Walter L. Perry

Biography

Walter Perry is a senior information scientist at the RAND Corporation and a professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. Perry recently led two projects on Operation Iraqi Freedom. The first was RAND's multiyear involvement in the Operational Analysis and Support Team for the Joint IED Defeat Organization, and the second was a congressionally mandated analysis of alternative drawdown plans for the exit of U.S. troops from Iraq. Prior to these studies, Perry led RAND's analysis effort in support of the “Army After Next” project and its successor on Army transformation. He led an Army-sponsored study that has resulted in a fully documented account of the Kosovo conflict, operations in Afghanistan, and major combat operations in Iraq. He developed an algorithm for the Defense intelligence Agency designed to indicate when a terrorist group is on the verge of acquiring weapons of mass destruction. He conducted research into methods for developing data fusion and information-processing algorithms and analyzing large command-and-control problems through network modeling. At the same time, he developed several metrics of the impact of command and control on military operations for both Army and Navy applications. Perry joined RAND in 1984 after a 20-year career with the U.S. Army Signal Corps. He has taught electrical engineering and computer sciences at The George Washington University, statistics at George Mason University, and mathematics at West Point. Perry received his Ph.D. from George Mason University.