Rand Rethinks Itself
If ever an institution embodied the contribution made by California’s intellectual Cold Warriors to America’s military-industrial complex, it is the Rand Corp., the Pentagon-spawned concrete tower on the Pacific whose name has been synonymous with “think tank” since its founding 50 years ago.
Like California--whose economy rose with steroid-like injections of up to $100 billion a year in defense funding at the Cold War’s height--Rand was pumped up by the arms race.
And like California, Rand was rattled by the Vietnam War. It was a Rand researcher, Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers exposing the futility of U.S. involvement in Indochina, outraging Rand’s military sponsors and delighting the antiwar protesters on its doorstep.
“I still dream about being back at Rand. It was such an idyllic place to work,” Ellsberg reminisced recently. “It was the best time of my adult life.”
And today, the end of the Cold War--accompanied by federal defense cutbacks, California base closings and the loss of thousands of aerospace jobs--is forcing Rand to reinvent itself. The fall of the Berlin Wall meant the demise of a third of Rand’s defense revenue, and the layoffs of 50 researchers.
“People whose specialties were East European regimes were instantaneously irrelevant,” said James Smith, a Rand labor economist. “It was all gone.”
Rand’s center of gravity is still shifting. Although the federal government is still the mainstay of its $110-million budget, the defense portion has dropped from 80% to 60% in a decade. Directors are courting foundations and corporations to boost its $84-million endowment and have begun taking direct contracts for private-sector work.
They even hope to cash in on the reheated Los Angeles real estate market. A review of proposals to co-develop Rand’s prime cliff-top Santa Monica parcel is in the final stages.
“We certainly had to make radical adjustments,” said Rand spokesman Jess Cook. “We’re still making adjustments.”
Rand’s defense research also has shifted, to cope with new issues. When India conducted underground nuclear tests, Rand had already briefed top U.S. policymakers on its conflict with Pakistan. Rand’s work on expanding NATO helped pave the way for the admittance of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic in 1997. There is research on warding off assaults on computer systems by foreign powers and terrorists, and countering the proliferation of nuclear and biological weapons. Rand monitors world technology developments for the CIA.
“The Cold War may be over, but the need for them remains,” said Caltech humanities professor Daniel Kevles, a leading science historian. “It’s still a nasty world out there, with all kinds of international security hazards, like terrorism and the rise of militant religious fundamentalist states.”
But in the absence of the “Soviet threat,” it is the Rand social scientists who are commanding a growing share of headlines and attention, as policymakers turn back to the domestic challenges of education, immigration, drugs and health care.
Some of Rand’s highest-profile Pentagon studies--on women in the armed forces, the consequences of bringing gay recruits out of the closet, and military child care, education and family issues--have moved from detente to modern social engineering.
“My guess is, in the next 10 to 20 years, we’ll be putting a lot of effort into these social policy issues,” said Roger Benjamin, leader of a Rand education project.
From Defense to Drugs
It is a far cry from the days when Rand dealt overwhelmingly with macho affairs such as strategic air power, the intercontinental ballistic missile, and the spooky nuclear chess game--aptly titled “mutually assured destruction,” or MAD--whose “balance of terror” was supposed to be the glue holding together Soviet-American detente.
“People literally thought that we built bombs here,” said researcher Richard Hillestad, who joined Rand during the Vietnam War. “We got high schoolers calling saying we shouldn’t build nuclear weapons in our basement.”
Some miss the old days. A senior Rand administrator recently told Roger Benjamin that the Cold War was the most exciting time in his career.
“I said, ‘What would it take to replace that?’ ” Benjamin recalled. “He said, ‘Probably the prospect of World War III.’ The question is, can Rand make a social contribution to revive that excitement?”
Some Rand social scientists think it already has.
Benjamin led a recent study warning that under-funding California higher education could relegate many Latinos and blacks to the lowest rungs of the socioeconomic ladder.
“The growing gap between the rich and the poor is one of the greatest threats to California’s--and the nation’s--economy,” it warned. “The social and economic inequalities are likely to grow to alarming . . . contradictions.”
The need to give uneducated immigrants skills and training is particularly urgent as the state’s industrial jobs are replaced by high-skilled service work, Benjamin said.
“If we integrate these waves successfully, it will be another signal to the world,” Benjamin said. “Because the rest of the world is going to look a lot more like Los Angeles in 10 years than the reverse.”
Recent Rand studies have found that mandatory long-term prison sentences for low-level drug offenders are ineffective; that scholarships and cash incentives for high school graduation reduced serious youth crimes five times as much as California’s three-strikes law; that giving high school students condoms boosted sexual safety, though not sexual activity; and that racial tracking in class assignments is shortchanging African American and Latino students.
On many projects, the old and new worlds at Rand are merging.
Its systems analysis methodology, originally developed for military use, helped test a proposal by Cleveland city planners who wanted to shift their economy into services. (Rand told them to stick with heavy industry, but manufacture new things.) Reapplied Rand war-gaming simulations helped overhaul Miami’s anti-drug effort.
“The dividing line between security and domestic work is blurring,” said Michael Rich, Rand’s executive vice president. “As time goes on, I think those labels are less and less useful to us.”
For the study on gays in the armed forces, military experts worked with social scientists, historians, legal experts and health specialists. Rand’s ongoing work on Gulf War syndrome combines the talents of everyone from epidemiologists to statisticians.
The cross-pollination is not entirely new. More than a few of the innovations developed at Rand--such as satellites, video recorders and the Internet--were undertaken for the military, but best known for their civilian applications. One of the first modern digital computers was built at Rand, around the time Microsoft czar Bill Gates was born.
Rand officers say that their conclusions do not always agree with their sponsors’ thinking.
In the 1980s, Rand pointed out the flaws of Star Wars, the space-based missile defense proposal that was a pet project of the study’s Reagan administration underwriters.
The Rand conclusion that sexual orientation should not determine who serves in the military, and that gays could be fully integrated without damaging unit cohesion, was rebuffed.
Findings in 1994 that drug treatment programs were a better investment than interdiction annoyed some high-level drug war policymakers, who were contemplating an expanded military role in interdiction.
Retired Rear Adm. Eugene Carroll, deputy director of the Center for Defense Information, said that of all the think tanks that take government contracts, “I’ve seen Rand on record, more often, suggesting a change in U.S. security policies and programs.
“I have seen Rand take positions which I thought were credible, and certainly not the party line,” he said.
Charles Townes, a Nobel-winning physicist at UC Berkeley who once served on Rand’s board, said it helps that the think tank is 3,000 miles from Washington.
“The government has its own aims and views, which can be partisan and biased,” Townes said. “Having an organization that is removed, with nothing political to sell, is a very good thing.”
Another UC Berkeley physicist, Charles Schwartz, is more skeptical.
“In recent decades, Rand has turned into a business enterprise, selling its wares to public agencies,” he said. “Whether that means it’s good, adversarial science is very questionable.”
Changes From Within
It is the direct private sector sponsors that are most testing Rand’s reputation for impartiality. Previously, such donations were pooled to prevent real or perceived conflicts of interests.
The first large project, for Texas Utilities, was conducted by Richard Hillestad, who developed a groundbreaking military resupplying system in the 1980s. Hillestad developed models to determine the utility’s risk of power outages and how much surplus energy is needed.
Those charting other changes to the face of Rand like to take visitors for a stroll down a quiet corridor of the building that serves as a photo gallery of famous researchers of the past. All are men. All are white. Many are smoking, in virile poses that underline the James Bond mystique once attached to their highly classified research.
Minority researchers--17 blacks, 17 Latinos, 39 Asians--are still few.
But the ranks of female researchers have expanded to more than one out of three. A third of Rand’s officers and program directors are also women, and their leadership has extended to Rand’s predominantly male military divisions.
The head of Rand’s Project Air Force, Natalie Crawford, has been mentioned as a candidate for Air Force secretary.
Lynn Davis, the former head of the Arroyo Center, Rand’s Army research center, served as a Clinton administration undersecretary of state for international security affairs.
“There was no affirmative action, but they were willing to take women, and women performed,” said Davis, now back at Rand’s Washington office.
An Unforgotten Past
Some veterans of the old days are still stung by criticism of the era when Rand played a role in developing nuclear war strategy, a time when Soviet apparatchiks called it “the academy of death and destruction.”
“There’s a continuous love-hate relationship with this place,” said Robert Brooks, director of Rand’s health care policy research.
“I think part of it may come from the initial perception that Rand created the atomic bomb or its purpose is to kill people,” he said. “Wasn’t there a Dr. Rand in Dr. Strangelove?”
The atomic bomb predated Rand. But there is an apparent Rand dig in “Dr. Strangelove,” the darkly absurd 1964 movie directed by Stanley Kubrick.
In “Dr. Strangelove,” a bumbling clan of Cold Warriors commission a ludicrous “Bland” study on the effectiveness of the Soviet “Doomsday machine,” which is designed to blow the world to smithereens in the event of a U.S. attack. At the end of the movie, mushroom clouds bloom around the planet as one A-bomb after another reduces the world to radioactive compost while “We’ll Meet Again” plays on the soundtrack.
“We knew who they were talking about,” Michael Rich said.
But the early years at Rand were a vastly different time, an era when the Russians were said to be coming and backyard bomb shelters were more than kitsch.
Project Rand, which stands for research and development, emerged in 1945, at the end of World War II and the dawn of the Atomic Age.
It was forged under an Air Force contract with the Southern California Douglas Aircraft company, which eventually became America’s largest defense contractor--McDonnell Douglas. Rand’s first report outlined a proposed design and use for satellites, giving the Air Force a jump in its rivalry with the Navy over satellite development.
In 1948--the year before NATO was founded as a bulwark against Communist expansion--Rand broke away to form a nonprofit corporation and began taking contracts from other federal agencies, such as the Atomic Energy Commission, which hired Rand to study the dynamics of thermonuclear explosions.
A 1950s Life magazine spread showed unrepentantly homogeneous groups of white men--wearing the black Clark Kent nerd glasses that recently boomeranged back into style--gesturing at chalkboards and pondering algebraic equations of apocalypse through graceful spirals of cigarette smoke.
“The man is thinking. Thinking fast and furious, far into the future. And since you’re paying his salary, you can hope he’s outthinking the Russians,” said a 1957 Wall Street Journal piece on Rand, written in a hard-boiled, noir style.
The favorite lunchtime pastime was said to be kriegspiel, or war games. “If New York is wiped out, the scientists try again,” the Wall Street Journal said tersely.
Such paranoid prose mirrored an era when many Americans “regarded the Soviet Union as a serious threat,” said Caltech’s Kevles.
“It wasn’t simply a figment of people’s imagination,” he said. “The Soviets were not nice guys, either at home or in Eastern Europe. They did have missiles pointed at us. There was a great deal of saber-rattling on both sides.”
Ellsberg first worked at Rand in the summer of 1958, when the think tank was deeply involved in helping develop a U.S. defense strategy to counter Soviet nuclear capabilities.
He was the kind of liberal young Rand cadre that in 1967, as the Vietnam War fueled public scepticism over American leadership, the leftist Ramparts magazine characterized as the “civilized and intellectually honest men” making decisions “that may mean life or death for all of us.”
“There is this feeling that it is all very creepy,” Ramparts said. “There is something dangerous about a place like Rand, with all of its comfortable rationality.”
Or, in the words of a song sung by Pete Seeger:
“They will rescue us all from a fate worse than death with a touch of a push-button hand/We’ll be saved at one blow from the designated foe, but who’s going to save us from Rand?”
It was in 1971, after the war spilled into Cambodia and Laos, that Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to the press.
He says he now wishes he had revealed, years earlier, evidence that the U.S. was overestimating Soviet firepower, and perhaps averted the arms race altogether.
“I felt they were leading us toward an abyss, with scores of lives lost, and the possibility of nuclear war,” Ellsberg said. “I was certainly prepared to go to prison for the rest of my life to prevent that. There were Strangeloves.”
It was a security meltdown. The Air Force stationed an officer at Rand to control classified documents. The Rand president who hired Ellsberg resigned. Ellsberg’s friends cut him off.
“There was a fairly large exodus from Rand at the time of the Ellsberg thing,” Richard Hillestad said. “There was a question of whether Rand would survive. There was some question over whether the Air Force would renew their contract.”
Some at Rand still darken over the incident.
“He broke the law,” Natalie Crawford said. “Maybe he thought it was a protest. It was a very selfish act. We survived and recovered. But it took a while.”
Times researchers Steve Tice, William Holmes, Robin Mayper, Malloy Moore and Julia Franco assisted with this story.
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Rand at 50
“To further and promote scientific, educational and charitable purposes, all for the public welfare and security of the United States of America.” Rand Articles of Incorporation, May 14, 1948
Key Accomplishments
* The Rand Graduate School has produced more PhDs in policy analysis than any other institution in the nation (including Harvard).
* Packet switching, the technological and conceptual basis for the Internet, was developed at Rand by researcher Paul Baran.
* One of Rand’s all-time best sellers is “A Million Random Numbers with 100,000 Normal Deviates.” The book and its tables constitute the world’s leading source of purely random numbers and are used by engineers, economists and statisticians everywhere.
* Rand researchers conceived aerial refueling, airborne alert and numerous other defense techniques. In a somewhat different category, researcher J.R. Drake invented the equipment used in windsurfing.
* Rand’s legend and studies have crept into numerous movies and TV scripts, including “Dr. Strangelove,” Rodney Dangerfield’s “Back to School” and an episode of “Barney Miller.”
* New Rand reports are available, in full, on the Rand Web site at www.rand.org.
* Rand has published more than 20,000 studies.
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Reliance on govenment funding declining, but still heavy
1971
Govenment: 94%
Other: 2%
Foundations: 3%
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1980
Government: 90%
Other: 7%
Foundations: 3%
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1996
Government: 86%
Other: 7%
Foundations: 7%
Through the Years
1940-60s
Rand completed various defense industry projects and produced landmark studies on aerospace and nuclear deterrence. A number of key business and research methodologies developed at Rand continue in widespread use today.
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1970s-80s
Important studies on health care and topics such as cost-cutting in the military.
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1990s
Concentrates on social issues such as education, drug control and crime. Also explores excess automobile personal injury claims and U.S. income and wealth distribution.
