In 1944, Ed Bowles organized the first experiment in direct civilian scientific participation in American wartime planning, the B-29 Special Bombardment Project. He chose Arthur Raymond and Frank Collbohm to direct the effort. The Army Air Force was facing a severe logistical problem in the Far Eastern theater. Given the distances involved from accessible bases, it was very difficult to fly very many bombing sorties over Japan. Using OR techniques, Raymond and Collbohm and their team discovered that the range, speed and bomb-load capacity of the B-29 could be vastly increased by stripping away most of the plane’s heavy defensive armor. They also calculated that doing so would make the B-29 fly much faster than any known Japanese fighter plane; hence the armor plating would not be missed. They recommended retaining only a tail gun and some armor in the rear to guard against possible random dive-bomb attacks from above. In the last weeks of the Pacific war, one wing of B-29s was stripped down in this fashion. General Curtis LeMay, commander of the XXI Bomber Command, reported to headquarters that never before had bombing been so precise.
As Collbohm gained a broader perspective on the war planning, he grew disturbed that many high-ranking military officers were winning the military phase of the war but losing sight of the larger objectives. For example, in their obsession with measuring effectiveness by gauging damage of production facilities, many officers wanted to bomb the coal mines of the Ruhr Valley. Collbohm and many other civilian consultants argued that the Germans were practically defeated, and that such rich resources should now be protected, not destroyed. Collbohm talked the situation over with Dave Griggs, Ed Bowles and others. They all agreed that the military could not afford to lose the technical and scientific community after the war.
When Collbohm aired his concerns to Arnold, the general agreed. “We have to keep the scientists on board,” he said. “It’s the most important thing we have to do.”
Arnold immediately sent Collbohm back to Santa Monica to calculate how much money and what sorts of facilities and personnel would be needed for a new organization of scientists, similar to that urged by Von Karman, that would work for the military.
Throughout the summer of 1945, Collbohm made frequent trips to Washington to discuss the new organization with Arnold, Bowles, and Secretary of War Robert Patterson. In Santa Monica, he and Douglas talked a lot about it as well.
On September 30, Collbohm came to Arnold with a proposal from Don Douglas: Douglas Aircraft would agree to house an independent group of civilians to assist the Army Air Force in planning for future weapons development. Arnold was excited by the idea. Douglas had served the nation well in war. By the war’s end, it was one of the largest aircraft manufacturers in the nation. And Don Douglas was a man Arnold could trust. They were longtime hunting-and-fishing friends and, two years earlier, Arnold’s son had married Douglas’ daughter. Arnold had already concluded that this new scientific organization probably could not be set up at a university, owing to the need for classified information; nor could it be inside the government, due to the relatively low pay scales of civil service. He had thought that industry was out of the question too, that possible conflicts of interest would make life difficult for the fledgling outfit. But if Don Douglas was willing and eager to take this thing on and get it moving, then maybe an industry connection would work after all.
Arnold called for a lunch meeting to be held the very next day at Hamilton Field, an Air Force base just outside San Francisco. Arnold and Collbohm, who were in Washington, borrowed President Truman’s private plane to get there. Present at the meeting were Arnold, Collbohm, Ed Bowles, Don Douglas, Arthur Raymond and a few other representatives of Douglas Aircraft. The meeting was to the RAND Corporation what the Continental Congress had been to the United States. Years later, the comparison would be made self-consciously; the group that met at Hamilton Field would be referred to in RAND folklore as “the founding fathers.”
Arnold announced to those assembled that he had $30 million left over, unspent, from his wartime research budget. He wanted to divide that into three packages of $10 million each for projects that would study techniques of intercontinental warfare. He pledged one of the packages to Douglas: that would be enough to finance the new group and to keep it standing on its own feet for a few years, free from pressures to exhibit its achievements prematurely. Douglas wanted to start quickly, before the inevitable peacetime economy measures drastically reduced the output of his company. Frank Collbohm said that he would hunt around for someone to direct the outfit and would lead it himself in the meantime. Arthur Raymond came up with the name RAND, standing for “Research and Development.” (Later, Curtis LeMay, noting that RAND never produced any weapon, would waggishly say that it should have stood for “Research and No Development.”)
On December 1, 1945, General LeMay was appointed head of a new directorate, Deputy Chief of Air Staff for Research and Development. The idea of establishing a separate high-level office to deal with all R&D projects had been recommended by Theodore Von Karman’s Toward New Horizons report. Among LeMay’s tasks would be to watch over, provide guidance to, and protect from all obstacles the new Project RAND. One of the first things LeMay did was to call the representatives from all relevant commands into his office to determine the precise wording of the RAND contract. Nobody was to leave the room until the language was composed.
The job did not take long. The charter of RAND read: “Project RAND is a continuing program of scientific study and research on the broad subject of air warfare with the object of recommending to the Air Force preferred methods, techniques and instrumentalities for this purpose.” On March 1, 1946, Army Air Force contract number MX-791 was signed. Project RAND was born.
RAND started life as a four-man outfit housed in a walled-off section on the second floor of the main Douglas Aircraft building in Santa Monica. At the outset, they worked—along with some Douglas engineers—strictly on technical and engineering problems: comparisons of rockets and ramjets, the use of titanium alloys on supersonic airplanes, aerial refueling, bomber and fighter designs, nuclear propulsion, upper-atmosphere physics, new mathematical and statistical techniques. The project was attracting top-notch scientists and mathematicians, many of whom had worked during the war in OR divisions or on radar technology.
RAND’s first report, released May 2, 1946, was called Preliminary Design of an Experimental World-Circling Spaceship, and it predicted that the launching into outer space of what would later be called a satellite “would inflame the imagination of mankind, and would probably produce repercussions in the world comparable to the explosion of the atomic bomb.” Few paid attention in 1946, but eleven years later, when the Soviet Union put Sputnik in the sky, those words eerily rang true.
RAND was expanding. In March 1947, it was too large for the Douglas building so Douglas rented an abandoned newspaper plant in downtown Santa Monica and, soon after that move, portions of the buildings on all four corners of the intersection at Fourth and Broadway. (In 1953, RAND would build and move into the two-story pink building on the beach; in 1961, the five-story annex would be added.)
However, the connection with Douglas Aircraft was cracking. The company lost a few contract bids in the early days of RAND, and Don Douglas started to think that the Air Force might be leaning over backward to avoid the appearance of favoritism. RAND was becoming a financial liability, and Douglas’ initial enthusiasm was rapidly cooling. By September 1946, Ed Bowles, still an “Expert Consultant” to the Secretary of War, complained to Hap Arnold that Project RAND “has been moving very, very slowly—so slowly, in fact, that the opposition in the Air Forces is sitting by, if I may say so, gloating over [its] impending failure….” Especially concerned about these problems was Frank Collbohm, temporarily in charge of RAND. Collbohm started to look for a way that RAND might escape the clutches of Douglas Aircraft.