the project with the idea
it wanted real-time reconnaissance and judged his approach that McCulloch’s work with human brains might provide a
far too slow. Then the Soviet Union launched its Sputniks in fruitful analogy, even a model.
1957, sending a shock wave through the Pentagon. Suddenly The question Baran first confronted was this: How, in the
the midair retrieval system, which yielded pictures at least as event of a strike against the United States that might take out
quickly as reconnaissance planes, began to look very good as critical points of the command-and-control hierarchy, could
an interim strategy. the “go” or “no go” command for a counterstrike be communi-
Spurred by new urgency, WS-117L was redefined and be- cated? This was a chilling, unanswered question in 1960, when
came highly classified under CIA management. The public, tensions between America and the Soviet Union were fierce and
which had become aware of WS-117L from press coverage, unstable. Baran had heard RAND’s president, Frank Collbohm,
was told that the project had been canceled. Even Katz and express reservations about the Air Force’s dependence on high-
Davies, whose advocacy frequency communication
had helped bring about and suggest using AM
what was now taking radio stations for surviv-
place, were never told the ability. So Baran, using
truth. The reasoning was RAND’s Johnniac, plotted
that Katz was such a talk- AM radio stations across
er that he would raise the country and outlined
suspicion if he abruptly a redundant network for
dropped his favorite sub- communicating a simple,
ject, as he would have to crucial “go” or “no go”
do. Space reconnaissance message.
throughout the 1960s was On the basis of Baran’s
done very much as Katz work, the Air Force built
and Davies had urged. The the first emergency broad-
system was crucial to the cast system by “hijacking”
nation’s defense, because the AM network and send-
not until the 1970s were ing a signal that couldn’t
the problems associated be heard on radio but
with electronic transmis- Roger Johnson of RAND could be transmitted from
sion of high-resolution shows a model of an node to node. However,
video images back to experimental airplane. once Baran had talked with
earth finally worked out. people at Air Force bases
Cold War considerations also played directly into RAND’s around the country, he knew that communicating a “go” or “no
role in developing the concept behind what we now know as go” message was a very bare minimum requirement and that
the Internet. In 1959 RAND’s reputation for intellectual free- unlimited communication was what was ultimately needed. To
dom induced a young engineer named Paul Baran to leave have that in a robust, redundant system, digital technology was
Hughes Aircraft and pursue his interests at RAND, a few miles called for.
away. Baran was intensely interested in improving the reliabil- That’s where Baran’s key idea came in. He envisioned break-
ity of the military “command and control” system—the means ing each message into standardized blocks of data, with each
of communicating crucial information and orders from one block containing information about its recipient, its origin,
level of command to another. This system could come under the length of time it had been in the network, and its position
severe strain when it was most needed, in the event of an within the message of which it was a part. A series of blocks
enemy attack. would go out into the network and make their way through
Even before arriving at RAND, Baran had been thinking it in any sequence they could—each one sending back a con-
about the concepts of redundancy and rerouting that were firmation from the new node to the previous node—until all
put forth in the neurobiologist Warren McCulloch’s work on the blocks arrived at their destination. If a certain node was
“neural nets.” When he heard that the Air Force had asked not available, a block that was sent to it would bounce back

SUMMER 2004 INVENTION & TECHNOLOGY 57

FROM A STRICTLY TECHNOLOGICAL STANDPOINT, THE RAND CORPORATION’S

and tell the node it had just come from to avoid sending any on ARPA projects in 1969, and over the following decades it
further blocks that way. When all the blocks reached their des- gradually shed its military orientation to become the Internet
tination, they were reconstituted into a message. we know today.
Baran’s idea was a brilliant inspiration to those who under- Just as consequential as RAND’s contributions to the Inter-
stood the concept of digital technology. But 40-odd years net were its accomplishments in computer software, particu-
ago the digital universe was little more than fantasy to a world larly the software it developed for linear programming. Linear
immersed in analogue reality. The people in charge of the na- programming (with programming used in the sense of plan-
tion’s largest, farthest-reaching communication system, the tele- ning or allocation, not as a reference to computing) basically
phone monopoly of AT&T, were analogue folk. AT&T even involves finding the optimum value for a multivariable func-
refused to listen to its own innovative research division, Bell tion governed by a system of linear equations. One classic prob-
Labs, and turned down the Air Force’s request for a study of lem involves designing a diet that will contain specified mini-
digital network possibilities. Prodded by RAND, the Air Force mum levels of certain nutrients. Given an assortment of pos-
decided to do the work itself. Then the Department of Defense sible foods, along with their prices and a list of what nutrients
intervened to decree that work of this type belonged exclusively they contain, what is the cheapest way to satisfy the constraint?

under the purview of the Defense Communications Agency, not RAND has published many Many problems of this type come
the Air Force. But the DCA wasn’t interested in digital tech- books over the years, up in management. The inputs may
nology, so nothing happened. aimed at widely varying be raw materials, personnel, or me-
The instigation for the Internet ultimately came in 1966, groups of readers. chanical parts, for example, and the
when Robert Taylor, director of the Information Process- constraints may involve cost, time,

LEONARD MCCOMBE/TIME LIFE PICTURES/GETTY IMAGES

ing Techniques Office of the Defense Department’s Advanced weight, or some other limiting factor.
L E F T: C O U RT E S Y O F T H E R A N D C O R P O R AT I O N ; R I G H T:
Research Projects Agency (ARPA, now known as DARPA), was Linear-programming problems can be expressed using ma-
looking for a way to exchange computer files among research- trices and vectors and handled with the techniques of linear
ers around the country. Although Baran had briefed ARPA algebra, but since they are usually underdetermined (that is,
many times on his network concept, the architecture that re- there are fewer constraints than variables), the standard meth-
searchers settled on for the ARPANET was that proposed by ods of solving exact systems of equations do not apply. In the
the British physicist Donald Davies, who in 1965 had indepen- late 1940s George Dantzig of RAND developed the simplex
dently reinvented the same technology. method for solving linear-programming problems. In essence,
Davies had coined the term packet switching for his network it involves expressing the set of all allowable solutions as a poly-
concept and had presented briefings in the United States in hedron and going from one vertex to another until the opti-
1967. This turned out to be the right time for his ideas to get mum solution appears.
a hearing; Baran had come up with his own version of a net- The simplex method was indeed simple, and it was brilliant.
work before the communications world was ready to think Industrial processes, management planning, and many other
in digital terms. ARPANET began linking scientists at work complex situations that could be formulated as linear-program-

58 INVENTION & TECHNOLOGY SUMMER 2004

GLORY DAYS CAN BE SAID TO HAVE ENDED SOMETIME IN THE LATE 1960 S .

ming problems could suddenly be solved in a hurry with the active frontier of technological advance. Both Willis Ware
aid of a computer. In a 1963 RAND report, Dantzig described and Bruno Augenstein have suggested that the time and place
the simplex method in action: “To solve [the problem earlier (post–World War II Southern California) in which RAND was
described] by brute force . . . would require solar systems full created had a great deal to do with the intellectual leaps it
of nano-second electronic computers running from the time of came up with. RAND’s early reconnaissance research not only
the big bang until the time the Universe grows cold to scan all prompted technological innovations in the military but also
the permutations in order to be certain which is best. Yet it spurred private-sector developments like video recording. That
takes only a second using an IBM-370-168 and standard sim- work was declassified only in the mid-1990s, and the next
plex method software.” decades may well reveal other consequential research that can
only be hinted at now. In the meantime, the advances that

P
RECISION AND ACCURACY ARE DIFFERENT THINGS , OF can be discussed, such as the work that Paul Baran did lead-
course, and any analytical solution, no matter how clever, ing to the Internet, make a persuasive case that an organi-
is only as good as the model used to derive it. In the zation whose sole job is to generate ideas can promote the
excitement that attended RAND’s advances, some enthusi- advance of technologies with the power to change the life of
asts got carried away and forgot this important truth. In an an entire culture. ★
echo of Jeremy Bentham’s “felicific calculus” of the eigh-
teenth century, ambitious social scientists tried to express a VIRGINIA CAMPBELL is a freelance writer living in Los Angeles.
host of amorphously defined social benefits and costs
with mathematical equations and use them to make
“scientific” policy decisions on economic, budgetary,
and natural-resource issues. Robert McNamara, who
had been an enthusiast of RAND-style analysis as a
high-ranking executive at the Ford Motor Company,
tried to run the Vietnam War with models and com-
puters, learning too late that unanticipated factors
without a variable in the equation can greatly alter the
outcome.
From a strictly technological standpoint, RAND’s
glory days ended sometime in the late 1960s. By then the
Air Force had drawn significant benefits from RAND’s
emphasis on free inquiry, cross-fertilization, and systems
analysis, and its own research activities had incorpo-
rated these techniques. Other organizations and busi-
nesses saw that RAND’s research could be useful to
them, and they began offering subsidies for projects that
had nothing to do with the military. As the 1970s wore
on, RAND shifted more and more from actively creat-
ing the frontiers of technology to concentrating on pol-
icy analysis, military and nonmilitary. These studies have
ranged far afield. One mid-1970s report, for example,
suggested that some recovering alcoholics could safely
drink in moderation instead of abstaining completely.
Another set of studies evaluated cost, safety, and envi-
ronmental impact for a proposed set of storm barriers
along the Netherlands’ northern coast. More recent pub- An Air Force officer
lications have run the gamut from the arts to counter- peers out from a room
terrorism. used by umpires in
RAND’s policy-centered work has been impressive RAND’s war games.
and influential, but most of it has not occurred at the

SUMMER 2004 INVENTION & TECHNOLOGY 59