Paul H. O'Neill is chairman and chief executive officer of Alcoa and chairman of the RAND board of trustees. James A. Thomson is president and chief executive officer of RAND.
RAND is attacking the problems of today and tomorrow from the same broad capability base and with the same values of quality and objectivity that established a legacy of achievement. In fact, many projects and plans of today flow directly from the research streams that produced major breakthroughs in earlier decades. A few then-and-now highlights should make the point.
The post-World War II period, like our own post-cold war era, was a time of transition. New technologies, Soviet power, the appearance of nuclear weapons--all demanded creative response. In our very first project, later described as the cornerstone of America's space program, a team of researchers demonstrated the feasibility and utility of placing satellites in earth orbit. To better understand a secretive adversary, another group helped launch the new discipline of Soviet area studies. Many of the nation's core strategies for defense and deterrence in the nuclear age were developed here. Staff scientists pioneered key features of the high-flying reconnaissance systems that gave the West essential windows into the closed world behind the Iron Curtain.
Today, our researchers are responding to the contemporary versions of these challenges: pursuing ways and means to ensure that the U.S. Air Force, our original sponsor, extends its command of air and space well into the 21st century; helping the U.S. Army shape the ground forces of the future; formulating strategy for the much-discussed revolution in military affairs and for coping with the latest weapons of mass destruction; mapping the directions and implications of growing Chinese power; analyzing the logic and costs of NATO expansion and of a broader, less Eurocentric, transatlantic partnership; and engaging the new Russia through a dialogue among American and Russian business leaders.
In the 1950s and 1960s, RAND operated at the cutting edge of the information revolution. Staff members constructed one of the first online, time-shared computers. They also wrote the programs that became the basis for artificial intelligence systems. One of their most far-reaching innovations, the concept and technology of distributed communications, has evolved, spectacularly, into what we now know as the Internet and the World Wide Web.
Today, their successors are exploring the perimeters of information warfare, examining the vulnerability of the nation's information-based infrastructure, and weighing the costs and benefits of providing access to e-mail for all Americans.
Given our penchant for confronting the toughest issues and our emphasis on exacting analysis, RAND has always been fertile ground for the creation of new analytic tools. Linear programming, game theory, scenario writing, systems analysis, and policy analysis are techniques that were pioneered within our walls before migrating throughout the world.
The most recent addition to this tool kit is adaptive planning, a way of addressing policy problems--global warming is a good example--that are laden with uncertainties. A 1996 RAND paper embodying this adaptive planning approach provided an important conceptual underpinning for the Pentagon's 1997 Quadrennial Defense Review.
Our health policy unit has been a particularly rich source of methodological innovation. The program took wing in the early 1970s with the RAND Health Insurance Experiment, the largest such sociological study ever undertaken. The mammoth, nationwide effort concluded some 15 years later with an invaluable database and a raft of findings showing the relationship between costs of coverage, health care utilization, and health outcomes. The experiment also spawned the first attempts to measure quality of care.
Today, RAND Health is refining and expanding those measures in partnership with government and, more recently, private industry. Pfizer Inc., to cite just one such partner, is supporting our efforts to develop tools for measuring and improving the quality of care provided to our most vulnerable elderly citizens. Recently, our health researchers completed a sweeping overview of the caliber of care prevailing across the country. More ambitiously still, they are now crafting strategies to reengineer the health care system in a fashion that puts quality of care on a par with cost control. With many Americans now enrolled in managed health care plans, this has become an urgent task.
Each of our research units has its own extensive agenda and interdisciplinary roster, but they frequently pool their expertise to mount integrated projects as well. RAND Health and the Institute for Civil Justice, for example, are pursuing joint investigations of arbitration in health care disputes and of litigation issues in managed care. RAND labor economists and criminologists have collaborated on an evaluation of the costs and benefits of programs for helping families with very young, at-risk children.
The late 1940s and the 1990s have been times of transition for research funding as well as for research challenges. Prior to World War II, government investment was minor. But that changed during and after the conflict. RAND itself was born out of the military leadership's concern for maintaining its wartime collaboration with America's scientific talent. The burgeoning federal role was justified on economic and public health grounds as well as in national security terms. Research funding not only exploded in quantity but became qualitatively expansive as well, encouraging wide-ranging inquiry. For an institution like RAND, this translated into broad goals, long-term perspectives--and a string of immensely creative contributions to the public interest.
In recent years, the spirit of federal and, for that matter, industrial research support has changed radically. The emphasis today is on narrowly targeted goals and short-term perspectives. We are pleased to respond to these changing needs and do so with the same dedication to quality and objectivity as in the past. But the nation's need for broad, long-range thinking remains. To sustain our ability to pursue the wide-ranging inquiries that have served this nation so well for so long, we are building a robust relationship with the private sector. Some of RAND's leading analysts are now working with individual business firms, both to improve their decisionmaking and to collaborate in their public interestrelated activities. The Pfizer partnership mentioned above and our current efforts to help Texas Utilities prepare for deregulation are good illustrations.
As research budgets shrink, margins grow tighter, and the federal government plays less and less of a public policy role, the appropriate response is to make our expertise available to a broader mix of clients. Increasingly, we expect to fulfill assignments for wide-ranging entities, including federal and state governments, municipalities, public-private partnerships, educational consortia, public utilities, foreign ministries, and individual businesses.
Quality endures; objectivity endures. These are the timeless RAND values that will be as applicable in the future as they have been in the past. Well into the 21st century, RAND will be helping policymakers arrive at the informed decisions that can do the most good for the greatest number of people.