What the Last Century of Efforts to Bridge the Beltway/Ivory Tower Gap In National Security Tells Us

From the beginning of the 20th Century, there has been a tension between the two objectives of rigor and relevance which explain the uneven course of efforts to mobilize social sciences in support of national security policy.

By Michael Desch

Defense Policy & Posture

January 19, 2023

From the beginning of the 20th Century, there has been a tension between the twin objectives of rigor and relevance which explains the uneven course of efforts to mobilize social sciences in support of national security policymaking. America’s 20th century wars regularly began with optimism that the basic and applied elements of social science research could be reconciled, as the tensions between these two objectives were largely submerged during the war or the period of heightened international security competition. Once the threat receded, however, tensions between scientific rigor and practical relevance reemerged and the inclination within the Ivory Tower was to favor the interests of the former at the expense of the latter. Therefore, social science’s relevance question – can it simultaneously be rigorous and relevant – remains an open one, especially for scholars and practitioners of national security affairs.

In his April 14, 2008 speech to the Association of American Universities launching the Minerva Initiative, the most recent effort to mobilize social science in support of U.S. national security policymaking, former Texas A&M University president and then-Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates declared that “we must again embrace eggheads and ideas.” What he meant was that “throughout the Cold War, universities were vital centers of new research” and that at one time U.S. national security policymakers successfully tapped intellectual “resources outside of government” to help them formulate policy.¹

However, Gates’ efforts to bridge the Beltway and Ivory Tower gap came at a time when it seemed to be growing wider. In April 2009, Harvard Professor (and former high-level State Department, Defense Department, and intelligence community official) Joseph Nye opined in a widely discussed article in The Washington Post that “the walls surrounding the ivory tower never have seemed so high.’”² The gap between scholars and policymakers has widened in recent years, particularly in the realm of national security affairs, once a model of collaboration.³

This development is puzzling: It flies in the face of a widespread and long-standing optimism about the compatibility of rigorous social science and policy relevance that goes back to the Progressive Era and the very dawn of modern American social science.^{⁴ Note: See, for example, Gene M. Lyons and Louis Morton, Schools for Strategy: Education and Research in National Security Affairs (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1965), 4 and 69; and Ellen Herman, “The Career of Cold War Psychology,” Radical History Review Vol. 63, No. 3 (Fall 1995): 62.} And early in the Cold War at the height of the Behavioral Revolution in the social sciences, Harold Lasswell sought to craft a “policy science” that would apply cutting edge social science to the pressing policy problems of the day. Indeed, there is confidence that the effort to make the social sciences more “scientific” was not incompatible with relevance.⁵ Some scholars go so far as to argue that scientific rigor is the sine qua non of real relevance.⁶

But from the beginning of the 20^th Century, there has been a tension between the two objectives of rigor and relevance; the social sciences experienced it particularly acutely.⁷ This tension would lead to what political scientist David Ricci termed the “tragedy of political science:” as the discipline sought to become more scientific, in part to better address society’s ills, it became less practically relevant.⁸ The professionalization of the social sciences – their growing preoccupation with method over substance, their quest for scientific objectivity, and their predilection for basic rather than applied research – reduces their relevance to policymakers.

America’s 20^th century regularly began with initial optimism that the basic and applied elements of social science research could be reconciled, as the tensions between these two objectives were largely submerged during the war or the period of heightened international security competition.⁹ Once the threat receded, however, tensions between scientific rigor and practical relevance reemerged and the inclination within the Ivory Tower was to favor the interests of the former at the expense of the latter.¹⁰

The Great War was the first sustained effort to apply academic social science knowledge to national security policy in the United States.¹¹ It was a watershed in its effect on the rest of American life, comparable only to that of the Civil War.¹² Naturally, it dramatically affected academics and universities as well.¹³ One important source of this willingness was social scientists’ war-time embrace of the Progressive Era “service ideal.”¹⁴ It brought a “new class of university-trained intellectuals” to power, including President Wilson himself.¹⁵ Progressivism rejected the classical view that knowledge and practice were distinct and mutually incompatible realms. Instead, during, the Progressive Era, scholars sought to link the two. The war fostered an optimistic intellectual climate in which science and practical application could be seamlessly interwoven.¹⁶

Recognizing that it was becoming a total war, and that the United States could no longer remain on the sidelines, the Wilson Administration took steps to mobilize academia along with the rest of American society. As part of that process, the government encouraged the establishment of a variety of other institutions to foster connections with academe. One example was the National Research Council, an off-shoot of the National Academy of Sciences, which was designed to mobilize science for wartime service.¹⁷ Woodrow Wilson’s own background as a political scientist and former university president, combined with the abiding Progressive Era enthusiasm for the scientific administration of politics, gave the effort to marshal political science for the war effort a road map.

Many social scientists came away from their World War I experiences confident that social science could continue to guide policy in peacetime.¹⁸ Economist Wesley Mitchell, for example, regarded his wartime experience as a harbinger of a bright future in which “economists and other social scientists would soon assume their rightful roles in an intelligently planned society.”¹⁹ Even those who took a darker view of the wartime experience admitted that the Progressive quest for “scientific control” of politics was even more essential now in order to prevent a repeat of that calamity.²⁰ In other words, one intellectual legacy of the First World War was to buttress the belief that science and policy were mutually compatible.

The Interwar period, though, brought into focus the peacetime limits of the compatibility between science and policy, and exposed the proclivity among scholars when push came to shove, to favor rigor (“science”) over relevance (“reform”). Not even the Great Depression, the greatest economic crisis of the 20^th Century, could relax the tensions inherent in the desire of social scientists to craft a rigorous science while also contributing to concrete reform policies. Indeed, more than anything else the Great Depression demonstrated the failure of the trickle-down theory that basic social science research would produce relevant and useable applied knowledge without any additional effort to identify its applied implications.²¹ Sociologist Robert Lynd’s Knowledge for What represented the late Interwar era’s most influential public jeremiad decrying the growing irrelevance of academic social “science.”²²

It was not until the Second World War that the Interwar estrangement between academic social science and the policy world began to fade. As with so many other aspects of American society, the mobilization of the country’s intellectual resources for the Second World War was even more extensive than it had been in the First. Bernard Brodie later reflected that World War II witnessed a revolution in terms of both innovative new military technologies (especially the atomic bomb) but also the new role of civilian experts in developing them and devising strategies for how to employ them.²³ At the behest of President Roosevelt, MIT engineer Vannevar Bush established the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) in 1940 to harness American scientists to the war effort.²⁴ The NDRC later morphed into the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), “the most powerful and highly centralized organization for the sciences.”²⁵ In historian David Engerman’s words, “World War II was the watershed moment for the involvement of federal agencies in university-based research. Indeed, the impact of World War II on post-war academic life is hard to overestimate.”²⁶ For that reason, some regard it as the true golden age of government and university cooperation.²⁷

The role of physical scientists in the war effort was substantial and has been widely acknowledged.²⁸ Less well-known or widely acknowledged was the role of social scientists and other scholars in the war effort. Office of Strategic Services (OSS) historian Barry Katz chronicled how the social sciences were called to the colors in a major way: “World War II has been called the physicists’ war in deference to the unprecedented recruitment of the scientific community to government service and the historic pooling of intellectual effort that followed…. It was also, however, the economists’ war – and the sociologists’, the historians’, the philosophers’ war – even if, viewed from the perspective of the human sciences, it ended less with a bang than a whimper. The social sciences and the humanities were called to arms in an intellectual mobilization that pressed into government service a community of academic scholars that was no less extraordinary than that of their scientific counterparts.”²⁹ Scholar-cum-naval officer Alexander Leighton confirmed that “during the war, there was extensive use of social science.”³⁰

According to a post-war Russell Sage Foundation study, “much of the contribution of the social sciences to the prosecution of World War II consisted not of new research but of the application of already existing knowledge to practical problems.”³¹ Among the areas in which extant social science contributed to the war effort were: 1) military job assignments; 2) morale studies (both domestically and internationally); 3) psychological health of soldiers; 4) race relations in the armed forces; 5) propaganda; 6) assessing the enemy; 7) U.S. war production; 8) effects of price controls and rationing; and 9) foreign area and culture training.³² The National Resources Planning Board and the Civil Service Commission established a National Roster of Scientific and Specialized Personnel to identify qualified social scientists for government service in 1940.³³ And it had a significant impact: In 1938, about 7,830 of the 75,000 federal employees were social scientists; by 1943, I estimate that 313,346 of the over 3 million federal employees came from that professional background.³⁴ Given that, it is hardly an exaggeration to conclude that World War II “was a god-send for the social sciences.”³⁵

The reason that social scientists decamped from their ivory towers and marched back toward practical engagement was that the growing danger of war overcame many of the Interwar disciplinary obstacles to it. Peter Mandler noted that the “period [from 1939 through 1953] uncoincidentally spans the years of international crisis leading to the Second World War, the war itself and the renewed crises of the early Cold War. It represents one of the peak periods of social scientists’ involvement in public policy and a peak period, too, in their engagement with the popular imagination.”³⁶ The war inculcated among the social scientists and other scholars who served in it an ethos emphasizing the obligation of their intellectual disciplines to the larger community.³⁷ At its core was the notion that scholars held “dual citizenship in the civic republic and the republic of letters, they had acquired during the war an immediate sense not only of the social relevance of ideas but of the social responsibility of the intellectual.”³⁸

If the Second World War saw the mobilization of large numbers of physical scientists, the Cold War would finally explicitly include many social scientists from its very beginning. In only a slight over-statement, briefers to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara would call it the “Social Scientists’ War” in recognition of how the Kennedy Administration was trying to marshal those disciplines as government officials during the Second World War had brought physical scientists into the war effort.³⁹ As RAND executive Warren Weaver put it at a seminal conference in 1947, “since the last war there has been a change in the character of war, a change in the character of the inevitable amalgamation of all intellectual and material resources of the country which are necessary to maintain our position in peace and enable us to defend ourselves if the need arise, a complete change in the attitude on the part of the military toward accepting civilians into partnership, no less, in the ownership of the United States.”⁴⁰ Thus, as with the First and the Second World Wars, the Cold War witnessed continuing government interest in drawing upon social science as a resource for national security policy making.⁴¹

Weaver admitted that as a result of the war and the revolutionary post-war changes in military technology, “the military has come to realize (and, I think, to realize completely and honestly) that they have to accept and want to accept a type of partnership with civilians and a type of partnership with competence wherever they may find it, such as they have not been interested in accepting in the past…. They were quite willing to accept civilians on a certain service level in the past. They used to say, ‘We like to have you around, and if you are awfully smart we will ask you questions and you will answer them as well as you can; but then we will go into another room and shut the door and make our decisions.’ That, in the past, they were quite willing to do. Now, however, they want us in the back room with them.”⁴² In this spirit, the U.S. Government became a major user of social science as well as employer of social scientists.⁴³

Indeed, the experience of the Second World War once again prompted wide-spread optimism about the potential role for social science in national security policymaking. Such public optimism, however, concealed a vigorous in-house debate among national security policy makers about whether academic social science, particularly as it was developing after the war, would really prove useful. For example, in December 1950 and January 1951 the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) co-sponsored a conference with the Social Science Research Council on “Social Science and Point IV,” President Truman’s early Cold War initiative in the developing world. Afterwards, Samuel Bayes, Director of Programming Planning and Advisory Staff of the Technical Cooperation Administration, sent Social Science Research Council (SSRC) President Pendleton Herring a polite letter of thanks.⁴⁴ Behind the scenes, however, INR’s internal assessment of the event was scathing: In a March 6, 1951 memo, INR staffer Edward W. Doherty dismissed the academic social science contribution as “drivel” and shuddered “to think that [U.S. economic development programs] might be answered in any substantial way in terms of providing our social scientists with an experimental approach to their subject.”⁴⁵ Despite rhetorical euphoria, early Cold War relations between policy makers and social scientists were clearly mixed as the U.S. Government, unlike academic social science, was less in the thrall of the ideology of basic research that increasingly came to dominate the Academy.⁴⁶

Two issues in the early Cold War security environment seemed to open the door for civilian national security expertise. The first was the nuclear revolution, which had been ushered in largely through the work of civilian natural scientists.⁴⁷ Given the revolutionary nature of these weapons, and the fact that military officers had themselves never fought a nuclear war and so could not claim a monopoly on strategic expertise with those new weapons, there also appeared to be a significant role for civilian social scientists to contribute to nuclear strategy. In addition, the rise of insurgencies in the less developed world and the general acceptance of the notion that understanding their causes and consequences involved far more civilian than military expertise, gave social scientists an opening in that realm as well. A SECRET memorandum from MIT Provost J.A. Stratton outlining the terms of reference for the Institute’s new Center for International Studies’ [CENIS] relationship with the U.S. Intelligence Community confirmed that “it is imperative that we mobilize our resources for research in the broad field of political warfare as has been done rather successfully in connection with the development of more conventional weapons of war; and we must do this on the assumption of a long pull rather than for a series of crisis operations.”⁴⁸

What made the Cold War unique was that it was characterized by an effort to maintain this collaboration for a protracted period of peace, though one punctuated with intense international crises and small-scale wars. As Brigadier General Richard Stillwell conceded in his keynote for the Army’s 1962 Limited War symposium, “I was equally struck by some nostalgic remark that in World War II we had a focus. There was nothing we could not do. We could coalesce our efforts. We had direction, we knew exactly what was needed, and we did it. That experience represents the apex of our respective careers. Now, the real problem I think, for all of us is to somehow find the symbol, the value…. we need – all of us, in uniform and out – the same dedication, the same coalescing of effort, the same reversal of trends toward fragmentation, the same uni-direction which we expect and get when that magic threshold is reached.”⁴⁹ Given this complex security environment, it is hardly surprising that we would see swings in the relationship between policymakers and the academy during the Cold War on these issues.

In fact, by the early 1970s there was a marked change in the attitudes on campus about academics participating in national security policy-making. Many still did as individuals, but the bridge from the Ivory Tower to the Beltway increasingly became a one-way street, with most of those crossing over it to Washington such as Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski never really returning to academe.⁵⁰ To be sure, a handful of senior scholars in political science managed to go back and forth – people like Samuel Huntington, Joseph Nye, Robert Jervis – but as time went on they became more and more the exception rather than rule among leading scholars. Today, those academics with greatest visibility in the policy world are less likely to be among the leaders of the discipline.⁵¹

That academic security studies, among the most policy-relevant social science sub-field, should find its footing unsteady after the end of the Vietnam War and the beginning of a period of détente between the United States and the Soviet Union is not surprising. It follows that such a relaxation in tensions would increase the relative importance of other policy concerns.⁵² Moreover, this less pressing sense of threat reduced public interest in what academic national security experts had to say.⁵³ Even scholars deeply committed to the security studies enterprise conceded that détente mandated a radical reassessment in how we think about its place in the academy.⁵⁴ Such a reconceptualization undermined the previously close relations between the academy and government. This explains why Michigan political scientist Raymond Tanter and Princeton political scientist Richard Ullman reported during the early 1970s that their “search of the existing literature in international relations has rather forcibly impressed upon us that academic theorists and working practitioners have had, and appear to continue to have, relatively little to say to each other.”⁵⁵

There were, to be sure, a number of efforts by the U.S. Government to use more rigorous social science as a tool of national security policymaking in the post-Vietnam era. They began with great optimism about the compatibility of cutting-edge social science models and approaches. Very quickly, however, the tensions between rigor and relevance manifest themselves and neither scholars nor policymakers were fully satisfied with the results.

The first such effort took place at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1973 when Director William Colby established the Methods and Forecasting Division of the Office of Regional and Political Analysis (ORPA) with the objective of bringing into the Agency previously ignored methods from the Behavioral Sciences.⁵⁶ Other components of the Intelligence Community also experimented with these approaches. For example, in the early 1970s, the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research inaugurated Project QUEST, a series of demonstration studies of Quantitative Techniques of Estimation and Forecasting to see how useful they would be. The initial reaction from INR analysts was not favorable. As the authors of a summary analysis explained, “in contrast to the quantitative scholar, the INR analyst deals with a range of units of analysis which are more diverse; he deals with topics which are much more specific and detailed; he deals with the kinds of variables, and with the relationships among those variables, which are more demanding of complex analytical techniques.”⁵⁷

Parallel efforts also took place at the Department of Defense. DoD, or at least the more technical research offices such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Department of Defense, Research and Engineering (DDR&E) offices, were more sympathetic to quantitative approaches to social sciences which seemed familiar to the natural scientists and engineers who dominated these agencies. DARPA provided $1 million from 1967 to 1973 for the World Event Interaction Survey at the Universities of Michigan and then Southern California. It also funded the Quantitative Indicators for Defense Analysis from 1970 to 1975 for $2 million. One longer-term project that emerged out of these early efforts was “The Early Warning and Monitoring System (EWAMS).”⁵⁸

Project director Charles McClelland’s and his DoD patrons’ early enthusiasm soon flagged and Event Data research never really took off in the Department of Defense. One problem was that the EWAMS data came from media sources.⁵⁹ This raised doubts in the minds of potential U.S. Government users that the findings of the model might reflect media coverage rather than real-world events.⁶⁰ More serious, in DARPA official Stephen J. Andriole and Defense Intelligence College instructor Gerald W. Hopple’s view, was that “basic events data researchers never reached the point where they could confidently list and rank any causal variables; consequently, we should not have expected applied event data-based indicators to satisfy any explanatory needs.”⁶¹ This inability to clearly identify causal relationships reduced EWAMS’ usefulness to policymakers.⁶²

With the reinvigoration of the Cold War, interest in this effort to bring cutting-edge social science to bear on national security policymaking waned. Indeed, by that point, Andiole and Hopple candidly admitted that the natural science biases among their DARPA colleagues may have led them to have unrealistic expectations about the potential of these approaches to successfully balance rigor and relevance: “Too often, engineers and hard scientists, who dominate DoD (and quite a few other) research decision processes, impose standards from engineering and the natural sciences which are quite simply irrelevant to soft or social science research.”⁶³

A second wave of enthusiasm for this effort to employ advanced quantitative techniques to make real-time predictions crested in the early post-Cold War era.⁶⁴The most important manifestation of this was the State Failure Task Force, which subsequently would be rechristened the Political Instability Task Force (PITF).⁶⁵ PITF was reportedly the brain-child of then Vice President Al Gore who tasked the CIA in October 1994 to find a formula for understanding and predicting “the correlates of state failure.” His concern was not surprising given the unanticipated, dramatic, and in some cases costly state failures in Somalia, Bosnia, Liberia, and Afghanistan. PITF was launched with high expectations and ambitious claims, such as those evident in an article in The Week breathlessly entitled “The CIA has a Team of Clairvoyants.”⁶⁶ What made the PITF distinctive was that the CIA mandated that “advanced analytic methods” be employed to help U.S. policymakers see into the future.⁶⁷

The Task Force’s charge was to construct a framework “using open-source data … to develop statistical models that can accurately assess vulnerability to instability two years hence and can identify key risk factors of interest to policymakers.”⁶⁸ Specifically, members looked at four sorts of events: 1) revolutions, 2) ethnic wars, 3) genocides, and 4) violent regime changes. The Task Force adopted this broader definition of “state failure” because only 20 actual “central state authority collapses” occurred between 1958 and 1998, “too few for robust statistical analysis.”⁶⁹ Political instability, it turns out, is a rare event in their data-set, with only 141 episodes in 7,500 country years (<2%).

Various Task Force members have been candid in admitting the limitations of their forecasting enterprise. These include recognizing that their approach is largely inductive because it is based on retrodiction from the same historical data used to formulate the models rather than based on prediction of new events, that the relations among types of state failure they have identified are unclear, that they lack measures for many potentially important variables (e.g., state capacity), that most of the variables they have identified as significant change only slowly, and that in trying to construct models using the fewest variables possible they risk over-simplifying complex processes and perhaps comparing incommensurate manifestations of state failure.⁷⁰

Potentially the most serious weakness of the PITF models is that they are weak establishing causation, a key component of policy relevance. As one Task Force report conceded, “this study identified factors associated with failure, rather than direct causes of failure. The task force believes that infant mortality and trade openness serve as indicators for more complex combinations of related conditions that affect the risks of state failure, rather than as direct causes of risk. The task force therefore fears that policies aimed at improving infant mortality or trade openness in isolation would have little impact on the risk of state failure.”⁷¹ Elsewhere, Task Force members seem to reject causal analysis itself.⁷²

That the PITF would not in the final analysis live up to the optimists’ early expectations should not be surprising given that the longer history of such efforts has provided scant grounds for such confidence. An analysis of the needs of U.S. Government policymakers by a CIA analyst involved in initial efforts to bring cutting-edge social science tools into the policy process highlighted the challenges the effort faced. As he explained, there are five important differences between what policymakers want and social scientists can give them. First, policymakers want answers based upon the requirements of policy, not availability of data. Second, policy problems often involve unquantifiable elements. Third, quantitative forecasting models have not facilitated causal analysis well. Fourth, policymakers need brief and clear answers which scholars are often not inclined to give. Finally, policy frequently deals with rare and unique events whereas social science gravitates toward general and universal explanations. No wonder, he concluded that futures research of the sort PITF was conducting would remain “only a very small part of the [Intelligence Community’s] political research effort.”⁷³ Another CIA analyst who advocated using formal models as a forecasting technique, similarly admitted that “despite the advantages of [such] models, which became known as ‘factions’ models within the CIA, the vast majority of analysts do not use them.”⁷⁴

What is striking is how consistent contemporary policymakers’ assessments of the quantitative forecasting effort are with those of previous efforts. Writing in 2012 in the CIA’s Studies in Intelligence, another government analyst concluded that quantitative forecasting models were only useful for general warning, not point prediction; could be misleading due to their approach of extrapolating from past events; tend to produce unsurprising results; and neglect critical case-specific details.⁷⁵ The data-sets they rely upon also get out of date quickly.⁷⁶ But their most critical weakness in terms of policy relevance is their continuing inability to guide policymaking by clearly identifying causal relationships among factors.⁷⁷

Finally, the attacks of September 11, 2001 on the World Trade Centers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, DC ushered in what many regard as the end of the post-Cold War era.⁷⁸ Once again, a “sense of urgency” affected the entire country, including academic social scientists. In response, many scholars not previously known for their engagement with national security policy answered the call of duty, taking on security-related topics of potential interest to policy makers.⁷⁹ Others who for much of their career had sought to bridge the gap between the two worlds found that their efforts were more successful after 9/11 and the associated wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.⁸⁰ Finally, efforts by the media to tap scholarly work in national security picked up again.⁸¹ In one sense, the post-9/11 world was one in which sustained cooperation between scholars and national security policymakers once again seemed possible and mutually beneficial.⁸²

Early on, military commanders in Iraq began complaining about the lack of on-the-spot cultural expertise, sparking intellectual ferment in national security policy circles.⁸³ Initial U.S. Government efforts to mobilize social science for the war on terror began with a November 2004 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) conference on “Adversary Cultural Knowledge and National Security,” reportedly the first such effort to mobilize social science for national security since the early 1960s.⁸⁴ In 2005 the Marine Corps established a “Center for Advanced Operational Culture” at its training base in Quantico, VA.⁸⁵ These efforts had to overcome the gap between the academic and policy communities that had existed for years.⁸⁶

The social science discipline of most interest to DoD and the services was initially anthropology. In 2004 US Army War College Commandant General Robert Scales proposed to Vice Admiral Arthur Cebrowski, then Director of the Pentagon’s Office of Force Transformation, a social science program to ascertain how the enemy thought. This proposal led DARPA to reach out to anthropologists to provide the scholarly expertise that might assist in this effort, much as their predecessors had done during the Second World War. Montgomery McFate organized a joint DARPA/Office of Naval Research conference on “Adversary Cultural Knowledge and National Security” in November of that year.⁸⁷ The Military Operations Research Society (MORS) also sponsored a workshop in “The Global War on Terrorism: Analytical Support, Tools, and Metrics Assessment” in late fall 2004 at the Naval War College.⁸⁸

On the one hand, the demand for scholarship that could aid policymaking spiked in response.⁸⁹ The Defense Science Board, an advisory body to the Secretary Defense, echoed this conclusion, observing that the lesson of Iraq and Afghanistan is that “social awareness” was as important as military capability for those missions.⁹⁰ To achieve this, the U.S. military and national security policy community would have to “gain deeper understanding of how individuals, groups, societies and nations behave and then use this information to 1) improve the performance of U.S. forces through continuous education and training and (2) shape behaviors of others in pre-, intra-, and post-conflict situations.”⁹¹ In 2009, the DSB Task Force on Understanding Human Dynamics pushed for the institutionalization of the “production, evaluation, circulation, and consumption of knowledge about human dynamics (economic, religious, political, and cultural influences on personal, interpersonal, and social behavior) to improve full-spectrum military operations.”⁹² The key challenge in the mind of many soldiers and policymakers was how to end the “disconnect” between academics who studied various countries in the developing world wracked by political violence and the “strategic corporals” the United States sent there to combat violence and build nations.⁹³

In order to accomplish these objectives, the DSB concluded that “DOD needs to become more familiar with the theories, methods, and models from psychology, sociology, political science, economics, and cultural anthropology in order to identify those with potential to add value.”⁹⁴ DoD had consistently used social science for more mundane issues such as “personnel selection, training, leadership, and organization,” but the Board’s recommendation went well beyond that to employ social science to help make policy in the war on terror.⁹⁵ This recommendation reflected the typical optimism early in a conflict about the compatibility between sophisticated, quantitative Human, Social, Cultural, Behavioral (HSCB) social science models and the needs of policymakers. Board members, dominated by natural scientists, not surprisingly saw great potential in “coupling [social science] to quantitative and computational modelling and simulation techniques from mathematics, physics, statistics, operations research, and computer science” to achieve breakthroughs in marketing research and election forecasting.⁹⁶ In those heady days, leading academic political scientists even testified before Congress.⁹⁷

In the final analysis, though, national security policymakers were ultimately unpersuaded that the results of methodologically sophisticated social science were necessary for them to do their jobs. The MORS report noted that “the group agreed that the quality of the analyst is more important than the quality of the tools. A good analyst can produce good results from poor tools; but a poor analyst is unlikely to produce good results even with good tools.” And its authors feared that the impulse to focus on technique over substance would be hard to resist because “the quality of the tools is easier to discuss.”⁹⁸ The MORS group was also skeptical that applied results would automatically trickle-down from even high-quality basic research.⁹⁹ Instead, they concluded that policymakers needed models that “include assessment of alternative policy options” to be of relevance to them.¹⁰⁰

Secretary Gates’ 2008 Minerva Initiative certainly testifies to on-going dissatisfaction among policymakers with purely in-house research and analysis and the lack of useful scholarly research on some of the most pressing post-Cold War security issues such as the consequences of cultural and religious change; the ideologies of terrorist groups; military transformation in China, the national security consequences of environmental change; new theories of deterrence; and the dynamics of failing states. It signaled his desire to rebuild the bridges between the Beltway and the Ivory Tower and change the status quo in the post-Cold War relationship between scholars and policymakers. In fact, the Minerva Initiative was the largest post-9/11 effort by DoD to engage with social scientists since the Vietnam War.¹⁰¹ It also constituted the latest effort to square the circle between basic and applied social science research.

The question for the initiative, and social science more generally, is whether focusing purely on basic social science research is likely to be either politically feasible or operationally useful for national security policymakers? On the former, as the 1976 Report of the Defense Science Board Summer Study Group on Fundamental Research in Universities noted, the “Mansfield syndrome,” the aversion among Members of Congress to funding basic research, continues to tax Congressional patience with DoD support for basic research in universities.¹⁰² In fact, the uneven course of these past efforts to bring together social science scholarship and policy in national security research constitute evidence of lingering doubts about supporting basic research, useful policy information would also “trickle-down.”¹⁰³ In sum, social science’s relevance question – can it simultaneously be rigorous and relevant – remains an open one, especially for national security affairs.

Michael C. Desch is the Packey J. Dee Professor of International Affairs and the Brian and Jeannelle Brady Director of the Notre Dame International Security Center. He is author most recently of The Cult of the Irrelevant: The Waning Influence of Social Science on National Security (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), from which this essay draws heavily.

Notes

1
^{Note: Full text is available at http://archive.defense.gov/Speeches/Speech.aspx?SpeechID=1228.}
2
Note: Joseph S. Nye, Jr., “Scholars on the Sidelines,” The Washington Post, April 13, 2009, A15.
3
Note: Alexander L. George, Bridging the Gap: Theory and Practice in Foreign Policy (Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace, 1993); Philip Zelikow, “Foreign Policy Engineering: From Theory to Practice and Back Again,” International Security, Vol. 18, No. 4 (Spring 1994): 143-71; Joseph Kruzel, “Review: More a Chasm Than a Gap, But Do Scholars Want to Bridge It?” Mershon International Studies Review, Vol. 38, No. 1 (April 1994): 179-81; Joseph Lepgold, “Is Anyone Listening? International Relations Theory and the Problem of Policy Relevance,” Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 113, No. 1 (Spring 1998): 43-62; Peter D. Feaver, “The Theory-Policy Debate in Political Science and Nuclear Proliferation,” National Security Studies Quarterly, Vol. 5, No. 3 (Summer 1999): 69-82; Joseph Lepgold and Miroslav Nincic, Beyond the Ivory Tower: International Relations Theory and the Issue of Policy Relevance (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001); Bruce W. Jentleson, “The Need for Praxis: Bringing Policy Relevance Back In,” International Security, Vol. 26, No. 4 (Spring 2002): 169-83; Stephen M. Walt, “The Relationship Between Theory and Policy in International Relations,” Annual Review of Political Science Vol. 8 (June 2008)23-48; Kenneth Lieberthal, “Initiatives to Bridge the Gap,” Asia Policy, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2006): 7-15; Joseph S. Nye, Jr., “International Relations: The Relevance of Theory to Practice,” The Oxford Handbook of International Relations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 648- 60; and Bruce W. Jentleson and Ely Ratner, “Bridging the Beltway-Ivory Tower Gap,” International Studies Review, Vol. 13, No. 1 (March 2011): 6-11.
4
Note: See, for example, Gene M. Lyons and Louis Morton, Schools for Strategy: Education and Research in National Security Affairs (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1965), 4 and 69; and Ellen Herman, “The Career of Cold War Psychology,” Radical History Review Vol. 63, No. 3 (Fall 1995): 62.
5
Note: For an example see Raymond Tanter, “The Policy Relevance of Models in World Politics,” World Politics, Vol. 16, No. 4 (December 1972): 555-83.
6
Note: Karl W. Deutsch, John Platt and Dieter Senghass, “Conditions Favoring Major Advances in Social Science,” Science Vol. 171, No. 3970 (February 5, 1971): 458-59. Also see David Glenn, “Calculus of the Battlefield,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 8. 2002, A14-16.
7
Note: Gene M. Lyons, The Uneasy Partnership: Social Science and the Federal Government in the Twentieth Century (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1969), 26. Also see, Gruber, Mars and Minerva, 32.
8
Note: David M. Ricci, The Tragedy of Political Science: Politics, Scholarship, and Democracy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), 23.
9
Note: In fact, one can argue that this process actually began much earlier during previous wars from the very beginning of the United States. On this, see, Appendix II, “Statement of Hon. John S. Foster, Jr., Director of Defense Research and Engineering; Accompanied By Col. James M. Brower; Donald M. MacArthur; Rodney W. Nichols; and Morton H. Halperin,” “Department of Defense Sponsored Foreign Affairs Research,” Committee on Foreign Relations, U.S. Senate, 90th Cong., 2nd sess., May 9, 1968, 86 and Warner R. Schilling, “Scientists, Foreign Policy, and Politics,” American Political Science Review Vol. 56, No. 2 (June 1962): 287.
10
Note: Dorothy Ross, “Changing Contours of the Social Science Disciplines” in Theodore M. Porter and Dorothy Ross, eds., The Cambridge History of Science [Volume 7] The Modern Social Sciences (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 219.
11
Note: E. A. Shils, “Social Science and Social Policy,” Philosophy of Science Vol. 16, No. 3 (Jul., 1949): 222. Also see, Richard Hofstadter, “A Note on Intellect and Power: Review of The Servants of Power by Loren Baritz,” The American Scholar Vol. 30, No. 4 (Fall 1961): 588 and Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992).
12
Note: Barry D. Karl, Charles E. Merriam and the Study of Politics (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1974),84. Also see the discussions in Crick, The American Science of Politics, 19-20 and William E. Leuchtenburg, “The New Deal and the Analogue of War” in John Braeman, Robert H. Bremner, and Everett Walters, eds., Change and Continuity in Twentieth-Century America (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1964), 85.
13
Note: Carol Gruber, Mars and Minerva: World War I and the Uses of Higher Learning in America (Baton Rogue, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1975), 44. Also see 46, 82, and 172.
14
Note: Gruber, Mars and Minerva, 95.
15
Note: William E. Leuchtenburg, “The New Deal and the Analogue of War” in John Braeman, Robert H. Bremner, and Everett Walters, eds., Change and Continuity in Twentieth-Century America (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1964), 87. For further discussion, see John A. Thompson, Reformers and War: American Progressive Publicists and the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 91-92. Even skeptics like Randolph S. Bourne grudgingly conceded the war’s magnetic effect between intellectuals and government. Note: Randolph S. Bourne, “Twilight of Idols” in Carl Resek, ed., War and the Intellectuals: Collected Essays 1915-1919 (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, [1964]1999), 59.
16
Note: Deborah Shapley, Promise and Power: The Life and Times of Robert McNamara (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993), 13. Also see the discussion of the influence of pragmatism among intellectuals in Bruce Kuklick, Blind Oracles: Intellectuals and War from Kennan to Kissinger (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 8-14; and Samuel Beer, “Liberalism and the National Idea,” The Public Interest No. 5 (1966): 70-82.
17
Note: Lyons, The Uneasy Partnership, 28. Also see, James G. Hershberg, James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1993), 43.
18
Note: Sidney Kaplan, “Social Engineers as Saviors: Effects of World War I on Some American Liberals,” Journal of the History of Ideas Vol. 17, No. 3 (June 1956): 360.
19
Note: Mark C. Smith, Social Science in the Crucible: The American Debate Over Objectivity and Purpose, 1918-1941 Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 63.
20
Note: Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 397.
21
Note: Smith, Social Science in the Crucible, 76.
22
Note: Robert Staughton Lynd, Knowledge for What: The Place of Social Science in American Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1939).
23
Note: Bernard Brodie, “The American Scientific Strategists,” RAND Paper [P-2979] (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, October 1964), 11-12.
24
Note: Hershberg, James B. Conant, 127.
25
Note: Lyons, The Uneasy Partnership, 97 and U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, A History of Department of Defense Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (Washington, DC: Government Publishing Office, June 1995), 14.
26
Note: David C. Engerman, “Rethinking the Cold War Universities: Some Recent Histories,” Journal of Cold War Studies Vol. 5, No. 3 (Summer 2003): 81.
27
Note: Phillip E. Mosely, “Research on Foreign Policy” in Daniel Lerner, ed., The Human Meaning of the Social Sciences (New York: Meridian, 1960), 49.
28
Note: The Earl of Birkenhead, The Professor and the Prime Minister: The Official Life of Professor F.A. Lindeman, Viscount Cherwell (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, Co., 1962); C.P. Snow, Science and Government (New York: Mentor, 1962); and Stephen Budiansky, Blackett’s War: The Men Who Defeated the Nazi U-Boats and Brought Science to the Art of Warfare New York: Knopf, 2013).
29
Note: Barry M. Katz, Foreign Intelligence: Research and Analysis in the Office of Strategic Services, 1942-1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), xi.
30
Note: Alexander H. Leighton, Human Relations In A Changing World: Observations on the Use of the Social Sciences (New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., 1949), 43.
31
Note: Effective Use of Social Science Research in the Federal Services (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1950), 29-47. Quote from 42.
32
Note: Effective Use of Social Science Research in the Federal Services, 14-20; Robert Lynd, “The Science of Inhuman Relations: Review of The American Soldier by Samuel A. Stouffer,” The New Republic (August 29, 1949): 22-23; Leighton, Human Relations In A Changing World, 43; Talcott Parsons, “Social Science – A Basic National Resource” in Samuel Z. Klausner and Victor M. Lidz, eds., The Nationalization of the Social Sciences (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), 79-101; and Roy F. Nichols, “War and Research in Social Science,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 87, No. 4 (Jan. 1944): 361-62.
33
Note: John McDiarmid, “The Mobilization of Social Scientists” in Leonard D. White, ed., Civil Service in Wartime (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1945), 85.
34
Note: Estimated from data in McDiarmid, “The Mobilization of Social Scientists,” 73-75. Basically, I assumed that the same percentage as held in 1938 would obtain in 1943. This surely produces a conservative estimate.
35
Note: Terence Ball, “The Politics of Social Science in Postwar America” in Lary May, ed., Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of Cold War (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 81.
36
Note: Peter Mandler, Return from the Natives: How Margaret Mead Won the Second World War and Lost the Cold War New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), xi.
37
Note: Michael A. Bernstein, A Perilous Progress: Economists and Public Purpose in Twentieth Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 82.
38
Note: Katz, Foreign Intelligence, 190.
39
Note: See Seymour J. Deitchman, The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy (Quantico, VA: Marine Corps University Press, 2014), 30.
40
Note: F.R. Collbohm and Warren Weaver, “Opening Plenary” in Conference of Social Scientists, September 14 to 19, 1947 [R-106] (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, June 9, 1948), 6.
41
Note: Hamilton Cravens, “Part I: The Social Science Come to Washington” in Hamilton Cravens, ed., The Social Sciences Go to Washington: The Politics of Knowledge in the Postmodern Age (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 6.
42
Note: Collbohm and Weaver, “Opening Plenary,” 5.
43
Note: Effective Use of Social Science Research in the Federal Services (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1950), 5.
44
Note: Bayes to Herring, February 26, 1965, Department of State, Bureau of Intelligence and Research Subject file (1945-60), “Social Science Research File,” National Archives and Record Administration [NARA], Record Group [RG] 59, MLR 1561, I, 1951.
45
Note: Doherty to Evans, “Social Science Conference on Point Four,” March 6, 1951, Department of State, Bureau of Intelligence and Research Subject file (1945-60), “Social Science Research File,” NARA, RG 59, MLR 1561, I, 1951, 1-2.
46
Note: Roger L. Geiger, Research and Relevant Knowledge: American Research Universities Since World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 190.
47
Note: Bruce L.R. Smith, The RAND Corporation: Case Study of a Nonprofit Advisory Corporation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), 30. Also see, Lyons and Morton, Schools for Strategy, 16.
48
Note: J.A. Stratton, Provost, “Memorandum to Dr. Max F. Millikan,” March 30, 1951, SECRET, April 23, 1951, Department of State, Bureau of Intelligence and Research Subject file (1945-60), “Project Troy,” NARA, RG 59, MLR 1561, I, 1951, 3.
49
Note: Brigadier General Richard Stillwell, “Invited Address,” in William A. Lybrand, ed., Symposium Proceedings: The U.S. Army’s Limited-War Mission and Social Science Research (Washington, DC: SORO, March 26-28, 1962), 113.
50
Note: David C. Engerman, Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America’s Soviet Experts, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 261.
51
Note: Paul C. Avey and Michael C. Desch, “What Do Policymakers Want From Us? Results of a Survey of Current and Former Senior National Security Decision-makers,” International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 58, No. 2 (June 2014): 227-46, Table 4.
52
Note: David A. Baldwin, “Security Studies and End of the Cold War,” World Politics Vol. 48, No. 1 (October 1995): 124.
53
Note: Bruce M. Russett, “Warriors and Scholars: Fellow Professionals in Hard Times,” Naval War College Review Vol. 28, No. 2 (Fall 1975): 89.
54
Note: Morris Janowitz, “Toward a Redefinition of Military Strategy in International Relations,” World Politics Vol. 26, No. 4 (July 1974): 484.
55
Note: Raymond Tanter and Richard H. Ullman, “Theory and Policy in International Relations: Introduction,” World Politics Vol. 24, Supplement (Spring 1972): 6.
56
Note: Richards J. Heuer, Jr., “Adapting Academic Methods and Models to Government Needs” in Heuer, ed., Quantitative Approaches to Political Intelligence: The CIA Experience (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1978), 1-2.
57
Note: Michael K. O’Leary, William D. Coplin, and Dale Dean, “The Quest for Relevance: Quantitative International Relations Research and Government Foreign Affairs,” International Studies Quarterly Vol. 18, No. 2 (June 1974): 230.
58
Note: Joy Rohde, “Pax Technologica: Computers, International Affairs, and Human Reason in the Age of American Hegemony,” unpublished ms., University of Michigan, February 2017, 18.
59
Note: Stephen J. Andriole and Robert A. Young, “Toward the Development of an Integrated Crisis Warning System,” International Security Vol. 21, No. 1 (March 1977): 127.
60
Note: Andriole and Young, “Toward the Development of an Integrated Crisis Warning System,” 127, fn. 18.
61
Note: Stephen J. Andriole and Gerald W. Hopple, “The Rise and Fall of Event Data: From Basic Research to Applied Use in the U.S. Department of Defense,” International Interactions Vol. 10, Nos. 3-4 (1984): 303.
62
Note: Andriole and Young, “Toward the Development of an Integrated Crisis Warning System,” 109, fn. 6.
63
Note: Andriole and Hopple, “The Rise and Fall of Event Data,” 304.
64
Note: For examples, see Jon C. Pevehouse and Joshua S. Goldstein, “Serbian Compliance or Defiance in Kosovo? Statistical Analysis and Real-time Predictions,” Journal of Conflict Resolution Vol. 43, No. 4 (August 1999): 538-46 and Sean P. O’Brien, “Anticipating the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: An Early Warning Approach to Conflict Instability Analysis,” Journal of Conflict Resolution Vol. 46, No. 6 (December 2002): 791-811.
65
Note: Robert H. Bates, David Epstein, Jack Goldstone, Ted Robert Gurr, Barbara Harff, Colin Kahl, Kristen Knightt, Marc Levy, Michael Lustik, Monty G. Marshall, Thomas Parris, Jay Ulfelder, and Mark Woodward, “Political Instability Task Force Report: Phase IV Findings,” November 18, 2003, 1.
66
Note: Cameron Evers, “The CIA Has a Team of Clairvoyants,” The Week July 14, 2016 at http://the week.com/articles/635515/cia-team-clairvoyants.
67
Note: Daniel C. Esty, Jack A. Goldstone, Ted Robert Gurr, Pamela T. Surko, and Alan Kruger, “State Failure Task Force Report,” 30 November 1995, iii. Also see Daniel C. Esty, Jack Goldstone, Ted Robert Gurr, Barbara Harff, Pamela T. Surko, Alan N. Unger, and Robert Chen, “Failed States and International Security: Causes, Prospects, and Consequences,” unpublished paper delivered at Purdue University, February 25-27, 1998, 1.
68
Note: Bates, et al., vii.
69
Note: Jack A. Goldstone, Ted Robert Gurr, Barbara Harff, Marc A. Levy, Monty G. Marshall, Robert H. Bates, David L. Epstein, Colin H. Kahl, Pamela T. Surko, John C. Ulfelder, and Alan N. Unger, “State Failure Task Force Report: Phase III Findings,” September 30, 2000, 3.
70
Note: Esty, et al., “Failed States and International Security,” 8 and Goldstone, et al., “State Failure Task Force Report: Phase III Findings, 25 and 61.
71
Note: Esty, et al., “State Failure Task Force Report,” iii, 16-17, and 19 and Goldstone, et al., “State Failure Task Force Report: Phase III Findings, 49 and 52.
72
Note: Monty G. Marshall, “Fragility, Instability, and the Failure of States: Assessing Sources of Systemic Risk,” (New York, NY: Council on Foreign Relations, October 1, 2008), 21.
73
Note: Heuer, “Adapting Academic Methods and Models to Government Needs,” 8. Also see, 4-5.
74
Note: Stanley Feder, “Forecasting for Policy Making in the Post-Cold War Period,” Annual Review of Political Science, Vol. 5 (2002): 119.
75
Note: J. Eli Margolis, “Estimating State Instability,” Studies in Intelligence Vol. 56, No. 1 (March 2012): 14.
76
Note: Dr. William Forrest Crain, “The Global War on Terrorism: Analytical Support, Tools, and Metrics Assessment,” (Alexandria, VA: Military Operations Research Society, 30 November-2 December 2004), 16.
77
Note: Crain, “The Global War on Terrorism,” 3.
78
Note: Eli Berman and Lawrence Freedman, “Transforming Security Research: Summary Report,” (Arlington, VA, National Science Foundation, February 26-28, 2013), 8 [copy in author’s possession].
79
Note: Nicholas Lemann, “What Terrorists Want,” The New Yorker October 29, 2001 at http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/10/29/what-terrorists-want and Ushma Patel, “Shapiro Brings Scientific Analysis to Terrorism and Counterterrorism Research,” News at Princeton, January 28, 2010 at https://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S26/46/99M53/index.xml?section=featured.
80
Note: Marc Lynch, “The Political Science of Syria’s War,” Foreign Policy December 19, 2013 at: http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/12/19/the-political-science-of-syrias-war/.
81
Note: See, for example, “The Interpreter” column in The New York Times, at: http://www.nytimes.com/newsletters/the-interpreter?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news.
82
Note: “A Social Contract,” Nature, Vol. 454, No. 7201 (July 2008): 138.
83
Note: David Rohde, “Army Enlists Anthropology in War Zones,” New York Times, October 5, 2007 at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/05/world/asia/05afghan.html?_r=0.
84
Note: Montgomery McFate, “Anthropology and Counterinsurgency: The Strange Story of Their Curious Relationship,” Military Review Vol. 85, No. 2 (March/April 2005): 24.
85
Note: Max Boot, “Navigating the ‘Human Terrain,’” Los Angeles Times, December 7, 2005 at http://articles.latimes.com/2005/dec/07/opinion/oe-boot7.
86
Note: Jerrold M. Post and Raphael Ezekiel, “Worlds in Collision, Worlds in Collusion: The Uneasy Relationship Between the Counterterrorism Policy Community and the Academic Community,” Terrorism Vol. 11, No. 6 (1988): 503.
87
Note: Annie Jacobsen, “The Pentagon’s Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America’s Top Secret Military research Agency New York: Back Bay Books, 2015), 360-63.
88
Note: Dr. William Forrest Crain, “The Global War on Terrorism: Analytical Support, Tools, and Metrics Assessment,” (Alexandria, VA: Military Operations Research Society, 30 November-2 December 2004).
89
Note: Kerry Fosher, “Forward” to Deitchman, The Best-Laid Schemes, 2.
90
Note: Defense Science Board, 21st Century Strategic Technology Volume II, Critical and Enabling Technologies (2006 Summer Study) (Washington, DC: Office of the Under- Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics, February 2007), 28.
91
Note: Defense Science Board, 21st Century Strategic Technology Vectors [Vol. I] Main Report (Washington, DC: Office of the Under- Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics, February 2007).
92
Note: Cameron Keys, “Historical Perspectives: A Review and Evaluation of 76 Studies of the Defense Research Enterprise, 1945-2015,” Undated Department of Defense Report, circa 2015, 45.
93
Note: Jeff Bearer, “Introduction” to Deitchman, The Best-Laid Schemes, 7-8.
94
Note: Defense Science Board, 21st Century Strategic Technology Vectors I, xiii.
95
Note: James J. Blascovich and Christine R. Hartel, eds., Human Behavior in Military Contexts (Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2008), 67.
96
Note: Defense Science Board, 21st Century Strategic Technology Vectors II, 29 and 43 and Defense Science Board, 21st Century Strategic Technology Vectors I, 12.
97
Note: “Statement of Dr. Jim Fearon,” “Iraq: Democracy or Civil War?” Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats, and International Relations, Committee on government Reform, House, 109th Cong., 2nd sess., September 15, 2006, 54.
98
Note: Crain, “The Global War on Terrorism,” 68.
99
Note: Crain, “The Global War on Terrorism,” 25.
100
Note: Crain, “The Global War on Terrorism,” 3. Also cf. 10.
101
Note: Patricia Cohen, “Pentagon to Consult Academics on Security,” New York Times, June 18, 2008 at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/18/arts/18minerva.html.
102
Note: Keys, “Historical Perspectives,” 22 and 24.
103
Note: Deitchman, The Best-Laid Schemes, 175.