Bryan Gabbard

A challenge gift will help RAND pursue the most consequential research questions.

Bryan Gabbard at the RAND Alumni Reunion at RAND's Santa Monica Headquarters, August 6, 2024

Photo by Diane Baldwin/RAND

Bryan Gabbard has learned one tough lesson about public policy research in his half-century relationship with RAND. “Very often,” he said, “the most important questions have no customers.” He and his wife, Kay, recently gave $60,000 to help RAND pursue some of those questions.

Sixty, here, was a meaningful number. The Gabbards gave their gift in the name of someone Bryan Gabbard had long worked with and admired—and whose relationship with RAND goes back even further than his. Natalie Crawford started her career at RAND in 1964 and has spent 60 years answering questions that needed to be answered, especially for the U.S. Air Force. She answered his gift with a $30,000 donation of her own.

Dozens of current and former RAND staffers also followed the Gabbards' lead. Many were first-time donors inspired to get involved by a challenge the Gabbards issued with their gift. For every $1,000 they gave, they wanted someone else to step up with another donation of any size. RAND met the challenge in less than 72 hours. With Crawford's gift, the challenge nearly doubled the impact the Gabbards had, to $119,105.

“The Air Force, the Army, civil organizations and foundations, they all come to RAND with statements of work that say, 'Here's a problem we need to solve,'” Bryan Gabbard said. “That's fine. But those aren't always the biggest problems. I'd like to see this fund stimulate a little more thinking that allows RAND to take on problems that have no customers but are important.”

His career at RAND began in 1971, when he was still a graduate student at MIT. He joined the physics department but stayed for less than a year before he and several colleagues spun off a private science company. That established a pattern he would follow for the rest of his career: work at RAND for some time, then leave for the private sector, then come back. “I'm a three- or four-time alumnus,” he joked.

He became a senior political scientist, with a focus on space, science, and intelligence, during one of his longer stints at RAND in the late 1990s and early 2000s. He also served as the associate director for development and operations of RAND's science and technology unit. He never worked for Crawford, a vice president and director of RAND Project AIR FORCE at the time. But he often worked with her on projects and panels.

Crawford is now a senior fellow and distinguished chair in air and space policy at RAND. But that doesn't fully capture the contributions she has made. She's been described as a tireless researcher, a mentor to generations of Air Force officers, and a leader who never shrank from speaking truth to power. Gen. Philip Breedlove, the former Supreme Allied Commander Europe for NATO, called her a national asset.

“Few people have had the impact that Natalie has had,” Bryan Gabbard said. “I've just admired her for a long time. She's added great value to national security in ways that are not always apparent, and so I wanted to find a way to support her.”

Among her other titles, Crawford is also the president of the RAND Alumni Association, an organization for former RAND staffers. Each year, alumni select a research project to receive an impact award named in honor of her and her husband, the Natalie and Robert Crawford Alumni Impact Award. Its purpose is to extend the reach of timely and important research. The most recent award, for example, is helping researchers explore how to build and strengthen the health care workforce.

The Gabbards decided to direct their $60,000 gift to that award fund. But they also wanted to get more RAND alumni involved. Their challenge ended up drawing 110 additional gifts, totaling an additional $29,105—plus Crawford's $30,000 donation.

Bryan Gabbard has seen firsthand what that kind of funding can do. He was a part of several projects at RAND that pushed what was possible with science and space technology. That's the kind of pathbreaking research he hopes to encourage with the alumni fund. Those projects “had no customers,” he said. “They revolutionized the world, but they had no customers at the time.”

November 15, 2024