Tim Hwang is general counsel and senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation, the DC-based think tank advancing American technology and national security. This summer, his team will send two intrepid Americans to Ukraine to experience the future of war and bring lessons back to Washington. Below, an overview of the mission, and why it matters.

One of the greatest photospreads in American military thinking appears in the May 11, 1959 issue of LIFE Magazine. There, amidst an article about the then newly-formed RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, four pages capture the goings-on at what the magazine diminutively called a “valuable batch of brains” and an “odd little company.”

The photos are out of a parallel universe. There’s a guy putting a chunk of beryllium in his mouth to prove that it’s safe for industrial use in planes. There’s a guy on the beach smoking a cig next to a transmitter he built for sending back signals from the moon. There’s a circle of bespectacled dudes hanging out late at night in a funky looking living room talking about nuclear war.

And, perhaps most iconically, the LIFE photographer captures an action shot of two silhouetted RAND engineers dressed in full suits and ties clambering precariously on an offshore oil drilling rig in the Pacific Ocean to assess its suitability as a mobile missile launching platform.