CNA 70th Anniversary Celebration and Awards Dinner

Paul H. Nitze Award

Paul Henry Nitze—statesman and former CNA trustee—was for more than 50 years a principal architect and determined builder of American national security and arms control policies and of naval policies of the United States. He served every President from Roosevelt to Reagan and shaped the issues and events that became the landmarks of modern national security policy: the strategic bombing survey, the Marshall Plan, the H-bomb debate, NSC 68, the Korean War, the Berlin and Cuban missile crises, Vietnam, SALT, INF, and START. His singular and sustained influence on strategy and arms control was without equal. He personified the interplay of theory and practice that brings strong ideas to public policy and an experiential basis to learning.

In 1992, we established the CNA Nitze Award to recognize other distinguished leaders who promote, stimulate, and broaden public understanding of national security. Recipients include Sam Nunn, James Schlesinger, Lee Hamilton, Lawrence Eagleburger, and William Perry. Senator Richard G. Lugar will receive the CNA Nitze Award this year.

Award for Operational Analysis

Seventy years ago, CNA pioneered the field of operations research and analysis. During the early part of World War II, the U.S. Navy turned to a group of scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for help in responding to the German U-boat threat. Not content with studying the problem from afar, these scientists insisted on deploying with Navy forces to observe firsthand the operational challenges and collect the data needed for meaningful analyses. Their groundbreaking work not only established operations research and analysis as a distinct field of study, but also set the standard for future operational research methods. From this initial group of scientists, CNA was born.

Operations research and analysis has grown from its early roots supporting the military to encompass a great diversity of work within the government and in the private sector. Today, operations research and analysis includes decision analysis, management science, and computational finance, and it draws on more than just its mathematical basis to include the cognitive and organization sciences. This year, in recognition of the heritage and traditions of operational research and analysis, we created the CNA Award for Operational Analysis. This competitive award is open to all researchers and analysts outside CNA and will be presented to the individual or team whose submitted work is judged as providing the most creative, empirically based solution to a real-world problem or in support of a real-world decision. MIT team Dr. Ioannis Simaiakis, Ms. Melanie Sandberg, Professor Hamsa Balakrishnan, and Professor R. John Hansman are the recipients of our Operational Analysis Award.

CNA invites you and a guest to join us as we celebrate our 70 years of service and
honor the recipients of our awards on Saturday, November 17, 2012,
at the Renaissance Arlington Capital View Hotel in Arlington, VA.
(Attendance is by invitation only)