ORO-RAC

The Operations Research Office (ORO) was an U.S. Army-linked behavioral science research unit established at Johns Hopkins University in Bethesda, Maryland, that conducted some of the earliest systematic psychological studies of combat performance in the Korean War. When Johns Hopkins University grew uncomfortable with its military ties, it severed the relationship and ORO reconstituted as the Research Analysis Corporation (RAC), an independent nonprofit headquartered in McLean, Virginia.¹

From ORO to RAC

ORO's early work centered on what made effective fighters and effective fighting units, drawing on Korean War data, including identification of the psychological and behavioral factors distinguishing effective combat units from less effective ones. The transformation into RAC followed the same institutional dynamic that affected other university-based military contractors, notably HumRRO at George Washington University and CRESS at American University: as the Vietnam War generated campus opposition, universities preferred to disentangle themselves from visibly military-sponsored social science.¹

RAC is often described in the military research community as being to the Army what Rand Corporation is to the Air Force: a generalist operational research organization that addresses all fields of operational inquiry, not just psychology. In the psychological sciences its interests have concentrated on motivating soldiers and guerrillas, pre-testing methods for psychological warfare and evaluating their effectiveness, and analyzing the uses and organization of Communist propaganda.¹

Location and Institutional Environment

RAC's McLean, Virginia, headquarters placed it in a cluster of smaller military research organizations in the same area, including the Human Resources Research Inc., a smaller contractor working in related fields.¹

Shared Work with HumRRO, CRESS, and Rand

ORO contributed psychological studies on defection and disaffection to the Korean War-era research record. These are cited alongside HumRRO studies in the same period, and CRESS (then SORO) drew on both bodies of work for its counterinsurgency research in the early 1960s. The ARPA-commissioned Rand Corporation Viet Cong motivation and morale study of the mid-1960s and RAC's own psywar evaluation work formed complementary parts of a larger institutional effort to apply behavioral science to Vietnam War counterinsurgency.¹