Abstract In recent years, a considerable amount of effort has been made on the part of structural engineers to model the excitation to structures as a random process and to analyze the structural response so that Structural behaviors under nondeterministic disturbances can be predicted with certain probability statements. However, much less work has been accomplished dealing with structures with a random property. This appears to be due to the fact that the governing equations of motion for structures with spatial statistical variation of material property involve stochastic parameters and are usually extremely difficult to solve. This paper introduces a Monte Carlo approach to solve structural problems of this kind and deals, as an example, with the stress-wave propagation through a random structure under impact loading. Through this is example, total compatibility of the proposed approach with the infinite element analysis, which is capable of taking into consideration the effects of irregular boundaries, nonlinear material properfies, and finite displacements, is demon- strated. Such generality is beyond the reach of analytical mcthods, but is required for problems of engineering importance. The complexity of the structure is limited only by the computing facilities available, and the accuracy of the sample statistics by the computational time required.