Chapter

The Future of Social Science & National Security Project

Politics & Ethics in the Mobilization of Social Science for National Security

The century-long history of efforts to mobilize the social sciences for national security offers cautionary tales and important lessons for the future of national security research

By Joy Rohde

Defense Policy & Posture

March 13, 2023

The history of the social science-national security relationship is replete with moral, political, and epistemic challenges. Defense patronage has been a powerful driver of intellectual and institutional growth in the social sciences since the early twentieth century. Yet, it has also contributed to the militarization of the social sciences by subtly shaping scholarship in the direction of military goals.

Defense projects have also implicated scholars in problematic political and security projects, including interventions in the Global South that have drawn domestic and international criticism. Collaborations between scholars and Defense interests have even called into question the objectivity and neutrality of social research itself.

If future collaborations between social scientists and national security agencies are to benefit scholarship, national security, and global welfare, their architects must attend to the lessons of the past.

For over a century, scholars and government officials have sought to bring academic social science to bear on American national security questions. Their efforts have been marked with optimism about the ability of “eggheads and ideas,” in Defense Secretary Robert Gates memorable phrase, to lend clarity to the social, political, and behavioral challenges of security.¹ But they have also been heavily criticized by scholars and citizens concerned about the influence of militarized and securitized interests on research and public values. This essay draws on the history of the social science-national security relationship to explicate its fraught ethics and politics. Beginning in World War I, military funding proved an enormous boon to the nascent social science disciplines. In the essay’s first section, I explain that in the absence of other federal support of similar generosity, the social sciences hitched their institutional and intellectual growth to military patrons. In the second section, I explain why this seemingly synergistic relationship raised challenging political, ethical, and policy questions in the decades after World War II. In the final section, I explain why those challenges remain salient in the context of the U.S. War on Terror and suggest what they imply for the future of the national security-social science relationship.

In brief, my argument is that honest reckoning with that relationship requires a broad and deep contextual analysis that situates it in a broad field of contested moral values and political relationships. When I use the term political, I do not mean political partisanship. Rather, I refer to the ways that knowledge, like policy, affects the “arrangements of power and authority in human associations” in intended and unintended ways.² Because social knowledge confers power differentially, it can injure as well as protect. For that reason, the moral, political, and epistemic challenges that face Defense-funded research are serious. Any future collaboration between social science and national security agencies demands deliberate, systematic, and ongoing accounting for the potential harms—to social science, to the U.S. state, and to the targets of American interventions abroad—that it may produce.

Defense Funding as an Engine of Social Science’s Growth

National security patronage has been a powerful driver of intellectual and institutional growth in the social sciences since at least World War I, with important implications for their scholarly trajectories and policy roles. The history of psychology is an instructive case. During the Great War, psychologists developed morale programs for American troops, devised propaganda messages targeting America’s enemies, and created intelligence and manpower testing programs that reshaped the military profession itself.³ Public relevance paid dividends. After the armistice, more universities created psychology programs, providing them with new buildings and laboratories, more faculty lines, and higher salaries. The National Research Council, established in 1916 to provide the federal government with scientific advice on pressing policy problems, made the discipline the first social science to be included in the organization. And the profession’s ranks exploded; the American Psychological Association’s membership nearly quadrupled in the fifteen years after the war.⁴ Meanwhile, the psychologists who led WWI military research programs catapulted to the top of their profession. As a younger generation of psychologists noted in the 1960s, the list of psychologists who helped the United States mobilize for the war—including James R. Angell, James McKeen Cattell, Lewis M. Terman, and Robert Yerkes—still “reads like a roster of the authors of the great books of our time.”⁵

World War II further expanded the intellectual and policy footprint of the social sciences as military and intelligence offices incubated new social science specialties focused on problems of war and security. At the Office of Strategic Services—the nation’s first foreign intelligence agency and the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency—political scientists, anthropologists, sociologists, and historians working in the Office of Strategic Services produced over two thousand reports on foreign politics and peoples, providing the wartime government much needed foreign area expertise. This work laid the foundation for the development of area studies during the late 1940s and 1950s.⁶ Similarly, research on foreign morale that had informed psychological operations campaigns during wartime played a substantial role in the establishment of communications as a scholarly field.⁷ And as they had in World War I, psychologists working on military problems developed new research paradigms that shaped the field for decades to come, including small group psychology and human factor analysis.⁸

The close ties forged between military sponsors and social scientists in the years after World War II were not due to a natural affinity between scholarship and security, but to the dearth of funds for social research from non-military government sources. The National Science Foundation (NSF) was not established until 1950 and until 1954, federal legislation all but prohibited the Foundation from funding most social research.⁹ Social scientists learned that they could fill the financial breach by framing their research in military terms. Princeton psychologist Charles Bray, for example, argued that military technologies and projects were intended “only to persuade other men, in other parts of the world, that they cannot, without reason, impose their wills upon” the United States.¹⁰ These strategies worked. The Office of Naval Research (ONR), established in 1945 to “promote basic research for the long-run benefit of the navy’s weapons’ development capacity,” became a leading supporter of social science.¹¹ In its first decade, ONR spent over $17 million on psychology alone—a very large sum for social science at the time. This money supported projects at over 120 universities, yielding over 800 peer-reviewed journal articles and sixty books.¹² Recognizing ONR’s importance to the discipline, the American Psychological Association presented the ONR with a “‘Certificate of Appreciation’ for its ‘exceptional contributions’” to the field’s development.¹³

As the Cold War deepened, the security community’s growing research budget and the NSF’s meager support of social research made military agencies leading supporters of government-funded social science. Previously accustomed to bootstrapping their research on meager budgets, social scientists took advantage of the military’s increasingly deep coffers. In the early 1960s, DOD spending on social sciences other than psychology reached $15 million a year, more than the military’s total budget for research and development before World War II, and far more federal funding than the social sciences received in the past.¹⁴ By 1967, the budget climbed to $40 million.¹⁵

For the defense community, this was a very small share of an enormous budget, a low stakes investment that would at the very least cultivate a pool of distinguished scholars who would serve as “ambassadors of national preparedness.”¹⁶ For social scientists, defense funds were a windfall, a source of research support and a sign of public relevance that propelled their careers and institutions to new heights. Military patronage shifted the institutional landscape of the social sciences by fostering the creation of new quasi-private and quasi-academic research institutions that worked directly on defense problems. Social scientists at the RAND Corporation, created by the Army Air Force in 1946, advised the military on nuclear bargaining, designed psychological warfare programs for Soviet and Eastern bloc audiences, and applied rational choice theories to support U.S. bombing campaigns in North Vietnam.¹⁷ Meanwhile, military funding helped turn sleepy intellectual backwaters into leading centers for social research. By the early 1950s, for example, American University in Washington D.C. had twice lost its accreditation and had no social science reputation to speak of. After contracting with the U.S. Army to run the Special Operations Research Office (SORO), which studied psychological warfare, the social psychology of counterinsurgency, and the politics of nation-building in the global South, American ranked among the top ten universities engaged in federal social research.¹⁸

Politics and Ethics at the Macro Scale

Between World War I and the mid-1960s, national security patronage powerfully influenced the trajectory of the social sciences, shaping both the questions scholars asked and the methods they used to answer them. The social sciences relevant to global affairs underwent a process of militarization: the “intensification of the labor and resources allocated to military purposes, including the shaping of other institutions in synchrony with military goals.”¹⁹ The trajectory of international relations offers an instructive example. Between World War I and the late 1940s, a dominant strain of philanthropically-funded international relations research sought to foster internationalism and world peace. As University of Chicago international politics and legal expert Quincy Wright explained, peace required that social scientists cultivate “consciousness in the minds of individuals that they were related to the world-community.”²⁰ Wright and dozens of like-minded scholars—including anthropologist Fay Cooper-Cole, sociologist Robert C. Angell, and economist Jacob Viner—studied the histories, politics, economies, and national values and public opinions of various nations, as well as the histories of wars, seeking to identify the cultural, psychological, and social obstacles to world peace. Their work informed international scholarly collaborations like the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization’s “Tensions” project, which aimed to create educational programs that promoted peace via “tolerance as a cross-cultural principle.”²¹

But as the Cold War set in, military-funded research focused on shoring up American national security—understood broadly as the extension of American political and military influence over broad swaths of the globe—supplanted research traditions that emphasized international understanding and cooperation. At military-funded think tanks and research institutes like RAND and SORO, social scientists asked not how to foster peace, but instead, “what the next war might be like, if and when it benefitted American national interests to wage war, and how statesmen could effectively wield the threat of force against their enemies in order to strengthen American power without triggering violence.” By the 1960s, game theoretic and systems analytic assessments of nuclear escalation, quantitative evaluations of the best methods to control communist-backed insurgencies, and theoretical tracts advocating hard-nosed realist postures dominated the study of international affairs. Meanwhile, underfunded and disparaged as idealistic, the study of peace and international cooperation was pushed to the margins of the social sciences.²²

The influence of militarized definitions of scholarly problems posed a conundrum. Social science’s policy value depends on knowledge’s claim to objectivity—its ostensible freedom from values, ideologies, and prejudices. As science policy expert Sheila Jasanoff explains, the mantle of scientific objectivity allows policymakers to imbue their positions and decisions with “the neutrality and impartiality of science itself.”²³ At the same time however, national security agencies turned to social research for its security relevance. Like all policy concerns, security concerns are fundamentally normative and political. The military supported research into the processes of social and political because they might inform the design of military modernization programs and the containment of democratic political movements in Guatemala and Indonesia, to name only two, that were feared too communist friendly. Research into cross-cultural communication garnered military support because it could inform psychological warfare operations—not just in war zones like Korea and Vietnam—but in Eastern Europe, South Asia, and South America.²⁴

Security-funded social science was influenced by the interests and values of its patrons, and thus, its claims to scientific disinterestedness and political neutrality were insecure. By the early 1950s, social scientists openly expressed concerns that their close financial ties to national security agencies threatened their intellectual integrity. Psychologist John G. Darley, whose University of Minnesota research lab received ONR funds in the 1950s, wrote in 1952 that even though military contracts led scholars to direct their research toward areas of interest to the military, the money was so tempting that, “like Ado Annie in Oklahoma we ‘cain’t say no.’”²⁵

Like their colleagues in the hard sciences and engineering, social scientists had a few techniques to insulate themselves from what they saw as the potentially corrupting influence of military patronage. One was the research funding system itself. As historian Paul Edwards explains, military grants and contracts did not “need to direct research and development in detail.” Instead, he writes, they worked to “orient scientists… toward a general problem area.” Grant writing often operated “as a kind of make-believe” in which scholars “pretended to care about military problems” to secure funding. The relationship between scientists and national security agencies was one of “mutual orientation,” rather than coercion or subterfuge. Because the relationship was not coercive—and because scholars became adept at framing research questions in military terms to suit some audiences and scholarly terms to suit others—national security funded work could appear unfettered, even politically neutral.²⁶

A second compensatory strategy was overtly normative. Until the late 1960s, when events in Vietnam made their claims untenable, military-funded social scientists argued that the military was a benign, even progressive, force, and that social science could make it even more humane. The interests of the U.S. military and scholarship, they insisted, were synergistic. MIT’s Lucian Pye informed an audience of national security officials that, “the range of problems which you now identify as counterinsurgency” were in fact fundamental questions for social science: “how to build the most complex of all social institutions…: the modern nation-state.”²⁷ Researchers at the Army’s SORO explained that their work would help the U.S. military establish “a community of stable nations, where political change occurs peacefully.”²⁸ This argument animated hundreds of military-funded studies in the 1960s, from research into psychological warfare to studies that framed studies of U.S.-backed military counterinsurgency projects as basic theoretical investigations of “social control and social change” in the developing world.²⁹

Because the orientation of research toward security questions was not coercive but instead opportunistic, social scientists could simultaneously perceive themselves as pursuing unfettered, neutral scholarship and be engaged in projects that, as historian Ron Robin explains, offered government officials “strategies for imposing order on, and legitimizing an American world view of” foreign peoples, cultures, and political systems.³⁰ To make sense of this seemingly contradictory state of affairs, Edwards encourages an analytical distinction between historical scales. At the micro-level of individual researchers and their projects, scholars could see themselves as either tailoring their research to military interests in order to pursue their own intellectual ends or as involved in a synergistic, progressive project. Yet, at the macro-level of institutional relationships and political values, scholars were enmeshed projects that were unquestionably wedded to military values and interests.³¹

The history of Project Camelot shows how scholars could simultaneously perceive themselves as unfettered, objective investigators and simultaneously be implicated in ethically and politically dubious military activities abroad. A multi-million dollar, unclassified Army-funded study initiated at SORO in 1964, Camelot was supposed to be the social sciences’ Manhattan Project. Designed by prominent sociologists, political scientists, and anthropologists, it aimed to discover the causes of political instability and revolution in Latin America in order to develop “nonmilitary and nonviolent solutions” to them. Referencing the legendary court of King Arthur, the study’s codename signaled its aspiration: “the development of a stable society with domestic tranquility and peace and justice for all.” The study’s official title, “Methods for Predicting and Influencing Social Change and Internal War Potential,” revealed its military purpose. Social scientists argued that Camelot was simultaneously basic, unfettered scholarship and directly relevant to normative political goals; it sought to “arrive at generalizations about complex social matters that are abstract enough to have serious theoretical significance and still retain immediate practical utility” in the form of “undercut[ting] the forces of insurgency.”³²

At the micro-level, Camelot’s research team viewed themselves as engaged in a noble, synergistic endeavor: building theory and preventing violence. But at the macro-level of global affairs, Project Camelot was ethically problematic and overtly political. When social scientists and public officials outside of the United States learned about the study in June 1965, they responded with outrage. As Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung explained, the study rested on the assumption that the U.S. military was a source for social good. That assumption was belied not just by the history of uninvited American incursions into Latin America, but also by current events. Those concerned about unwelcome U.S. political and military interference needed to look no farther than the Dominican Republic for evidence that contradicted Camelot’s assumptions. In April, the United States sent 24,000 American troops to Santo Domingo to stop a rebel movement attempting to restore the nation’s democratically elected president, whom the Americans painted as too communist-friendly, to power. While the U.S. military framed the operation as a peacekeeping mission, the occupation circumvented both Dominican democratic politics and the authority of the Organization of American States. ³³

In this context, it should hardly have surprised U.S. social scientists and public officials when Chilean president Eduardo Frei decried Camelot as yet another example of “unwanted and unacceptable interference” in his region.³⁴ Nor should it have surprised U.S. officials when the story of Camelot spread rapidly around the world; in the months after the study’s exposure, multiple U.S. embassies fielded questions from concerned public officials about the possibility that similar studies were happening on their own soil. In the face of global concern, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara stepped in and cancelled the project.³⁵

The Camelot episode thrust to the forefront longstanding political and ethical concerns about military-funded social science’s claim to provide objective, politically neutral expertise. What seemed neutral or beneficent from the micro-scale of a single research study was, at the macro-scale of American and global politics, a manifestation of a contested national security project that had material consequences for sovereign nations. While in the early Cold War, American scholars and public officials were generally willing to equate American national security with global welfare—to see the U.S. military as a force for global good—that sanguine attitude had been replaced by the mid-1960s with a more sophisticated recognition of the problematic aspects of the projection of American military power abroad. American political support for corrupt, authoritarian, and undemocratic regimes in South Vietnam, Korea, Iran and elsewhere in the name of anti-communism was no longer as compelling as it had been fifteen years before. And if security-funded social science was not unfettered, but was instead a product influenced by political positions, its beneficiaries could not claim to be politically insulated by the mantle of scientific disinterestedness. Rather, their expertise might simply be a superficial cover for fundamentally political and ideological national security projects.³⁶

Project Camelot’s design also revealed how military research could reflect the racialized dynamics of U.S. national security policies. The study’s designers had initially planned to include a case study of the Quebecois separatist movement alongside its investigations of other internal instabilities. Concerned that an investigation of civil conflict in the U.S.’s majority White northern neighbor could damage U.S.-Canadian relations, the State Department quashed the case study. But no such concern was expressed about the Latin American nations targeted by Camelot.³⁷

As the U.S. war in Vietnam intensified in the late 1960s, so too did concerns that the social sciences abetted deeply problematic political and military projects. Viewing the question of social research and national security from the macro-level, a growing number of scholars and public officials insisted that national security funded social science condoned, and in some cases even abetted, American bellicosity. RAND’s social research helped inform the expansion of the air war in Southeast Asia.³⁸ Theories of psychological and political development mobilized by scholars at SORO, MIT, and elsewhere informed the logic of forced resettlement of Vietnamese communities via the Strategic Hamlet Program.³⁹ And theories of modernization and counterinsurgency were invoked to justify U.S. intervention in any nation—not only Vietnam, but also Thailand and the Democratic Republic of the Congo to name only two—whose political regimes did not align with U.S. interests, violating national self-determination.⁴⁰

Those who questioned the products of the social science-national security partnership were hardly members of the intellectual or political fringe. Hans Morgenthau argued that events in Vietnam revealed that Pentagon-funded social science was merely “the ideological defense of a partisan position, an intellectual gloss upon power, made to appear as the objective truth.”⁴¹ In Congress, elected officials worried that the military mobilized social science to expand its power over American foreign policy. And civil rights activists pointed out that national security funded social science frequently supported racialized projects; more often than not, American interventions happened in majority non-White nations in the global South. Viewed from the macro-level, security-funded social science was implicated in pressing political and moral questions about the appropriate role of the United States in the world, a role that was increasingly attacked at home and abroad as repressive and belligerent. In recognition of the problematic role that social science had assumed, Congress slashed military funds for social science at the end of the 1960s. The Defense budget for social research related to foreign affairs dropped to $3.3 million in 1969, and nearly to zero in subsequent years.⁴²

Social scientists’ disciplinary associations took up the ethical questions of military sponsorship in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but they never settled them. The American Anthropological Association (AAA) and the American Political Science Association, for example, opened inquiries into the relationship between their members and national security agencies. Protective of intellectual freedom and scholarly autonomy, however, they rejected the construction of firm lines separating scholars from national security interests. Instead, they encouraged their members to carry out their own ethical assessments by attending to the ways that macro-scale concerns manifested in what could no longer be framed as micro-scale questions. As the leader of the AAA ethics committee argued, researchers should take care to ensure that their sponsors’ goals were consistent with their own “professional and academic goals, values, and ethical systems.”⁴³ This left ethical questions to the personal responsibility of individual scholars. It also left the broader questions of the appropriate roles of expertise in national security affairs and the projection of American power in the world unresolved. As the U.S. retreated from highly visible military interventions in the wake of Vietnam, they faded from public and scholarly concern.

Lessons from the Past

As national security agencies looked to social scientists for assistance in the War on Terror, these unsettled questions returned to the forefront. The lesson of the history I have recounted is not that scholars must pursue political, financial, and ethical purity or else be exposed as corrupted political operatives. As historians and philosophers of science have repeatedly demonstrated, values—personal, disciplinary, institutional, political—shape the questions that all scholars, not only sponsored ones, believe are important, the problems we choose to study, and the patrons whose support we seek or spurn.⁴⁴ Indeed, history shows that objectivity and other forms of purity are political claims—discursive strategies mobilized to convince audiences that knowledge is a politically neutral instrument and thus can dictate policy without being undemocratic.⁴⁵

The lesson of history is that the epistemic, political, and ethical challenges posed by national security agency funding (and indeed, any funding) are most appropriately engaged at the macro-scale. Only from the macro-scale can researchers, patrons, and publics engage honestly and robustly with the closely intertwined and fundamentally value-laden nature of scholarship and the policy concerns that animate it. Micro-level arguments attempt to insulate scholarship from politics by holding sponsorship, and thus research’s potential use, at arm’s length. Micro-level defenses essentially argue that “it is the use which should be judged,” not the specific research study.⁴⁶ But that argument is incomplete, and at times may even be disingenuous, for it elides the very reasons that research is supported by national security agencies.⁴⁷

The distinction between the micro- and macro-scales helps explain why even ostensibly basic research projects, like the Minerva Research Initiative, have attracted ethical concerns. Minerva administrators addressed important micro-scale ethical issues by committing to “openness and rigid adherence to academic freedom and integrity,” as well as to human subjects’ protections. But research administration cannot address broader, macro-level concerns that, by supporting social research in the name of American security goals, Minerva is located within a broader landscape of scholarly and policy militarization. The project was launched to deepen “knowledge about sources of present and future conflict,” to better understand the foreign regions of specific “strategic importance to the U.S.”⁴⁸ Its ethics and politics are thus not insulated from the normative commitments and policy environments that justified its creation.

In the post-9/11 United States, security has been a powerful framing device that has legitimated a number of domestic and international policies and projects, ranging from basic research to policy applications. That landscape includes programs that pose serious ethical challenges and have had real human costs: the controversial Human Terrain System, the ineffective and unethical enhanced interrogation program at Guantanamo, and approximately twenty policies initiated in the wake of 9/11 that indiscriminately targeted tens of thousands of members of domestic Arab and Muslim communities with surveillance, detention, and in thousands of cases, deportation. By tying particular peoples, places, and identities to radicalism and crime, securitized policies and projects have reinforced dominant U.S. perceptions that vulnerable and innocent people are security threats in the United States as well as abroad.⁴⁹ That record is part of the macro-scale in which all national security funded social science, including fundamental research justified by security concerns, must be carefully considered. At the macro-scale, even basic research projects like Minerva are part of a landscape of securitized social science projects.

Proponents of the social science-national security nexus may argue that applied research projects are entirely distinct from research programs like Minerva, which at the micro-scale appears to be unproblematic, fundamental research. They may also question whether social science has directly informed events at Guantanamo or projects like the Human Terrain System, rather than being just one input among many. But these arguments, which enact the micro-scale separation of research and policy relevance, miss the point. What mattered to critics of military-funded social science in the Cold War and what still matters today is that social science can be and is invoked to gloss military and political projects with the patina of objectivity and neutrality, thus shielding them from scholarly and public scrutiny. As historian Susan Lindee writes, “The intersection of violence and truth over the last century have produced phenomena that should puzzle us, give us pause, and lead us to wonder how the ideals of … knowledge and intellectual neutrality became central to the state’s monopoly on violence, how this shaped individual careers and trajectories, what it has meant for scientists, and what it has meant for us.”⁵⁰

The relationship between social research and security concerns can, if left unchecked, lead to astonishingly pernicious results. This is precisely what happened at the American Psychological Association. In 2015, an extensive independent legal investigation found that senior APA executives—including its ethics officer—secretly colluded with military officials to create a watered-down ethics policy that permitted psychologists to participate in the Defense Department’s so-called enhanced interrogation program. The investigation revealed a professional organization in the thrall of national security coffers and influence. It concluded that APA officials were so closely tied to military interests that they acted as if “what was best for DOD was best for APA.” Their motivation: to “curry favor” with military officials not because the APA sought Pentagon funds for itself, but because remaining on good terms with national security agencies—prime supporters of military and operational psychology—was in the best interest of the discipline’s continued growth.⁵¹

All of this is not to say that research programs like Minerva are equivalent to the torture program. But it is important to bear in mind the consequences that may follow when disciplinary and professional goods are confused with security goods, and when the ostensible objectivity of scholarship is mobilized as a cover for activities that are anything but neutral. While the APA example is extreme, the danger of confusion is very real in a funding landscape where security agencies and interests, far more than civilian ones, justify the expenditure of federal funds on scholarship relevant to global affairs. The reason that the security state looms so large over the question of whether or not scholars have an obligation to engage with national political and policy questions is, in part, an accident of history. But that historical accident has material, political, and ethical implications that demand a full accounting in any potential future collaboration between social science and security agencies.

Realists and pragmatists insist that decisions about national security will be made with or without scholarly input and that some expertise is better than none.⁵² Indeed, that is precisely why macro-level ethical assessment is so important—why the micro-level effort to sanitize research by severing it from its potential use is insufficient. Researchers may invoke the normative argument that military-funded behavioral expertise leads straightforwardly to widespread benefits, but that argument is not borne out in an honest macro-scale account which reveals that the overlap of scholarly and security interests has long been ethically fraught. The micro-scale ethical assessment fell short in the context of the Vietnam War, and it continues to lack moral force outside of the rather narrow scholarly community dedicated to security research. This is particularly the case in the wake of the difficult American failures of nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A macro-scale ethical analysis of security funded research points to at least two ways forward. One is the creation and long-term maintenance of robust research funding relevant to international affairs from non-securitized perspectives. This would provide richer, more diverse intellectual inputs to policy, reducing the likelihood that the evidence on which policymakers rely recapitulates securitized norms and agendas. Diverse funding sources could make more room for scholarship in areas typically foreclosed by dominant frameworks of national security: research that is not strongly biased toward American and Western perspectives, research that reflexively interrogates American political and military postures and interests with the same rigor it aims at overseas security targets, and research that places social justice, human rights, and nonviolence at the forefront of scholarly concern rather than invoking it as a vague, potential effect of U.S. security projects.

Of course, that kind of funding has never been an easy sell on Capitol Hill, which is precisely what led social science to Defense patrons in the first place. Targeted NSF programs on militarized problems may have a better chance of getting funded in Washington, at least during times of national security crises. But those programs will not mitigate concerns about the outsized role that the dominant national security frames play in scholarship and American society more broadly.

A second way forward is less concrete, but no less important: the deliberate, sustained, wide-ranging and ongoing conversation among scholars, patrons, and concerned publics, about the moral, epistemic, and political trade-offs posed by the mobilization of expertise in national security domains. We can look to biomedical science for models of productive inquiry. Ethical questions related to human genome editing, for example, have inspired calls respected public institutions like the National Academies to facilitate collaborative ethical investigations among scientific experts, humanists with ethical expertise, and the publics affected by scientific innovations.⁵³ The goal of systematic ethical and political interrogation of the social science-national security nexus should not be closure; values-based differences may not be overcome, but their articulation can be put to productive use. Carried out honestly, such discussions may help mitigate the pernicious consequences of militarized scholarship and militarized policy (and militarized society) and deepen the connection between research and public benefit. Such endeavors may also help ensure that security scholarship does not become an echo chamber in which only those who concur with the normative goals of security agencies inform policy and practice. And they may help scholars and government agencies carve out spaces for research more focused on human flourishing, independent of American national security interests—a rightful but overlooked aim in the financially strapped realm of federally-funded social research.

Joy Rohde is associate professor of Public Policy and History and the Director of the Science, Technology, and Society Program at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Armed with Expertise: The Militarization of American Social Research during the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2013).

Notes

1
Note: Quoted in National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Evaluation of the Minerva Research Initiative (Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2020), p. 7.
2
Note: Langdon Winner, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” Daedalus 109.1 (1980), 121-136, p. 123.
3
Note: John S. Carson, “Army Alpha, Army Brass, and the Search for Army Intelligence,” Isis 84.2 (1993), 278-309.
4
Note: T. M. Camfield, “The American Psychological Association and World War I: 1914 to 1919,” in R.B. Evans, V. S. Sexton, and T. C. Cadwallader, eds., The American Psychological Association: A Historical Perspective (Washington DC: APA, 1992), pp. 91-188.
5
Note: Philip I. Sperling, “A New Direction for Military Psychology: Political Psychology,” American Psychologist 23.2 (Feb. 1968), 97-103, p. 98.
6
Note: David C. Engerman, Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America’s Soviet Experts (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Osamah F. Khalil, America’s Dream Palace: Middle East Expertise and the Rise of the National Security State (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2016).
7
Note: Arvind Rajagopal, “Communicationism: Cold War Humanism,” Critical Inquiry 46 (2020): 353-80.
8
Note: Joy Rohde, “Social Science and Foreign Affairs,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia in America History, 2015, DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.154.
9
Note: Daniel Lee Kleinman, Politics on the Endless Frontier: Postwar Research Policy in the United States (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 145-157; Mark Solovey, Shaky Foundations: The Politics-Patronage-Social Science Nexus in Cold War America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2013.
10
Note: Quoted in Joy Rohde, Armed with Expertise: The Militarization of American Social Science during the Cold War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013), p. 9.
11
Note: Kleinman, Politics on the Endless Frontier, 148.
12
Note: J.G. Darley “Psychology and the Office of Naval Research: A Decade of Development,” American Psychologist 12.6 (1957): 305-23, pp. 306, 317.
13
Note: Quoted in Darley, “Psychology and the Office of Naval Research,” 305.
14
Note: Ellen Herman, Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 128-29.
15
Note: Rohde, Armed with Expertise, 107.
16
Note: Navy Admiral Julius Furer, quoted in Daniel J. Kevles, The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 355.
17
Note: Daniel Bessner, Democracy in Exile: Hans Speier and the Rise of the Defense Intellectual (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018).
18
Note: Rohde, Armed with Expertise, p. 26.
19
Note: Catherine Lutz, “Making War at Home in the United States: Militarization and the Current Crisis,” American Anthropologist 104.3: 723-35, p. 723.
20
Note: Quoted in Rohde, “War,” in Society on the Edge, Philippe Fontaine and Jefferson Pooley, eds., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), p. 360.
21
Note: Rohde, War, 360-362, Angell quoted at p. 362.
22
Note: Rohde, “War,” esp. 365; on peace studies, see also Nicolas Guilhot, After the Enlightenment: Political Realism and International Relations in the Mid-Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 202-203
23
Note: Sheila Jasanoff, “The Practices of Objectivity in Regulatory Science,” in Social Knowledge in the Making, ed. Charles Camic, Neil Gross, and Michele Lamont (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 307-38, p. 308.
24
Note: The literature on military support for such political projects is extensive. Cf., Bessner, Democracy in Exile; Engerman, Know Your Enemy; Mai Elliot, RAND in Southeast Asia: A History of the Vietnam War Era (Santa Monica: RAND, 2010); Ron Robin, The Making of the Cold War Enemy: Culture and Politics in the Military-Intellectual Complex (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Rohde, Armed with Expertise; Christopher Simpson, Science of Coercion: Communication Research and Psychological Warfare (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
25
Note: John G. Darley, “Contract Support of Research in Psychology,” American Psychologist 7.12 (1952), 720-21.
26
Note: Paul N. Edwards, “Infrastructure and Modernity: Force, Time, and Social Organization in the History of Sociotechnical Systems,” in Modernity and Technology ed. Thomas J. Misa, Philip Brey, and Andrew Feenberg (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2013), 185-225, pp. 215, 216, 213. See also David Price, Cold War Anthropology: The CIA, the Pentagon, and the Growth of Dual Use Anthropology (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), xii-xiv.
27
Note: Quoted in Rohde, Armed with Expertise, 32.
28
Note: Quoted in Rohde, Armed with Expertise, p. 4.
29
Note: Quoted in Rohde, Armed with Expertise, p. 34; see also pp. 42-53, and Michael C. Desch, Cult of the Irrelevant: The Waning Influence of Social Science on National Security (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 193-4.
30
Note: Robin, The Making of the Cold War Enemy, p. 93.
31
Note: Edwards, “Infrastructure and Modernity,” 213-16.
32
Note: Rohde, Armed with Expertise, 63, 65, 66.
33
Note: The U.S. Dominican occupation concluded in 1966 with the installation of another U.S.-friendly authoritarian leader in the presidency. Alan McPherson, “US Interventions and Occupations in Latin America,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History (2019), https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199366439.013.643; Stephen G. Rabe, “Alliance for Progress,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History (2016); doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199366439.013.95.
34
Note: Rohde, Armed with Expertise, 69. Frei’s successor, Salvador Allende, would be overthrown by a U.S. backed effort less than a decade later.
35
Note: Rohde, Armed with Expertise, 75.
36
Note: Rohde, Armed with Expertise, Chapters 3 and 4.
37
Note: Rohde, Armed with Expertise, 70-71.
38
Note: Michael C. Desch, Cult of the Irrelevant: The Waning Influence of Social Science on National Security (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 168-74.
39
Note: Elliot, RAND in Southeast Asia, 82-84.
40
Note: Michael E. Latham, The Right Kind of Revolution: Modernization, Development, and U.S. Foreign Policy from the Cold War to the Present (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010).
41
Note: Quoted in Rohde, Armed with Expertise, 99.
42
Note: Rohde, Armed with Expertise, Chapters 4-5.
43
Note: Quoted in Rohde, Armed with Expertise, p. 86.
44
Note: This literature is voluminous. For an accessible entry point, see Sheila Jasanoff, ed., States of Knowledge: The Co-Production of Science and the Social Order (New York: Routledge, 2004).
45
Note: Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2010); Jasanoff, “Practices of Objectivity in Regulatory Science”; Theodore M. Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
46
Note: Rohde, Armed with Expertise, p. 44.
47
Note: The question of how much, if at all, research influences decisions is particularly difficult to answer in national security domains where many factors influence choices and few decisions are public. One study of RAND’s Defense-funded research during the Vietnam War found that the Corporation’s most influential work “reinforced what policymakers were already inclined to do, encouraged them to believe that they were on the right track, and motivated them to persist in doing what they were doing,” but that “cause-and-effect link[s]” were difficult to locate. Elliot, RAND in Southeast Asia, p. viii.
48
Note: Quoted in NAS, Evaluation of the Minerva Research Initiative, p. 8.
49
Note: Cf. Henry A. Giroux, “The Militarization of US Higher Education after 9/11,” Theory, Culture and Society 25.5 (2008): 56-82; David Wiley, “Militarizing Africa and African Studies and the U.S. Africanist Response,” African Studies Review 55.2 (Sept. 2012), 147-161; David H. Hoffman et al., Report to the Special Committee of the Board of Directors of the American Psychological Association: Independent Review Relating to APA Ethics Guidelines, National Security Interrogations, and Torture (Chicago IL, Sidley Austin LLP, 2015); Louise Cainkar, “Post 9/11 Domestic Policies Affecting U.S. Arabs and Muslims: A Brief Review,” Comparative studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 24.1 (2004), 245-48.
50
Note: Susan Lindee, “Experimental Wounds: Science and Violence in Mid-Century America,” Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics 39.1 (Spring 2011), 8-20, p. 19.
51
Note: Hoffman et al., Report to the Special Committee of the Board of Directors of the American Psychological Association, pp 23, 10-11, 68. Retrieved from http://www.apa.org/independent-review/APA-FINAL-Report-7.2.15.pdf.
52
Note: David M. Abramson, Laura L. Adams, and David W. Montgomery, “Translating Contexts into Policy,” in Central Asia: Contexts for Understanding, ed. David W. Montgomery (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022), pp. 716-17.
53
Note: Alessandro Blasimme, “Why Include the Public in Genome Editing Governance Deliberation,” AMA Journal of Ethics 21.12 (December 2019), E1065-70; Shobita Parthasarathy, “Lessons for CRISPR from the Missed Opportunities of Asilomar,” Ethics in Biology, Engineering, and Medicine 6.3-4 (2015): 305-312.

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