Today, we face similar circumstances. While the threat may not be as grave as during the darkest days of World War II, the need for specialized knowledge and expertise is perhaps greater. Our challenge today is not so much that of developing new weapons, important though those efforts may be. Rather, our challenge today is to understand the nuanced linkages within and across societies that we in America are relatively unfamiliar with. We need, for example, to understand the long term challenge posed by extremist ideology and what this means in nations experiencing rapid demographic changes. Language skills, cultural knowledge and understanding, understanding the attitudes of different populations, these are the critical tools that the US government needs to more fully integrate into our kit bag of capabilities for the future.

This, in essence, is what the Minerva Initiative is all about. It is about laying the important foundations today to enable a more robust and long-term relationship between the Department of Defense and our nation’s diverse community of social science researchers. Minerva is about leveraging the so-called “soft power” potential that resides across this nation (and indeed across the globe) to help our government prevail in the face of challenges that are more complex, more interrelated and potentially more deadly than any we have previously faced. As a result, cultural knowledge and regional expertise become critical enablers that we must add to our quiver of capabilities to help us deal with this rapidly changing world.

“No one should ever neglect the psychological, cultural, political and human dimensions of warfare,” Secretary of Defense Robert Gates wrote in his recent article in Foreign Affairs. The Secretary is concerned that there is no “deeply rooted constituency inside the Pentagon or elsewhere for institutionalizing the capabilities necessary to wage asymmetric or irregular conflict — and to quickly meet the ever-changing needs of forces engaged in these conflicts.” Minerva is just one of several initiatives that Secretary Gates has launched in recent years in an attempt to redress this imbalance. Secretary Gates has also urged more funding be added to the Department of State’s annual budget and that something akin to the Cold War-era US Information Agency should be re-established to help in 21st Century strategic communication efforts.

As noted above, the US government has long played a healthy and constructive role in the funding of science and research across American colleges and universities. Recently, the Department announced it was boosting funding in the areas of physics, ocean sciences, chemistry, electrical engineering and the geo-sciences by an additional $400 million over the next five years. This is important work and these additional investments are surely needed.

But it should also be noted that the vast majority of DoD spending on university research is devoted to the physical sciences, both basic and applied. Relatively little funding, in comparison, has been devoted to the social sciences. This is a situation that Minerva intends to redress, albeit on a far more limited scale. In addition, one of the virtues of social science research, compared to the physical sciences, is that it is also relatively inexpensive. This enables the funding of a greater number of research projects for a smaller cost. Yet the payoff can be equally valuable.

Much has been written about Minerva in recent months, both in the media and as a result of our concerted outreach efforts. While the message has at times been distorted or misunderstood, I think it would be worthwhile to articulate here some of our underlying thinking regarding Minerva and attempt to answer some lingering questions like “Why the social sciences and why now?”

The need for Minerva stems partly from the cross-disciplinary challenges we see arising on the security horizon, combined with Secretary Gates’ intuitive understanding that the Department’s existing institutions must change to meet new demands. The Secretary has emphasized repeatedly that the Department must do a better job of reaching out to the vast reservoir of knowledge and expertise that resides across America’s academic research institutions. As the former President of Texas A&M, this is an issue the Secretary has first-hand experience with. For example, in the study of political Islam, there are individual scholars scattered all across the academic landscape. With Minerva, we would like to tap into this specialized expertise on critical problems and then enable these disparate researchers to network into larger communities of interest in order to gain insights into what their combined intellectual talents may produce.

The desire to create Minerva also comes from a recognition that the government must do a more thorough job of harnessing new academic disciplines to help in resolving many of the issues we face. Fields like history, anthropology, sociology and religious studies could be better leveraged to help in devising new approaches and unearthing innovative ideas to aid in solving the intertwined and complex challenges of the future. These are just a few of the academic disciplines that Minerva will engage in a more systematic and fulsome way.

To jumpstart Minerva this year, the Department piloted two complementary tracks of funding. One was a Broad Area Announcement (BAA), while a separate solicitation was issued by the well-respected National Science Foundation. The response from academia to these separate solicitations has literally been overwhelming: these two tracks yielded nearly 450 proposals for research. We have just completed selections for the BAA and we are extremely pleased with the results. I think you will recognize in the awardees some of your own peers and colleagues, all of whom are first- rate scholars and well-respected in their fields. The NSF is now in the process of evaluating proposals, and we are just as optimistic about the outcome of that process.

We envision that over time Minerva will support the development of cross-institutional research centers and multi-disciplinary research projects, that it will produce new areas of advanced study, generate new academic research papers and spin off numerous conferences and different types of publications and research archives. As we have pointed out before, all research will be unclassified and no government restrictions will be placed on research conducted under the Minerva Initiative.

By drawing on the knowledge, ideas and intellectual creativity of the nation’s universities, we intend to foster a new generation of engaged scholarship in the social sciences. While we fully expect this project to fuel new ideas and areas for exploration across the social sciences, in many ways the more overarching goal of Minerva is to build bridges and forge bonds between the Department and academia and lay the foundation for a sustained and enlightened dialogue.

To meet the demands of a changed world, the Department needs to pool the resources and talent of the nation together to surmount impending challenges. While there may be some limited drawback to expanding collaboration between DoD and academia, there may be significantly greater risks if we do not even attempt to do so.

In order to prevail over 21st century threats like jihadist extremism, ethnic strife, disease, poverty, climate change, failed and failing states and resurgent powers, we must in the succinct phrase of Secretary Gates “again embrace eggheads and ideas.”

The resort to oncology and epidemiology reflects wide spread alarm concerning Minerva’s allegedly retrogressive siren song. Critics argue that the major disciplines targeted by Minerva’s profoundly nation-centric agenda have transcended their once collusive relationship with the nation state. Today the core disciplines of the social sciences espouse transnational values and a moral cosmopolitan. Hence, their defenders defy Minerva’s attempt to re-center the nation within the domain of knowledge production.

I seek here to provide a historical context for this particular critique of Minerva as striking at the heart of the academic body. I have accepted the challenge of this forum’s organizer, by offering a brief historical survey of reaction to Project Camelot as a historical reference point. I am wary of the dangers of such comparisons. The differences between the Camelot affair and the Minerva intiative are as significant as the similarities. Hence rather than comparing the two instances, I have limited my observation to reaction among academics to the two projects.

The significance of Camelot loomed particularly large after its nullification when a vocipherous post-mortem followed the revelation of its duplicitous funding arrangement. Predictably the Camelot affair engendered a debate within academia between Camelot participants and its detractors. The core debate focused on the relationship between academic research and the state, as well as the nature of objectivity in the social sciences.

For the purposes of this paper I shall touch briefly on Gabriel Almond’s critique of Camelot and the rejoinder of Camelot participant Jesse Bernard. While Almond and Bernard never locked horns formally over Camelot, they were definitely on different ends of the spectrum. Almond offered the most resonant indictment of the project, while Bernard was one of its major participant-defenders. For both of these individuals Camelot was merely foil for a more extensive examination of the role of social scientists at a crucial juncture of the relationship between the academy and state.

Stanford University’s Gabriel Almond posited Project Camelot as an example of the limitations of intellectual independence in the Warfare State. In a perfect world, he argued, the American academic community belonged first and foremost to a mostly invisible global college of like-minded intellectual souls. Academics had professional obligations to a borderless republic of sciences that at times collided with their affinity with the nation-state. The Camelot affair suggested that independence from the nation state — a seemingly indispensable prerequisite for competent knowledge production — was close to impossible. Federal funding — whether directly linked to agents of American expansionism, or indirectly linked thorough the fuzzy channels of federally funded agents– limited both overtly and covertly the scientific agenda. Those who did not accept federal funding were effaced from the map of knowledge production.

While conceding the existence of some outstanding examples of federally funded initiatives that had maintained their independence, Almond argued that they were exceptions to the rule. The main issue was not the source of government funding but, rather the monopolization of the creative process. Massive government support for the academic enterprise limited scientific creativity through centralization rather than through overt political censorship.

The problem, then, was not whether some sub agent of massive government funding espoused problematic political designs. The danger lay in the monolithic source of funding — always federal, despite its different channels. The autonomy of science hinged upon the existence of multiple non-governmental funders and sponsors. Academia, much like the mythical market place, thrived when guided by an invisible hand. The fall from grace exemplified by Project Camelot was not the result of politics. It was, instead, more of a psychological constraint. As was the case in the domain of economics, Almond argued that closed borders and gatekeepers — a by-product of restrictive defense related funding — was the antithesis of good science. Just as a thriving economy hinged upon open markets, science prospered within an open academic milieu.

The sociologist Jesse Bernard brushed aside those who criticized Camelot’s participants for selling their soul to the predatory designs of the state and its military establishment . As for the integrity of the social sciences, in general, Bernard had no patience for nostalgic reconstructions of a pristine academy. In fact, she argued that as far as the United States was concerned, an immaculate academic enterprise had never existed. The modern university was tied cheek and jowl to the nation state, and any suggestion to the contrary was either disingenuous or masterfully misinformed.

Bernard argued that the presence of competent social scientists embedded in military projects had an overtly benign effect as sociologists and their intellectual kin often offered alternatives to the military’s knee-jerk recourse to violence. Bernard argued that in modern conflicts research may actually contribute to conflict avoidance and resolution. Bernard and other key Camelot explained that “every example of violence in a conflict may be said to represent a failure in strategy. For when, or if, strategic solutions are available, strategy may supplant violence.”

In a manner of speaking Bernard appeared to be revising the core definition of the social sciences as a value free intellectual enterprise. Science without patronage was a utopian and, perhaps, unrealistic goal. Bernard was scornful of those who accused her of transgressing her commitment to objective social science. The analysis of social systems-whether produced in the illusory pristine groves of academe or within government funded projects such as Camelot– was an ideological rather than scientific enterprise. No measure of methodological sophistication could neutralize the political bias of the researcher.

Bernard argued against the dystopian view of a slavish academic enterprise laboring under the shadow of targeted government funding. In fact the few stabs at research carried out under the auspices of the short lived Camelot project offered a surprising spectrum of opinions. Once thrust together, Bernard recalled, Camelot’s intellectuals immediately engaged in preening their intellectual differences rather than supporting their funders.

A compilation of Camelot conference papers from 1965 suggests that, indeed, participants were anything but a band of dutiful soldiers. During the course of this conference the venerable James C. Coleman argued that the trajectory of social change in the nation state could be plotted mathematically because rational considerations of economic self interest were at the heart of change in the nation state. In what would become a foundational argument of modernization theory , Coleman offered a heurist model of a modern state governed by a “positive relationship between economic development,” and a robust and competitive democratic polity.

Amitai Etzioni and Fredric Du Bow offered an impassioned rebuttal. To begin with, they argued that Coleman’s mathematical model offered no leeway for including unquantifiable and non-economic phenomena. But the most intriguing part of their critique was their attack on what they saw as the underlying conservatism Coleman’s use of economic variables.

Coleman’s “island approach,” they argued, had artlessly ignored external, non-economic stimuli for change. They accused the hapless Coleman of positing outside influence as inherently intrusive and destructive,. He had dismissed external, non-economic stimuli as the infestation of pathological viruses into a the body politic, rather than legitimate variables in the political and social change of societies. By claiming that political change hinged upon economic variables, Coleman dismissed with a sleight of hand the moral, political and psychological dilemmas that were endemic to any form of sociological development.

Perhaps we should not read too much into this fascinating exchange. After all, the participants in this conference were probably unaware of the magnitude of deception that lay behind Camelot’s secretive funding arrangement. Moreover, one may ask whether a brief and long forgotten historical incident such as Camelot illuminates in any way our own complex concerns. Does history in any way offer insight into the Minerva initiative?

Most of the participants in this SSRC forum have voted with their feet. Despite exhortations from the organizers, the vast majority of participants have ignored Camelot, in particular, and historical reasoning, in general. I am painfully aware of the inherent limitations of historical analogies for extracting meaningful insight from the past. And yet, even a cursory comparison does elicit a few observations that may serve us well as we weigh the limitations and opportunities of military funding.

To begin with, the Coleman clash suggests immunity rather than widespread contagion among those who accepted Camelot patronage. An impressive spectrum of different political persuasions found their way into the Camelot debate. Despite the narrow intentions of military funders, they could not control the free wheeling nature of academic inquiry. Unruly participants glibly ignored the agenda; they spilled over into a variety of subject matter and elicited a myriad of responses. There was nothing very monolithic about the Camelot enterprise. Moreover, Camelot did not necessarily attract second rate scholars. Participants spanned the gamut from the mediocre to the movers and shakers.

The most pertinent observation from this cursory comparison of past and present appears to be the choice of metaphors for deciphering foundational concerns. In the Camelot case, the recourse to market metaphors suggests a willingness to debate both the dangers and the opportunities of defense-related funding. Rather than closing off debate by comparing Camelot to unmitigated evil, critics settled on the more benign images of the market place.

Even so, such economic analogies had distinct limitations. As is always the case with recurring metaphors and analogies, the economic terminology of the Camelot controversy was more revealing of their proponents’ ideological precepts than of the actual process of knowledge production. An unfettered market place of ideas sounded thrilling, but its existence was debatable then as it is now. Behind funding of any source — military or otherwise — there is always a hidden agenda of one kind or another. Moreover, the Camelot debate suggests that even in the academic equivalent of a restricted, intellectual economy, the market place of ideas was quite vibrant, with clashing paradigms jostling for attention despite or perhaps because of restrictive foils. Such heated exchanges suggest that despite contested patronage, Camelot offered capacious space for dissent, even to the point of critiquing its own fundamental underpinnings.

The choice of metaphors is equally enlightening in our own contemporary debate over Minerva. The epidemiological images used to explain the dangers of Minerva conjure up visions of a one way conduit: a malignant funding agent contaminating a healthy academic body. History suggests, however, a reciprocal process To the degree that there is contagion both sides are affected.

The Minerva recourse to cautionary tales of infection may, of course, signal a heightened awareness of the predatory nature of such episodes of tainted funding. Hence, any form of debate concerning by-products or hidden advantages or positive by products is inherently self-destructive and should be removed from the agenda by means of argument-ending metaphors. However, history appears to play no role in the reasoning of critics. Camelot, in particular, and historical instances of the military-intellectual complex, in general, are mentioned in passing only.

The most immediate conclusion regarding the Minerva debate appears to be the paucity of metaphors. Rather than deciphering foundational concerns, they obfuscate the complex relationship between sound academic scholarship and funders with ulterior motives. Defense related funding is problematic for a host of reasons. A cursory glance at military patronage — both past and present — suggests many existential dangers. Above and beyond the hazards of confounding research and politics, Minerva and other historical examples suggest that the military-intellectual complex has had other detrimental effects on the social sciences. The erosion of the theory-practice divide and an underlying statistical fatalism — where choice becomes a mathematical rather than an ethical dilemma — are two obvious examples of the pitfalls of military patronage. Together and separately- they offer serious reasons to be wary of military-academic collaborations.

When stripped of their debate-closing epidemiological analogies, the key concerns of the Minerva affair are far from Sui Generis. Much like Camelot we have still have the same recurring, nagging concerns: Does the presence of academic interlopers have a moderating effect on military doctrine? Will patronage — however loosely defined — lead to a self-selective bias of the research agenda? These are open-ended questions worthy of moral argumentation rather than philological closure. Such questions become moot and irrelevant when military funding is compared to a malignancy. One cannot debate the nuances of a life threatening invasion of the academic body.

2. Jessie Bernard, “Conflict as Research and Research as Conflict,” in Irving Louis Horowitz (ed.), The Rise and Fall of Project Camelot: Studies in the Relationship Between Social Science and Practical Politics (Cambridge, Mass., 1967)

3. James Coleman, “Game Models of Economic and Political Systems ,” in Samuel Klausner (ed.), The Study of Total Societies (New York, 1967), 30-44.

4. Amitai Etzioni and Fredric Du Bow, “Some workpoints for a Macrosociology,” in ibid., 147-62.

This is a serious concern in principle, but, speaking from the perspective of my own discipline of political science and especially my own subfield of international relations, the critics are not only too late, but they overestimate the impact of research funds on scholarship. Political scientists at the best US universities have not been bought, as some might crudely charge, nor have they been coopted through more subtle means. They have retained their capacity for critical thinking: they have not become mere parrots of the official government line. But the lure of affecting public policy, of being “relevant” to and bringing scholarly expertise to bear on debates of the moment, is powerful, and this has—both for good and for ill—shaped scholarly research agendas. Consequently the critics exaggerate Minerva’s impact. That said, Minerva remains wedded to a narrow conception of what constitutes policy relevance, and both scholarship and US national security would benefit from a broadening of the project’s field of vision.

Let us not adopt an idealized picture of the modern university. We might like to think of it as entirely free from state power and thus a safe refuge for critical thought. An attractive image, yet one at odds with the history of the American academy, whose remarkable growth and vitality were underwritten by the Cold War national-security state. The social sciences profited both indirectly from government support, as overhead costs from immense government grants for the natural and applied sciences subsidized the liberal arts, but also directly, though funding for area studies (see David Nugent’s essay). Yet the result was not to bind the academy so tightly to the bosom of state as to suffocate it. If academics often reproduced the “Cold War consensus” in the 1950s and beyond, universities also harbored many dissenters, and academics were among the first to raise questions publicly about the consensus’ core elements, facilitating its at-least partial unraveling in the wake of Vietnam. If university-based critics of the US government complain about the militarization of the academy, there is more than a little irony in the fact that those who decry government funding for perverting scholarship owe their jobs, at least indirectly, to such funding.

Let us also not adopt idealized images of how scholarly research agendas take shape. The critics seem to suggest that money is the root of all evil. Money can of course be corrupting, but for political scientists, especially in the subfield of international relations, “relevance” and “policy impact” proved awfully alluring even when, in the days after Vietnam, state research funding was relatively scarce. Indeed, in the leading subfield journal since its establishment in the mid-1970s, International Security, as well as its more recently founded competitor, Security Studies, articles routinely in their conclusions offer recommendations to at least generic state policymakers, and often explicitly to the makers of US foreign policy. Nor has it been uncommon for scholars publishing in these journals to so identify with the state that they portray international security as hinging on US national security, presuming thereby that what is good for the United States is good for the global order. However, such scholarship did not simply serve power: in fact it often spoke to power quite harshly. But it did generally speak to power in familiar terms and on subjects the authorities deemed important. This was certainly not entirely, or even mostly, a bad thing: scholars of international relations enriched debates on matters of contemporary concern. But a danger lurks if current policy-relevance becomes the primary criterion by which one judges the value of research.

“Presentism” in the field of international relations meant that the concerns of the field overlapped substantially with the concerns of the state. It is hardly accidental that security scholars focused on the 3:1 rule or strategic stability in the 1980s, nuclear proliferation and ethnic conflict in the 1990s, and terrorism after 2001. These were pressing concerns, on the public agenda and on the state’s agenda. But presentism also meant that social science, and specifically IR, always seemed to be a couple of steps behind. Prediction is of course more than can reasonably be asked of social science, but a less presentist discipline would presumably have been better positioned when the unexpected occurred—to make sense of those events and to advise unprepared policymakers—simply because it had spread its intellectual bets more widely and thus had a better chance of having a half-decent stock of knowledge. The irony then is that we scholars are perhaps least useful to the polity when we are most attuned to its needs of the moment. 

Critics of Minerva presume that scholars follow power and money. There is of course some truth in that, but disciplinary norms and priorities also vary in ways not fully predictable by patterns of funding. After Vietnam, sociology and anthropology and, to stretch the social sciences a bit, history largely abandoned the battlefield: few departments of sociology even have a military sociologist on staff, and military historians are nearly equally rare. Few sociologists or anthropologists acquire prestige by working in these subfields often considered by their colleagues retrograde, politically conservative, and perhaps morally questionable. It is hard to imagine that these now long-standing trends would reverse simply because the Department of Defense offered even reasonably substantial sums for attractive research projects. At the same time, political scientists remained deeply engaged with questions of security even after Vietnam, and service in government imparted little taint to scholars of international relations (many of whom jumped at the opportunity to witness policymaking from within and to participate in it, through International Affairs Fellowships sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations). In short, Minerva is unlikely radically to transform disciplinary priorities. Scholars who aspire to policy relevance would have launched research agendas on these questions in any event. Minerva can only reinforce and reproduce enduring disciplinary trends.  From the perspective of political science, insofar as Minerva proposes to devote (what are by disciplinary standards) meaningful sums to research on important questions, and insofar as it will provide further incentives to pursue research and employ concepts and categories that are already being employed, it is hard to see what harm it will do.

Additionally, let us also not exaggerate the scope of Minerva. The project is indeed worth discussing, if DoD in fact disburses between $50 million and $75 million over five years—an average of $10-15 million per year. That is hardly pocket change in the social sciences. But it is worth citing some figures to keep this in perspective. The National Science Foundation’s 2009 request for the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences was $233.5 million—around 20 times the size of Minerva. In 2007 the Ford Foundation disbursed some $656 million on various grants (basic research constituting only a portion of this impressive sum)—around 65 times the size of Minerva. Minerva’s proposed expenditures are on the order of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, which in 2007 disbursed about $12.5 million in fellowships and grants. A substantial sum then, but hardly one poised to radically reconfigure disciplinary priorities.

The implication of all this is that if Minerva is not quite a molehill, it is also not a mountain impeding passage to the scholarly promised land. This is of course not to say that Minerva “gets it right.” It does not. There is a remarkable disconnect between the wide-ranging introduction to the Broad Agency Announcement and the narrow formulation of the research priorities (that on China is perhaps the best illustration). If Secretary of Defense Gates really wants to bring academic expertise to bear, and I have no reason to doubt his sincerity, why not involve scholars themselves—including the most critical of scholars—in the process not just of generally advising the Defense Department but of formulating Minerva’s priorities? If distinguished social scientists were involved from the very start in defining Minerva’s call, this might go far in boosting other social scientists’ faith in Minerva, and thus might address, or at least alleviate, Hugh Gusterson’s concerns regarding the sorts and quality of the scholars who might select into or out of the program (a lesser concern, I would submit, in political science, which among the social sciences is likely to get the bulk of the funding). More important, involving social scientists from the start would almost certainly broaden Minerva, to the benefit of both social science and US national security. Decision-makers in DoD are not likely to be much concerned about the first, and they are likely to be skeptical with regard to the second—a skepticism to which I now turn.

DoD should be sponsoring research not only on matters that further US national security as DoD currently defines it, but on matters that are more loosely linked to the nation’s security. The Department of Defense, perhaps more than most government bureaucracies, has historically displayed little commitment to what Alexander George called “multiple advocacy,” and thus Minerva’s pluralistic inclinations should be welcomed and encouraged. But we can also be concerned about the thinness of DoD’s newfound embrace of pluralism. Multiple advocacy entails welcoming a wide range of perspectives, and Minerva, as presently formulated, unnecessarily truncates the research that DoD might support and presumably to which it may pay unusually close attention. Funders never like to see money wasted on projects they deem frivolous or outside their mandate. But it is worth recalling that the sums at play in Minerva are minuscule by DoD standards and not only when judged against major weapons platforms: the Office of Naval Research’s research budget in 2006 was $1.6 billion, of which $160 million was spent on various counterterrorism programs, and the ONR is just one of several DoD units that offer grants for basic research. Minerva currently focuses on what former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld nicely called “known unknowns.” Why not use some money to explore what Rumsfeld termed “unknown unknowns”? Billions have slipped through DoD’s fingers unaccounted for in Iraq. It can spend a fraction of those sums, and with far greater accountability, to expand its horizons and to take a chance on out-of-the-box ideas with uncertain payoff and of relatively indirect relevance to battlefield and strategic concerns. Especially in an uncertain security environment, in which the shape of future threats can be only dimly discerned, a well-funded Department of Defense should recognize that its interests and those of the state are best served by letting a thousand flowers bloom and not overly narrowing the field that supported scholarship will bring into view.

Minerva’s owl cannot fly with her wings so clipped.

If these and other concerns are differently expressed across the social sciences, they add up to resistance among social scientists in welcoming Minerva-like opportunities. But, whether justified or not in this case, they also actively contribute to a dramatic lack of public dialogue between the social sciences and the military. I want to explore here how that, too, can be problematic. In the absence of more lively and wide-ranging discussions between the military and university-based social sciences, the military is in effect left to make of social science research what it will. This includes the reproduction of potentially hard-to-dislodge and often parochial military-specific assumptions about how the social sciences are in fact relevant and should be used, which can lead to unhappy outcomes.

A Military Take on the Social Sciences

When the military at once incorporates the methods and insights of the social sciences while also remaining largely disengaged from a richer diversity of academic perspectives, the likelihood greatly increases that it will pick and choose from among the kinds of social science that best mirror image what the military already thinks it knows, or wants to do, and from among what fits best with how it already characteristically operates. A lack of substantive dialogue makes it more likely that military planners will hear what they want to hear rather than what they might need to hear. As such, the usual subjects of military funding — the computational modelers, or interdisciplinary teams of applied researchers adopting a systems approach, and the technical problem-solvers — will all continue to be supported in the absence of alternatives.

As Thomas Asher made the point about the categories of research proposed by Minerva in a recent SSRC-sponsored forum on the subject, they appear to express the military’s own “folk categories” (e. g. the deeply problematic elision of religion with Islam with fundamentalism with terrorism).[1] And if not otherwise engaged, these categories will remain mostly uncontested and continue to find their way into future policy objectives — with potentially disastrous results. A lack of meaningful dialogue further increases the likelihood of a permanently mediocre “military social science” that is largely conditioned by the policy, institutional, and epistemological constraints of the military establishment, as remote from the freer-wheeling debates of the academic community, and which is not in a good position to know what it is missing. And military pedagogy will likely suffer, and be more willing to embrace an area studies lite or program of language proficiency with a sprinkling of culture training, served up in stale regional thumbnail histories or lists of cultural traits to be memorized, and where urgent problem contexts (e. g. global warming) remain non-factors in the immediately instrumental mode of military problem-solving. This would not be good news.

More specifically, one way that the military has, and is, using social scientists is through subcontracting. This habit is an expression of a broader military predicament, in an era of increasing and more varied responsibilities and decreasing resources: the requirement to outsource. If this is part of the military’s own internal crisis, the outsourcing strategy also keeps what interaction does take place with social scientists at arm’s length, and where social scientists periodically are brought in to consult, in compartmentalized fashion, and often to address already well-defined mission objectives. When social scientists are used as temporary hired help, it becomes much more likely that they will continue to be thrust into historically well-established roles: as “useful idiots” and “eggheads”[2] who produce “data,” with the expectation that they simply be handed over, or worse, plugged in by the military, as a distinct user community. Outsourcing, thus, helps to discourage the military’s internal accountability in the form of self-critique.

In the process, social science training and expertise can quickly become reduced to that of the technician, engineer, or the translator, rather than as a critically engaged relatively autonomous knowledge producer. This has been part of the story with current invitations for anthropologists to work more closely with military institutions, or to take advantage of military funding. The need for generic “culture area experts” has led to an alarmingly indiscriminate employment of underqualified M.A. level or graduate student content area specialists and of differently qualified anthropologists. Despite an ethnographic career so far spent entirely in Latin America, for example, I have been asked to join research teams for Minerva grant applications as the resident anthropologist and “Iraqi culture expert.” Needless to say, this exhibits an alarming lack of awareness of the limits and the uses of the methods, forms of inquiry, and knowledge production, of professional anthropology.

The social sciences and the military would benefit from more quality time to discuss what it is that different kinds of social scientists do, their characteristic methods, the varieties of knowledge they produce, and most importantly, the ethical and conceptual limits of such knowledge with respect to military goals.

Anthropology Talking at the Military

A dialogue is, of course, always minimally a two-party reciprocal exchange. And one of the underappreciated facts in the ongoing, sometimes passionate, discussions and debate about what the relationship between the military and the social sciences should be is the fact that there are significantly different disciplinary versions of it. The “we” of the social sciences is in fact composed of distinct disciplinary histories, institutional arrangements, signature knowledge investments, and political identities. And whether social scientists should be open to new DoD funding streams is a question that significantly depends upon what social scientific interlocutor we have in mind. Just as “the military” is in fact really a wide variety of interests and institutions, military funders should embrace the extent to which any dialogue with the social sciences is actually a plurality of distinct disciplinary dialogues.

What a Minerva-based dialogue should look like from the social science end of things, then, depends in significant part on unique disciplinary factors. Anthropology has been prominent in sounding not only a note of caution with the military, but also in regularly making the point that the discipline should remain free of any and all military-derived entanglements. As I began this essay, the reasons are varied and important to understand. Anthropology is especially attentive to its own history, as “handmaiden of colonialism,”[3] and where influential disciplinary voices were professionally socialized during the era of the “bad war” that was Vietnam, with associated ethical scandals in the social sciences including the often cited Project Camelot. It is also important to note that contemporary anthropology, as a set of projects carried out among mostly marginal communities and in post-colonial contexts, has in large part been dedicated to often trenchant critiques of the “State.” This can make working with, or on behalf of, state institutions a challenge. The discipline’s Code of Ethics, itself currently under reconsideration, also emphasizes the fundamental principles of: do no harm, self-disclosure, transparency of research results, and voluntary consent.[4] These commitments support a primary disciplinary responsibility to one’s research subjects. And militaries are understandably viewed as not in the best interest of most research subjects. For these reasons, and others, it has been asserted that to not work for the military amounts to a long-standing disciplinary norm.

But this must also be balanced against the fact that, despite developing anthropological research on military and security topics, and despite the small number of anthropologists currently working within military contexts, at present the discipline of anthropology does not have an adequate working knowledge of the military as a social institution. Despite more than 1.4 million current active duty members, including inside-the-beltway policy types, outside-the-beltway practitioners, officers, grunts, different forces, and different missions, because anthropology tends to address the military from a distanced remove in ways almost comparable to the Cold War era “study of cultures from afar,” and because anthropology’s debate too often characterizes the military whole cloth simply as a blunt instrument of violence, this is unlikely to change. Such a state-of-affairs is reinforced by sometimes self-serving representations of academic institutions as Ivory Tower cloistered spaces of independent research, where, we hear, if military representatives want to talk with social scientists, they should do so “on our turf” and not the other way around. But I am skeptical about whether this would amount to a meaningful discussion at all. Rather, it is likely to be a more invisible and impoverished discussion, once-removed, conducted via Google, already available publications, the occasional forum, and including informal personal networks traversing otherwise agonistic arenas. In short, this is the present state of things. But a military establishment that is largely insulated, because removed, from substantive engagements with an academy determined to maintain its purity-at-a-distance is potentially debilitating to public and democratic debate.

Public Engagement

The American Anthropological Association’s Ad Hoc Commission on Anthropology’s Engagement with the Security and Intelligence Communities was created by the AAA as part of a realization by the discipline’s largest professional organization that it lacked the necessary knowledge to weigh in on these matters in a responsible and grounded fashion. Its November 2007 report to that organization’s Executive Board encouraged “openness and civil discourse on the issue of engagement.”[5] If it has been suggested that not to work with the military is a strongly defined disciplinary norm, this should be balanced against other core disciplinary commitments. If anthropology can no longer claim a monopoly on it, one of these is its signature method of field work: participant-observation ethnography. Ethnography is an inherently dialogical process. I am reminded of Clifford Geertz’s well-known remark about our counterparts in the field, “We are seeking, in the widest sense of the term in which it encompasses very much more than talk, to converse with them.”[6] This is a broadly accepted disciplinary charge.

I recognize this ethnographic sensibility as more than a narrowly defined “method,” but also as a principle of public engagement. We should, too, recognize that the injunction to converse, as is true of the vagaries of field work, is not unilateral. Nor should our politics decide its extent. If it is to be ethnographic, the conversation should be open-ended, and happen in a variety of locations not always of our choosing. Ethnographic conversations are also already of the “engaged” sort. As such, they are valuably productive of different kinds of situated knowledge. Experience-near sorts of engagements — working closely with the military — have their place in this exchange alongside more experience-far types of engagements — working from within the academy. Nor, of course, are these the only kinds of conversations we should be having. But, in ethnographic terms, we are better off not striving a priori to close the door upon our interlocutors.

Recent years have seen a repeated call for a more public anthropology that would more effectively address problems beyond self-imposed disciplinary boundaries and encourage broad conversations that constructively re-frame important questions and public critical debate. The military funding of social science research is certainly one such problem. In fact, it offers an opportunity for disciplinary self-critique with respect to what we mean by a “public anthropology” in the first place: How should we address the long-standing estrangement of academic from applied anthropology? What does the evident separation of theory from its application say about the discipline? What disciplinary response should we have when our stock-in-trade becomes the subject of public policy, as has been the case with the culture concept of late? As a kind of engagement with instrumental goals, is military work different from the engaged advocacy stance often built into the current anthropology of social movements? Most generally, who specifically is anthropology’s “public”? Sharpening our appreciation of these questions can be an outcome of Minerva-funded research.

Perhaps the most important reason for the strong repudiation of Project Camelot-types of cooperation between the military and the social sciences is because Camelot amounted to a “covert form of espionage,” if presented in terms of legitimate scientific research. The problem, in short, was secrecy and deception. For Minerva to be credible among social scientists, it will have to take significant steps to build in regular opportunities for public scrutiny and discussion at multiple stages of the Minerva process. In addition to keeping Minerva unclassified and open, this should begin by reforming the granting process to remove even the slightest whiff of behind-the-scenes manipulation, as is the case with the military role in the current peer-review process for the NSF Minerva funds. This can be complemented by instituting independent forums with non-Minerva funded academics at the stages of peer-review, to track what kinds of work the funds are used to support, in the assessment of outcomes, and with respect to research ethics. The goal should be that of Minerva as a contribution to public knowledge. If, as SSRC’s president Craig Calhoun has put it, Minerva is a kind of “listening project,”[7] then we should be willing to talk, while at the same time seeking to protect the relatively autonomous spaces of critical academic knowledge production and dissent. If it proves difficult both to keep Minerva public and to maintain critical debate, than that is where the dialogue ends.

[2] Speech by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. Delivered to the Association of American Universities. Washington, D. C. April 14, 2008.

[3] The debate about this history is best epitomized by Talal Asad’s 1973 edited volume, Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (London: Ithaca Press).

[4] The most recent version of the AAA Code of Ethics can be found at: http://www.aaanet.org/issues/policy-advocacy/Code-of-Ethics.cfm.

[5] Final Report of the American Anthropological Association’s Ad Hoc Commission on Anthropology’s Engagement with the Security and Intelligence Communities, p. 25. Delivered November 4, 2007.

[6] Clifford Geertz’s The Interpretation of Cultures (1973) (New York: Basic Books), p. 13.

[7] Comment by Craig Calhoun as part of the Minerva Research Initiative Roundtable Discussion. Social Science Research Council. New York, NY. October 25, 2008.

Framing the Problem

Some critics of Minerva frame the problem as one of the U.S. ruling class needing technical help in their quest for global hegemony. Seen this way Minerva is positioned as the latest episode in a history that began with the overthrow of Mossedegh in Iran, the 1954 CIA Guatemala coup, Project Camelot, Vietnam, Iraq, and so on.

My take is different. Call it frame 2. Minerva is part of something larger going on in American society and higher education. There is a tremendous innovation in organizational forms because existing institutions have proven inadequate not just to meeting the challenges we face, but to even having a productive conversation about them. Consider the new organizational forms in recent years: new knowledge geographies around Rt. 128 in Boston and Silicon Valley in California; public-private partnerships in transportation, land use, and education to overcome the inertia of public administration; and new business links with the university in the form of cooperative research ventures and corporate backing of medical research, business management, and other cherry picked fields.

My view is that the right way to frame Minerva is as part of this larger transformation of American knowledge institutions to bring their capacities to bear on policy. This search for new forms encompasses private institutions like the university. But importantly, it also includes the government itself, which increasingly understands that its present knowledge structure isn’t likely to be any more successful in the future than it has been in the recent past. We have a situation where many academics believe the government needs help in seeing future challenges. At the same time we have the government itself pretty much saying the same thing. It is difficult for me therefore to reach any other conclusion but that Minerva is a move in the right direction.

Minerva as a program may disappear for any of a number of reasons. The defense budget might cut it out because of deficit pressures. Competitors — inside the Beltway “think tanks” and defense contractors in the studies and analysis companies – will try to keep their grip on the “think” business, with some in the Pentagon backing their claim that more academic stuff isn’t needed because existing institutions are doing just fine thank you.

But the need for some institution to overcome the intellectual (and organizational) chaos that passes for a conversation about national security in this country will not go away. Even if Minerva is killed it will come back in some other form, perhaps renamed. This is because existing institutions just don’t have the capacities, knowledge, and skills needed to manage the challenges ahead. This is the real significance of Minerva.

The Past as Prologue

New knowledge institutions have a history. But it’s one far more nuanced than holding up Project Camelot as the poster child of social science in thrall to the Pentagon. We might look more closely at this history as a way to make sense of the problems, or at least, as a different perspective on what these problems are.

In the Cold War the U.S. government poured millions of dollars into academic research, areas studies, and language training. We developed experts who actually knew something about the Middle East, Russia, and Southeast Asia. Of course this didn’t prevent disasters. Nothing ever does. But it allowed for the possibility that at least some of the disasters could have been avoided had leaders sought a broader assessment. In other words, we weren’t automatically doomed to failure because of ignorance combined with the singular American leadership trait of going with your immediate gut instinct over deliberation.

Think tanks were established, the Rand Corporation, the Hudson Institute, and others. Had these institutions not existed fundamental questions of nuclear stability and crisis management, and command and control would have been addressed by military staffs, wrapped in a cocoon of secrecy. The hot line and arms control would never have been deployed to restrain the arms race. These think tanks broke the government’s monopoly over how fundamental problems were framed in the first nuclear age. Compared to the alternatives (like having Curtis LeMay do it), this was a good thing.

One can question the independence of the Cold War academic institutes and think tanks. But compared to what? It’s often struck me as highly significant how virtually all of today’s think tanks focusing on national security have relocated to inside the Washington Beltway. In the Cold War none of them did. Being outside of the day to day hustle was a way to preserve their independence and judgment. They consciously located away from the daily action to get a better perspective on the issues.

So What?

Examining Project Minerva in what I have called frame 2 leads to conclusions and insights which are different than the standard criticisms. I make no claim to be right on these matters. But there is great value in having different frames for such an important topic, and not to automatically accept the first framework that comes along.

Most academics who might consider working on Project Minerva are not inside the Beltway. This may be a very good thing. This is an advantage of the university. Those experts who populate the inside-the-beltway institutions, whether in think tanks or contractors (and often there’s little difference between the two) by necessity have to focus on the urgent needs of Beltway Washington. This isn’t the same thing as focusing on the important problems. Most people I know in this world freely admit that they have little time to really think, because so much time is spent chasing the next little pellet of support.
The academy provides resources to deliberate about a problem or issue over an extended time. That’s what is needed now, not another 700 word quickie op-ed about a grand peace strategy for the Middle East coming from an out of office Assistant Secretary of State.

There is some concern that Project Minerva will distort funding in the social sciences in the academy. But I would make a different comparison. The spending on programs like this should be compared to the cost of a weapon. Let’s do the math. The current top estimates are that Minerva will spend $75 million over five years. According to the GAO 2,400 Joint Strike Fighters will cost $ 244 billion, or about $ 100 million per plane. Let me suggest something that may at first appear to be wildly subversive. Let’s buy 2,399 airplanes, and spend the $ 100 million saved on thoughtful assessments of what we are doing in the world when it comes to security and global order.

Finally, one concern I have has not been voiced in the various debates and criticisms over Minerva. My fear comes from the absence of some broker organization standing between the government and the scholarly community. Absent such an intervening structure, larger more interesting interdisciplinary academic projects are unlikely to happen. Even more dangerous is the likely move of beltway think tanks and defense contractors in the studies and analysis business to interpose themselves as intermediaries. There is already a trend for them to set up “domain knowledge specialists.” This means padding their proposals with a stable of academics who they invoke as domain experts. If they are lucky, the academic specialists might get invited to a kick off free lunch where they are touted to clients as a way to bolster their credentials. Their larger impact, however is minimal.

I am not sure how to handle this. Maybe the SSRC should study the topic. Perhaps the SSRC itself could serve the role as some kind of broker organization to prevent these negative consequences. Or perhaps new organizational forms based on the Internet – a virtual think tank, maybe – might be established to encourage interdisciplinary research. This has happened in other academic areas. But the subject of broker organizations needs to be more carefully considered if Minerva is not to be window dressing on business as usual.

Project Minerva creates more opportunities than it does problems. The problems, however are real and must be faced. My view, however, is that they are likely to be different than the ones usually imagined, and for this reason a more sober assessment of broader trends in the organizational forms of knowledge is needed if we are to avoid past mistakes.

Social scientists who choose to engage with the military through their research sometimes experience an epistemological or cognitive slippage between the way we frame issues and the ways in which the military frames them. The reason for this is quite straightforward: like all epistemic communities, the military thinks about the issues of interest to it in ways that are subtly different from those of other epistemic communities, in this case academic social science.

If social scientists are to engage effectively with the military, they must first find out more about their uniformed interlocutors, sponsors and funders. In the frontier zone where military and academics encounter each other there is a need for translators: people who “speak the language” and are familiar with the culture and worldview of the other. We have not been good at this. We need to send some of our community over to them as amateur “anthropological scouts.” This is something we can all do: I am not suggesting a research program for anthropologists.

We tend to think of the military as a rather homogeneous and largely total institution. A significant number of serving military officers were born into military families, grew up on military bases, and have served all their adult lives in a notoriously enclosed set of institutions. (And, of course, there are professors who are children of professors and who have never worked outside of the academy.) The military are different from us in many ways, and part of this is that they often think about things differently. These differences arise from different formative experiences, from social location and organizational interest, and from the military’s own sense of what its role in society and its principal professional tasks are. Exactly what these epistemological differences are is a matter for another, lengthier paper. Suffice it to say that if social scientists are to effectively engage with the military, we will need some understanding of these cultural differences.

Any large organization like the military is bound to be quite diverse. We are likely only to engage with a very small section of the military. We are unlikely to have much to do with submarine drivers or helicopter pilots: we will primarily engage with military intellectuals. These people are engaged in their own intra-mural debates which we will often find esoteric. Military intellectuals have a different vocabulary, make different assumptions, have different methodologies and criteria for evaluation, different rhetorical strategies. We need to understand these. If we don’t, we will be blind to the ways in which our research is filtered and appropriated by the military.

There is a surprisingly large number of military intellectuals: officers whose primary task is intellectual activity of some kind. They work in the professional military education complex, in the training and doctrine commands, in headquarters units, preparing plans and policies, and in the interface between the military and the political system in Washington. They write for military journals like Joint Force Quarterly, Military Review, Parameters, the Marine Corps Gazette, the Naval Institute Proceedings, the Naval War College Review, Air and Space Power Journal, and many others. If you want to see what they argue about, check these out. Most of them are on the web.

The military educational complex is large: there are the three well-known service academies that provide a college education for aspiring officers: West Point, Annapolis and the Air Force Academy at Colorado Springs. There are the Command and Staff Colleges run by the services and by the Joint Staff to train mid-level officers. Then there are the War Colleges where senior officers spend a year, sometimes two – six of them: the Army, Navy, Marine and Air War Colleges, the Industrial College of the Armed Forces and the National War College. Each of these educational institutions is staffed by military intellectuals. Add up the numbers: there are a lot of them. Moreover, most of these educational establishments are host to one or more military think-tanks or research groups. The Army War College, for example, hosts the Strategic Studies Institute, the Command and Staff College has the Combined Arms Center, and West Point has the Combating Terrorism Center.

In addition, there are also less familiar institutions: the doctrine commands (in each service and in the Joint Staff) where military intellectuals attempt to distil the lessons of recent operations. Here there are teams of people focused on thinking about such things as social networks, command and control systems, the causes of political conflict, the future shape of the human world, etc. Then there is the Pentagon, a hot-house of staff officers seeking to influence the Washington political system. In short, there are many hundreds of military officers scattered about bases throughout the country doing what we would think of as social science research.

It is these people, the military intellectuals, with whom we will be in contact. They already know quite a bit about us: many of them have graduate degrees in history and the social sciences. In fact, they know more about us than we do about them. They have spent time amongst us, and we have (generally speaking) not spent much time among them. Analogically speaking, they are the anthropologists, and we are the tribe. The flow of knowledge is going largely in one direction. We cannot have a meaningful conversation if we only hold it on our territory; we need to send members of our tribe into their territory to learn more about them and engage them in locales where they set the frames for discussion.

Often, the contacts will be mediated by the organizational men and women of the military, the managerial types. They will inevitably think of social science research products in a technicist manner: as specific problem-solving tools that they can apply to problems as they, the military, have defined them. Many social scientists, however, will want to try to get the military to redefine problems, and to think anew about how best to utilize social science expertise. This will require long-term active engagement. This is where the “anthropological scouts” and “cultural translators” come in.

My concrete proposal is to establish a number of social science fellowships to place academics in military think-tanks and research institutes for one-year stints. Ignore, for the moment, the issue of funding sources: that can be discussed separately. The idea is to take genuinely civilian social scientists (i.e. not people who are already working with the military in a sustained way) and place them in a military research environment. From the point of view of the social scientist, this is a bit like a sabbatical: he or she would have to do some work, but it would be a change, hopefully a refreshing change. From the point of view of the military think-tank, this would be a net addition to their research staff. Everybody benefits in the short run.

The long run benefits are what interest me. On the one hand, this will give some of us an opportunity to immerse ourselves in a very different and interesting organizational environment. We can act as amateur anthropologists, learning how our military counterparts think about things, and the ways in which those thoughtways are different from our own. After our one-year tour in the military, we can then explain things to our colleagues back in academia. The long-term benefit will be the creation of a corps of social scientists who, after their immersion experience, have a good understanding of how their counterparts in the military approach issues of war and peace. It should enable us to engage with them more effectively. From the military point of view, it enhances the capacity of social science to usefully address questions that matter to them. With persistence we may persuade some of our military colleagues to reframe issues in ways that make more sense to us. Speaking perhaps immodestly, I think this would be a service to the world as a whole. It is better to have a smart military than to have a dumb military.

There are many details to be ironed out, and many ways in which such a program could be expanded. There will also be considerable resistance from within the military, particularly from those who scoff at the ability of ivory-tower academics to address themselves to real-world problems. It is precisely this sort of resistance that we need to overcome if we are to have a real dialog. Top leaders in the Department of Defense have asked for our help. We won’t know whether we can make the military into the kind of military we want unless we try. Now is the time to make the effort.

But there is a specificity of the military demand for knowledge that must be acknowledged: it is a question of life and death.

One must therefore assess thoroughly the meaning of a military demand for social science research at two levels: a) on the basis of a political (in the etymological sense) questioning of the reasons for going to war; b) on the basis of an epistemological question about the insertion of social science research within contemporary strategic thinking, and not only in general. We should refine our judgment by working out the strategic meaning of military demand and supply as they are currently reshuffled in the context of the dramatic transformation of the Department of Defense (DoD). Within the confines of this paper, I can only sketch a series of questions.

I start by recalling the Clauswitzian framework of military-civil relationships and its implications — for a republic, for a democracy, for an empire, and for the global economic and military system. Under the aegis of Clausewitz — which is certainly as worthwhile as Minerva — one must play the part of the devil’s advocate, the devil being in this case the deployed military officer who lacks a clear vision of the sociopolitical definition of his mission. Following a series of remarkable analyses of the Minerva documents by American scholars (less so by European ones), I then look more closely at these documents and at what they say or imply. Finally, I offer a conclusion, which is necessarily ethical and, also, necessarily political, at a level that seeks to transcend national differences, since the globalization of securitarian representations has gone dangerously far.

1. Clausewitz and the political in a democracy: it should be possible to trace the Zweck (political goal) all the way back into the Ziel (military objective) in order to return to peace

The worst militarism is always that of civilians who ignore the conditions of war or who believe that it is legitimate to expect that combat might compensate for their lack of political intelligence through commando actions, or reinforce their economic capacity through predatory moves. This is why the military demands to deepen our upstream knowledge in advance of war are fundamentally honest.

In the absence of a political vision, wars become barbarian and endlessly succeed one another, without a purpose, without an end, and in particular without peace. Soldiers become maddened warriors. This disconnect between the political and the military is the precondition for the emergence of a neo-imperialism made of stealthy or permanent expeditions (note that this neo-imperialism no longer has to radiate exclusively from Washington D.C.) Such an empire has a fractal shape, and is based on the consolidation of unequal status quos at all levels. The enemy no longer exists: it has been replaced by a hostile environment. This conception, which dates back to Rumsfeld, is not irreversible, but it is integrated within the dynamics of the organization and the transformation of the DoD.[1]

The Clausewitzian theory no longer applies as a simple fact: it explodes into and along thousands of ramifications, and could get lost in the new complexity of a digitized operational space, in electronic observation and targeting, in flexible coalitions, in the paramilitarization of fighting units. The chaos generated by the disappearance of the old East-West polarity, the erosion of state sovereignties, and the rise of corporate sovereignties does not facilitate military work. A modern definition of war could be: “the unleashing, for the benefit of transnational economic interests, of local conflicts between constituted military units still under the control of state apparatuses, with or without the UN.”

However, when engaged in operations abroad, military commanders continue in general to ask for a good definition of the enemy, of their mission, of the national interests at stake (what Clausewitz calls the popular acceptance of the greatness of the war objectives, as part of the military relation to moral forces) in order to evaluate their chances of success. They tend to translate their requirements in terms of “sufficient means,” although they know that the most serious obstacle is the insufficient definition of the ends. A military war that does not end in defeat can be politically lost, if the citizenry decides so, as the American army has discovered in Vietnam and the French army in Algeria. Any Western country that has possessed and lost a colonial empire knows it and does not fall ill over it: rather, it turns this assumption into the benchmark of Realpolitik.

Hence a first conclusion: the possibility to read the political Zweck in the military Ziel remains an absolute requirement in a democracy. Even today: if war and peace are no longer exclusively orchestrated along the scale of sovereign states, but along blocs on a multitude of scales, then success requires politics. The economic or the techno-military is no longer sufficient. By asking for complete assessments and for upstream knowledge, the military is Promethean and probably criticizes the Epimethean action of governments that put them in the situation of vanquished victors.

2. The demands formulated by the Minerva program

But if the military worries about launching a social science research program with the support of a government in terminal crisis, it means that this demand is ambiguous. It is clear that the Pentagon or its different components may have several expectations, some of them contradictory, from this allocation of financial and intellectual resources.

1) Improving the general culture of the modern soldier

First hypothesis: the military seeks to improve its upstream knowledge of what is likely to constitute the operational field of future wars, in order to act strategically and tactically in the best possible conditions. The works of social scientists are freely sold in bookshops. Are they an easy read for non-specialists? Probably not, but the creation of teaching positions in the social sciences within military training programs, or the compulsory acquisition of Master’s degrees for military officers could for instance solve this problem without having to order new research. These things certainly exist already.

2) Generating new applied knowledge

If the problem does not consist in improving the general social science knowledge among the military, then it is about generating new knowledge, that would provide answers to military questions proper, whether strategic or tactical, which could not be answered by the military without a contribution from the social sciences: because war has become more technical, or more psychological, or planned as it goes and within the short term, or even because of other reasons that would have to do with the philosophical definition of war — why not?

A host of questions are not treated by the social sciences in their current configuration, because few specialists focus on the anthropology of war or the sociology of combat. The social sciences could thus be solicited to provide such answers. The questions are not lacking. In the perspective that is dominant today, these questions naturally focus on the various dimensions of total social war, since the point is to win over evil on chaotic territories, in an unstable global environment. The problem is then to define preemptively the vulnerabilities of potential enemies, to identify the means through which it becomes possible to create or re-create divisions — the adequate impact points, ideological manipulations, the armed propaganda, or police practices.

The social sciences can be useful for targeting enemy societies, not only in the economic or mercantile sense, but in the military sense of the word. This imagery, that is destructive in asymmetrical conflicts, belongs to the Douhetist paradigm only at the micro level (“the destruction of Falluja“). But the question asked would be: how can force be democratized? Contrary to Europe under Nazi or Communist domination, the Asian societies targeted by the US have a hard time believing that they are liberated by the Western expedition.

On these issues, the military demand seeking access to a social science research program has to reveal its real purposes truthfully, and it does. The five items of the Minerva program are heteroclite, but their objects belong to the clear-cut categories that define the unilateralist and imperial “world vision” of the recent US governments (since George W. Bush, but in some respects even since Bill Clinton). In part, this initiative promotes cultural and behavioral research in order to have a handle on possible manipulations of the sensitivities and the public opinion of occupied populations, in order to ensure its submission or its rallying by terrorizing or corrupting it. In France, one knows very well what this means and why it can lead a democracy to violate the human rights of the opponent by criminalizing him and even to rely on torture, in the name of a struggle for the absolute good.

Only the fifth item of Minerva seems to be open to a critical analysis of the aporetical foundations of the Iraqi and Afghan chaos.

3) Organizing a science of security

A third and more systemic objective can be discerned behind the expression that the NSCC has chosen to qualify the long-term aim of this operation (not only the Minerva-DoD, but also the neighboring framework of NSCC), in spite of the monitoring of Minerva funds by the National Science Foundation: the objective is to lead disciplines toward the constitution of a new field of research and of a multidisciplinary community of researchers working on a common set of problems and more precisely to enable scholars “to develop into a community of security science researchers.”[2] The point is to create a new applied science, the science of security. Yet,

1. The creation of a new science cannot flow from a military decision.
2. The semantic shift from defense to security is a symptom that is well diagnosed, even in Europe, even in France, in particular with the publication in 2008 of the new Livre Blanc sur la Défense et la Sécurité Nationale.

This lexicon is the vehicle for an ideology that is less military than police-oriented, and that can be considered as a Schmittian doctrine coated in material modernity (laser guns, drones, electronic surveillance) aiming at the maintaining the global urban order. By generating a unified arsenal and mixed missions, it seeks to transform soldiers into policemen, policemen into soldiers and, in the end, private police forces into militias or mercenary elite corps, thus allowing for the building up of a privatized repressive apparatus kept on reserve.

3. Ethical and political conclusions

On the basis of the previous discussion, all the epistemological interrogations regarding the monitoring, the evaluation, and the safeguarding of the independence of research should come after a more concrete and urgent question: in order to win which wars is the Pentagon seeking to mobilize in the long run part of the social science research community?

Answer: the main opponent that is designated remains Islamic terrorism in the Middle-East. However, neither Bush nor even Obama have yet realized that, for the past seven years, the main cause of Islamic terrorism has changed. It is no longer the Bin Laden conspiracy, but American “security” activism itself, in this area placed under the responsibility of CENTCOM, that has become a cause of terrorism and insecurity (including through the swelling of NATO and manipulations in the Caucasus that are teasing the Russians in order to re-create a traditional threat and win Europe’s rallying).

A second change is in the making: the environment defined by new threats and violent social and political behaviors will no longer be fueled exclusively by inequalities caused by growth and interventionism, but by unrest generated by a recession.

The promotion of a broad configuration of research and teaching oriented towards security, repression and preemption, and towards the fine-tuning of strategies aiming at destroying the trouble-makers, should rather be opposed by those researchers who believe that is still possible, in the West, to install a new democratic state, a rational development policy, and an international movement based on the rule of law and the prevention of wars.

What can be done in order to invert the trend, without falling into a purely negative opposition? In the current situation that prevails on both sides of the Atlantic, I can think of three different precautions:

1. Suggest that part of the military funds appropriated for research in the social sciences be transferred to programs sponsored by the State Department or technical departments rather than by the Pentagon, in order to refocus strategic research on peace and negotiation.

2. The transfer of another fraction of the funding toward an analysis of “returns and post-mission experiences” that should be squarely internal to the military apparatus, and based upon the experiences of the army and the marines. This type of analysis could in some cases rely on social scientists in order to better understand combat situations (historians, anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists). In France, it is on the basis of such post-mission analyses imposed by military officers that a new strategic school emerged, oriented toward the return to peace and toward force-deployment doctrines for external operations that are adjusted to UN principles and aimed at securing the reconstruction stage.[3] Troops that are placed under a command that has not made this self-analysis have little chances of distinguishing themselves.

3. The time may be ripe for planning, for the social sciences of the 21st century, the equivalent of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs that Einstein and Russel created in 1955 and whose purpose was to prevent and defuse the threat of nuclear war. To the extent that the current crisis has reached the scale of the Great Depression, it may be time to prevent the outbreak of the asymmetrical Thirty Years War that is in the making and premised on the just-in-time logistics of the permanent modernization of military means and on the deregulation of a free market for violence.

(Translated from French by Nicolas Guilhot)

[1] See Department of Defense, 2008 Army Modernization Strategy, p. 5-7.

[2] Thomas Asher, “Making Sense of the Minerva Controversy and the NSCC,” New York, Social Science Research Council, 2008, p. 5.

[3] Alain Joxe, “La doctrine OPEX du CDEF: adaptation, stabilisation, paix”, Le débat stratégique, n. 93, Sept. 2007.

One way to chart the changing relations between the military and the academy is in relation to periodic crises in capitalist accumulation practices, and the impact of these crises on strategies of imperial management. Such an approach would seem especially germane at present (the closing months of 2008), as an economic crisis that has been gathering steam for over a decade (Arrighi 1994) hits home with devastating force. But this is not the first time that economic crisis has generated a shift in the relations between the military and the academy. It was an earlier period of crisis — and of recovery and management — that spurred the military’s first major intervention into the social sciences.

The depression of the 1930s, and the World War that followed in its wake, brought military concerns directly into the halls of academia — and vice versa. It was the “area” concept — which dominated pure, disinterested social science for decades after the war, and subsequently became the focus of post-structural critiques of Cold War-era rigidities — which acted as the bridge between military concerns and academic conception and practice. The concept of “area” was a reflection of little more than military expediency. It grew directly out of the heat of WW II. About mid-way through the conflict, when it appeared that the US would eventually win, it dawned on military strategists that they were wholly unprepared for the peace that would follow the war. They realized that they where not ready to administer the vast territories scattered all around the globe that they would soon inherit from the Axis powers.

In an effort to prepare for the administration of these far-flung territories, the US army rapidly assembled a team of distinguished social scientists from all the major disciplines. Their assignment was to design a standardized curriculum that the army could use in training its personnel to establish military government anywhere in the world. Thus did the “area” concept become instrumental to the military.[2] Under the auspices of the Foreign Area and Language Program — which the army used to teach area studies — interdisciplinary teams of social scientists at 55 universities around the country trained thousands of officers in the art of military government (Nugent 2008).

After the war, the area framework was considered useful in transitioning to the peacetime administration of areas formerly under military government. As is well known, during the opening decades of the Cold War the US government and the great Foundations spent vast sums of money to construct an extensive new social science infrastructure. Replete with prominent research centers at prestigious universities, new and reorganized granting agencies (NSF, SSRC, ACLU, etc.) and unprecedented sums to support graduate education, this infrastructure ensured that “area” was the lens through which the world would be viewed. Just as several thousand officers were trained to implement the war-time version of area studies, several thousand civilians (social scientists) were trained in its peace-time iteration. These included some of the most influential scholars of the era (see Szanton 2004; Wallerstein 1997).

The point in reviewing this history is not to rehearse the shortcomings of area studies. The point is rather to indicate how difficult it is to draw any clear boundaries between military and academic concerns. Throughout this entire era, the “relative autonomy” of organizations like the NSF, the SSRC, etc., was deeply compromised by the origins of the area concept in the exigencies of military government, and by the de-militarization of area studies to serve the interests of Cold War stability. That is, for much of the Cold War the geopolitical concerns of the US military were constitutive of the conceptual apparatus used by social scientists to analyze and apprehend the world.

While the assumptions embedded in the area concept certainly played a significant role in limiting the parameters of research, it was not the area studies framework per se that compromised critical enquiry. Indeed, many scholars who were trained in area studies became outspoken critics not only of the notion of “area,” but also of the broader structures of government and military power of which it was a part. Rather, it was the unusually repressive political environment of the era that posed the most serious threat to academic freedom. Ironically, the moral panic that gripped much of the country in the context of McCarthyism was spurred by civilian rather than military institutions — by the US Congress, the Executive and Judicial branches of government and the private sector. Nor was it the breakdown of the area studies framework (which was institutionally strong into the 1970s) that somehow freed scholars to engage in radical critique in the 1960s. Rather, the political fallout from involving significant numbers of middle class youth in the Vietnam War accounts for most of the radical turn in the social sciences.

The US military has changed profoundly since WW II. So too has the global empire that the US seeks to manage. How might we draw on the past to better understand the dilemmas posed by the current Department of Defense offer to fund research? Since the fall of the Soviet Union the US military has taken on a new role in world affairs. While it continues to harass and brutalize on an extensive scale, the military has also become involved in a wide range of seemingly non-military activities (Lutz 2004). Dubbed Operations Other than War (OOW), these range from evacuation operations to disaster relief, from environmental clean-up to election monitoring. They include protecting vulnerable populations from food shortages and endemic disease, safeguarding civil authorities and institutions of government, and promoting peace. OOW even involves building roads and sanitation facilities, and digging wells for drinking water and irrigation (J-7 Joint Staff n.d.; ACT 1995).

Many of the “non-traditional” activities in which the new military is involved are virtually identical to those in which the major Foundations and the US government have intervened in recent decades, and on a truly massive scale. It is interesting to note that these are the very activities and problems that social scientists are increasingly encouraged to investigate by a broad array of non-military research sponsors — governmental and non-governmental alike. Since the end of the Cold War, and especially since 9/11, there has been a real convergence in the strategic concerns of government, foundation and military. From rogue states to the rule of law, from civil society to sustainable development, funders of all shapes and sizes betray a major preoccupation with issues of “security.” Indeed, upon reviewing a description of the MINERVA project what is startling is not how foreign are the research themes the military seeks to advance (authoritarian regimes; religious [especially Islamic] fundamentalism; terrorist organizations) but how familiar they seem. For the most part, one would be hard-pressed to distinguish them from the interests of non-military sponsors of research.

Despite similarities (in particular, a widespread suspicion of political dissent in the context of massive US intervention overseas), the conditions that affect contemporary relations between the military and the academy differ from those of the post WW II era in important ways. The 1950s was a period of recovery from global economic crisis, one that allowed for a major expansion of the social sciences. At present, however, we are well into a period of serious economic and political retrenchment. As many scholars have noted, the last two decades have been witness to a major reorganization of the university.

Until recently, much of this reorganization was a function of the growing impact of the private sector on research. Of late, however, a trend that was developing from the 1980s onward has hit home with great force. For the last several years the financial support for university research and training, especially in the social sciences and the humanities, has crumbled. Funding for NSF, NIH and NEH has been cut significantly — decisions made by civilian, not military decision-makers. Even the most prestigious and well-off public and private universities have been forced to downsize, and to slash budgets.

Some schools have been compelled to combine or even eliminate entire departments. Hiring freezes and salary cuts are the norm. Work speed-ups of many different kinds are almost universal. As many have noted, the entire academic workforce has undergone a major process of restructuring. At the same time, for the fortunate few lucky enough to be in tenure track positions, the research and publishing requirements for attaining tenure are going up.[3] As teaching and service demands escalate, and as resources for scholarship contract, people’s professional survival depends on the ability to access funds for research and writing. In such a context, academics will inevitably look to what are now regarded as “non-traditional” sources of funding (like the Department of Defense). They will also seek out collaborations with scholars working in fields that are receiving the lion’s share of a shrinking resource base (a process already well underway in many disciplines).

None of this is to suggest that MINERVA poses no risk to the social sciences. Rather, it is to argue that the threat of MINERVA does not stem from its origins in the Department of Defense. As we have seen, military planners and academics have an old and venerable tradition of cooperation and mutual support, making it exceptionally difficult to separate scholarly from soldierly concerns. The threat of MINERVA is not dissimilar to that represented by all programs — military and civilian alike — that sponsor “operations [and investigations] other than war.” First, there is the danger that scholars will accept support without a thoroughgoing understanding of why it is offered, and how research results are to be used — and thus will fail to grasp the conditions of possibility of their work. Second, there is the risk that we will fail to draw upon the resources offered to develop trenchant critiques of the power structures out of which the programs emerge — a task at which many academics trained in area studies excelled. Finally, and most importantly, there is the danger that scholars will fail to take a more aggressive stance with respect to all donors and insist on the right to dictate the terms under which we will and will not accept support. The American Anthropological Association took a modest but important step in this direction by insisting that a neutral body of academic experts (in this case, NSF) oversee the evaluation of MINERVA-related research proposals. But much, much more could be done. The kinds of problems we will investigate, when and where we will do so, by what means and why, are issues that scholars should decide. Only in this way will we begin to transform the relations between the academy and its sponsors.

References

ACT (Center for Advanced Command Concepts and Technology). 1995. Operations Other than War (OOTW): The Technological Dimension. Washington, D.C.: National Defense University Press.

Arrighi, Giovanni. 1994. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of our Times. New York: Verso.

J-7 Joint Staff. n.d. Military Operations Other than War. Joint Doctrine. Joint Force Employment (J-7 Operational Plans and Interoperability Directorate). Washington, D.C.

Lutz, Catherine. 2004. “Militarization.” In A Companion to the Anthropology of Politics, David Nugent and Joan Vincent, eds., pp. 318-331. Malden, MA and Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

Nugent, David. 2008. “Social Science Knowledge and Military Intelligence: Global Conflict, Territorial Control and the Birth of Area Studies,” Anuário Antropológico 2006: 33-64 (Rio de Janeiro: Tempo Brasileiro).

——-. 2002. “Introduction.” In David Nugent, ed., Locating Capitalism in Time and Space: Global Restructurings, Politics and Identity, pp. 1-59. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Szanton, David. 2004. “Introduction: The Origin, Nature and Challenge of Area Studies in the United States.” In David Szanton, ed., The Politics of Knowledge. Area Studies and the Disciplines, pp. 1-33. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1997. “The Unintended Consequences of Cold War Area Studies.” In Noam Chomsky, et al., eds., The Cold War and the University. Toward an Intellectual History of the Postwar Years, pp. 195-231. NY: Free Press.

[2] In no sense, of course, did the military invent the “area” concept, but rather privileged it over alternative ways of approaching socio-cultural phenomena. Prior to World War II “areas” played a quite marginal role in the social sciences (see Nugent 2008).

[3] In the interest of “fairness,” social science departments at several major universities recently decided to be transparent about the requirements for tenure, and announced that henceforth three books would be required.

But what if the important issue here has little to do with compromising academic freedom and everything to do with the fragmentation of the army as a Cold War institution? And in fact the new relationship being created between scholars and soldiers is part of a more general realignment by which the military outsources its infrastructure and service requirements, from buildings and equipment to cooks, labourers, interrogators and even security personnel to outside contractors. The army, in other words, is increasingly operating on a civilian model, which former Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld likened to venture capitalism.[1] This de-militarization can even be seen in the army’s own regulations, which according to a recent article tend to converge with the standards of civil and criminal law even as they expand their scope to more and more subjects.[2]

Instead of the militarization of civilian life we might equally see in such occurrences the army’s de-militarization, so that it becomes difficult to draw any clear line between these sectors. In the wake of the Cold War, then, the army’s new civilian role is being crafted in ventures like the Minerva Initiative, which is meant to support open and non-classified research prompted by pre-determined subjects of interest, which is exactly the kind of thing that the great private foundations also do. So apart from its ownership by the government, what’s the difference between this project and that supported by a foundation? What can the military get from scholars without classified access to information, and working on subjects on a temporary and part-time basis, that they cannot obtain from in-house expertise?

Even if the Initiative’s point is to outsource non-essential research, it renders indistinct the line traditionally drawn between civilian and military sectors, thus resulting in the paradox that the state’s institutional withdrawal from a certain arena of research makes its presence all the more pervasive there, if only through outside contractors. Of course universities have for some time now been dealing precisely with this kind of government presence, especially in the fields of science and technology. But it is not clear how this kind of engagement differs from the other, market-based relationships that universities enjoy with private industries like pharmaceuticals. Is not the instrumentality of funding and the setting of research agendas the same in either case?

If the military funding of research works in ways similar to that organized by private companies, which may also result in the development of tests and products that are extremely injurious to the well-being of large numbers of people around the world, then criticizing one without the other makes little sense. In fact blame can equally be laid at the door of universities themselves, which operate according to the same instrumental logic as governments and corporations by turning research and education into products for the purposes of securing funds, fees, students and those all-important ratings. In other words engaging with the military turns out not to be something strange and new after all, so that refusing such engagement will require a great deal of self-criticism first.

There are two reasons why scholars and universities might be leery of working with the army. The first is political: because of the bad things the forces are seen as doing in their operations at home and abroad. Should a situation arise where military action is adjudged beneficial, in other words, there would be no cause to refuse working with the forces. The second reason is constitutional: academic institutions and their employees should not co-operate with military projects on principle, because this compromises their freedom and distorts their research agendas. Not being a principled one, the first of these objections is weak and belied by the kind of bad instrumentality that pervades academic life already. And the second makes little sense in a world in which it is no longer clear where the civilian ends and the military begins.

From the beginning of the War on Terror it was clear that the military strongly resisted the Administration’s attempts to plunge it into an open-ended war, subvert its code of conduct, including its adherence to the Geneva Conventions, and therefore effectively de-professionalize or rather de-institutionalize it. The military has been purged for resisting the encroachments of the executive in its attempts to muddy the legal and other distinctions that defined the armed forces and in doing so bring it closer to civilian norms. In other words it is the government’s civilian rather than military branch that poses a greater danger to the principle of defending academic and other freedoms. This it does by emphasizing civilian forms over military ones. Should the upholders of academic freedom therefore defend military norms against civilian ones?

[1] Donald H. Rumsfeld, “Transforming the military,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 81, no. 3. May/June 2002, p. 24.

[2] Robert M. Chesney and Jack L. Goldsmith, “Terrorism and the Convergence of Criminal and Military Detention Models”, Wake Forest Legal Studies Research Paper Series, no. 1055501, November 2007, pp. 14-15.