[Reader-list] Institutional mapping sites (1)

[Jeebesh Bagchi]

http://www.fiatpax.net/

[Fiat Pax is a research and advocacy based website which provides 
information to university students, faculty, and the public regarding 
the militarization of science and society.]

http://www.fiatpax.net/unisandmil.html

Universities and the Military

Since WWII, DoD funding of scientific research, development, testing, 
and evaluation has remained the first priority of federal research 
funds. The military led the way in creating federal agencies, offices 
and partnerships with America's universities and research centers. Prior 
to WWII there had been no serious attempt by the federal government to 
fund academic research. During WWII, the DoD created agencies and 
linkages that provided billions of dollars to universities and 
corporations to research and design the weapons that would win the war 
and wage future wars. Among these weapons was most notably the atomic 
bomb, but also the proximity fuze, missile technology, and radar. 
Breakthroughs in electronics during the war led to the modification of 
anti-aircraft guns with analog computers, used to calculate the firing 
times and trajectories necessary to hit high speed targets like 
fighter-bomber aircraft and the German V-1 rocket. Computers were used 
to calculate artillery tables, they solved complicated engineering 
problems, decoded enemy communications, and opened up the future of 
technological war.

/*The Enlistment of Science and Technology */

Leading members of America's academic institutions joined Vannevar Bush, 
an electrical engineer at the Massachusettes Institute of Technology 
(MIT) in the creation of the National Defense Research Committee. The 
committee's mandate was to conduct research in service of America's 
military. It was composed of Frank Jewitt (National Academy of Science 
and AT&T), James Connant (President of Harvard), Karl Compton (President 
of MIT), and Richard Tolman (Caltech). A year later the same men founded 
the Office of Scientific Research and Development, which allowed them 
more ability to take research projects from basic phases into the 
development and applications stages. President Roosivelt signed off on 
the efforts signaling that, "essentially for the first time, the proper 
function of government included support of basic research by university 
scientists". Toward the wars end the future of academia and the military 
were bound. Charles E. Wilson, Executive VP of the War Production Board 
, President of General Motors Corp., and later Secretary of Defense 
under the Eisenhower administration, summed it up in 1944 saying:

/"What is more natural and logical than that we should henceforth mount 
our national policy upon the solid fact of an industrial capacity for 
war, and a research capacity for war that is also 'in being'? It seems 
to me that anything less is foolhardy."./

Universities and the Military (part 2)

According to historian Richard Abrams, "As the war neared its end, 
Edward L. Bowles, science advisor to the secretary of war Henry Stimson, 
called for 'an effective peacetime integration' of the military with the 
resources of higher education."

The Office of Naval Research quickly took to this task of integration, 
and by 1949 it was funding thousands of research projects, at hundreds 
of universities nationwide5. Founded in 1946, it remains the largest 
distributor of DoD funds.

Soon after the ONR's chartering, the other services got involved with 
the commandeering of academia for the purpose of war. The Air Force 
Office of Scientific Research (1952), the Army Office of Scientific 
Research (1958), and the Advanced Research Projects Agency (1959), later 
called DARPA, all established linkages between the military, 
universities, and corporations. In the interim of the ONR's 
establishment, and the coming of the other military research offices, 
the government chartered the National Science Foundation. The NSF's 
primary goal was to provide civilian, or non-military research funds, 
but it remains unclear as to how much this agency falls under the 
control or influence of military goals.

In addition to funding many areas of interest to the DoD, the NSF can be 
interpreted as an outgrowth of the military's relationship with 
academia. In fact, the first director of the NSF was Alan Waterman, who 
came directly over from the Office of Naval Research to administer the 
new agency: The NSF's foundational years were led by the same men who 
constructed the vast university-military relationship. Parallel to these 
developments was the growth of the DOE labs, managed by the University 
of California, and constituting the core of the military's nuclear 
weapons infrastructure. These labs provided a shining example of what 
became he nation's Federally Funded Research and Development Centers 
(FFRDC), funded by the military or proxy agencies, and managed by 
universities, drawing from their superb human resources, and using their 
prestigious names as an effective legitimation of the work carried on 
inside.

Universities and the Military (part 3)

Technological war  

The war of economies bent toward productive destruction, the creation of 
the most effective, and horrifying weapons systems has flourished ever 
since. The DoD has managed to guide the disciplines of science and 
engineering into a militarized knowledge of control, force, application, 
and functionality. The military has transformed broad aspects of 
science, so much so that it is hard to draw the line between the 
civilian and military purposes of some technologies.

We have in many ways an economy based on warfare, but the interaction 
between war and science has not only been a one way street. Warfare - 
strategy and tactics have been profoundly influenced by the inclusion of 
science. MIT professor Carl Kaysen describes it as, "...a rapid 
evolution of military technologies [that] has led to a much broader and 
more rapid interplay between technology and strategy".

The exponential expansion of capabilities, the ability to strike targets 
anywhere on the planet, real-time network communications, data, radar, 
night vision, unmanned aircraft, logistics - every new technological 
revolution fueled by scientific research has changed the way war is 
fought. The most striking example is the DoD's gaming approach to war. 
In his description of modern industrial society's most apocalyptic 
tendencies, social theorist Herbret Marcuse described the process by 
which the Air Force's RAND think tank (a quasi academic institute of the 
military) would create US nuclear strategy.

The "thinkers" at RAND would divide into teams, red and blue. The red 
team would be put on the offensive, while the blue team's goal would be 
to maintain deterrence from nuclear attack. In such a way the forces of 
destruction are organized and readied8. Through gaming theory, the Gulf 
War of 1990-1 was fought out long before Hussein ever invaded Kuwait, 
two years to be exact. Prior to the war, the US military conducted 
countless games involving wildly different scenarios in the Middle East 
(as they still do for almost every conceivable conflict in ever last 
corner of the earth), several of which included the nearly exact 
scripting of Operation Desert Storm9. But the games have gone much 
further. RAND's theorists, and other military minds have experimented 
with "limited nuclear exchanges" in regions like Vietnam, and Korea, 
while helping to pioneer a style of "detached", "academic," and 
"rational" approaches to war:

/"Many of RAND's brightest minds - and it had these in abundance were 
mathematicians... trained in the techniques of 'operations research' 
(mathematical analysis of complex strategic problems, such as the 
optimum number of ships in a protected convoy) during the war. RAND soon 
began to apply statistical analysis, systems analysis, game theory, and 
other formal and mathematical techniques to the burgeoning problems of 
nuclear strategy. Their results led to a series of shifts in the US 
military strategy." /

Technoscience, the child of the Pentagon has changed it's creator as 
much as the military has changed the academic institutions which have 
carried out the research. The military entered academia, shaped it, and 
fostered a cooperation by asking for superior weapons What they got was 
the beginning of a revolution in warfare that continues to this day.

Universities and the Military (part 4)

The first computers, Colussus (1943) in the UK, and ENIAC (1945) in the 
United States were both constructed by university professors in 
partnership with their governments.

ENIAC was built by scientists at the University of Pennslyvania under 
the supervision of the US Army who desired the machine for computing 
ballistics calculations. ENIAC's first assignment in 1946 was to 
calculate a particularly complicated equation for the atomic bomb 
program at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, administered by the 
University of California. "Just before pressing a button that set the 
ENIAC to work on the atomic bomb, Maj. Gen. Gladeon Barnes spoke of 
'man's endless search for scientific truth."

What he really meant was some men's endless search for war. Computers 
have since found their way into every facet of life, but most funding 
for computer science still comes from the military. In 1999 the DoD 
spent $643 million to fund computer science within American 
universities, and this sum was projected to rise another $100 million by 
2001. In addition, the most powerful computers remain in the service of 
the warfare-state.

The UC administered Lawrence Livermore Lab's ASCI White, the world's 
most powerful computer is used mostly to simulate nuclear explosions, 
both testing aging weapons in the US stockpile, and now new weapons with 
designs that cannot be tested in actual explosions since the US 
suspended underground explosions in 1992. ASCI stands for Accelerated 
Strategic Computing Initiative White. Accordingly, "It's also just the 
beginning. The government says that to certify the nuclear arsenal with 
full confidence, it needs a supercomputer that is 10 times as powerful 
as ASCI White by 2004". Clearly warfare still guides the future present 
and future of computing.

The entire hyper-dominance of the US military has evolved through 
research conducted through American universities. Without access to the 
best and the brightest the stream of technological and strategic 
innovation would dry up. For example, around 55-60% of the DoD's basic 
electronics research is conducted in universities, computer science is 
higher, around 70%, not surprisingly the humanities and arts recieve 
nothing.

The DoD is extremely reliant on its access to academia. And science has 
been equally affected. The military-university relationship has 
symbiotically created an American science, or more accurately a militant 
form of knowledge. Science, most strikingly the disciplines of the 
physical sciences have been molded by this relationship, so much that 
physics, and engineering owe much of their theoretical basis, 
methodology, and purpose to assumptions about the world which include 
uses of force, that the earth is possessable, disposable, and winnable 
(assumptions that we find within and exemplified by the military). A 
1953 DoD publication concerning R&D clearly explains this molding of 
basic physical science (and scientists) into knowledge of military 
application as intended,

/"...to maintain effective contact between the Armed Services and the 
scientific fraternity [note the masculine identity of America's 
scientists] of the country, so that the scientists can be legitimately 
encouraged to be interested in fields which are of potential importance 
to national defense."
/

Universities and the Military (part 5)

The Reagan administration echoed these words with its introduction of 
the University Research Initiative of the 1980's. University science was 
guided into fields of applicability, not knowledge, force, not energy, 
power, not understanding, and here it remains today. The fields have 
developed under these assumptions. Within electrical engineering the 
discipline became more focused on quantum electronics, solid state 
physics, applied science rather than pure science going so far as to 
impact the theoretical foundations.

Many scientists have described the structure of research within American 
universities as tending to force one into the arms of the military. 
Professors are responsible for obtaining the majority of their funding 
through grants. This money supports both their research, and graduate 
students. When upwards of 70% of the available funds are distributed by 
the military, professors tend to compete by moving their research toward 
more obvious, and much of the time directly applicable topics of 
interest to the Pentagon.

The Mansfield Amendment of 1970 was intended to stem the military 
control of research by limiting DoD fuds to projects of direct relevance 
and application to the military. It was believed that such a law would 
decrease academia's reliance on DoD funds, which at the time supported 
much of the basic (non-applied) research within American universities. 
Instead, the law had the effect of transforming science itself into 
applied and military oriented topics. Military funding is structural 
component of the university, the individual researcher, departments, and 
entire fields of study must to fit into this structure, or at least 
modify themselves as to gain some degree of advantage. In 1987, the 
American Mathematical Society, the largest association of university 
mathematicians took up the topic of military funding and control over 
knowledge through a mail referendum. The text read:

/"The AMS is concerned about the large proportion of military funding of 
mathematics research. There is a tendency to distribute this support 
through narrowly focused (mission oriented) programs, and to circumvent 
peer review procedures. This situation may skew and ultimately injure 
mathematics in the United States..." /

The subsequent vote was 5000 to 1300 in favor of increasing the fraction 
non-military funding in hopes of staving off a militarization of math 
(which had unfortunately occurred long before). Physicist Edward Gerjuoy 
and Elizabeth Baranger of the University of Pittsburgh conclude of DoD 
funding in the physical sciences that, "research directions are being 
skewed, department hiring and promotion policies probably are being 
influenced, and top level administration policies and recruiting may be 
influenced as well". Thus is the military-university relationship.

Attempts to wean scientific research from military funds have failed 
because they do not attack the root of the problem - the military. The 
historical relationship outlined above continues to this day, the 
military continues to fund and guide science, especially technological 
research, the assets of the university remain at the disposal of the 
warfare-state, and the quest for ever more destructive weapons continues.