Fergie's Tech Blog

Off Beat: Are We the Bastard Children of RAND?

Alex Abella writes on The History News Network:

Sixty years ago this May an obscure team of defense research scientists quietly incorporated into an organization that would rewrite world history. They kept the cryptic acronym they had given themselves when they were a top Pentagon project —RAND, as in Research and Development—and set up shop in an abandoned newspaper plant by the beach in Santa Monica, California.

Within the span of a few years RAND had become what the Soviet newspaper Pravda dubbed ‘an academy of science and death,’ a place where defense intellectuals could, at their frightful leisure, dream up new ways to make war on America’s enemies. Soon its sway spread beyond the military sphere, extending to national defense, foreign policy, domestic issues and economic theory. Over the past sixty years, the think tank’s influence has been so pervasive that it is no exaggeration to say that all of us who live in the Western world can be called the bastard children of RAND.

posted by Fergie @ 5/18/2008 10:49:00 PM