Social Sciences In The Military, Special Report With Brit Hume (FNC), 6:00 PM,  September 8, 2008

JIM ANGLE: The U.S. is spending billions every year to improve its weapons and medical technology, but defense leaders recognize there is also value in another type of science – social science: understanding cultures, religions and other factors that affect war and national security.

Correspondent Caroline Shively has this story about the military and professors.

CAROLINE SHIVELY: The Pentagon has its share of soldiers and tanks. Now it’s looking for new weapons in the war on terror: eggheads and ideas. And Defense Secretary Bob Gates, a former university dean and president, has $50 million to pay for it.

GEOFF MORRELL [Pentagon Press Secretary]: He is a strong believer in the notion that social scientists can help us in our efforts in Iraq, in Afghanistan, elsewhere – help us gain a better understanding of the culture and make adjustments to how we do things.

SHIVELY: The Pentagon program is called the Minerva Research Initiative, studying war and the conditions that can lead to it. Despite assurances that Gates respects their intellectual independence, some academics are wary of the idea, saying it could set up an old-style Soviet partnership with the Pentagon paying for research to justify military action and pushing academics to skew their results.

Prof. David Vine calls it the creeping militarization of universities.

DAVID VINE [American University]: Pentagon has insisted on funding it. Unfortunately, it’s sort of stacked the deck to – asked to determine what questions will be asked about U.S. national security policy, and then to determine what research will be selected and funded.

SHIVELY: The initiative focuses on four key issues: China’s military and technological advances; terrorist groups that have formed in Iraq; the role of religion and ideology in jihadist extremism; and something called the new discipline’s project – using social sciences to study the threats of war.

STEPHEN FLANAGAN [International Security Expert]: The military cannot win many of these struggles, particularly the struggle against extremist violence, on its own – that it has to be a much more integrated application of many elements of U.S. governmental and un-governmental capabilities.

SHIVELY: The U.S. military already has smaller partnerships with university scholars. The Army’s Human Terrain System embeds social scientists will soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan to help the military better understand local customs and how cultural and religious differences can turn into terrorism.

Secretary Gates is using the 1950s model of historian Arthur Schlesinger, who said the U.S. should employ eggheads and ideas to meet the Russian challenge of the Cold War. While some academics say they worry about a repeat of the best and the brightest leading the U.S. into another Vietnam, that hasn’t stopped their colleagues from applying for the grants, the first of which is said to be awarded later this year.