Pentagon pays RAND to model wars before they happen

The Pentagon has put up to $985 million on the table to keep fighting wars that have not happened yet, all inside conference rooms and computer simulations rather than on any actual battlefield.

Washington Headquarters Services, the Pentagon office that manages support functions and contracting for the Office of the Secretary of Defense, awarded a task order contract worth $452 million to the RAND National Defense Research Institute, with the total value climbing to $985.6 million if the government exercises every option built into the deal. A task order contract works like a pre-approved menu rather than a single purchase, letting the Pentagon assign specific research projects to RAND over time up to a maximum ceiling value, and the notice specifies that no funds have actually been obligated yet, meaning the headline figures represent a spending cap rather than money already committed or spent.

RAND National Defense Research Institute is one of three Defense Department research centers operated by the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit think tank founded in 1948 that traces its roots to a U.S. Army Air Forces project established two years earlier to bring rigorous, independent analysis to postwar military planning. The federal government designates RAND’s defense-focused divisions as Federally Funded Research and Development Centers, commonly called FFRDCs, a special legal status that grants nonprofit research organizations privileged, long-term access to sensitive government data and problems in exchange for operating without a profit motive and maintaining independence from the specific policy outcomes their research might favor. Alongside the National Defense Research Institute, which serves the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff, and the military’s combatant commands, RAND separately operates Project Air Force for the U.S. Air Force and the Arroyo Center for the Army, giving the organization parallel, dedicated research relationships across every major branch of the Pentagon’s civilian and uniformed leadership structure.

According to the contract notice, the money covers research, studies, analysis, analytic models, simulations, and wargaming exercises, the last of which represents one of RAND’s oldest and most distinctive contributions to American defense policy. RAND pioneered modern military wargaming in the 1950s, running political and military simulations that helped shape the intellectual foundations of Cold War nuclear deterrence strategy, and the practice has evolved considerably since then into a standard Pentagon planning tool used to test how a potential conflict, whether against a near-peer power or in a regional crisis, might actually unfold before any American service member is ever put in harm’s way. These exercises typically bring together defense analysts, government officials, academic researchers, and industry representatives around a shared simulated scenario, letting participants war-game decisions, resource allocations, and potential outcomes in a setting where a bad call costs nothing more than credibility rather than lives or equipment.

The contract specifies that work will take place at the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, at RAND’s headquarters in Santa Monica, California, and at a RAND office in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a geographic spread that reflects how the institute’s research staff and government-facing analysts operate across multiple locations rather than a single campus. The current task order carries an estimated completion date of August 1, 2026, a relatively short window that likely reflects either an initial base period within a longer contract structure or a specific near-term research priority, though the notice itself does not specify which projects or studies will be funded first under the award.

This contract sits within a research relationship between RAND and the Pentagon that has run continuously for more than seven decades, producing analysis that has directly informed decisions ranging from nuclear strategy during the Cold War to more recent Pentagon planning around great-power competition with China and Russia. The scale of this particular award, with a ceiling approaching a billion dollars, underscores how central RAND’s wargaming and analytic work has remained even as the character of potential conflicts has shifted dramatically toward considerations like cyber warfare, artificial intelligence, drone swarms, and contested logistics across the vast distances of the Indo-Pacific, all domains that traditional military planning struggled to model using the same tools that worked for Cold War-era scenarios built around massed armor and nuclear exchange.

RAND’s China and Taiwan wargaming in particular has produced some of the institute’s most consequential and uncomfortable findings for Pentagon leadership over the past decade. David Ochmanek, a senior RAND international defense researcher and former deputy assistant secretary of defense for force development, has spent years running and analyzing simulations of a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan, and one widely cited public assessment he offered of what those exercises repeatedly show became one of the most quoted lines in recent defense policy debate.

“In our games, when we fight Russia and China, [the United States] gets its ass handed to it,” Ochmanek said.

That kind of unvarnished finding is precisely the value proposition FFRDC status is designed to protect, since RAND’s nonprofit structure and contractual independence let its analysts publish conclusions that might embarrass the very Pentagon leadership funding the research, rather than softening results to please a paying client the way a traditional defense contractor might feel pressure to do. Ochmanek’s more recent work has pushed past simply cataloging American shortfalls toward proposing fixes, including simulations showing that large, autonomous drone swarms capable of operating across a distributed data-sharing network could meaningfully shift the odds in a Taiwan Strait crisis, findings that have directly influenced how the Air Force and other services think about investing in cheap, mass-produced unmanned systems rather than relying solely on small numbers of exquisite, expensive platforms.