Jerry Pournelle had some thoughts on think tanks:
RAND was a think tank, and over time it became too intellectual for General Schriever and Air Force Systems Command. Schriever, who built the modern Air Force and who understood megamissions very well, caused the creation of the Aerospace Corporation, which was to be “practical” rather than theoretical. Schriever ordered two major studies of the future of the Air Force: Project Forecast, which dealt with winged aircraft, and Project 75, which was a study of missile systems. Both were intended to answer the megamissions question. For more on megamissions see my lecture at the war college. Colonel Francis X. Kane was the Director of Project Forecast. Project 75 was done at Aerospace with Bill Dorrance as Director; I was the Editor of the study. Both were very influential in the development of USAF weapons systems.
RAND and Aerospace Corporation worked together. RAND considered Aerospace a bit too rough and ready, too operations oriented with too little regard to matters intellectual. Aerospace people thought of RAND as too theoretical with too little regard for practical matters. The Air Force generally required RAND critiques of major Aerospace studies, and most RAND Air Force studies required similar participation from Aerospace before the final report could be written. This cross fertilization was often useful and sometimes very much so, but it could lead to considerable frustration as well.
RAND had managed to establish the principle that RAND people were always on duty thinkers, and thus should fly first class when on company business since they were expected to work during the flights. This sometimes meant that a RAND intellectual would be flying first class while the spouse sat back in steerage with the Aerospace troops when we all went to a major conference. (In those days families often went to major conferences, paying their own way while the staffer got a paid ticket.) Aerospace Corporation staff were also expected to work while on the road, but weren’t authorized first class tickets. In practice, at least in my case, we did so much travel that we got upgrades from the airlines, so the RAND first class privilege wasn’t as important as it might have been.
There were other major government owned think tanks, mostly on the East coast. MITRE and Lincoln Labs were the two I worked with.
RAND published a wide variety of documents on many important matters. Herman Kahn’s Techniques of Systems Analysis, a RAND document, was the best (indeed nearly the only) systematic introduction to systems analysis/operations research in publication for some years, and remains one of the best even today. RAND did studies on such matters as “hostile trade”, a study of Japanese economic warfare in previous centuries.
Everyone used to enjoy visiting RAND in Santa Monica, and the Indonesian rijsttafel restaurant down the street.