RAND Corporation

RAND Corporation (Research ANd Development) is an American nonprofit global policy think tank originally formed by Douglas Aircraft Company to offer research and analysis to the United States Armed Forces. It is financed by the U.S. government and private endowment, corporations including the health care industry, universities and private individuals. The organization has expanded to work with other governments, private foundations, international organizations, and commercial organizations on a host of non-defense issues. RAND aims for interdisciplinary and quantitative problem solving via translating theoretical concepts from formal economics and the physical sciences into novel applications in other areas, that is, via applied science and operations research. Michael D. Rich is president and chief executive officer of the RAND Corporation.

RAND has approximately 1,700 employees. Its American locations include: Santa Monica, California (headquarters); Arlington, Virginia; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and Boston, Massachusetts. The RAND Gulf States Policy Institute has an office in New Orleans, Louisiana. RAND Europe is located in Cambridge, United Kingdom, and Brussels, Belgium. RAND Australia is located in Canberra, Australia.

United States

Coordinates: 40°N 100°W / 40°N 100°W / 40; -100

The United States of America (USA), commonly referred to as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a federal republic composed of 50 states, a federal district, five major territories and various possessions. The 48 contiguous states and Washington, D.C., are in central North America between Canada and Mexico. The state of Alaska is in the northwestern part of North America and the state of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific. The territories are scattered about the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea. At 3.8 million square miles (9.842 million km²) and with over 320 million people, the country is the world's third or fourth-largest by total area and the third most populous. It is one of the world's most ethnically diverse and multicultural nations, the product of large-scale immigration from many countries. The geography and climate of the United States are also extremely diverse, and the country is home to a wide variety of wildlife.

Alex Abella

Alex Abella (born 1950) is an American author and journalist best known for his non-fiction works Soldiers of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire (2008) and Shadow Enemies: Hitler's Secret Terrorist Plot Against the United States (2003, with Scott Gordon).

Early life

Abella was born in Cuba in 1950. His family left the country after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961. The family settled in New York, where Abella attended Columbia University on a Pulitzer scholarship.

Career

After college, Abella moved to California to work for the San Francisco Chronicle initially covering local news, then network news as a reporter, writer, and producer.

Abella left the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1980s for Los Angeles, spending seven years there as a Spanish language interpreter for the Los Angeles Superior Court. His first novel, The Killing of the Saints (1991), is a Los Angeles crime thriller about the beliefs of the Santería religion used as a defense for murder.Saints and its sequels, Dead of Night (1998) and Final Acts (2000), feature a Cuban-American lawyer and investigator of Cuban heritage.

Anti-aircraft warfare

Anti-aircraft warfare or counter-air defence is defined by NATO as "all measures designed to nullify or reduce the effectiveness of hostile air action." They include ground-and air-based weapon systems, associated sensor systems, command and control arrangements and passive measures (e.g. barrage balloons). It may be used to protect naval, ground, and air forces in any location. However, for most countries the main effort has tended to be 'homeland defence'. NATO refers to airborne air defence as counter-air and naval air defence as anti-aircraft warfare. Missile defence is an extension of air defence as are initiatives to adapt air defence to the task of intercepting any projectile in flight.

In some countries, such as Britain and Germany during the Second World War, the Soviet Union and NATO's Allied Command Europe, ground based air defence and air defence aircraft have been under integrated command and control. However, while overall air defence may be for homeland defence including military facilities, forces in the field, wherever they are, invariably deploy their own air defence capability if there is an air threat. A surface-based air defence capability can also be deployed offensively to deny the use of airspace to an opponent.

Defence Command (Denmark)

The Defence Command (Danish: Værnsfælles Forsvarskommando, VFK) is the Danish joint military command and the top coordination and controlling authority of the Danish military. It is a Level I command authority, directly under the Ministry of Defence.

It consists of the Chief of Defence and three service staffs, Operations and Planning Staffs, known collectively as Forsvarsstaben (the Defence Staff), Arctic Command and the Special Operations Command.

History

Forsvarskommandoen was established on the basic of law no. 334 of June 18, 1969 about the origination of the Danish Defence; in order to reduce resources expended and make a true combined Defence command of Denmark. It was a continuation of the Danish defence re-construction of 1950, which erected Ministry of Defence, Chief of Defence, Forsvarsstaben, Hærkommandoen, Søværnskommandoen and Flyverkommandoen.

These latter commands was in 1969 combined into one and placed under the Ministry of Defence, giving the Chief of Defence full administrative and operational command of all branches of the Danish military. The staff of these former branch commands continued to exist inside FKO, but in 1982, which saw a major re-construction of FKO, they too vanished in favour of an even more branch independent organisation. The reorganization resulted in a unified command structture similar to the previous Generalkommandoen.