TO SOME FIRST-RATE ANALYTICAL MINDS, HAVING INTELLEC-tual elbow room in which to carry out advanced research canbe a greater lure than money, power, or position. Academic institutions understand this, as do certain sectors of the cor-porate world. But military organizations, with their emphasison hierarchy, discipline, and protocol, have traditionally beenthe least likely to provide the necessary freedom.

During World War II, however, the Commanding Generalof the U.S. Army Air Forces, H. H. (“Hap”) Arnold, saw crea-tive engineers and scientists come up with key inventions suchas radar, the proximity fuze, and, of course, the atomic bomb.He knew that research and development would be even moreimportant in the battles of the future. So before the war end-ed, he began taking steps to ensure that the wartime spirit ofinnovation would continue after it was over—and made sureto put a premium on creating a flexible and innovative intel-lectual environment. L

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That was the genesis of the original“think tank,” Project RAND, the namebeing short for Research and Develop-ment. (The term think tank was coinedin Britain during World War II and then imported to the United States to

describe RAND’s mission.) The project officially got under wayin December 1945, and in March 1946 RAND was launched asa freestanding division within the Douglas Aircraft Com-pany of Santa Monica, California (whose founder, David Doug-las, was a longtime close friend of Hap Arnold). A number of other aeronautical enterprises had sprung up or flourished inSouthern California during the war, turning the region into a hotbed of aircraft, space, and missile development, so it was a natural location. Arnold made sure that RAND’s agree-ment with the Air Force gave it two remarkable freedoms: Itcould initiate its own research as well as respond to Air Force

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

How RAND Invented the Postwar World

Centralized,decentralized, anddistributed networks,from Paul Baran’sprescient 1964 book.

Exemplifying RAND’smix of seriousness andinformality, scientistsin suits and ties sit on the floor discussingpostnuclear strategywith Albert Wohlstetter(center foreground) athis home in 1958.

As a result, a certain mystique has always surrounded theRAND Corporation, with both supporters and detractors attrib-uting to it virtually limitless influence and achievements. Whatis undeniable is that RAND has played a central role in the crea-tion of critical technological developments since World War II,most prominently during the nail-biting era of the Cold War.

The extraordinary feature of RAND that emerged quicklyafter its creation was its interdisciplinary approach to identify-ing, evaluating, and applying technology. The organization wasstructured along conventional academic lines, with departmentsof mathematics, physics, engineering, economics, psychology,chemistry, and aerodynamics. But under the leadership of FrankCollbohm, a former Douglas test pilot and engineer, and excep-tional division heads like John Williams of the mathematics department, RAND sought to cross those lines at every oppor-tunity. Its mathematicians and physicists were urged to be con-

versant with the concepts its engineers andeconomists were pursuing, and vice versa.

As Arthur Raymond, the chief engineerof Douglas Aircraft, said in 1947, RANDstudied “systems and ways of doing things,rather than particular devices, particularinstrumentalities, particular weapons, andwe 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 epochalresults. And the fact that all ideas were fo-cused on concrete military challenges put a firmly pragmatic tug on RAND’s creativeintellectual freedom.

The organization’s very first report, “Pre-liminary Design of an Experimental World-Circling Spaceship,” was issued in May of1946, within months of RAND’s creation.It set an immediate precedent, serving as a model of how orchestrated ideas couldforcefully shape the development of tech-nology in several different areas. The reportwas a detailed engineering feasibility studyfor a proposed satellite. It spelled out whysuch a vehicle should be developed: Spacewas the future; the Air Force should con-sider space its natural habitat; space offeredtremendous advantages in reconnaissance,communications, and weather forecasting.It noted that technologies for launching intospace, conducting activities in space, and de-orbiting were within reach. B

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Franklin R. Collbohm, aformer Douglas engineerand RAND’s firstpresident, in his office.

A MYSTIQUE HAS ALWAYS SURROUNDED RAND, WITH VIRTUALLY LIMITLESS

requests, and it could turn down Air Force proposals that it believed were inappropriate to the strengths of its 200 staff researchers.

Today the RAND Corporation, as it has been known sinceit became independent of Douglas in May 1948, is a nonprofitorganization with more than 800 researchers. It performs re-search for many sponsors besides the Air Force, most of themnonmilitary. Throughout its history it has conducted innu-merable studies, often with world-changing results, involvingtechnologies both military and civilian. Some of its most ex-ceptional work, though, has gone unsung, for a number of rea-sons. First, RAND’s work consists of ideas and assessments,rather than inventions or manufactured goods. Second, a goodpart of its most technologically interesting research has beendone under secret classification. And third, RAND’s preferredpublic stance has always been one of understatement.

The report was solid in its engineering,recommending parallel studies on alcohol–liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen–liquidoxygen 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.

“Preliminary Design for a World-Circling Spaceship” wasso direct and clear that it jump-started the minds of those within the Air Force who would, in the crucial years to come, push a host of space initiatives through the natural resistance that radical and expensive proposals engender. In a follow-uppaper, the RAND analyst James Lipp remarked: “Since mas-tery of the elements is a reliable index of material progress, the nation which first makes significant achievements in space travel will be acknowledged as the world leader in both mili-tary and scientific techniques. To visualize the impact on theworld, one can imagine the consternation and admiration thatwould be felt here if the United States were to discover sud-denly that some other nation had already put up a success-ful satellite.” This is, of course, what happened a decade later,when the Soviet Union launched its Sputnik satellites. Fortu-nately, RAND’s first report had provoked the developments thatlet the United States respond quickly after the Soviet Union’sinitial success in space.

R AND’S INTERDISCIPLINARY PHILOSOPHY WAS SO ESSEN-tial to its functioning that it became the driving concernin the architecture of the purpose-built facility RAND

moved into in 1953. John Williams had planned the layout ofthe building to heighten the probability that researchers fromdifferent fields would come face-to-face in the course of theirdaily activities. From the outside, RAND’s headquarters had afunctional, unremarkable mid-century look. Inside, however,the small, quiet offices in which analysts worked (there wereno traditional laboratories, since RAND was devoted to pencil-and-paper research) were arranged in a two-floor grid arounda set of square outdoor courtyards. It was impossible for anyeconomist or psychologist to go far without encountering aphysicist or engineer, which meant that theoretical constructsgot steadily confronted with the shaping forces of economicreality, human behavior, and utilitarian concerns.

Meanwhile, the interdisciplinary approach was yielding con-crete results. A researcher named Ed Paxson used the term sys-tems analysis to describe the process of analyzing not just amilitary operation but the entire complex of activities in which

S U M M E R 2 0 0 4 I N V E N T I O N & T E C H N O LO G Y 5 3

INFLUENCE ATTRIBUTED TO IT.

the operation occurs. It’s widely takenfor granted today, but until the conceptof systems analysis was defined and re-peatedly demonstrated, people didn’tthink that way, especially people in

military institutions. The mathematical logician who would be-come RAND’s most influential analyst, Albert Wohlstetter, putsystems analysis to work in a study that realigned U.S. defensepolicy and determined the direction in which defense-driventechnological inquiry would turn.

The Air Force had asked RAND to define the best possiblebasing scheme for the planes that would drop nuclear bombson the Soviet Union in the event of war. In its request, the AirForce was assuming that its bombers would be striking pre-emptively in response to an extremely imminent threat. But sup-pose, said Wohlstetter, you start by looking at how you wouldsurvive a first strike from the Soviet Union and then see whatthat means for bombers, bases, and the long list of other fac-tors that suddenly come into play. America’s overwhelming—but short-lived—nuclear superiority was probably part of thereason the Air Force had ignored the danger of a surprise attackso soon after Pearl Harbor. In any case, Wohlstetter (whosewife, Roberta, was a RAND researcher and historian workingon what would be a classic early study of Pearl Harbor) wrotea report that provoked a huge change, affecting everything fromspecific mechanical procedures to the entire orientation ofstrategic policy.

On the simplest level, it established aerial refueling of thestrategic bomber force as a routine practice. Wohlstetter’sstudy made clear that strategic bombers should be based se-curely within the continental United States and not in Europe,where they would be vulnerable to attack themselves. Thismade in-flight refueling a must. Wohlstetter’s work also gavehigh-profile urgency to technologies that enhanced the surviva-bility of military assets, including communications.

In work that ran parallel to Wohlstetter’s, the RAND analystBruno Augenstein, who had come to Santa Monica in 1949 fromPurdue University, established the technical foundation for theAir Force’s accelerated development of intercontinental ballisticmissiles (ICBMs). Essentially, he joined the idea of the nuclear

RAND’s Santa Monicaheadquarters, designedto promote interactionbetween disciplines.

in mathematical terms. Under his influence, RAND researchersadded game theory to their arsenal of techniques, using it, forexample, to predict the outcome of various scenarios involvingnuclear confrontations.

While most of RAND’s researchers shunned experimentalwork, it was the mathematicians, of all people, who got theirhands dirty by building a computer, which they affectionatelynamed the Johnniac in honor of Von Neumann. It was simplejustice for the computer to be so named, because it was one offewer than 10 “Princeton-type” parallel scientific computersbuilt to the logic Von Neumann had developed at the Institutefor Advanced Study.

T HE MACHINE, WHICH BECAME OPERATIONAL IN 1953—four years after Williams and others had determined thatthey couldn’t simply buy what they wanted—was custom-

built at RAND with a slate of features that made it groundbreak-ing and ruggedly adaptable to the most practical concerns. It usedpunch-card input and output devices, and it was designed to al-low easy access to all of its 80 vacuum tubes for ready mainte-nance. So thorough were the efforts to keep its moving parts cooland operational (most pioneer computers could run without interruption for only painfully short times) that researchers whowere exposed to the closed-cycle air cooling system during main-tenance began referring to the Johnniac as the Pneumoniac. TheJohnniac was remarkably reliable for its time; the IBM 701 thatRAND soon acquired never matched it in this respect.

Because RAND needed increasingly complex calculations toattack the problems it had defined through systems analysis,

the Johnniac was continually being improved. Whenstorage tubes made by RCA proved too troublesome,RAND had the International Telemeter Corporationdevelop the first commercially produced magnetic-core memory. The Johnniac also served as a test bedfor advances that were later adopted by commercialcomputer makers, such as the first 140-column-wide,high-speed impact printer and a swapping drum tosupport 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 forgood reason that RAND’s researchers as well as

the users of its output have long joked that RAND standsfor Research and No Devel-opment. The Johnniac was onemajor exception to this rule.Another was the 1955 volume A L

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Left: The Johnniac’sconsole. Right:Analysts play a wargame, with bombbursts and planes.

blast to the idea of rocket propulsion. At that time nuclear bombswere heavy and unwieldy, and rockets were imprecise. But Au-genstein realized that if you could achieve more precision inmissile guidance, you would need a less powerful blast at thetarget, which meant a smaller warhead that could be carriedby a smaller rocket needing a smaller amount of propulsion.

Augenstein and his team worked out the calculations cover-ing precision guidance, rocket technology, high-yield weapons,re-entry techniques, and strategic reconnaissance to arrive ata set of feasibility alternatives and design tradeoffs. They thengave a four-hour briefing to a Department of Defense commit-tee chaired by the mathematician John Von Neumann, whichmade recommendations based on RAND’s results. Augensteinreported his work in a 1954 memorandum that is widely re-garded as the most important document of the missile age. TheAir Force’s ballistic-missile program would never have receivedtop priority as early as 1955 without it, and since this programhelped develop the basic space-launch capability that is usedto this day, America’s space program would have proceededmore slowly as well.

Though systems analysis was the grand concept behindRAND’s highest-profile work, the most important key to RAND’soverall creativity was the sheer intellectual force of its mathe-matics department, with people like Williams, Von Neumann(who served as a consultant), and Willis Ware (who came toRAND in 1952 from Princeton University). At the Institute forAdvanced Study, in Princeton, New Jersey, Von Neumann hadpioneered the discipline of game theory, which formalizes thehuman decisions involved in games, negotiations, and so forth

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

JUST BUY WHAT THEY WANTED.

The technologies involved in bringing this off—includingrocket propulsion, television cameras, and electronic trans-mission—were in various stages of development, some suffi-ciently short of maturity to give the Air Force pause. In gen-eral the Pentagon put far greater trust in spy planes, but theAir Force allowed RAND to continue its work on space re-connaissance.

ONE IMPORTANT ELEMENT THAT PROJECT FEED BACK

envisioned was the use of magnetic-tape storage to holdvideo images until the satellite flew over a point where

they could be transmitted back to earth. As part of the study,RAND contracted with a small California company called Ampex Corporation that was doing groundbreaking work onvideo recording and magnetic tape. RAND’s support spurredon Ampex’s efforts, which proved crucial to the developmentof the commercial video-recording industry we have today.

The RAND researchers Amrom Katz and Merton Davies tire-lessly briefed decision makers on Project Feed Back, continu-

ing to argue in favor of space as a recon-naissance arena for the Air Force. RAND’s1954 Project Feed Back report became the blueprint for the development of anAir Force space reconnaissance vehicle,

and the contract for the vehicle,identified as WS-117L, went toLockheed in 1956.

Back at RAND, Katz and Da-vies watched as electronic trans-mission difficulties began to bogdown progress on WS-117L. Buttheir colleague Richard Raymondhad suggested a design that didnot use a video camera and hencedid not require video storage ortransmission. It used conventionalphotography and depended on a re-entry vehicle that would bedeorbited to bring film back formidair retrieval. As outlandish asthe idea sounded, it required onlytechnologies that were already de-veloped. Re-entry technology—basically the search for an ade-quate heat shield—had progressedquickly under the impetus ofICBM research. And the midairfilm-retrieval procedure had al-ready been shown to work in the

Million Random Digits With 100,000 Normal Deviates. (According to RAND legend, the latter half of the title causedthe book to be catalogued under Psychology by the New YorkPublic Library.)

RAND developed its collection of random numbers by firstbuilding a machine, basically an electronic roulette wheel, togenerate them and then subjecting the results to rerandom-ization and severe testing to weed out any unintentional pat-terns. RAND needed the numbers for the vast assortment ofprobability procedures that its research called for. The rest of the world needed them too, for everything from polling to sociological surveys. In a slightly more esoteric application,there is the story of the submarine commander who kept A Mil-lion Random Digits next to him when his sub was on patrolduty for use in setting his evasion courses. The book wentthrough three printings by 1971, stood the test of time as a standardized text, and was reprinted anew in 2001. WithinRAND, the joke about this surprise classic is that it is perhapsthe only case in which a random misprint would not be con-sidered an error.

RAND’s work on reconnaissance, which began in its earli-est years and continued for decades, resulted in some of its most impressive accomplishments. The organization’s stud-ies in infrared detection in the early 1950s led directly to thespace-based early-warning sys-tem against Soviet attack. RANDresearchers verified by calcula-tion that sensors could detectthe exhaust plume of a rocketsitting on a launch pad.

Only since the mid-1990s, withthe declassification of work fromthe 1950s, has RAND’s most in-teresting work in space reconnais-sance been put in perspective.Back in 1946 RAND was avidlytouting the importance of spacevehicles when the rest of theworld looked upon such notionsas mere fodder for Hollywood.In the early 1950s the RAND re-searcher James Lipp led ProjectFeed Back, which made a pas-sionate case for the feasibility ofa reconnaissance system in whichorbiting television cameras wouldtransmit back to earth electronicdata, giving the Air Force real-time images of enemy assets. L

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COLD WAR CONSIDERATIONS PLAYED DIRECTLY INTO RAND’S ROLE IN DEVEL

5 6 I N V E N T I O N & T E C H N O LO G Y S U M M E R 2 0 0 4

An illustration fromRAND’s first report,on a “world-circlingspaceship,” in 1946.

RAND to look into the survivability of command-and-controlstructures in a nuclear war, he joined the project with the ideathat McCulloch’s work with human brains might provide afruitful analogy, even a model.

The question Baran first confronted was this: How, in theevent of a strike against the United States that might take outcritical points of the command-and-control hierarchy, couldthe “go” or “no go” command for a counterstrike be communi-cated? This was a chilling, unanswered question in 1960, whentensions between America and the Soviet Union were fierce andunstable. Baran had heard RAND’s president, Frank Collbohm,express reservations about the Air Force’s dependence on high-

frequency communicationand suggest using AM radio stations for surviv-ability. So Baran, usingRAND’s Johnniac, plottedAM radio stations acrossthe country and outlined a redundant network forcommunicating a simple,crucial “go” or “no go”message.

On the basis of Baran’swork, the Air Force builtthe first emergency broad-cast system by “hijacking”the AM network and send-ing a signal that couldn’tbe heard on radio butcould be transmitted fromnode to node. However,once Baran had talked withpeople at Air Force bases

around the country, he knew that communicating a “go” or “nogo” message was a very bare minimum requirement and thatunlimited communication was what was ultimately needed. Tohave that in a robust, redundant system, digital technology wascalled for.

That’s where Baran’s key idea came in. He envisioned break-ing each message into standardized blocks of data, with eachblock containing information about its recipient, its origin, the length of time it had been in the network, and its positionwithin the message of which it was a part. A series of blockswould go out into the network and make their way throughit in any sequence they could—each one sending back a con-firmation from the new node to the previous node—until allthe blocks arrived at their destination. If a certain node wasnot available, a block that was sent to it would bounce back

upper atmosphere with weather and reconnaissance balloons.The Air Force objected to Raymond’s idea, mostly because

it wanted real-time reconnaissance and judged his approachfar too slow. Then the Soviet Union launched its Sputniks in1957, sending a shock wave through the Pentagon. Suddenlythe midair retrieval system, which yielded pictures at least asquickly as reconnaissance planes, began to look very good asan interim strategy.

Spurred by new urgency, WS-117L was redefined and be-came highly classified under CIA management. The public,which had become aware of WS-117L from press coverage, was told that the project had been canceled. Even Katz andDavies, whose advocacyhad helped bring aboutwhat was now takingplace, were never told thetruth. The reasoning wasthat Katz was such a talk-er that he would raise suspicion if he abruptlydropped his favorite sub-ject, as he would have todo. Space reconnaissancethroughout the 1960s wasdone very much as Katzand Davies had urged. Thesystem was crucial to thenation’s defense, becausenot until the 1970s werethe problems associatedwith electronic transmis-sion of high-resolutionvideo images back to earth finally worked out.

Cold War considerations also played directly into RAND’srole in developing the concept behind what we now know asthe Internet. In 1959 RAND’s reputation for intellectual free-dom induced a young engineer named Paul Baran to leaveHughes Aircraft and pursue his interests at RAND, a few milesaway. Baran was intensely interested in improving the reliabil-ity of the military “command and control” system—the meansof communicating crucial information and orders from one level of command to another. This system could come undersevere strain when it was most needed, in the event of an enemy attack.

Even before arriving at RAND, Baran had been thinkingabout the concepts of redundancy and rerouting that were put forth in the neurobiologist Warren McCulloch’s work on“neural nets.” When he heard that the Air Force had asked

S U M M E R 2 0 0 4 I N V E N T I O N & T E C H N O LO G Y 5 7

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

Roger Johnson of RANDshows a model of anexperimental airplane.

on ARPA projects in 1969, and over the following decades itgradually shed its military orientation to become the Internetwe know today.

Just as consequential as RAND’s contributions to the Inter-net were its accomplishments in computer software, particu-larly the software it developed for linear programming. Linearprogramming (with programming used in the sense of plan-ning or allocation, not as a reference to computing) basicallyinvolves finding the optimum value for a multivariable func-tion governed by a system of linear equations. One classic prob-lem involves designing a diet that will contain specified mini-mum levels of certain nutrients. Given an assortment of pos-sible foods, along with their prices and a list of what nutrientsthey contain, what is the cheapest way to satisfy the constraint?

Many problems of this type come up in management. The inputs maybe raw materials, personnel, or me-chanical parts, for example, and theconstraints may involve cost, time,

weight, or some other limiting factor.Linear-programming problems can be expressed using ma-

trices and vectors and handled with the techniques of linearalgebra, but since they are usually underdetermined (that is,there are fewer constraints than variables), the standard meth-ods of solving exact systems of equations do not apply. In thelate 1940s George Dantzig of RAND developed the simplexmethod for solving linear-programming problems. In essence,it involves expressing the set of all allowable solutions as a poly-hedron and going from one vertex to another until the opti-mum solution appears.

The simplex method was indeed simple, and it was brilliant.Industrial processes, management planning, and many othercomplex situations that could be formulated as linear-program-

and tell the node it had just come from to avoid sending anyfurther blocks that way. When all the blocks reached their des-tination, they were reconstituted into a message.

Baran’s idea was a brilliant inspiration to those who under-stood the concept of digital technology. But 40-odd years ago the digital universe was little more than fantasy to a worldimmersed in analogue reality. The people in charge of the na-tion’s largest, farthest-reaching communication system, the tele-phone monopoly of AT&T, were analogue folk. AT&T evenrefused to listen to its own innovative research division, BellLabs, and turned down the Air Force’s request for a study ofdigital network possibilities. Prodded by RAND, the Air Forcedecided to do the work itself. Then the Department of Defenseintervened to decree that work of this type belonged exclusively

under the purview of the Defense Communications Agency, notthe Air Force. But the DCA wasn’t interested in digital tech-nology, so nothing happened.

The instigation for the Internet ultimately came in 1966,when Robert Taylor, director of the Information Process-ing Techniques Office of the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA, now known as DARPA), waslooking for a way to exchange computer files among research-ers around the country. Although Baran had briefed ARPAmany times on his network concept, the architecture that re-searchers settled on for the ARPANET was that proposed bythe British physicist Donald Davies, who in 1965 had indepen-dently reinvented the same technology.

Davies had coined the term packet switching for his networkconcept and had presented briefings in the United States in1967. This turned out to be the right time for his ideas to geta hearing; Baran had come up with his own version of a net-work before the communications world was ready to think in digital terms. ARPANET began linking scientists at work L

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FROM A STRICTLY TECHNOLOGICAL STANDPOINT, THE RAND CORPORATION’S

RAND has published manybooks over the years,aimed at widely varyinggroups of readers.

ming problems could suddenly be solved in a hurry with theaid of a computer. In a 1963 RAND report, Dantzig describedthe simplex method in action: “To solve [the problem earlierdescribed] by brute force . . . would require solar systems fullof nano-second electronic computers running from the time ofthe big bang until the time the Universe grows cold to scan allthe permutations in order to be certain which is best. Yet ittakes only a second using an IBM-370-168 and standard sim-plex method software.”

PRECISION AND ACCURACY ARE DIFFERENT THINGS, OF

course, and any analytical solution, no matter how clever,is only as good as the model used to derive it. In the

excitement that attended RAND’s advances, some enthusi-asts got carried away and forgot this important truth. In anecho of Jeremy Bentham’s “felicific calculus” of the eigh-teenth century, ambitious social scientists tried to express a host of amorphously defined social benefits and costswith mathematical equations and use them to make“scientific” policy decisions on economic, budgetary,and natural-resource issues. Robert McNamara, whohad been an enthusiast of RAND-style analysis as ahigh-ranking executive at the Ford Motor Company,tried to run the Vietnam War with models and com-puters, learning too late that unanticipated factorswithout a variable in the equation can greatly alter theoutcome.

From a strictly technological standpoint, RAND’s glory days ended sometime in the late 1960s. By then theAir Force had drawn significant benefits from RAND’semphasis on free inquiry, cross-fertilization, and systemsanalysis, and its own research activities had incorpo-rated these techniques. Other organizations and busi-nesses saw that RAND’s research could be useful tothem, and they began offering subsidies for projects thathad nothing to do with the military. As the 1970s woreon, RAND shifted more and more from actively creat-ing the frontiers of technology to concentrating on pol-icy analysis, military and nonmilitary. These studies haveranged far afield. One mid-1970s report, for example,suggested that some recovering alcoholics could safelydrink in moderation instead of abstaining completely.Another set of studies evaluated cost, safety, and envi-ronmental impact for a proposed set of storm barriersalong the Netherlands’ northern coast. More recent pub-lications have run the gamut from the arts to counter-terrorism.

RAND’s policy-centered work has been impressiveand influential, but most of it has not occurred at the

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

An Air Force officerpeers out from a room

used by umpires inRAND’s war games.

S U M M E R 2 0 0 4 I N V E N T I O N & T E C H N O LO G Y 5 9

active frontier of technological advance. Both Willis Wareand Bruno Augenstein have suggested that the time and place(post–World War II Southern California) in which RAND wascreated had a great deal to do with the intellectual leaps it came up with. RAND’s early reconnaissance research not onlyprompted technological innovations in the military but alsospurred private-sector developments like video recording. Thatwork was declassified only in the mid-1990s, and the nextdecades may well reveal other consequential research that canonly be hinted at now. In the meantime, the advances that can be discussed, such as the work that Paul Baran did lead-ing to the Internet, make a persuasive case that an organi-zation whose sole job is to generate ideas can promote the advance of technologies with the power to change the life of an entire culture. ★

VIRGINIA CAMPBELL is a freelance writer living in Los Angeles.