ARAG brought together experts from the military, academia and other fields in "research clusters" dedicated to specific areas of concern, in order to provide policy-makers with focussed analysis of international security issues.
It produced a large number of research papers - made freely available to the public from the Defence Academy website - as well as more targeted limited distribution work.
[3] Mackay is on public record as stating that ARAG was the only organisation in the MoD capable of helping him plan and write his operational design for his Brigade tour in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, in 2007.
ARAG was renamed Research & Assessment Branch in late 2009 and, losing its own budget, incorporated into the Defence Academy's HQ Building - newly refurbished to accommodate them.
Since the vast majority of ARAG and R&AB's work was undertaken in organic language analysis, it is unclear how such functions could be fulfilled by King's College London or Cranfield University.
At its close the 25 full-time R&AB staff spoke 27 languages and administered a distributed global network of associates and subject matter experts of over 5000 people world-wide.
All of R&AB's civil servants joined the MoD re-deployment pool whilst its long standing contractors - Persian, Arabic and Russian analysts - were laid off.
A number of the new centre's functions (Quote: the institute will encompass themes such as behaviour, capacity, media, strategy and development unquote)[4] exactly mirror those of the former R&AB, leading to further accusations[by whom?]