Welcome to the newly expanded RAND Review.

The most significant change is a bigger news section, which captures a greater diversity of ideas and information about research related to timely policy debates. Some of the research is complete. Some of it is incomplete. Some of it consists primarily of provocative discussions and dialogues. But all of it demonstrates the dynamic interplay between policy research and policymaking.

Another addition is a commentary that appears near the back of the magazine. The commentary gives a leading researcher the chance to address a pressing policy problem that hasn't necessarily been exhaustively analyzed by research. In this inaugural commentary, Jim Quinlivan anticipates the upcoming general election, which America will conduct in a wartime environment, and offers suggestions for protecting democracy itself.

The primary focus of RAND Review remains its collection of feature articles that summarize and synthesize the completed and published works of RAND research. For the cover story of this issue, Brian Stecher and Laura Hamilton caution that the new national agenda of high-stakes testing in elementary and secondary schools may be more of an academic hindrance than a help—unless the 50 states take certain steps to avert the potentially negative consequences.

Richard Speier and Brian Chow review the record of economic sanctions that have been imposed to deter the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and their associated missile systems. The authors propose that a combination of new procedures, new legislation, new staff, and new principles can make current and future sanctions work much more efficaciously.

Finally, Rick Eden charts a military success story in what many have dubbed extremely formidable terrain: the mammoth logistics system of the U.S. Army. The lessons of streamlining learned by the army during the 1990s have led not only to a leaner army logistics system but also to a stronger U.S. military capability as a whole during the recent U.S. deployments to Afghanistan.

The obvious lesson from the army logistics system is that bigger is not always better. Therefore, considerable effort has been made to ensure that each additional section of this magazine serves a larger purpose: to inform public opinion about policy debates in an accessible way. Fulfilling that purpose is one of the means by which a research institute can richly serve the public interest.

—John Godges