Marine Corps University Press

Quantico, Virginia

The Best-Laid Schemes

A Tale of Social Research

and Bureaucracy

by

Seymour J. Deitchman
e views expressed in this book are solely those of the authors. ey do not necessarily

reflect the opinions of the organizations for which they work, Marine Corps University,

the U.S. Marine Corps, the Department of the Navy, or the U.S. government.

Marine Corps University Press

3078 Upshur Avenue

Quantico, VA 22134-5103

1st Printing, 2014

ISBN 978-0-9911588-3-6

Originally published by

MIT Press, 1976
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Deitchman, Seymour J., author.

e best-laid schemes : a tale of social research and bureaucracy / by Seymour J.

Deitchman.

pages cm

Originally published: Cambridge : MIT Press, 1976.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Summary: “Offers a personal account by a responsible participant of the fiasco which

resulted from the U.S. government's efforts in the mid-1960s to sponsor social science

research as an aid to the waging of counterinsurgency warfare”--Provided by publisher.

1. Vietnam War, 1961-1975--United States. 2.  Social sciences--Research--United

States. 3. United States--Politics and government--1963-1969. I. Title.

DS558.D44 2014

959.704'31--dc23

2013050871

Contents

Author’s Acknowledgments ix

Credits xiii

Abbreviations and Acronyms xiv

Foreword 1

By Kerry Fosher

Introduction 7

By Jeff Bearor

PART I: Great Expectations 11

Chapter 1: Antecedents 13

Chapter 2: Social Science To the Rescue 23

Chapter 3: A System of Ethics and Values 37

PART II: The Bureaucracy 43

Chapter 4: The Scene 45

Chapter 5: The Foundation 49

Chapter 6: Bureaucratic Interactions and Attitudes 61

Chapter 7: The DSB Study 71

Chapter 8: The Wheels Start Turning 91

Chapter 9: The Army Moves Out Smartly 97

v
PART III: Donnybrook 115

Chapter 10: The Tip of the Iceberg 117

Chapter 11: The Press Has a Field Day 121

Chapter 12: The DOD Puts Its House in Order 133

Chapter 13: State Seeks Control 145

Chapter 14: Congress Becomes Interested 155

Chapter 15: Social Science Has Second Thoughts 173

PART IV: DOD Keeps Trying 195

Chapter 16: Return with a Low Profile 197

Chapter 17: Estrangement from the University Community 201

Chapter 18: Working within Constraints 217

Chapter 19: “Technical” Problems 237

Chapter 20: Who Will Buy My Wares 251

Chapter 21: Of Time and Tide 267

PART V: Reflections 283

Chapter 22: “What Have You Learned” 285

References 297

Index 308

vi
To Rains

“But Mousie, thou art no thy lane

In proving foresight may be vain;

e best-laid schemes o’ mice and men

Gang aft agley,

An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,

For promised joy!”

~Robert Burns, 1785

Author’s Acknowledgements

My purpose for writing this book is to tell the story of a great experiment

in social research in which I participated and whose events were important

and instructive for American social science in the mid-1960s and later.

I have attempted to limit what I have written to that which I experienced or observed, and to limit personal aspects of the narrative to those

which are required to portray the context and the atmosphere of the events.

It was necessary, nevertheless, to describe some of what others with whom

I have had little contact experienced and expressed. Such descriptions cannot but be tempered by my own views. us, I am afraid the reader will find

those views pervading everything, even though I have made a conscious attempt to minimize my intrusion. I regret any resulting distortion of “truth”

that other participants may find, but at the same time I will defend opinions

and conclusions expressly identified (and some that are implicit).

In the interest of saving time and effort, I have taken some liberties with

the usual practices of scholarship in annotating references and supporting

material. Such annotation is given to support statements of fact that may be

generally known or that may be controversial with two important exceptions. Official records, correspondence, or documents that are described and

discussed can be presumed to exist, but I have not listed them as explicit references if they have not been published or otherwise made generally available. Newspaper articles identified in the text by source, author, and date

did not seem to warrant the embellishment of formal citation.*

Some of the events described in this narrative are “recorded” only in the

memories of the individuals involved, including my own. In such cases, the

responsibility for errors of fact or differences of perception is purely my own.

You will find that, in many cases, I have gone to some lengths of circumlocution to avoid naming scientists, civilian or military officials, and

even countries in connection with particular aspects of the events or particular research projects. As the book will show, the material has in it, often

at unexpected turns of subject and time, the capacity to stimulate controversy and cause embarrassment. is applies especially to many members of

ix

* Permissions to quote directly from other copyrighted material are located in the credits following the

preface or, where it has been requested by the copyright holders, as footnotes to the text. Full bibliographic citation of generally available sources are in the references.
x

The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy

the academic community who are still (as this preface was originally written for the 1976 edition) feeling the effects of these adventures that touched

them and who have, in some cases, been subject to attack and vilification because of the role they played. It has definitely not been my purpose to write

an exposé, and I have tried to avoid mentioning names wherever I judged

that specters from the past would be unwelcome and would add little of

importance to the narrative.

My heartfelt thanks go out to many individuals. ey include those

who supported the efforts that, if events had taken a different turn, might

have affected more history than simply that of social research; those whose

comments and assistance were invaluable both during the events described

and in shaping the manuscript; and those without whose help on workday

matters I could not have finished it.*

Among the first are Drs. Harold Brown, John McLucas, Charles M.

Herzfeld, and Eberhardt Rechtin; all or whom perceived potential value in

the efforts that I undertook to stimulate and guide, and they gave me the

freedom and the strong support within Department of Defense (DOD)

bureaucracy to make and sustain the attempt despite the problems created

and the diversions from other more pressing business. e late Dr. S. Rains

Wallace and Drs. Jesse Orlansky and Eugene Webb were sources of knowledge and understanding about the intricacies of the world of social science.

Without their help and advice, I would indeed have been lost in a strange

forest. eir knowledge of the events made their comments on the manuscript especially helpful and valuable. Mrs. Edna Majors deserves a special

note of thanks for having borne the tedium of typing and retyping the 1976

manuscript for what must have seemed endless time. It would have been

impossible to track down references lost in the pressure of events without

the able assistance of Mrs. Evelyn Fass and Mrs. omasina Jones. My wife

observed the passing events from a ringside seat and shared with me the

strain of long hours and stressful conflicts. Finally, to all those other scientists, managers, and “target populations” who helped, who participated, and

who bore suffering they did not seek, I must express my gratitude and,

where appropriate, my sympathy.

* Some of the people listed here have passed away since this book was originally published (and, as the

dedication page shows, even before in one critical case). Rather than repeating “the late,” the text has

been left as written in 1976.
It should be obvious that, although I have worked for the government

and worked for an organization that serves the government at the time this

was written, I am speaking for neither of them in any part of this book. e

book is about government programs. But the descriptions and interpretations of those programs, of the events surrounding them, and of the policies that supported or affected them are mine alone. It must be remembered,

also, that the programs and policies I have thus described existed at another

time and in circumstances different from those that apply today. It is de

rigueur in modern bureaucratese to admonish that nothing in this book

should be taken as implying that the programs and policies described still

exist in the DOD or any other agency, or that anything like them will be

espoused in the future.

Having said that, however, I must bring my reaction to the events in

this book up to date by commenting on what I observed as I reviewed the

text for this U.S. Marine Corps University Press edition. In a word, I found

its relevance to events and circumstances of today’s world in the national security sphere uncannily unchanged. As we wind down our participation in

two major wars—in Iraq and Afghanistan—and face the potential for another conflict should Iran persist in its apparent pursuit of nuclear weapon

capabilities, the need to understand the culture and thought processes of our

actual and potential opponents is as urgent and important as ever. For example, we may have understood enough about the Soviet mindset to tolerate the deterrence standoff known as “mutual assured destruction.” But

what do we know about their “deterrability” for a nation (Iran) with rulers

that have explicitly stated that another nation (Israel) should be wiped off

the map, even if that means much of their own population would be killed

by a last-gasp Israeli return strike, and that they are willing to sacrifice a

generation of young men by having them act as human minesweepers as it

happened in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s?

us, it seems eminently reasonable to ask the social sciences, once again,

to give us insight into the mindsets of the peoples in the broad swath of land

from Egypt through Afghanistan and Pakistan. And indeed that was done,

but with a very different outcome from the one described in this book. e

facts and reasons for that are discussed in context at the end of chapter 3.

In that connection, I should note here the more extended rationale for

the way I chose to bring the modern world (of 2013) into this narrative. I

chose to do so by adding comments in footnotes when context suggested

that an update to today’s times would be in order, leaving the original text

xi

Author’s Acknowledgements
untouched. e reason for this was that I found that if I attempted to add

changes to the main text to bring the events up to date, the need for such

changes would cascade through the chapters, before and after the specific additions to update to modern times. Updates of this nature would have meant

major rewrites of some sections of the book, adding apparent disconnects to

the original narrative. In particular, it would have added comments about

matters where, unlike those in past events, I have no personal knowledge

through participation. And, finally in this connection, I am indebted to

Sharon Weinberger for her reminders that the events of bureaucratic infighting described at the end of the last chapter were as momentous, or more

so, than those described in this book—ironically, involving the same departments of the federal government that also figured into past events.

xii

The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy
Credits

Permission to reprint excerpts from the following is gratefully acknowledged: pp. 25–26 from Charles W. Bray, “Toward a Technology of Human

Behavior for Defense Use,” American Psychologist Vol. 17, 1962. Page 87

from Gene M. Lyons, e Uneasy Partnership: Social Science and the Federal

Government in the Twentieth Century, © 1969 by the Russell Sage Foundation. Page 88 from Chester L. Cooper, e Lost Crusade: America in Vietnam, Dodd, Mead & Company, 1970. Page 244 from Robert H. ouless,

How To ink Straight, Simon & Schuster, 1947. Permission courtesy of

Ms. Clare Bristow, Hodder & Stoughton, London. Pages 257–58 and 264

from Kalman H. Silvert, “American Academic Ethics and Social Research

Abroad,” American Universities Field Staff, Reports Service, West

Coast/South America Series, Vol. XII, No. 3 (KHS-1-65), July 1965. ©

1965 by the American Universities Field Staff, Inc. Pages 261–63 from Irving Louis Horowitz, “e Life and Death of Project Camelot,” Transaction Vol. 3, No. 1. Published by permission of Transaction, Inc. © 1965 by

Transaction, Inc. Pages 268–70 from Michael T. Klare, “Counterinsurgency’s Proving Ground,” e Nation, April 26, 1971. © Michael T. Klare.

Pages 270–72 from Ralph L. Beals, Politics of Social Research: An Inquiry

into the Ethics and Responsibilities of Social Scientists, Aldine Publishing

Company, 1969. Page 275 from Arnold ackray, “Reflection on the Decline of Science in America and Some of Its Causes,” Science Vol. 173, pp.

27–31, July 2, 1971. © 1971 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Page 449 from Donald T. Campbell, “Reforms as

Experiments,” American Psychologist Vol. 24, 1969. Pages 449–50 from

Daniel P. Moynihan, “Eliteland,” Psychology Today, September 1970. © 1970

by Ziff-Davis Publishing Company. All rights reserved. Page 453 from D.

Shapley, “Education Research: HEW Auditing Two SRI Contracts,” Science Vol. 177, p. 973, September 15, 1973. © 1973 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. For permission to quote from their

letters, I am grateful to Joseph E. Barmack (p. 188) and Ithiel de Sola Pool

(pp. 188-90).

xiii
Abbreviations and Acronyms

AFOSR Air Force Office of Scientific Research

AID Agency for International Development

ANZUS Australia, New Zealand, U.S. Security Treaty

ARO Army Research Office

ARPA Advanced Research Projects Agency

CI Counterinsurgency

CIA Central Intelligence Agency

CINCSO Commander-in-Chief, Southern Command

CINCPAC Commander-in-Chief, Pacific

CINFAC Counterinsurgency Information and Analysis Center

DCSOPS U.S. Army, Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations, and

his “office”

DDR&E Director of Defense Research and Engineering

DOD (DoD) Department of Defense

DSB Defense Science Board

FAR Foreign Area Research Coordinating Group

FCRC Federal Contract Research Center

GAO General Accounting Office

GVN Government of Vietnam (refers to South Vietnam)

HumRRO Human Resources Research Organization

IDA Institute for Defense Analyses

INR U.S. State Department, Bureau of Intelligence and

Research

ISA International Security Affairs (refers also to the

Assistant Secretary of Defense for International

Security Affairs and his “office”)

JUSPAO Joint U.S. Public Affairs Office

MAAG Military Assistance Advisory Group

MACV Military Assistance Command, Vietnam

xiv
MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology

NAS National Academy of Sciences

NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization

NLF National Liberation Front (South Vietnam)

NRC National Research Council

ODDR&E Office of the Director of Defense Research and

Engineering (i.e., the director’s staff )

ONR Office of Naval Research

OSD Office of the Secretary of Defense

RAC Research Analysis Corporation

RAND e RAND Corporation

R&D Research and Development

SAC Strategic Air Command

SECDEF Secretary of Defense

SORO Special Operations Research Office

SRI Stanford Research Institute

USAPRO U.S. Army Personnel Research Office

USIA United States Information Agency

VC Viet Cong

xv

Abbreviations and Acronyms

Foreword

By Kerry Fosher*

“e administrator uses social science the way a drunk uses a lamppost,

for support rather than illumination.”1

~Alexander Leighton

When I first began to work with the military in 2006, helping a colleague

start the U.S. Air Force’s cross-cultural competence effort, I was already involved in the debates about the way national security organizations try to

use social science research and social scientists. I had done my field research

on homeland security, beginning a few months before the attacks of 9/11,

and continued the work at a research center at Dartmouth Medical School.

Because of my background, I was asked to serve as a member of the American Anthropological Association’s (AAA) commission looking into the

ethics of conducting work related to national security. In graduate school,

the problematic relationship between anthropology and both the Department of Defense (DOD) and the intelligence community (IC) during the

First and Second World Wars and the Vietnam War became clear. My time

on the AAA commission only deepened my understanding of the cyclic

dance of engagement, misunderstandings, betrayals of trust, frustration, and

distancing that have played out at various points in U.S. history. As I worked

across military training and education, intelligence, and policy, I could see

the dance starting again.

However, anthropology’s memory is long and DOD’s is short. Most of

the things I read were from an anthropological viewpoint. I knew I should

be getting other perspectives, but they were hard to find. DOD personnel

sometimes acknowledged past efforts to deal with “the culture problem.”

Military and civilian personnel would point to the U.S. Marine Corps’ Small

Wars Manual or the national character studies done during WWII and

wonder why those efforts had ended. Aside from some articles and theses

written by military personnel between the 1960s and 1990s, my fellow anthropologists and I found few accounts of past cycles from the perspective

of DOD personnel, and almost none that describe the institutional contexts

of the problems.

1

* Kerry Fosher is the director of research for the Translational Research Group at the Center for Advanced Operational Culture Learning, Marine Corps University.
Several of us working with DOD stumbled across Seymour (Sy)

Deitchman’s book, e Best-Laid Schemes, at roughly the same time.2 Although Schemes was out of print, we quickly purchased the used copies still

in circulation, only loaning them out with the threat of dire consequences

to a borrower who did not return the book in a timely fashion. Here, at last,

was an account from someone who could offer a different perspective on the

tangled bureaucratic and discursive reasons for why things went wrong in

the 1960s. ese cautionary tales might help us anticipate obstacles and,

perhaps, avoid intractable quagmires. We did not expect the book to be a

roadmap for success, and it is not. It does, however, chronicle how easily

such efforts can become twisted by and mired in the institutional orientations and habits of large bureaucracies.

Between 2006 and 2011, DOD developed a ravenous appetite for both

knowledge about culture and social science expertise, especially from anthropologists. ey were willing to expend great sums—astonishing sums

to an academic sensibility—in the pursuit of this knowledge and expertise.

Unfortunately, as with past cycles I had read about, the pursuit often was

indiscriminate, based on outdated fantasies about what culture is and what

anthropologists do. Social sciences, perhaps especially the fieldwork-focused sciences like anthropology, are not an easy fit with how DOD wants

to engage with the world. Scientific developments since the 1960s have

moved social science away from tidy ethnographies that characterize the

activities of groups of people in terms of Western categories, such as politics, economics, and religion. Anthropologist Tim Ingold wrote that it is

“more realistic to say that . . . people live culturally, rather than that they live

in cultures.”3 It is more accurate to look at how people go about in the course

of their daily lives, creating, maintaining, and changing the patterns we once

would have referred to as “their culture.”

is scientific shift is not a fad; it is based on the fundamental realities

of human social existence. ese realities have relevance both in operations

and military planning. A classical ethnography of Fallujah written in 2000

would have done little to help a Marine understand the complexities of engaging with that same population a few years later as the people coped with

the changes brought by the conflict. Likewise, a description of Pashtunwali

written for the whole of Afghanistan would not help a planner anticipate

the diverse and operationally significant ways this “code” was understood

and used in communities across that country. Yet in trying to integrate contemporary social science into DOD, we knew we were up against strong

2

The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy
preconceptions and an equally strong desire for particular types of solutions. ese organizations wanted databases, models, simulations, systems,

field guides—all things DOD and the IC know how to acquire and integrate, but that contradict what we know about culture. It was difficult to

make headway with more practical approaches, such as teaching military

personnel how to figure out complex, changing cross-cultural situations on

the ground. As Sy writes in chapter 20, “Part of this ‘impact’ problem, of

course, was the exact manner in which often unexpected results struck the

preconceptions of the recipient who was responsible for the action.”

For the group of social scientists with whom I collaborate, quotations

from Schemes often had us laughing and cringing at the number of passages

that could have been lifted from an email written the day before instead of

a book dated 1976. We knew we were facing a seemingly monolithic structure and deeply entrenched ideas about how the world worked in DOD

institutional environments that were unfamiliar for many of us. Yet, we also

knew—from the same social science so uncomfortable for DOD—that

such structures are never as impenetrable as they seem. Every institution is

created and then either maintained or gradually transformed through the

daily actions of individual people. Change often takes a long time, longer

than the career of any one person, but we knew it was possible. We hoped

to help create or steer small changes that might have significant effects

down the line.

Consequently, e Best-Laid Schemes made me angry when I first read

it. I already knew we would repeat many of the mistakes the book outlines.

Yet, as somebody trying to effect change without falling into the same sad

dance of past generations, it was frustrating to recognize the patterns Sy described, as some within the national security-supporting establishment

began to resist the changes we sought to make. Also, as an anthropologist,

I disagreed strongly with how the concerns of anthropologists were characterized and with many of the programs described. Still, I was able to learn

much from the book. I can spot re-emerging patterns more quickly, and I

have often used examples from it to point out the negative long-term consequences of current efforts, such as those that try to employ anthropologists for field research in conflict zones.

Beyond insights on organizational politics and cautionary tales, e

Best-Laid Schemes contains two overarching lessons for current and future

efforts. First, social scientists and defense personnel failed to communicate

their constraints and capabilities sufficiently for integration to happen. So3

Foreword
cial science cannot do everything DOD wants. Some of what military organizations want is not scientifically possible or violates the ethical codes

necessary for scientific enterprise. Likewise, DOD, especially the supporting establishment, is not a blank slate onto which scientists can layer current theory, methods, and information. Scientists new to DOD have to

build their understanding of the existing context, including preconceptions

about social science, budgetary and human resource processes, time constraints on training and education, and powerful discourses about the desirability of technology-based solutions. All of these issues hinder the quick

uptake of new approaches.

Second and, I believe, the most important lesson is the danger of indulging in crisis mode behavior rather than building something sustainable. It may appear easier to build something new and separate than to graft

a new approach onto existing processes. Work without the constraints of

bureaucracy seems more exciting, but whatever you build that way is

ephemeral. Stand-alone programs can be cut easily or simply stripped of resources and left to die with little or no effect on other parts of the institution. Truly integrating social science means fully entangling that science in

a bureaucratic labyrinth, while simultaneously keeping the institution from

altering the science to fit its comfort zone. New approaches must be turned

into business-as-usual, so that they are difficult to excise.

Even after all this time, Schemes still creates a strong impression as I

watch DOD retreat from promising (but decidedly unshiny), long-term

training, education, and professional development efforts and instead place

their faith in technology-based solutions. I wince as leaders advocate a

“break glass in case of stability operations” approach to academic outreach

that, in the face of nearly a century of contrary evidence, assumes social science expertise will be available and willing whenever and however DOD

needs it. Despite some successes, DOD is indeed on the verge of making

many of the same mistakes Sy documented, with consequences that will be

borne by future junior military personnel and the people they encounter.

ere is still time to make course corrections. It is not quite time for one of

us to write a sequel to e Best-Laid Schemes.

When we first approached Sy about reprinting this book, he modestly

questioned its value in the current environment. Fortunately, we were able

to convince him to proceed, and Marine Corps University Press came on

board as the publisher. Even though the author watched as many in DOD

ignored his first effort, I am deeply grateful that he agreed. While its im4

The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy
pact on the current cycle is uncertain, it is still a critical work to get back

into circulation for the future. is will not be the last time social science

and DOD get out on the dance floor.

So, to the reader who is seeing e Best-Laid Schemes for the first time

in 2014, 2024, or 2034, before you get too far into your work, stop and read.

Read this book, read accounts of the same issues by social scientists, read

everything you can get your hands on. Pay special attention to accounts

that make you uncomfortable about what you are doing. Be willing to accept that you did not invent the dance and that these lessons do apply to

you. Accept that you will not change everything and that real change may

mean sacrificing personal accolades. If you want to create long-term change,

you must learn about both current scientific practices and the institutions

with which you work. Remember that, even though you are not the first

person to do this work, you also are not the last, so consider what you want

to leave behind. Finally, you will have to make compromises, but you will

also have opportunities to rattle people’s preconceptions. Make good use

of them.

5

Foreword

Introduction

By Jeff Bearor*

e military is all about action and success—and the straighter the line to

a successful conclusion the better. One of my favorite sayings to those I

work with is that “I don’t want to chase down rabbit holes and find no rabbits.” When we started the U.S. Marine Corps Center for Advanced Operational Culture Learning in 2005, our purpose was to train and educate

Marines and Marine units deploying for combat in Iraq and Afghanistan

and, ultimately, to support successful outcomes on the battlefield. We did

not fully realize that the onion we were attempting to peel had so many

and varied layers.

e premise was simple—extract from academics, social scientists, regional experts, and the intelligence community anything and everything

they knew about the impact of culture and human interaction on our current battlefield problem sets, distill it down “Barney-simple,” and provide

that data as a training resource to Marines and their leaders so they can

successfully plan for and operate in the “human terrain” they navigate. What

we found was that for every question we asked, there were multiple answers—it was never going to be “Barney-simple.” Many times, we realized

were not even asking the right questions.

Peering at this aspect of operational and training challenges through a

strictly military lens and expecting to find easy-to-understand answers to

complex, inter-related problems was not going to happen. Planners and

commanders would have to get used to more ambiguity and complexity

than our robust training and education programs supported.

Sitting across the table from highly educated subject matter experts, it

often seemed that we might as well have been from different planets. I

heard what they said, I could make sense of most of it, but I could not figure out how to make it useful down at the lance corporal level. Our academic partners patiently schooled us about the need to understand the

context of intercultural interactions; the need to recognize the very basic

7

* Jeff Bearor created and was the first director for the Marine Corps Center for Advanced Operational

Culture Learning. Bearor was the driving force behind the standup of the Center for Irregular Warfare

(now the Small Wars Center and Irregular Warfare Integration Division at Quantico). He most recently

served as the executive deputy at the USMC Training and Education Command and was responsible

for all formal training and education programs for Marines around the world. Currently, he serves as

the senior director for security for the Department of the Navy.
differences that frame the American approach from the Arab or Afghani

approach; and the absolute requirement to correctly identify the “powerful” in the conversation from the “powerless” and to establish early on that

“power-distance” hierarchy. But also, how to make it most useful in the least

amount of time—that was the immediate dilemma.

We focused on an approach that took into account our view of the abilities of Marines and Marine Corps leadership based on the training time

crunch. We would provide some training for all Marines, a small measure

of training for corporals, a larger measure for captains, etc. ere was no

time for much more.

What happened with that minimum of training was astounding. Most

Marines not only “got it” but they chased our instructors down for more.

ey wanted more language training; and they wanted to read histories and

textbooks to deepen their understanding of both the particular cultural aspects of the area they would operate in and the underlying concepts of cultural interaction. So we provided more. We supported multi-day seminars

and month-long language training sessions. We wrote textbooks, and we incorporated everything we learned into professional military education.

Marines took that training and education and applied it to their specific operational challenges and, with typical Marine genius, made it work.

We redistributed those hard-won lessons back into the training pipeline

and, over time, Marines and their units became fairly proficient in understanding and utilizing their knowledge of “operational culture.”

I tell this story for a couple of reasons. Marines will adapt and generally understand very quickly when they have gaps in their abilities. It is incumbent on the Corps to forecast what those new or expanded abilities

may need to be and to provide the means to fill the gaps.

In my estimation, the Corps also needs to focus on leveraging the power

of social science to understand the innate abilities, strengths, and weaknesses

of Marines so that strengths are maximized and weaknesses diminished.

And, by fully utilizing the power of social science research, Marines may be

better prepared to do the things we ask them to do—particularly when approaching the complex problem sets associated with foreign operations

where the interaction with the local people and their cultural imperatives

are more important than tactical maneuvers and firepower.

8

The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy
Math, physics, and technology we get—those disciplines usually provide a straight-line answer and end state. Social science outputs may provide a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the problem, but many

times does not lead us to “the” answer and certainty we seek. Military leaders want certainty in the midst of ambiguity, and we want “science” that

gets us to that happy place.

e Best-Laid Schemes illustrates that disconnect between what military

leaders seek and what social scientists can provide. at does not mean that

social science is not significantly useful at every level. is is particularly

true for the Corps because each and every Marine is a complex social being

seeking his or her place amongst peers and leaders.

Have we fully leveraged the social sciences so we understand the human

capital that marches into our ranks each year? Do we understand the youth

now in high schools around the country so that we can lay the foundation

in the Corps’ training and education establishment to take advantage of

their strengths? Do we fully understand what “soft skills” we will need to

apply in the next fight? I would argue that we do not—that we are not yet

ready to ask the right questions much less leverage the outputs for a better

grasp of social science.

I believe there is an answer. e Marine Corps requires the ability to ask

the right questions and frame the translational research to make findings

from basic social science useful for practical applications in our training

and education institutions and ultimately in the field. We have created a

nascent capability to do that. However, we need to expand it so we can ask

the right questions now, which will prepare us to apply the answers to our

current problem sets while we reset the Corps and prepare for what is coming next. Otherwise, we will not find any rabbits down those rabbit holes.

9

Introduction

PART I

GREAT EXPECTATIONS

Chapter 1

Antecedents

In the early 1960s, while the United States was becoming involved in a

long and difficult war in a strange and far-off corner of the world, the Department of Defense (DOD) undertook what turned out to be a painful research experiment intimately connected with and driven largely by that war.

at experiment, which is the subject of this book, would have profound

implications, though still not fully recognized, for social research in the

services of the federal government.

e research and the war grew together from America’s increasing

involvement, after World War II, in the affairs of the former European

colonial empires. Conditioned by our deep cultural and historical interrelationships with the nations of Western Europe, and reinforced by the ebb

of their power in Asia and Africa, we believed it essential to our own safety

and theirs to block the advance of a new and hostile ideology that seemed

to be on the verge of sweeping the world with the same force as that of

Islam. We were involved in the Berlin blockade, the Korean War, the “loss”

of China and Cuba, and the lengthy conflicts in Greece and several countries of Southeast Asia. e increasingly strident Soviet and Chinese promises to support “wars of national liberation” were taken to be a euphemism

for a new and (for us) dangerous approach to “conquest” of regions where

we deemed our influence, and therefore our ultimate survival, to be at stake.

While there were obviously many nonmilitary facets—political, economic,

cultural, and informational—to the defenses we had constructed over the

years, the military aspects of the worldwide “cold war” conflict also loomed

large to successive American governments. By the late 1950s, a large, worldwide American military presence had become an integral part of our policy and of our attempts to contain expansion of the major communist

powers—powers that were not then viewed as a group holding diverse and

subtly different creeds. But by the early 1960s, it was becoming clear that,

despite this military presence and our aid programs, we were not succeeding as we hoped in transmitting military capability for local self-defense to

developing countries over whom we had thrown our protective mantle.

Enter, now, into the ambience of the early Kennedy era. An uneasiness

had grown in America about our image and our position in the world.

Nixon had been mobbed in South America; Eisenhower had been prevented by mob action from visiting Japan; and the embarrassment of the

13
U-2 affair was still palpable. e essence of Kennedy’s election campaign

was that he would “get America moving again.” When he took office, he

brought with him intellectuals and intellectualism from the northeastern

universities—especially Harvard and MIT. Some of the defense thinkers

of the RAND Corporation—Charles Hitch, Alain Enthoven, and Henry

Rowen—entered the DOD. eories of strategy, economic development

in the new world, the formation and use of military power, and foreign policy that had been incubating during Eisenhower’s presidency blossomed,

and those who held them were placed in positions where they could apply

them. e atmosphere was one of change, of ferment, of self-confidence—

of “knowing” what had to be done and of not questioning “can do.” It would

all lead to a better world. It was the time of Camelot.

President Kennedy took office to face a crisis over Berlin; the beginning

of active guerrilla warfare in Vietnam; a Laos where their shaky neutrality

had been upset in favor of a Western-oriented government whose Communist-supported forces were in the process of attacking and defeating;

and a government in Cuba that was openly hostile to the United States

and declared both its ties to the Soviet Union and its intention to carry Fidelismo to the rest of Latin America. All this was duly noted from the start.

In his inaugural address Kennedy said:

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we

shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support

any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success

of liberty. . . . In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its

hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility—I welcome it.

His speech would become the call to resistance against the “wars of national liberation” for which Nikita Khrushchev, in January 1961, promised

“resolute” Soviet support.1 Kennedy met with Khrushchev in Vienna, Austria, and left the meeting feeling that he was up against a tough opponent;

one who would not “give” easily in Europe or elsewhere.2 Kennedy found

at the Bay of Pigs that guerrilla warfare is not an easy instrument to use; and

the experiences of China, Indochina, Greece, Malaya, the Philippines, Algeria, and Laos showed that when it was used by a tough, well-organized

and resourceful enemy it was not easy to counter. Taking seriously the threat

to American power and influence implicit in Khrushchev’s words, and in

the later elaboration on the theme by Khrushchev and the Chinese Com14

The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy
munists,3 he set about building our military and government instruments

to meet an obvious and serious threat. at challenge may appear shadowy

and full of braggadocio from the vantage point of the bitter experience of

all parties in the late 1960s. But who can deny that it was uttered seriously

and was meant to succeed, if it could, 10 years earlier?

To meet it, Kennedy built the U.S. Army up from 11 to 16 active divisions, with corresponding increases in the strategic tactical naval and air

forces. He added to airlift and sealift forces to improve our ability to deploy

overseas—the prospect and the propriety of intervention to meet the threat

were foreseen and accepted. e U.S. Army Special Forces became a favorite of the president, and were expanded and oriented toward training

foreign troops in counter guerrilla warfare.4e president stressed the need

for the military to learn about what seemed to be a new kind of warfare. He

said in an address at West Point in June 1962:5

It is a form of warfare uniquely adapted to what has been

strangely called “wars of liberation,” to undermine the efforts of

new and poor countries to maintain the freedom that they have

finally achieved. It . . . preys on economic unrest and ethnic cultures. . . . ese are the kinds of challenges that will be before us

in the next decade if freedom is to be saved, a whole new kind of

strategy, a whole different kind of force, and therefore a new and

wholly different kind of military training. . . . e mission of our

armed forces . . . is to master these skills and techniques and to

be able to help those who have the will to help themselves . . .

e justification for this interest was at once simple and lofty. A year

earlier, Walt Rostow, then in the State Department, had said6 “. . . it will permit American society to continue to develop along the old human lines

which go back to our birth as a nation—and which reach deeper into history than that—back to the Mediterranean roots of Western life. We are

struggling to maintain an environment on the world scene which will permit our open society to survive and to flourish.” ere was a pervading sense

of the importance and of the urgency of undertaking the task of assistance

overseas. In his statement in spring 1962, supporting the fiscal 1963 defense budget, Robert McNamera said:7

ere was come into prominence, in the last year or two, a kind

of revolt which Mr. Khrushchev calls wars of national liberation

or popular revolts, but which we know as insurrection, subversion, and covert armed aggression. I refer here to the kind of war

15

Chapter 1 • Antecedents
which we have seen in Laos and which is now going on in south

Vietnam. Actually, it is not a new Communist technique. We

have seen it in many other parts of the world since the end of

World War II. . . . We have a long way to go in devising and implementing effective countermeasures against these Communist

techniques. But this is a challenge we must meet if we are to defeat the Communists in this third kind of war. It is quite possible that in the decade of the 1960s, the decisive struggle will take

place in this arena.

At the same time, McNamera recognized that “to meet successfully

this type of threat will take much more than military means alone. It will

require a comprehensive effort involving political, economic, and ideological measures as well as military.”8

President Kennedy started to organize and interconnect the DOD and

other parts of the government to undertake the task. e State Department

was assigned diplomatic and political roles and the responsibility for coordinating the efforts of other key government agencies. e Agency for International Development (AID) would continue its task of economic

assistance, but also was given the responsibility to tailor this assistance,

where necessary, to help recipient nations build their strengths against subversion and insurgent forces. is included helping build police and other

paramilitary internal security forces. e United States Information Agency

(USIA), through its overseas offices, was supposed to carry out not only its

traditionally assigned duties of gathering and disseminating information

and studying the U.S. image overseas, but it was also to render assistance to

countries under insurgent attack by helping them learn to undertake and

counter psychological warfare.9 (e Peace Corps was also organized at this

time with a purely people-to-people role that was the obverse of the coin

for security-related assistance.) It is clear from later news stories and books

about American involvement in Southeast Asia that the CIA was given an

operational role in supporting combat and irregular forces that went beyond its intelligence mission alone.10

All of these agencies and the DOD were instructed about the parts

they were to play in a coordinated program, with the president telling them

what they were supposed to do and how and in what areas they were to

work with each other. e DOD’s role was made broader than simply undertaking military operations; it was to work with other agencies at the

“inter-faces” between civil and military operations—psychological opera16

The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy
tions, searching for guerrillas and protecting local populations against them

and forms of small-scale and local economic assistance that could be clustered under the rubric of “military civic action.”

To coordinate all these activities from the top, the president established

what came to be called the Special Group (CI).11 is included the second

ranking men in the State and Defense Departments; the chairman of the

Joint Chiefs of Staff; the directors of the CIA, AID, and USIA; and a representative from the office of McGeorge Bundy, the president’s special assistant for National Security Affairs. e attorney general, the president’s

brother, was also a member of the group. He could obviously help keep the

president closely informed about its activities and carry the president’s direct authority and interest into the group and its deliberations.

In the spring of 1962, the Laotian government army moved against

the Pathet Lao but was routed at Nam a by what had been said to be an

inferior force that seemed to be on the verge of crossing into ailand. e

president moved American troops into ailand near its northern border.12

en, in difficult and sensitive negotiations at Geneva, Switzerland, a treaty

was patched together that brought Souvanna Phouma back into power in

a troika of incompatibles, temporarily stabilizing a very shaky situation.

ere had been one obvious fact: the Laotian army, which we [the United

States] had helped equip and train, had folded and could not withstand an

attack. ere were other signs of similar problems. Even earlier, the Draper

Report had stated that our military training programs in developing nations were not achieving their objectives.13 In the critical area of military logistics—simply maintaining equipment and keeping the armed forces

supplied—our training efforts were not succeeding. ese armies were

therefore not very effective and, instead of operating in the field, they clustered around a few areas near the national capitals and regional centers of

population and power. e Draper Report stated that their effectiveness for

conventional wars left much to be desired. It was worse still for the counterguerrilla warfare, where these armies needed extreme flexibility, good intelligence, and the ability to disperse into small groups against bands of a

tough and resourceful enemy who used a secret, cellular, and hierarchical organization that was very hard to penetrate. Additionally, in many countries,

the armed forces served a political purpose by being the muscle that kept

existing regimes in power. is, too, kept them near the population centers

where they could be watched and used as political instruments.

17

Chapter 1 • Antecedents
Moreover, the developing countries faced severe economic problems,

and their societies were characterized by a lack of national cohesion, as well

as a political elite usually separated by wealth, education, and a degree of

Westernization from the population they governed. us, it appeared that

for most of our allies outside NATO and ANZUS the political climate and

military capability were not well suited to fighting a tightly organized conspiratorial group able to play on local disaffections and to take advantage of

both the political and geographical remoteness of most people from the

influence of the central government. ere were, during this period, about

30 internal wars or conflicts at various stages of maturity in various parts of

the world.14 Such problems were coming to the fore in Southeast Asia, in

both Laos and Vietnam. ey were not recognized very early, but they became less obvious and insistent with the events that ultimately led to the

overthrow of Diem and the consequent series of military coups and countercoups in South Vietnam.

Drawing on some of the research results that I will discuss later, we can

now appreciate some of the underlying reasons for the increasing difficulties American policy and its implementation were facing in these areas. We

did not really understand the countries we had undertaken to help. We

learned ultimately that the guerrillas in South Vietnam did their work in

the villages, gaining the confidence of the population or using terror to separate them from the government and to wipe out the government’s sparse

cadre of trained administrators. But, we came to recognize early that it was

a war for the sympathy and support of the people—largely a rural people—

in which we were trying to play the important role of guiding and assisting the central government. We then found that we did not really

understand the relationships between that government and its people, or

among the various factions who might be involved, both within the government and without. eir history and their political and cultural motivations were mysterious to most Americans involved; it was not clear what

divided all these groups from each other, much less how they might be

drawn together. All this was proof, if any was needed, that the process of social development, revolution, and internal warfare in a country with which

we had undertaken a sort of marriage contract were not very clearly understood by those who were most deeply involved in the events. e philosophical underpinnings of the political and economic theories on which we

based our actions were complex and more specific to our culture than to

that of the Vietnamese—or, for that matter, the culture of other countries

with which we had become involved. Experts differed on the nature of the

18

The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy
problems, on who the key players were and what motivated them, and on

what should be done or how. Few of the experts were consulted, nor was

their advice often followed, as policies were made at the highest levels and

orders given to carry them out. At the same time, the Vietnamese Communists and Marxist revolutionary groups in other countries had a firmly

based social theory—founded on Marx, Lenin, Mao, Giap, and Che—

which, whether it might be right or wrong about processes of social evolution and revolution, lent cohesiveness and the discipline of dogma. So the

other side held this important advantage, while we moved pragmatically

from one step to the next, without fully understanding the players on both

sides or the implications of our moves, their moves, or the interactions between them.

Much of the burden fell on American advisors overseas at all levels.

When all was said and done, policy was made in Washington, DC, incorporating the advice of our ambassadors and sundry other high officials. It

then had to be implemented in the field. While ambassadors and theater

commanders and mission chiefs—the chiefs of the Military Assistance Advisory Groups, the AID missions overseas, the U.S. Information Service

and others—worked with the top levels of the local government, they were

assisted by staffs which, in the military’s case, could number in the hundreds and in Vietnam even before the entry of American combat troops

came to be numbered in the thousands. ese staffs had the “nuts and bolts”

job of making the policy work by interacting with lower-level officials and

officers in the foreign armed forces. While this job may have held a certain

glamour, it eventually emerged as difficult and frustrating. ere were a few

Americans who had long local experience and were intimately acquainted

with the local cultures and people, but the advisory staffs and the staffs responsible for administering American programs were composed primarily

of short-timers who had had a minimum of training to prepare them for the

nontechnical parts of their tasks. It was difficult for most of them to understand a people and a culture having the ingrained patterns of thousands

of years of evolution, totally different from their own. In general, staff personnel did not speak the local language. e orientations of the Americans

and those they came to assist toward getting a job done were poles apart.

In Indochina, for example, the South Vietnamese officer corps were

likely to have been politically appointed and, thus, politically motivated.

ey were not aggressive and job-success-oriented, but rather survival-oriented. Many were foreign trained—French or American—and were not

19

Chapter 1 • Antecedents
culturally in rapport with their enlisted troops. Some had been fighters with

or against the Viet Minh, and the instruction they received from their

American advisors often was not compatible with their understanding of

how to organize and fight in Vietnam. e U.S. Army Special Forces, in the

job given to them, had to deal with primitive tribesmen, the Montagnard

of the Vietnamese Highlands, and in the process they became involved in

the long-standing animosity between the Montagnard and the Vietnamese.

e latter looked on the mountain tribesmen as little better than animals,

while the tribesmen viewed the lowland, agriculturally oriented Vietnamese

as enemies who were trying to steal their land and stifle their freedom. In

one case, when an anthropologist asked a Montagnard village chief what he

would do with the weapons he had asked for—ostensibly to fight the Viet

Cong—the chief answered very frankly, “If we have guns, we can drive all

those Vietnamese out of here.”

In other areas of the world, the United States was making policies

about its relations with and giving aid to countries in transition from colonial to modern status. ese were fragmented societies just coming into the

twentieth century. Age-old differences and antagonisms existed among

many groups. e few Americans assigned in these countries became deeply

involved with the inhabitants after long periods of time and came to understand the issues, but they were not usually known to those in Washington who were making policy or to those serving a conventional “three-year

tour” in the country. Politically, these countries were generally not oriented

to or familiar with democratic government as we know it and could be sympathetic with as a people, and yet our aid had to be justified at least partly

on the basis of building defenses for Western democracy. On an economic

level, these countries were struggling, with small, capitol-oriented and well

educated elites and masses of relatively primitive peasant populations, to

make the transition from suppliers of raw materials to the West to states

undertaking modern commercial and industrial activities.

All of this led to social stresses that must, in any case, create conflict, violence, and revolutionary forces. It was not surprising that the military often

could not learn to maintain and use modern equipment and its required

forms of organization, since they had no basis of technology and industry

on which to build. ese conditions existed everywhere in varying degrees,

but they were not always obvious to high-level American policy makers or

low-level advisors and trainers. Yet judgments based on far-from-adequate

knowledge had to be made in an environment of communication across

20

The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy
cultures where even simple acts or words in the wrong pattern could destroy

a man’s usefulness for the remainder of his “tour,” be he ambassador or simple soldier.

is, then, is how the situation had evolved as American foreign policy led to increased American involvement in world affairs. Historically,

Western nations in colonial times had a lode of data deriving from and relevant for the master-slave relationship between governors and governed.

Such data were often not germane, and the learning problem was much

more severe in the more egalitarian relationship we had undertaken with

the Vietnamese. We had insufficient knowledge to do the job as well as we

wanted to and, while this may be typical of the international efforts of all

nations, growing awareness led to a strong feeling at the highest levels of

American government that we would have to do better. By 1964, the kind

of option held by some who had key roles in participation with or observation of the American advisory effort in Vietnam, that only about 15 percent of the American advisors could establish effective relationships with

their counterparts, was beginning to be heard. And questions about how

this performance could be improved were being asked.

From our current view, these issues could play into argument that we

should not have become involved. But, however we might view Vietnam

now in rueful retrospect, the point at the time was not whether the job

should be done or even whether it could be done, but rather how to do it

better.

21

Chapter 1 • Antecedents

Chapter 2

Social Science To the Rescue

In its action-oriented view, the government had much reinforcement from

an important part of the social science community. Among its other efforts,

that community had rendered past service on difficult human problems for

the DOD. Now it saw a new set of problems, and it made recommendations

to undertake research to solve them, fully confident that research would

provide many of the answers. Some of these social scientists had been involved in studies of international problems with government support or

otherwise. But the bulk of the research that had proven so useful for the

Armed Forces was performed in the areas of selection and training, human

factors engineering, and performance evaluation. A summary of the history of these contributions and the evolution of what needed to be done

next was prepared for the formal testimony given before the House Foreign

Affairs Subcommittee under Congressman Dante Fascell1 as a consequence

of events that will soon be described. is presentation still appears to be

the best concise description available; it is repeated here verbatim:

e accomplishment of the DOD mission depends basically

upon how well the people in the Armed Forces do their jobs. is

implies that they must have the knowledge and skills required

for the jobs and must want to perform them as well as they can.

e behavioral sciences (which includes psychology, sociology,

economics, anthropology, and political science) are devoted as

basic disciplines to the understanding of how and why people

act as they do. As applied sciences, they are directed to improving man’s effectiveness and so have a direct input to the DOD

mission.

e number and variety of jobs in the Armed Forces is almost as

great as in the country at large. ey range from simple, low-level

tasks such as washing vehicles to those of the highest complexity such as commanding large combat organizations.

e Defense Department, through recruiting and the draft, must

staff these jobs with capable people at a minimum waste of time,

money, and human talent. Individuals who cannot do even the

simplest of the Armed Forces tasks become a financial and managerial burden. ey must be identified and rejected before entering the service. Beginning with World War I, this process has

been performed with ever-increasing accuracy through the use

23
of tests and procedures developed by mental measurement psychologists. e savings made by these are certainly in the millions of dollars per year.

Among those who were admitted to the Armed Forces there are,

of course, people capable of doing a large number and variety of

jobs. Some can do even the most complex and it is of primary importance to identify these and make sure that their potential is

used. But practically everyone is better suited for one kind of job

than another. He* is better off and the efficiency of the Department is increased if he is trained for and assigned to the kind of

job he can do the best. It was a standing, only half-joke for

decades that the army makes cooks out of college professors and

instructors out of high school dropouts. is charge has substantially lost its basis as the result of classification test batteries

now used in all of the Departments. e worth of these was

demonstrated dramatically during World War II by the Air Force

Air Crew Classification Battery. Studies performed at the end of

the war conclusively demonstrated, that without this aid for separating men who were well-qualified for pilot training from those

whose chances of ever qualifying for wings was low, the Air Force

would have been required to put close to twice as many men into

training in order to produce the same number of pilots obtained

from the smaller but qualified group . . .

Once the individual has been properly screened and classified,

he must be given the knowledge and skills necessary to do his

job. It is probable that the Department of Defense is the largest

training establishment in the world.

Estimates vary but no one would deny that $3 billion is a minimum figure for the annual DOD expenditure in education and

training. e efficient investment of these funds is possible only

if our training methods and procedures produce proficient people for the least amount of time and money. Research on how to

identify the knowledge, skills, habits, and attitudes required to

perform a particular job competently and to instill these quickly

and permanently has paid off in many ways. Courses have been

shortened or completely altered by removing unrealistic, “gingerbread” content which was not really required for job performance.

24

The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy

* Use of the male pronoun throughout is an artifact of the ethos of the time, before women were admitted to the Armed Forces. Today we would say “he or she” or the euphemistic “they.”
Large sums of money have been saved by substituting inexpensive training simulation for expensive and rare operational equipment. e demand for hard-to-get instructors has been kept in

bounds through the use of new and more effective aids and

methods. Most important is the fact that the training end product in doing the real world job has been improved.

ere are outstanding examples of payoffs of research in this

large field. One is the Army’s modernized rifle marksmanship

course, Trainfire I, which trains the soldier to shoot in combat

rather than on a rifle range. Another is the Air Force work in

programmed instruction which has produced time savings in the

neighborhood of 33 percent in a wide variety of courses with no

loss and frequently a gain in graduates’ proficiency. Here again,

business and industry have capitalized on this pioneering work by

the Defense Department.

Understanding what a job requires and training men for it, demands knowledge of how men use their senses and their muscles

to get it done. Furthermore, some jobs place very high demands

on the senses and may even damage them. is has produced a

requirement for increased understanding of sensory and motor

processes acquired through psychophysics and psychophysiology.

e recent walk in space would not have been possible had it not

been for the studies of weightlessness performed by the Air Force

psychologists at Wright Field and studies of balance made by the

Navy psychologists at Pensacola. Navy work on night vision and

dark adaptation increased our effectiveness on land and sea long

before the physicist made his contribution of infrared scopes. e

Army’s studies of the effects of loud noise and blasts have saved

the hearing of large numbers of men.

In addition, psychophysiological information coupled with job

analysis and the study of how various motor skills are developed

and maintained has made it possible to design jobs and, indeed,

entire systems to ensure the best use of man’s sensory and motor

capabilities. With the increased complexity of our weapons systems, has come a recognition that men and machine must be fitted together if they are to operate effectively. e design of

equipment ranging from shovels to display and control panels

on our most sophisticated weaponry is now performed with the

help of the research generated by human factors engineering psychologists in all of the military departments. Indeed, without this

kind of know-how, some of our present systems could not possibly be manned.

25

Chapter 2 • Social Science To the Rescue
An example of the kinds of savings resulting from this type of

work is the $3 million saved through early design changes in the

Pershing missile system and a 50-percent reduction in the number of operators required. Another is the reduction of 25 percent

in the loading time of the Sergeant missile while reducing the

required number of men from 11 to 6.

Having the right jobs and equipment correctly designed and the

right men properly trained is not enough to guarantee efficient

manpower management. It is also necessary to assign the properly classified and trained men to the jobs they were trained for.

e importance of this step was highlighted by the recent study

of the draft that showed even slight decreases in assignment

“slippage” could result in substantial improvements in the overall effectiveness of our forces. With the availability of computers

and the development of highly sophisticated statistical theory

about ways of achieving maximum use of personnel, the Departments are now in a position to insure against malassignment

or costly and harmful pooling of idle men. An example of the

kind of breakthrough that can result from this type of research

is the Pensacola Personnel Appraisal System in which, at any desired time during a pilot’s training, his progress and achievements

can be reviewed and his chances of successfully completing the

course can be determined. e resulting elimination of further

investment in “bad bets” has already resulted in savings in the

millions of dollars.

Men forget as well as learn. e Department must, therefore,

concern itself with the maintenance of proficiency after formal

training is completed. It is also vital to have a continuing and accurate appraisal of the competence level of our forces. For both

these purposes, job proficiency measures are necessary. Such

measures have become more numerous and more realistic because of the years of research on how performance can be most

accurately and reliably assessed.

We are basically interested in performance when the chips are

down. Frequently this means performance under the kinds of extreme stress generated in combat. We know that effectiveness is

greatly reduced by stress. What we must know more about is how

to design jobs and equipment and train men to be more resistant to stress effects. Our success in this basic research effort may

be crucial for our national strength when it counts.

26

The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy
A large proportion of the jobs in the Armed Forces involve teamwork. Furthermore, some of the newer and most important tasks

must be performed by groups of men who are isolated under difficult conditions for considerable periods of time. e astronauts

in a manned-orbiting laboratory or men in an armored personnel carrier during nuclear warfare are cases in point. ese conditions and, indeed, any conditions that demand cooperation

introduce a number of problems.

Research is, therefore, being directed to improving teamwork,

lessening frictions, and increasing the compatibility of men assigned to a group. Some of the earliest work of this kind was

done in composing SAC air crews and resulted in clear gains in

their efficiency. Subsequently, social psychologists and sociologists have been working on similar problems for submarine crews,

infantry squads, missile teams, etc.

Our personnel must not only work together but, under that present concept of worldwide Defense Department activities, they must

also work with both military and civilian foreign nationals . . .

Since World War II, the foreign relations of the United States

have increasingly involved the developing nations of Asia, Africa,

and Latin America. In all these areas countries have been struggling against great odds to establish stable governments, to maintain their independence, and to improve their standards of

living—efforts the United States has supported. e major Communist powers have, on the other hand, sought to exploit the instability and economic problems in these nations to expand their

control over large parts of the world.

Khrushchev’s January 6, 1961, statement that the Soviet Union

will support so-called “national liberation wars” has been often

reaffirmed by the Soviet Union, even as recently as June 18, 1965,

in Pravda. On December 31, 1962, the Peking People’s Daily

stated that: “e Communists of all countries . . . must . . . resolutely support wars of national liberation . . . ” Evidence of this

“support”—which includes instigation—has been obvious in

Laos, Vietnam, and recently in ailand. Communist machinations, directly or through proxy countries such as Cuba, have also

threatened many countries in Africa and Latin America, and

have disrupted their internal affairs.

e State Department, the Defense Department, and key agencies such as the CIA, AID, and USIA have increasingly had to

27

Chapter 2 • Social Science To the Rescue
turn their attention to meeting this threat. Because of its involvement in military assistance activities in these nations, and

because of the all-encompassing nature of the threat—in the political, economic, social as well as military spheres—the Defense

Department’s mission in this area have been viewed as broader

than the traditional mission of providing the U.S. Armed Forces

for the national defense . . .

Events in Vietnam and elsewhere have made it clear, however,

that while improved military hardware can make a very important contribution to the defense against Communist subversive

warfare, this by itself is not enough. In fact, proper use of “nonmaterial” tools represented by sound knowledge and actions in

the nonmilitary sphere can obviate the need to involve large military forces.

Moreover, whether the military is involved in direct conflict or

pre-insurgency military assistance, U.S. military people all over

the world must work with and implement the counterinsurgency

programs. e war itself revolves around the allegiance and support of the local population. e Defense Department has therefore recognized that part of its research and development efforts

to support counterinsurgency operations must be oriented toward the people, United States and foreign, involved in this type

of war; and the DOD has called on the types of scientists—anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists, political scientists,

economists—whose professional orientation to human behavior

would enable them to make useful contributions in this area . . .

ere had been gradual buildup to this latter view, with accompanying

evolution of the details. In the few years prior to 1960, a research group examining the problems of social science applied to Defense problems, under

the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution, had made recommendations

for work in an area that they called “persuasion and motivation.” In a later

publication, the leader of this study explained it as follows:2

e topics of persuasion and motivation refer to the methods of

influencing people by means that are short of force, or authoritative command, or other direct incentives, on the one hand and

short of formal education or training, on the other hand.

Persuasion is exercised for the purpose of motivation; it shapes

expectations, molds opinions and attitudes. . . . Persuasion characterizes the normal, everyday means of social intercourse, engaged in by everyone. e military services constantly use

28

The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy
persuasion to motivate and influence their own people and those

people outside the services with whom they interact. e military

services are regularly used in indirect ways by the government to

influence foreign peoples and foreign states . . . In any future war

of significant length, there will be “special warfare,” guerrilla operations, and infiltration. Subversion of our troops and populations will be attempted and prisoners of war will be subjected to

“brainwashing.” e military establishment must be prepared to

assist promoting recuperation and cohesiveness within possibly

disorganized civilian populations, while attempting to shift loyalties within enemy populations. . . . e military establishment

needs to know all that can be known about persuasion (including) the processes of persuasion; group relations and persuasion;

the relation of cultural differences to persuasion; persuasion and

social change . . .

Another way to approach the interaction of values and persuasion

is to study in greater detail the methods of persuasion and indoctrination used by the Chinese and other Asian people in the

comparison with our own attempts to build favorable attitudes in

these countries. Still another is to study the effects of our own

military postures in different countries. From such testing of theories of persuasive processes can emerge a systematic classification of the value systems, stereotypes, and national images of the

chief cultures with which military establishments are likely to

have extensive contact . . .

On several occasions, our representatives have seemed to be caught

unaware by revolutions, when, with no warning, rioting mobs have

boiled up and around our bases reflecting a state of public opinion

and anger which previously seemed not to exist . . .

e primary need is to create a small number of stable, permanent

centers of research on persuasion as related to politico-military

needs. . . . Military support should seek to integrate basic and applied research in the pursuit of a technology of persuasion . . .

In the present structure of research support, and because of its

deep technological needs, the Department of Defense is the logical source of this new type of support for the systematic, longrange study of human behavior.

Shortly after the issuance of this report, Dr. Harold Brown became the

Director of Defense Research and Engineering (DDR&E). At President

Kennedy’s request in 1961, Congress had appropriated approximately $120

29

Chapter 2 • Social Science To the Rescue
million to expand research and development programs having to do with

limited war. To obtain some better perspective than then existed about how

the money could usefully be spent, Dr. Brown established a committee of

eminent scientists and high-level DOD civilians and military people, including those on his own staff chiefly responsible for this area of work, to

explore the nature of the limited-war problem and recommended how these

subsequent funds should be spent. In addition to hearing briefings in Washington from both the Defense and the State Departments about strategy,

tactics, the military forces, and the relevant research and development programs, the group traveled extensively to developing countries—where the

United States was involved in military assistance programs, and where we

were attempting to help the local governments prepare to face the approaching conflicts.

is study group, which included physicists, engineers, generals, and

admirals, was largely concerned with problems of military hardware,

weapons systems, and military tactics and strategy. But it recognized that

there were broader human problems involved, and a subcommittee, including some of the members of the Smithsonian group who had worked

on the report quoted previously, was convened to look at these questions.

e subcommittee’s recommendations reinforced observations made by the

main group in its travels and briefings overseas. A substantial portion of

the final study report was devoted to issues related to what came to be called

“non-material research.” It was recognized that, although weapons systems

could and needed to be created to help the United States match its own

military forces and its military assistance to the kinds of problems then

emerging in the world, these would not provide all of the answers. How

governments could organize to combat guerilla warfare and insurgency, how

to meet the insurgents’ psychological offensives, how the “static” armies of

the developing countries could be motivated to fight, how these governments could better relate to their people were pointed out as the most important questions facing the national military assistance programs. A

number of specific recommendations based on the contribution of the social science subcommittee were made for expanding research in this area.

When briefing the results of the main study group’s work to Secretary McNamara, the chairman of the limited-war study group and a world

renowned physicist commented that, while World War I might have been

considered the chemist’s war and World War II was considered the physicists’ war, World War III, which we might already be in, might well have to

be considered the social scientists’ war.

30

The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy
After its first report, the Smithsonian group reconstituted a group of

politically oriented social scientists to explore in greater detail national defense problems in terms of America’s issues overseas. A study under Ithiel

de Sola Pool of MIT led to another report in 1963, which became much

more specific about revolutionary warfare, insurgency, and counterinsurgency, and the research was needed to help the United States cope with

such problems in its overseas relations. is later report3 set the tone for

much of the effort that followed.

It is worth quoting extensively from it, because it illustrates many important aspects of the advice the Defense Department was getting. It is,

first and foremost, quite lengthy; ideas are explored in depth and at leisure

in a sometimes abstruse language that, later, would make it difficult for the

action-oriented parts of the Defense bureaucracy to understand, accept, and

implement the results of studies by social scientists. Second, the report illustrates the kind of thinking about the problems that, if it may have been

subject to disagreement on the part of some social scientists, was at least

widely enough accepted to evoke no great hostility. And third, it demonstrates plainly one of the lines of thinking that died only over a long period

of time: that the Defense Department should study problems of social

change very broadly and that this was a perfectly legitimate activity. e

following paragraphs may seem closely connected, but they are drawn

widely, although in sequence, from the 250-odd pages of the report.

e objective of this book is to consider what social science can

contribute to more effectively conduct research of the free world’s

defense effort. It does not aim to be exhaustive but rather to spot

significant topics on which social science has heretofore been too

little used.

Our chapters skip over those fields in which the military establishment has already made extensive use of the new technology

of human behavior . . .

As the Advisory Panel reviewed the outcome of its efforts, it

came increasingly to realize that it had inadvertently focused on

one aspect of the Defense Department’s problems, namely the

management of its own establishment.

With the partial exception of the report on persuasion and motivation, which concerned itself extensively with psychological

warfare, all of the reports dealt with the expansion of social science knowledge of a kind that could be used to make the manpower of the military establishment more effective . . .

31

Chapter 2 • Social Science To the Rescue
But there is also an entirely different domain of Defense Department problems which, the research group recognized, had

not yet been considered. To it, too, the social sciences might make

a contribution. [emphasis added]

is other domain of problems may be roughly characterized as

the operations of the Defense Department in relation to the eternal world . . .

It is thus not in criticism but simply in candid observation that

one must recognize that the defense establishment was eager to

accept the aid of social science on its vast management problems

but less willing to concede that social scientists might have something to contribute to those decisions, which constitute the crux

of military planning and operations . . .

In many places, the military job can only be accomplished by a

process of nation building. . . . Success in counterinsurgency outflanks a stalemate in the field by concentrating on actions which

will in two to five years’ time establish stable communities in a

progressing nation, with the surviving guerrillas quietly returned

from their hide-outs . . .

Until 1961, when this study was written, the United States has

communicated through its postures and strategies a resolve to

deter and contain—to deter the Soviet Union from a nuclear attack and to contain the Communist forces within their borders.

At the same time, it communicates an intention to help the new

and poor countries make a free choice politically and economically . . .

ese questions also arise with respect to the policy of commitment. Where are we prepared to draw the line? Where do we

use our troops? Where, if at all, and how do we defend against

the internal subversion and revolution which is the Communist

pattern? . . . It is entirely possible that the Soviet blueprint calls

for no invasion at all by communist troops of one of these countries . . . if we defend only against invasion, we may never have a

chance to strike with either the left or the right hand.

is is one implication of our military posture. . . . Another is the

fact that our opponents seem so free to exploit all the revolutionary movements and expressions of mass discontent in the developing countries and the colonial states. We, on the other and,

have been cast in the role of defending the status quo . . .

32

The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy
ere is another reason for making a special plea on behalf of

the study of internal wars at this time . . .

Much is in doubt about the causes of internal war, as we shall

see, but of one proposition we may be certain: internal war is

closely connected with social change . . . from this basic assumption it follows that one should expect internal political violence

to persist, perhaps to increase. . . . e tremendous number of internal wars in the period 1946–1959 . . . —and in other “transitional” periods, such as late antiquity, the Renaissance and

Reformation, and the early nineteenth century in Europe—is evidence of this . . .

It is particularly likely today that the Communist states will use

internal wars as tools of international politics. ey have already

done so frequently in the postwar period and are likely to do so

frequently in the future. Communism—especially the presentday Chinese version—is a militant messianic creed, and such

creeds always tend to produce expansionist zealots. If the use of

conventional warfare is closed to the Communists as a means of

exporting their utopia, they will try other means to the same end,

and the means most readily available is the instigation and clandestine support of internal violence. Furthermore, Communism

places no immediate normative prohibitions on political violence;

on the contrary, Communism justifies and glorifies violence. In

communist doctrines of course, violence is purely instrumental

to other ends . . . Communists have available in other countries

much material for fashioning internal wars: much desperate discontent, many sublime and frustrated hopes, and much anachronistic hatred of non-Communist Western systems. Most

important of all, the Communists have an enormous lead in the

experience of and reflection upon internal war. If we are far ahead

of them in deterrence theory, they are immeasurably farther

ahead of us in revolutionary theory . . .

At present, the most probable kinds of internal war, once started,

are difficult, if not impossible, to win by those on the defensive.

Above all, this is likely to be true of guerrillas fighting in favorable

terrain . . . if the noncombatant population is well-disposed toward

the guerrillas and the incumbents have any sort of scruples . . .

All this gives added point to the frequently repeated statement

that internal war adds a new dimension, a political dimension,

to the problems of warfare. Internal war is a struggle for political loyalties no less than military victories, a struggle requiring in33

Chapter 2 • Social Science To the Rescue
tense political consciousness on both sides. Indeed, the political

art of detecting internal war potential must have priority over the

military art of fighting it. is applies to military policy makers

no less than civilian ones.* In a world of alliances, foreign bases,

and far-flung power blocs, detecting in advance the instability of

regimes and knowing how to shore them up with fair chances of

success are among the most urgent imperatives of the military as

well as the political arts . . .

Under the discussion of internal wars, a number of topics for research

were presented and elaborated:

. . . Analysis of the uses of internal war situations. Since internal

war situations are often largely inchoate in their initial stages;

since they are very difficult to anticipate correctly under the best

of circumstances, owing to the role of ephemeral precipitants in

bringing them about and the complexity of their preconditions;

and since they are particularly difficult to anticipate correctly

with the knowledge presently available; nothing would seem to

be more urgently necessary than knowing how to use them for

one’s own policy purposes once they have occurred. We live in a

revolutionary world in which internal war is a basic fact of life. In

such a world, even conservative powers need conspiratorial theories; they can hardly hope to contain the tide of revolutions

everywhere, especially while being in the dark about the forces

causing it. Studies of techniques by which internal wars can be

molded and channeled are therefore of the utmost importance.

e Machiavellian overtones, the apparent cynicism, may make

such studies repellent but that cannot be helped.

. . . Studies of Communist theories of internal war. No doubt we

can learn a good deal about using internal wars from the Communists, who are masters of that unattractive art. But this is only

one of the many reasons for studying Communist ideas about

internal war. Without subscribing to the theory that Communists can make internal wars under any and all conditions, or the

view that modern internal wars are all Communist-inspired, one

can nevertheless argue that knowledge of Communist ideas

about the preconditions of internal war is indispensable at present for anticipating particularly crucial internal wars—those in

which Communists are in fact involved . . .

34

The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy

* Emphasis added. From this statement, as will be seen, the genesis of Project Camelot can be traced.
. . . Studies of the efficiency of certain policy responses to internal war potential. Here the most important subjects are to determine the optimum uses of repression, diversion, and

concession, or combinations of the three. Each of these responses

to internal war potential is potentially useful and potentially dangerous. Each has worked and failed in certain situations . . .

Under what conditions, structural and behavioral, are they likely

either to work or to fail? How far should they be carried? What

kinds of repression, diversion, or concession work best in what

sort of situations? How can one policy response best be combined with another—repression, for example, with concessions

or diversions?

. . . Studies of the internal war potential of critically sensitive

areas. In general, the systematic study of internal war potential

must be a long drawn-out process; there are no shortcuts to

knowledge as inherently complicated and difficult to acquire as

knowledge of this subject. In certain countries, however, we can

hardly await fully adequate theoretical knowledge to carry out

concrete appraisals. Such countries are those in which the security of important military bases might be imperiled by internal

war or countries in which internal war might imperil our fundamental international designs . . .

As for other projects relating to the problem of anticipating internal war these can easily be derived from the text of the study . . .

. . . [there is] one other topic for research, to illustrate the kind of

general-purpose inquiry requiring large resources which might

be particularly useful at this stage of inquiry. is topic involves

inquiring very broadly into what might be called “symptoms” (or

“indicators”) of internal war potential . . .

In the next few years, it can be expected that there will be a growing interest among social scientists in the problems of guerrilla

warfare and counter-subversion. It is, indeed, not impossible that

this area may prove to be a more fruitful one for social scientists

than many other aspects of military strategy. is is because the

problems posed by such forms of warfare and violence are intimately related to questions about the social structure, culture, and

behavior patterns of the populations involved in such conflicts.

Without question, social science research is in a strong position to

contribute useful knowledge in designing and developing internal

security forces. [emphasis added] Indeed most of our understanding about communist strategy and tactics in guerrilla war35

Chapter 2 • Social Science To the Rescue
fare and subversion and of their basic appeal in underdeveloped

countries has come out of the works of social scientists . . .

In the last few years, social scientists have becoming increasingly

interested in the political administrative roles which armies can

play in the nation-building process. . . . ere is, in addition, a

long tradition of historical analyses of the domestic political role

of military leaders, but unfortunately most of the work in the

field of civil-military relations in the West has only marginal application for understanding current problems in the newly

emerging nations . . .

Clearly, the research administrator who wanted to base a specific program on these recommendations had some work to do. Later, recommendations by social scientists as to the research that was needed would become

more precise. But it is obvious that the government and important members of the social science community were converging on both the definition of an important problem for research and on acceptance of the premise

that it was “researchable.”

36

The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy
Chapter 3

A System of Ethics and Values

In both the government’s and the scientists’ views, there were some implicit

assumptions about the legitimacy of the activities in question.

First, there was the question of counterinsurgency (or “internal war”) as

a matter of interest for scientific investigation. In the current view of much

of the intellectual community, as a result of our problems in Vietnam and

the opposition of that community to the war, the term “counterinsurgency”

has been taken on the connotation of suppressing “legitimate” revolutionary social developments in the third world (or even at home). is interpretation of the term was stressed by Senator Fulbright, as well as by many

of those in our universities who increasingly voiced their opposition to

American overseas involvements in such conflicts. But in 1960–64, “insurgency” was viewed in relationship to the Soviet and Communist China’s approaches to protracted warfare, for influencing countries and changing their

governments to be more sympathetic with the “socialist” countries and “progressive forces all over the world.” We in the United States viewed “wars of

national liberation” as a polite term for “Communist takeover,” using terror,

guerrilla warfare, coercion, and suppression of freedom. We were still sensitive about the problem of “brainwashing” with Communist techniques

generally—for example, Viet Cong methods of indoctrinating their adherents, thereby making them dangerous and effective insurgents. Such terms

as “unconventional warfare” and “special warfare” were used to describe both

what the revolutionary forces and the defenders against them were doing,

but these terms either had specialized military definitions or did not seem

to cover the complete gamut of activities—military, civil, political, and economic—that had to be undertaken to defeat “wars of national liberation.”

us, while those who were defining what research needed to be done in

this area were not unaware of the other possible connotations of the term, at

this time, the term “counterinsurgency” came to serve as a convenient shorthand for American resistance to Communist takeovers of weak countries

through “wars of national liberation.” e term did not change its complexion until our efforts in Vietnam faltered and turned the American intellectual community sour on the idea of America being “the world’s policeman.”*

37

* But some things never die, they just get redefined. Today (2012), the “counterinsurgency” term is applied with public support to such things as countering the Taliban’s attempt to recapture government

functions in Afghanistan. Note, however, that it still applies to what amounts to irregular warfare.
A related semantic-cum-philosophical problem, which was to come on

stronger later, was whether research on another country’s problems constituted undue political interference in that country’s internal affairs. Even in

a time of growing Defense Department interest in such research, there was

sensitivity on this point. It is well known how the arguments about Vietnam began around the issue of whether this was, in truth, a civil war or an

attack from the outside, and the United States government took great pains

to prove the latter view through State Department White Papers1 and even

remarks by the president at his press conferences. A later article in Foreign

Affairs by George Carver2 traced North Vietnamese involvement in the

south from the beginning. But it seems, in retrospect, that none of this convinced anybody, and the opposing sides held to their views. Of course, well

before this issue became important and gained added poignancy from direct American participation in the war, military and economic assistance

programs had acted as instruments of foreign policy through which we

hoped to influence the path of economic and political development of many

nations of the world. Even then, we were confusedly aware of the problems

of reconciling the many uses of such assistance with our public policy.3 In

addition, as illustrated by the many arguments and discussions in Congress

and the general sensitivity, at home and abroad, on the same issue of aid

“with strings attached,” we were torn between the motives of altruism and

extraction of maximum value from the expenditure of American dollars.

As far as the Defense Department was concerned in the early days of

the Vietnam War (and since, for that matter), not much further rationale

was needed than that the United States had been asked for help by a beleaguered “allied” government, and the whole official American policy from

the president on down was oriented toward providing it. So this was not

viewed as interference so much as assistance and, from the research point

of view, there was even less concern because the research supported the

quest for knowledge, understanding, and greater effectiveness in the overseas activities of the United States government. e main question that was

asked by the researchers was whether these could be provided. e Harvard

research groups studying the USSR and the Peoples’ Republic of China in

the early fifties, as well as others, had shown ways of doing research about

countries on the opposite side without access to much more than was published by those countries or could be gleaned by visiting scholars. As for

research on the problems of friendly countries, the question “is it polite to

study friends?” was raised in the second Smithsonian report (see, no. 3, ch.

2), and was answered as follows:

38

The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy
Research on political matters is a neighbor of intelligence. Perhaps this is the reason why a reluctance to study political conditions in friendly nations, or to be studied by friendly nations can

be detected. . . . Another reason for reluctance to conduct certain

types of research in friendly nations may be that this kind of activity can be taken as indicating distrust of the government of

that nation. . . . ere is often something faintly ridiculous about

the inhibitions applied to research among allies. Furthermore,

the United States in particular, and to an only slightly lesser degree, Great Britain, France, and West Germany publish about

themselves large amounts of information in categories that are

useful in connection with the functioning of alliances. It is not,

therefore, as though any of these nations were seeking information about others that they are not willing to disclose about

themselves. Nevertheless, the existence of suspicion about some

kinds of research, especially among emerging nations without

fully democratic governments, should be recognized and faced

as one of the problems besetting researchers in this field . . .

Two measures for dealing with this suspicion are suggested for

further exploration. One would involve having alliances themselves sponsor research. . . . It is probable that alliance-sponsored

research would not only overcome a large part of the resistance

to studies of friendly countries but would also make it possible

to benefit from better cooperation on the part of significant

groups in the country being studied.

A related suggestion is that greater use be made of cooperation

between private American social science research organizations

and research groups in friendly countries. . . . Many of them, both

within and without the universities, have traditions of cooperating with American research institutions and have been willing

to cooperate in sponsoring and executing studies of mutual interest.

at is, the general idea was put forward that, by enlisting the support

and collaboration of researchers and government in the country under study,

the work could be undertaken and would, in fact, be welcome. We were to

learn over the years that the problem was not so simple for many reasons,

but that, too, lay in the future.

It is clear, however, that as the Defense Department, in its efforts to

learn more about its military problems in the developing countries, followed the strong and consistent advice given by the scientific community.

39

Chapter 3 • A System of Ethics and Values
e members of that community who were involved and the government,

in general, held a group of premises and a set of values in common, without which the research efforts could never have been initiated. In 1963 and

early 1964, they were, in summary, as follows:

• e problems of the United States’ relations with developing

countries were important and contained many unknowns of a

cultural, philosophical, strategic, and operational character.

ere was deep concern about Communist expansion via Communist

groups within developing countries that were supported by China or the

USSR and were exploiting the difficulties faced by these countries. If this

expansion were successful, it would be detrimental to American interest

everywhere.

• e Communist instrument of expansion was the “war of national liberation”—internal war or insurgency.

• Assisting developing nations with counterinsurgency was the

American national strategy for preventing this expansion, and

was a legitimate form of expression and implementation of

American foreign policy.

• e U.S. Armed Forces played a major role in counterinsurgency, not only in the military sphere but in such areas as local

economic development, psychological warfare, and internal security.

• Research was needed to help solve the many problems associated with providing counterinsurgency assistance to foreign

countries. e unknowns that needed to be researched included

the processes of social change, revolutionary organization, guerrilla and counter guerrilla warfare, the role of the military in the

development of new nations, the uses of “persuasion and motivation” in the advisory processes, and cultural factors that would

increase the effectiveness of advisors.

Research in the social sciences had helped solve “internal” problems for

the Defense Department, and it could help solve these “external” problems

as well.

• It was acceptable and desirable for the Defense Department to

provide the funds for this research because it had the resources,

the mission, and the necessary extensive contacts within the

countries concerned.

40

The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy
• It was acceptable to perform research in allied foreign countries about their problems, and the sensitivities involved in such

research could be overcome by enlisting the support and participation of local foreign governments and scholars in the research.

It would be an exaggeration to say that these premises and value orientations were universally held. To the extent that the key figures in the

Defense Department thought about social science research in this context,

there was a good mixture of suspicion, or skepticism, about its value. e social scientists involved would have attributed this to a lack of understanding rather than pointed hostility. ese social scientists did not feel

especially inhibited by ethical considerations or the possibility of sanctions

by their peers for their involvement. e professional organizations were

permissive if not apathetic; only the American Psychological Association

had a code of professional ethics, and this dealt with personal behavior on

the part of psychologists rather than with the kind of work they might undertake or their relationships with or choice of clients.4e whole was pervaded by an atmosphere of intellectual excitement and inquiry stimulated

by the Kennedy presidency, an atmosphere whose momentum was to continue for another year, still. It would not have been difficult to obtain a majority opinion within the government community and the community of

scholars most concerned with the pertinent research in the social sciences

that this was a valid set of premises on which to build government research

and actions programs. We shall examine, later, the transformation that was

to overtake these premises. e reader who is skeptical of them now might

note how difficult it is to project backward from the mid-1970s through the

bitterness of the late sixties to that earlier, more innocent, time.*

As could be expected (see chapter 15), there were objections from the

anthropological community about the performance of such work by the

DOD, but these did not flare up into a major “Camelot-like” imbroglio. In

retrospect, I concluded that the difference between then and now was, first,

that the effort initiated in 2008 was proposed and “owned” by Secretary of

41

Chapter 3 • A System of Ethics and Values

* It is of interest to note that the idea of performing research by social scientists to understand our enemies better was revived in the context of the wars in Iraq and later in Afghanistan. I took the trouble,

in 2008, of writing to the person named in an article in Science as the one in OSD responsible for getting this effort, termed the Minerva Initiative, off the ground (For a brief description of the initiative,

see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minerva_Initiative). is led me into several meetings with people

involved in management of the effort and with the staff chief of Representative Ike Skelton, a key member of the House Armed Services Committee. And, all this activity led me to give much further thought

to understanding the differences between “then (1964–65)” and “now (2008).”
Defense Robert Gates rather than by an official in the bowels of the organization who might then be viewed as having made trouble for the secretary of defense that the latter could have done without. Second, the 2008

presidential election cycle was heating up amongst much antagonistic rhetoric within the primary campaigns and then during the party conventions

and the candidates’ election campaigns. is political period thus provided

much more grist for the media mill than the secretary of defense’s efforts,

which the media essentially ignored, to enlist social scientists’ help in understanding our opponents in the ongoing wars and related matters.

What’s the same, I think, is the sensitivity of the subject. As soon as a

social scientist breaks out and does or says something that the media sees

as newsworthy and would make a news article of interest or amusement to

the general public. e media will jump on it, mainly as something to make

fun of or to be snide or accusatory about, either vis-à-vis the government

because “why didn’t you understand what this guy is saying” or vis-à-vis the

social scientist because “why did you probe into that sensitive area?” e

sensitivity of what social scientists might find and how that would strike the

media, and how that might backfire on policy, I think, is much the same

now as it was then. An alert reader can detect the signs of such sensitivity

in much of the discussion about the Taliban in Afghanistan and its role in

disturbances in the tribal areas of Pakistan—for example, the floating of

the story that a polio vaccination campaign was purportedly used to gain

entrée to the compound where Osama Bin Laden was hiding, and the sequelae in punishing the doctor who helped in that campaign. Similar sensitivities can be identified, with some thought, to the Israeli/Arab conflict

or to the apparent Iranian attempts to move toward acquiring nuclear

weapons capability. e recent media-congressional circus that led UN Ambassador Susan Rice to withdraw from possible nomination as Secretary

of State by President Obama offers a similar, related example of the kinds

of media-congressional interactions that characterized the Camelot affair,

as will be seen.

42

The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy
PART II

THE BUREAUCRACY

Prefatory Note: A Personal Prologue

How did an engineer become deeply involved with the social sciences? As these things usually happen, almost imperceptibly. Much of my career had been spent on defense problems,

and I had developed a strong personal and professional interest in military affairs, strategy, and the problems of the operation of American military forces on the world scene. I

joined the Institute for Defense Analyses in 1960, had become involved in studies of tactical weapons systems and limited war, and participated as executive secretary of the group

performing the limited-war study for Harold Brown, mentioned in chapter 2. ese studies all showed the difficulty and complexity of the military problems inherent in our foreign policy, and led to the conviction that most of the contemporary theories of military

strategy developed by the early 1960s did not lend sufficient structure and clarity to the difficult tasks of creating military forces able to meet the realities of the world political scene

outside the nuclear standoff. is appeared especially important at the time, since President

Kennedy and his administration seemed, finally, to have discarded the unworkable doctrine of massive retaliation and were changing the form, functions, doctrines, and missions

of the Armed Forces. I expressed my views in a book, Limited War and American Defense Policy, written during 1962-63. rough the work on this book and my work at

IDA, I became acutely aware of the growing problems the United States faced in Vietnam,

and of the difficulties of building the bridges between American and Vietnamese cultures

and politics that would be essential if those problems were to be solved.

e problems of military equipment, tactics, and strategy in the particular kind of

warfare fought by the Viet Minh seemed important (and they still do), but I felt that, as

I had observed in my book, “the application of hardware and strictly military techniques

. . . can obviously be of great assistance, but is equally obvious that (they) cannot offer the

entire solution. e technical parts of the problem emerge as ancillary elements of the entire process of societal revolution that reflects itself in the outbreak of subversion and guerrilla war.” When I was asked in October 1963 to join the Office of the Director of Defense

Research and Engineering as his special assistant for counterinsurgency programs, I told

Harold Brown and his deputy for tactical warfare programs, Dr. John McLucas (to whom

I would report), that I believed many of the important solutions to such problems as we

were facing in Vietnam would have to be sought through research in the social sciences. Dr.

Brown agreed and also indicated his desire that I draw together and create an orderly research and development program out of many scattered and, in some cases, duplicative and

conflicting efforts having to do with counterinsurgency in general and Vietnam in particular that were being undertaken by the military services and the Advanced Research

Projects Agency. I therefore had a charter to try to start an effort that appeared important

and interesting, and I accepted the position offered in the expectation that I would be able

to help the Defense Department in ways that I thought would make the help count.

Chapter 4

e Scene

e position of the director of Defense Research and Engineering

(DDR&E) was established by the Department of Defense Reorganization

Act of 1958. Having a rank just below that of the service secretaries,* the

DDR&E was charged to “supervise all research and engineering activities

in the Department of Defense; and . . . direct and control (including their

assignment and reassignment) research and engineering activities that the

secretary of defense deems to require centralized management.” us,

DDR&E was responsible for initiating, reviewing, passing judgment on,

and assuring the budget for any research within the DOD’s mission that appeared essential to national interest. ere was, of course, a staff organization reporting to the DDR&E (known as his “Office,” or ODDR&E).

While the precise form of this organization might vary over time, it generally included a principal deputy (who in 1964 and 1965 had the rank of

assistant secretary of Defense) and a number of subordinate deputies for

areas, such as strategic weapons, “tactical warfare programs,” (i.e., attack

aircraft, artillery, tanks, aircraft carriers—virtually all the major weapons

systems in the Armed Forces except such nuclear strategic offensive and

defensive systems as Polaris, Minuteman, or the Anti-Ballistic Missile System), communications and electronics, and “science and technology” or

basic and applied research programs. e deputy for science and technology had, reporting to him, a director of behavioral science research programs. e director of the Advance Research Projects Agency (ARPA)**

also reported to the DDR&E; but the latter had no cognizance over the assistant secretary of defense, International Security Affairs (ISA), who reported directly to the secretary of defense. ISA was responsible for

reviewing the international implications of military affairs and for coordinating Defense with State Department activities; such coordination on

State’s part was effected through the director of the Bureau of PoliticalMilitary Affairs.

e work of ODDR&E centered around the annual budget cycle. Starting in the summertime, the defense budget was prepared for review by the

45

* Strictly speaking, the Army, Navy, and Air Force are “military departments,” while their operating

arms (the troops in the field) are “military services.” As a matter of convenience, the term “Services” will

be used to refer to either.

** Established by Congress after the first Sputnik to accelerate the research and development necessary

to improve America’s position in what became the “space race.” ARPA later came to perform many

other tasks assigned by the secretary of defense or the DDR&E.
secretary of defense in mid-fall. is preparation included all necessary coordination with the military services, whose inputs were requested, discussed,

argued, and sent to the secretary of defense (Robert S. McNamara, at that

time) and issues to be resolved, if necessary. e secretary decided what major

items or groups of items would be included in the budget and the level of

funds that should be assigned to them. e “presidential budget” would then

be sent to the White House at the end of December for incorporation into

the federal budget and presentation to Congress the following spring.

Another part of the budget cycle occurred in June in connection with

congressional appropriation for the Defense Department’s operations based

on previous budget requests. e DOD then went through an “apportionment review” in which further decisions were made about fund allocation,

taking into account the actual monies appropriated rather than those requested and incorporating program changes that might have been found

desirable in the meantime or been instructed by Congress during its deliberations. Between these two periods (the fall budget preparation and the

spring apportionment review), there were, of course, the congressional

budget hearings.

For each part of the budget cycle, the deputies in ODDR&E reviewed

all of the service programs, decided whether to recommend approval of the

service budget proposals or to propose alternative allocations, and negotiated with the services to resolve the large number of issues that would inevitably arise. Under the law, the DDR&E had the responsibility for

ultimate approval of service research and development (R&D) expenditures. is meant that final approvals of projects or programs and instructions to the services were signed by the DDR&E, although the necessary

documents might be prepared and recommendations made by the deputies

and their immediate staffs. Generally, each deputy would be responsible for

a large block of the entire $6–8 billion work of Defense R&D, with each

block adding up to hundreds of millions, or billions, of dollars worth of effort. Each subordinate staff member would be responsible for a group of

programs decided partly on the basis of how large a program an individual

could effectively oversee, and partly on the basis of coherence of projects

within a functional area. Only rarely were programs arranged such that one

program, or one group of projects in a particular subject area, was handled

by an individual solely because of its importance if the associated funding

were very small. e size of the organization simply did not permit this as

a standard procedure, however desirable it might be. But the position of

46

The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy
“special assistant” offered this kind of flexibility, and such a position could

be created when, as in this case, the DDR&E deemed it necessary.

DDR&E staff (including the deputies) had both no real power over the

services and yet a great deal of power at the same time. While only DDR&E

could legally give official instructions to the services, the services knew very

well that if a member of the DDR&E staff were negotiating for a certain

budget level on a project, or to have a certain project established, this could

become an “instruction” if DDR&E wished it to become so. Much of the

staff work revolved around the preparation of such instruction documents

with attendant discussion, negotiations, and coordination almost ad infinitum.

Lyons,1 in an important book on government support of the social sciences, has noted that the Defense Department at the DDR&E level had

only part-time help to pay attention to the social sciences. is is true, but

it tells only part of the story. My own work with the social sciences required

only a fraction of my time. Most of my time was spent on problems of military technology, systems research and development, analysis of operations

in a developing war, and organizing and coordinating a fast-growing Defense Department program that included all manner of things, ranging

from studies of Viet Cong motivation to the M-16 rifle, new helicopters,

aerial ordinance, or night-viewing equipment for infantry. As will be seen,

the nature of getting any one task done at that level of bureaucracy means

to initiate an action, talk with many people, hold meetings, write papers, and

then wait; much time is spent waiting for other people to do or decide

something in any one program area. erefore, I found that I had all the

time necessary for the social science research efforts I wanted to initiate

when the time was needed.

e part-time nature of DDR&E’s attention to social science as science

lay in the intermittent occupation of the position of responsibility for the

social science programs under the deputy for science and technology, rather

than in the intentional assignment of the responsibility to someone who

held another job simultaneously. is was due to the reluctance of social

scientists to give up their academic positions and freedom to take on this

important position, rather than to the Defense Department’s intent to give

the area short shrift, although the conditions under which the job would

have to be undertaken—reporting to hardware-oriented engineers and

physical scientists—made for an interesting social dynamic not calculated

to encourage social scientists’ interest. But during the critical first two years

of my involvement, a full-time social scientist worked in the Office of the

47

Chapter 4 • The Scene
DDR&E,* responsible for overseeing all of the Defense Department’s work

in the social sciences, and I worked with him very closely. In addition, the

military departments and ARPA had full-time social scientists responsible

for their social and behavioral research programs.**

As special assistant for counterinsurgency, I did not interact with the

social scientists in the DOD totally as a novice. In the course of my work

at IDA, I had come to know some of the social scientists in the outside

community who were advising the Defense Department on how social research could be helpful relative to the problem at hand. I had come to know

the service and ARPA social science program directors, as well. erefore,

in addition to a personal, avocational interest of long standing in social research, I had had rather extensive exposure to the pertinent social research

problems and to the people involved in them. I had had many discussions

with these people, and my close friend, Dr. Jesse Orlanskly,*** at IDA about

what social research might be expected to accomplish in this area. When I

entered the Pentagon, Orlanskly pointedly reminded the social science program directors in the services and ARPA that, despite the fact that my

background and responsibilities dealt primarily with hardware, someone in

ODDR&E with my orientation to and hope for the social sciences presented a rare opportunity for them to implement some of the things “the

community” had been urging on the Defense Department. I did not feel

that my own membership in a different discipline would interfere, since

there were obviously many sources of expertise and help.

So the atmosphere in the bureaucracy was hopeful, and it appeared that

the chance had come for the social sciences to help with the difficult problems of overseas conflict facing the Defense Department and the country.

48

The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy

* Dr. S. Rains Wallace, a psychologist whose career was devoted to various aspects of measuring human

performance, selection and training of personnel for specific job skills, and related matters. In addition

to his work for the DOD, Wallace had been chairman of the psychology department at Tulane University, vice president for research for the Life Insurance Agency Management Association, president

of the American Institute for Research, and chairman of the psychology department at the Ohio State

University. Dr. Wallace died of cancer in August 1973.

** At the time of the events described, these positions were held by Dr. Lynn Baker and Dr. Kenneth

Karcher in the Army Research Office; Dr. Richard Trumbull and Dr. Luigi Petrullo in the Office of

Naval Research; Dr. Charles Hutchinson in the Air Force Office of Scientific Research; and Dr. J. C.

R. Licklider and Dr. Lee Huff in the Advanced Research Projects Agency.

*** Dr. Jesse Orlansky is a psychologist who has specialized in human factors engineering, measurement

of human performance, and other problems in the application of the behavioral sciences to defense systems. He was one of the founders of the behavioral research firm of Dunlap and Associates, and has

been a member of IDA staff and management since 1960. He has also been a member of many scientific advisory committees for the military services and NASA.
Chapter 5

e Foundation

When the Defense Department—which from here on will be called by its

familiar acronym, the DOD—undertook in 1964 to enlist the social sciences in support of its expanding foreign operations, it was not starting

from a zero level of effort. ere were already a number of research programs underway that intended to improve the U.S. government’s knowledge about foreign countries and their peoples, the behavior of foreign

governments, causes of revolutions, and cultural factors affecting relationships between the United States and other countries. e thrust of recommendations previously described, when translated in action, was to build

on this base, to add work seeking the particular knowledge and understanding for which the need had become apparent, and to increase the level

of effort to meet newly emerging and newly emphasized problems.

Before describing this existing research base, it will be useful to digress

into a brief discussion about what is meant by “a million dollars worth of research,” in terms of effort applied, since the question of money available to

the DOD but not to others, such as the State Department, for such research

was to dominate later discussion of the propriety of the work. By the time

the researcher was paid his salary, his* “fringe” benefits were added, his secretarial help and travel to Washington and overseas were paid for, and other

“overhead” expenses (e.g., general administrative support and the mortgage

or rent on their buildings/facilities) were covered, it cost (during the 1964–

69 period covered by this book) approximately $50,000 per year for one professional researcher, outside the government, to work on a problem for the

government.1 is amount might vary, depending on the organization. e

cost at some universities might be as low as $35,000–$40,000 per year; but

often many overhead items were covered in other accounts encompassed by

a variety of grants from many sources. Moreover, the university researcher received his teaching salary from the university, and the research grant was

used to cover his time only when he was not teaching. He could be assisted

by graduate students who received minimal compensation. us, a man-year

49

* e previous comment about the gender of researchers applies here as well, and will be adhered to

henceforth without comment. It is appropriate to also note that the cost figures for a person-year of effort have also been overtaken by the upward drift of all costs, expressed in current dollars, over the time

from the events described here (1960s) and the present (2012). No attempt has been made to escalate

the dollar costs to the present or to convert the costs given here to constant dollars, as that would not

change the thrust of the argument that costs for research bear overhead attachments well beyond the

salaries of the researchers.
of effort in a university could be stretched further than in a contract organization. On the other end of the scale, some nonprofit or profit-making organizations who had to charge all their expenses to contracts, in addition to

a management fee, which might vary from 4 to 10 percent and was used for

organizational development, such as exploratory research in new areas or

continuing staff education, might require $50,000–$60,000 per year for a

professional researcher in the continental United States. e cost could go

as high as about $70,000 per year for a researcher who moved overseas and

lived there with his family for a period of two, three, or four years.

Since most DOD work in this subject area was done by contract, the

money to support this research had to be shown in the Defense budget explicitly under the particular research subject “line item” and appropriated by

Congress each year. erefore, it was highly visible. Some work by social

scientists in other subject areas, such as the studies of human resources and

performance undertaken for the Armed Forces, might be performed “inhouse,” and the budget would be covered by a general appropriation for inhouse laboratories. Although the items might be distributed differently and

the accounting categories might not be the same (e.g., such research might

be carried under manpower, operations and maintenance funds, or facilities,

and all might be scattered through different, aggregated budget line items),

the total cost for a year of work by a professional researcher within the government was not very different. Even the State Department, which had at

the time only about $150,000 for “external” contract research, did much related analysis in its Bureau of Intelligence and Research, which had a

budget and staff whose overall “professional man-year” costs did not depart

far from this average figure.

us, regardless of the source, whether the research was contracted out

or performed inhouse, “a million dollars worth of research” meant about 20

professional scientists or analysts were working on the government’s problems and were paid for by the government. A DOD budget of about $5–

$8 million for this work (about the range that was covered, although many

higher figures were quoted incorrectly, as we shall see) meant increasing the

number of professional social scientists engaged in this area of research

from about 100 to about 160. In the DOD case, since most of the pertinent

research was performed by contract, these researchers were largely outside

the bureaucracy. e analytical staff of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research came to roughly the same numbers, although they

were almost exclusively within the organization.2 e additional 60-odd

50

The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy
people would be drawn from a professional social science community that,

including all social scientists, numbered over 50,000 during that period of

time.3 At the same time, thousands of professional engineers and physical

scientists were working on research and development to solve weapons and

equipment problems associated with or related to the Vietnam War alone,

and the number working on all DOD R&D was obviously far higher.

While it later became obvious and was, in fact, understood at the same time

that very few people performing research related to foreign social problems

could be in a very sensitive position, the numbers talked about were never

very large and only a few of these people—perhaps 10 percent—ever went

overseas to do research on the problems in the field under DOD auspices.

e sponsorship of DOD programs in the areas associated with overseas conflict and counterinsurgency was divided, in 1964 and subsequently,

among the three services, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA),

and the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs (ISA). e pattern of work among these varied. Such research

in the Air Force and the Navy was funneled through or initiated and monitored by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) and the Office of Naval Research (ONR), respectively. ey worked largely through a

system of research grants to university scholars. e offices were under the

general supervision of the military, but essentially operated with a fair degree of independence under the control of civilian division directors within

the offices (see notes, p. 48). e grantees worked as individuals and had

great freedom to travel, contact American and foreign officials, and to undertake their work and publish their results with no restraints on academic

freedom. e work was usually not classified, although the scholars might

need access to classified sources. But the work might be quite sensitive, especially if the scholars had to contact American or foreign government officials or study government papers. AFOSR and ONR relied upon the good

sense and circumspection of the scholars to protect their sources and not to

upset the delicate matters of foreign relations.

Work for AFOSR and ONR was undertaken largely though the mechanism of unsolicited proposals sent to these organizations by the scholars.

Generally, relationships existed between the service organization and the

universities, which would allow the scholars to learn what problems were of

interest. Except for specifying general areas of interest to encourage proposals, problem definition and specific research subject matter and format

were performed by the grantees. e research projects then were molded

51

Chapter 5 • The Foundation
into final form through discussion between the scholars and the government “program managers.” Some work for the Air Force in this area was

also performed by the RAND Corporation—a nonprofit Federal Contract

Research Center (FCRC) that had a style and reputation for scholarliness

that rendered it not much different from the university community in important respects and gave it the same kind of access and freedom. Some

studies oriented primarily toward naval strategy but possibly having social

science components that might also be performed by another FCRC,4

—the

Center for Naval Analyses (CNA)—again under similar conditions.

e Army’s research operation in these areas was quite different. Behavioral and social science research at that time was conducted for the

Army primarily through one inhouse and two contract organizations—respectively, the U.S. Army Personnel Research Office (USAPRO), the

Human Resources Research Office (HumRRO), and the Special Operations Research Office (SORO). USAPRO concentrated largely on the

kinds of human factors and testing problems described in the statement

for the Fascell subcommittee (pp. 23–28). e other two organizations,

which had been established for the Army by George Washington University (HumRRO) and American University (SORO), were at that time captive Federal Contract Research Centers, obtaining their funds exclusively

from the Army and working on problems largely prescribed by the Army.

ese organizations were supervised by the Army Research Office and, in

some cases, parts of their programs were monitored by a representative of

the Army’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations (DCSOPS), a primary

“user” of the results. ARO was essentially a military organization, although

it employed civilians. Its Human Factors and Operations Research Division,

headed in 1964 and 1965 by the late Colonel William Sullivan, had two

civilians Dr. Lynn Baker and the late Dr. Kenneth Karcher—both psychologists—who provided technical supervision over the work of SORO

and HumRRO and who were to play an important part in later events.*

Each year SORO and HumRRO had to work out the detailed agreements for the individual work programs. While management responsibility was vested in e Army Ressearch Office, DCSOPS made its formal

52

The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy

* is office also supervised the work of the Research Analysis Corporation (RAC), another FCRC that

performed operations and systems analysis work for the Army. RAC became deeply involved in counterinsurgency research under the auspices of ARPA; social scientists were involved in some of this work,

but it was operational rather than social-system oriented. e Army supported little counterinsurgency

research at RAC.
“requirements” for outputs known and played an important part in shaping

the program. e organizations were assigned formal tasks by, and prepared

reports for, the Army. e reports were published only after Army (e.g.,

DCSOPS) review and approval. ere was close supervision by the Army

not only of the work but of the salary structure, travel, contacts with Army

officers in the field, and contacts with others for the purpose of gathering

data. us, whereas the Air Force and the Navy hired top talent at universities (i.e., supported scholars in their own areas of expertise, largely doing

work that the scholars proposed to do), Army-supported organizations had

tightly structured programs representing largely what the Army wanted

them to do and for which professional researchers were hired to work as assigned, first on one task and then on another, away from any close contact

with university colleagues.

It is implicit, first, that there was a division among the services between

“basic” and “applied” research. e university scholars supported by the Air

Force and the Navy were searching out and exploring basic phenomena—

why did certain human events or interactions take place; what were the

pressures for social change in a society; what were the underlying mechanisms of human behavior and interaction therein; what were the differences

in behaviors in different cultures? us their work was along the lines of the

fundamental studies called for by Smithsonian reports. But Army contractors worked on applications of social science knowledge and followed more

closely the applied directions recommended in the report or the limited-war

advisory group for DDR&E. HumRRO, staffed largely by psychologists,

was oriented toward problems of troop training and behavior and troop

performance under stress. is included some study of language training

and of cultural factors in contacts between American Army personnel and

foreign military personnel. Beyond this, HumRRO’s program did not get

involved much in counterinsurgency questions. Rather, this cross-cultural

research fed and was picked up by others.

SORO was the organization that concentrated on studies of foreign areas

and revolutionary war. SORO had been established by the Army in 1957 to

serve the needs of the Army’s psychological warfare directorate, which did not

find the special skills needed either at HumRRO or the Operations Research

Office (Research Analysis Corporation’s predecessor organization). Its mission and level of effort were expanded in 1962, with increased interest in the

Army Special Forces and counterinsurgency operations. is was part of the

Army’s response to President Kennedy’s call for increased effort in such areas.

53

Chapter 5 • The Foundation
SORO’s work included analyses of how Communist organizations

worked; case studies of revolutionary warfare, such as Cuba, Algeria, and

Vietnam; and for DCSOPS who wanted to use them in preparation for

Special Forces operations, descriptions of tribal groups in various countries.

Also under DCSOPS auspices, they engaged in preparation of “area handbooks”—unclassified books that described, in detail, the history, culture,

and societal structure of diverse foreign countries in the “ird World”—

to educate officers assigned to overseas duty. ese handbooks were also in

great demand by other parts of government, such as the State Department

or Agency for International Development, who regularly sent people on

overseas assignments. By the nature of the research or study assignments,

while the people supported by ONR and AFOSR used basic data sources

or performed field and laboratory research, SORO used secondary sources

and did much library research. As an organization, they were inexperienced

in fieldwork, although (with HumRRO) they had small field offices working under the respective military commanders in Korea and Panama on

specific problems of the relationships between American troops and the

local populations.

e research programs of the services were thus different in quality and

responsiveness to service needs. It was my view then that the Air Force and

Navy programs could be undertaken by the best people, but the work was

generally oriented to subjects the scholars wanted to explore, while the

Army could much more easily initiate work on problems that appeared important to the Services but it could not always have such work performed

by the best available expertise. is dichotomy underlay much of the later

difficulty that the entire DOD program encountered.

e ISA- and ARPA-supported work (see p. 51) followed a different

pattern still. ISA needed strategic and policy-oriented studies—what, for

example, might happen in various areas, such as NATO or Communist

China, under international conditions, and what were the policy implications of such events for the defense of the United States? ISA, often working through ARPA for administrative arrangements (since both were part

of the Office of the Secretary of Defense) let contracts with Federal Contract Research Centers, such as RAND or the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA); with nonprofit organizations such as the Stanford Research

Institute (SRI); and on occasion, they might be able to undertake a study

contract with a well-known university scholar. e work supported by ISA,

essentially a civilian organization, was under much less rigid control than

the Army’s, but research differed from that at universities in that much of

54

The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy
it was classified. However, at this time, before the campus turmoil engendered by Vietnam, the universities had no trouble accepting classified research; often it was embraced as a source of steady support. us, since such

work was usually undertaken by mutual agreement between the organizations and their sponsors, the conditions for ISA’s contractors were generally similar to those at universities, with the additional advantage for the

government that teams of two or more researchers could work full-time on

a problem without diversion for teaching or to administer other grants necessary to support graduate students. ese research organizations could attract scholars and experts from universities and government and turn out

studies of high quality, depth, and perception more or less at the predicted

time, which was not always the case with university research.

RAND and a number of other organizations, such as RAC and Stanford Research Institute, also worked for ARPA (sometimes, as in the RAND

studies of Viet Cong prisoners described later, jointly with ISA). In 1963,

ARPA had initiated a basic research program in the behavioral sciences associated with advanced information processing technology, under the direction of Dr. J. C. R. Licklider, a well-known psychologist who had taken

leave from the consulting firm of Bolt, Beraneck, and Newman, to help implement some of the recommendations of the first Smithsonian report.

ARPA, after helping to start a U.S. space program, had by this time become

more generally applied to DOD instruments for starting new, experimental

research and development programs that entailed more technical risks than

the service budgets could tolerate. Licklider’s program represented the kind

of advanced work that ARPA could undertake; at the same time he was

available, as a member of the agency, for consulting on the counterinsurgency studies just being initiated under ARPA’s Project Agile.*

Project Agile, along with “counterinsurgency” and “the CIA,” came to

symbolize all that the Students for a Democratic Society and others found

reprehensible about American overseas operations5 and had been established by ARPA in 1961 in response to DDR&E’s instruction, which resulted in turn from recommendations contained in the limited-war study

group’s report. e name “agile” was selected to signify the project’s ability

to respond rapidly to urgent requests for research. Its assignment was to

perform research and development in the counterinsurgency area, largely in

55

Chapter 5 • The Foundation

* It is not generally recognized that Licklider’s work for ARPA during this period laid the foundation

for the continuing work that later led, first, to ARPANET and subsequently to what we now know as

the Internet.
support of American activities in Southeast Asia. It had, early in its history, concentrated on counter-guerrilla hardware systems and equipment.

In late 1963 and early 1964, it was beginning to become concerned with the

human problems of such warfare.

After Licklider’s departure from ARPA in 1964, and under stimuli that

will be described in detail shortly, Agile increased its efforts in the so-called

“soft” sciences related to Vietnam and counterinsurgency. In 1965, this area

of work and some basic social science research that had been initiated by

Licklider, both came under the direction of Dr. Lee Huff, a political scientist who had worked for ARPA in ailand. One of the first such efforts undertaken by Agile, under a contract to the RAND Corporation and jointly

sponsored with ISA, was a program of interviewing Viet Cong and Northern Vietnamese prisoners and defectors in Vietnam to explore the factors

of motivation and social cohesion that bound cadres to the Communist

side in the Vietnam War. Also through RAND, ARPA initiated a study of

the relationships between U.S. military advisors and their “counterparts”—

those they advised in a one-to-one relationship—in Vietnam. Agile had

had studies performed of the effectiveness—or reasons for the lack of it—

of the strategic hamlet program in Vietnam and, in 1964, Michael Pearce,

a young RAND social scientist under AGILE sponsorship who spoke Vietnamese and lived in a village some 30 miles from Saigon, was studying the

dynamics of the interactions among the Viet Cong, Vietnamese government officials, the Vietnamese army, and the people. A study of village security in ailand was also initiated in 1963, and an evaluation was soon to

be made of the ai Government’s Mobile Development Units, which were

designed, as part of an effort to counter Communist infiltration and propaganda, to help integrate the villagers in Northeast ailand better into

central ai society. e ARPA program was much freer than that of the

Army because individual contracts were let with many different organizations, so that the best available research quality could be sought.

e total DOD programs of nonhardware research that could be considered directly relevant to counterinsurgency programs in 1964 came to

about $5 million, divided as shown in table 1. Table 2 lists the titles of typical study projects from each of the sponsor’s subprograms. e breakdown

into four categories was derived later when we started to work at expanding the program; it will be described in some detail in chapter 7.

We have already alluded to the processes by which “quality control” was

exercised over the work. AFOSR and ONR generally maintained contact

56

The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy
57

Chapter 5 • The Foundation

Amount Equivalent

(thousands of dollars) professional

researcher*

By sponsoring DOD component:

Army $2,305 46

Navy 280 7

Air Force 393 8

ARPA 2,200 44

TOTAL $5,178 105

By orientation of work:

Political studies 562 11

Operations research, 1,841 36

systems analysis, economics

Persuasion and motivation, 1,617 34

psychological operations

Manpower, selection, and 1,158 24

training research

TOTAL $5,178 105

By organization conducting the research:

Universities 455 9

Nonprofit organizations:

SORO 1,180 24

RAC 691 13

RAND 542 11

HumRRO 845 18

Other 529 11

Inhouse, government 455 9

Industry 472 9

Foreign universities 9 1

TOTAL $5,178 105

*Based on $50,000/man-year.

Table 1 • Support for work in the social sciences related to counterinsurgency,

FY 1964.
58

The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy

Army Navy Air Force ARPA

Political studies

None USSR-Chinese Patterns of national Studies of

relations (university) development and Northeast Thailand

implications for military (nonprofit)

planning, Africa, and Latin

America (university)

Operations research, systems analysis, and economics

Studies in Research None Republic of Vietnam

counterinsurgency implications of naval Air Force after-action

(nonprofit) counterinsurgency and study (nonprofit)

unconventional warfare

operations (nonprofit) Railroad security

(nonprofit)

Ambush patterns

and counteraction

techniques (inhouse)

Persuasion and motivation, psychological operations

Psychological Delineation of the Military power and Analysis of mobile

operations guides naval role in psychological persuasion (nonprofit) development unit

(nonprofit) operations (for-profit operations (nonprofit)

research organization) Measurement of attitudes

and attitude change

Inducing cooperation (university)

between adversaries

(university)

Small group coalitions

(university)

Manpower, training, and selection research

Development of Development of None Advisor-counterpart

concepts and culture-free tests (industry) communications

techniques in area (nonprofit)

training (nonprofit)

Procedures for

increasing the

effectiveness of small

infantry-type units

Table 2 • Illustrative projects supported by sponsor, program area, and 

type of contractor, FY 1964.

Note: All projects not included; represents a sampling to convey the

flavor of work supported by each sponsor.
with their grantees and reviewed their work periodically with them, but the

drive toward high quality was largely those of scholarship exercised within

the university community. e Army meticulously reviewed the products of

the work it supported and, through this review process, affected both its

quality and its orientation toward the Army’s areas of concern—at least as

interpreted by the reviewing officers. e program directors in the Office of

the Secretary of Defense—ISA and ARPA—generally worked through

“agents” in the services; that is, their money was transferred to the services,

which let the contracts for research. But responsibility for technical review

and supervision of the work was retained by the initial sponsoring organizations, and quality control was left at least as much up to the contract organizations as to the sponsors. e sponsors could, of course, exercise the

sanction of not extending, renewing, or giving further contracts if work was

found to be below par.

is, then, was the basic program material to which the DOD, while I

was in the Office of the DDR&E, had decided to add, and the organizational structure we had to work with. It might be commented about the

shape of this initial program, that its size and the studies and subjects included in its description reflect, to a certain extent, judgments that were made

at the same time about what information to include in assembling the program data. e counterinsurgency problem was so complex and touched on

so many different aspects of human behavior and social structure, varying

from the military to the economic to the political and the cultural, that a

separate decision had to be made for almost each individual project regarding whether it should be included or not. Since the intent was to understand

the phenomena in all their broad aspects, and since the boundaries of the

DOD role were quite fuzzy, the judgments were almost invariably made to

include more that might appear relevant rather than less. In the words used

at the time, we tended to “cast the net wide.” ese judgments were subsequently refined by a study undertaken for the purpose; but this is jumping

ahead. After the events of Project Camelot, with the attending reaction by

Congress and the press, this tendency to encompass as much as possible became more and more constrained. Ultimately, with Senator Mansfield’s

amendment to the 1969 Defense Authorization Bill requiring all DOD

work to be directly and obviously relevant to purely military matters, almost

everything that the DOD might do in relation to foreign areas that would

use the contributions of social scientists came to be included, so that, ironically, the act of making judgments about relevance became irrelevant.

59

Chapter 5 • The Foundation

Chapter 6

Bureaucratic Interactions and Attitudes

e report to the government by a group of experts who make program or

action recommendations in a particular area, which then languishes because

the recommendations are conceptually or bureaucratically difficult to implement, is a familiar phenomenon in American government life. Given a

set of recommendations that read, roughly, “increase social sciences research

on counterinsurgency, and here are some general subject areas of interest,”

and assuming that the government is positively motivated to follow such

recommendations, how does one go about doing it? ere are no rules except that one has to work within the bureaucracy. e task becomes purely

a matter of matching the elements of the bureaucracy and their inter-relationships to the components of the problem and their inter-relationships,

and trying to launch new ideas and new budget assignments over the usual

bureaucratic inertia and resistances. We needed to learn what was going on

currently in the DOD’s programs, to establish a measure of control over

those programs, to decide where to go next, and to start the process of instruction and coordination that would initiate the travel of the new program

from conception to implementation. All this came to be encompassed in a

set of five actions, which evolved as the effort went along as much as they

were planned long in advance: the establishment of an inhouse DOD working group; a more or less regular series of meetings with the research directors of the other departments of government; a review of past history,

new program proposals, and the DOD’s research instruments by the Defense Science Board; negotiation and issuance of appropriate instructions

for budget actions and program changes; and, subsequently, meeting with

the staffs of the responsible congressional committees to explain the new

funding requests.

From all the previous work of the social science community, we had a

fair idea of what needed to be done generally. But the need now was to

make the ideas very much more specific. An ad hoc committee of those responsible for this area of research and development in the services and

ARPA was convened, with myself as chairman. e committee first met on

February 7, 1964, and agreed that it would serve as a channel for informal

communication of ideas and “trial balloon” instructions between DDR&E

and the services, and as a vehicle to discuss and agree on purposes, definitions, and specific projects. e question of defining counterinsurgency and

61
judging the relevance of individual projects were among the first discussed.

e work of drawing together and collating lists of “relevant” ongoing projects was initiated. It was agreed that those would be grouped in the four categories (which, by themselves, illustrate the scope of the research being

considered) mentioned earlier: political studies; operations research, systems analysis, and economics; persuasion, motivation, and psychological

operations; and manpower training and selection research. In addition, a

first step was to be taken toward listing additional work that the participants

desired to undertake for two years ahead, assuming that additional funds

would be available.

From these discussions, I gained the impression that not all the members of this ad hoc committee were exactly eager to bring their work under

one set of headings for later exposure. As is natural in bureaucratic affairs,

the coming together for a common task began the exposure of divergent

points of review and self-protection for the different agencies. e resulting conflicts, friendly and low-key though they were in committee, had

much to do with the shape of the final program plan. Since the director of

ARPA reported directly to DDR&E, he would have no trouble in protecting his efforts; but ARPA was concerned about whether the committee’s

deliberations would lead to an altered pattern of control. e Army viewed

the subject as very much within its mission and responsibilities, and it was

anxious to get started; but the committee’s work would shake established

patterns and exacerbate the then-quiescent conflict between the Army’s

R&D and DCSOPS organizations about what SORO should be doing.

e Navy and Air Force representatives indicated more by attitude than

words, that they foresaw a number of problems in the offing. ey had had

enough trouble obtaining support for their programs from the professional

military officers who were really more concerned with hardware, weapons

systems, and studies of tactics and operations, and they anticipated more

critical reviews as visibility and pressure to change were increased. e relationship with the university community would always include some sensitivities, and it would need protection. Gathering a list of all their projects,

which would then become part of a different sort of program than the basic

research efforts within which they were then imbedded, made those projects

in the aggregate much more visible and therefore much more vulnerable to

adverse action, both within the services and by Congress. us, it took some

time over several meetings and a considerable amount of discussion and negotiation to agree that all the information would be drawn together and that

62

The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy
the program would be considered in the aggregate for this particular purpose.

But all of this was quite straightforward in concept and did not present more

than the expected number of bureaucratic difficulties.

At almost the same time I initiated an effort to examine—in relation to

each other and, if possible, to tie together—the efforts of the DOD and the

other interested government departments. is was a much more complex

problem, since there was not, among the various departments, nearly as much

unity of purpose and of methods as there was among the disparate parts of

the DOD—and even the latter were different enough from each other. A

meeting was held on March 20, 1964 with representatives of State’s Bureau

of Intelligence and Research; the research director of USIA; one of the men

in charge of a part of AID’s research and evaluation program (there was more

than one program); and a representative of the CIA’s R&D community.

e purpose of the meeting was stated, first, as information exchange

on “non-material research of interest to all the departments with respect to

the counterinsurgency area,” and then to explore the possibility of improving coordination of this research among the departments. Again, we ran

into the definition problem and, again, decided to leave it broad and up to

the judgment of the individual as to what might be included in such a program. But it was decided that the scope should encompass research in the

“political, behavioral, economic, life sciences, and operations research associated with areas of psychological operations and civic action.”

I outlined the developing DOD program objectives and gave a preview

of our intent to expand this area of research. ese plans received the universal blessing from those attending the meeting. ey agreed that the

problems were of important and universal interest. Of course, shadings of

differentiation within this general agreement were to appear soon enough.

We discussed the potentiality of conflicts between this particular attempt

at interdepartmental coordination and the efforts of other coordinating

groups, such as the Federal Council of Science and Technology and the

State Department’s Foreign Area Research Coordinating Group (FAR),

which was just being formed. e latter was especially important because

all the principals in the DOD ad hoc committee would eventually become

members of FAR (along with representatives of any other government department that might be supporting work having to do with a foreign area—

even the National Science Foundation and the Department of Agriculture).

FAR was to play an important role in the later bureaucratic infighting between State and Defense Departments over Project Camelot.

63

Chapter 6 • Bureaucratic Interactions and Attitudes
e group agreed to meet again soon and to exchange information on

the departments’ respective research programs, following which we would

discuss where to go from there. e possibility of exchanging funds,

whereby one agency, such as DOD, could contribute to the support of work

more appropriate to the mission of another, was also explored. It was noted

that this might not sit well with Congress, but that the idea warranted exploration in any case. We did meet again on May 8, 1964, with some new

faces as interest and responsibility were sorted out. In particular, William

Nagle, Director of External Research in the State Department’s Bureau of

Intelligence and Research, came, and thus began a year-long interaction

that was to have important consequences for the DOD’s program. e respective research programs were discussed and for the first time each department obtained a coherent and comprehensive view of work done by

the others in this area and of the relationship of its work to that of the others. None of the departments—even the DOD, at the time, except for the

Army and ARPA-Agile work—had as specific an orientation to the subject of counterinsurgency as was being contemplated by the DOD for the

future. us, the work bore generally on internal economic and political development of the developing nations, but not specifically on the human

problems of revolutionary events that were boiling up in American consciousness and foreign policy.

AID’s program included such things as country-oriented economic

modeling, studies of the diffusion of innovation, studies of the economic aspects of cultural change, and studies of socioeconomic problems, such as

land tenure (but, in the last case, not as used by revolutionaries, such as the

Chinese Communists, the Viet Minh, or the Viet Cong). Despite the large

AID responsibility in Vietnam and elsewhere, there was no research associated with the economic problems of the country at war, or with AID’s

public safety program and its operations in Vietnam. (is came much later,

about 1967, when AID established a Vietnam bureau.) It became apparent

also, from this and other “two-sided” discussions, that the “formal” research

program of AID was not all of AID’s research, since evaluations of overseas

economic programs, a key part of AID’s job, were performed by the

“desks”—those offices responsible for administering and overseeing action

programs in specific countries or regions—using AID program funds. ese

studies were not under the control of AID’s research director. e AID research program, exclusive of the “desk” evaluation programs, came to about

$12 million annually.

64

The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy
USIA generally had about $300,000 per year devoted to survey research—the impact of information programs overseas, views of the United

States by foreign populations, attitudes and aspirations of populations in

foreign countries toward whom our information programs were directed.

e USIA representatives made the point that they had the facilities and

the know-how for such work, which could make an important contribution

to understanding the overseas social and attitudinal problems associated

with counterinsurgency, and that these could be available to other agencies

for their use if appropriately funded. Again, they had no research supporting their operations in Vietnam, although USIA had the responsibility for

all information and psychological operations programs in Vietnam and

were soon to be joined with the military in a USIA-directed organization

in Saigon (the Joint U.S. Public Affairs Office, JUSPAO). ey agreed that

much work was needed in Vietnam to understand the outlooks and aspirations of people on both sides in the conflict, and the impact of the war on

the Vietnamese people—a need ARPA was later to fill. USIA either could

not get, or did not ask for, the research budget—I never found out which,

but in their case as well as State’s, the two possibilities obviously interacted

to establish a pattern.

e CIA stated that they had no general research program in the social sciences, but that they performed ad hoc, inhouse studies in support of

their immediate operational needs. e meeting and the DOD work (current and proposed) were of great interest to them for what they could learn

from them.

In this and in many subsequent meetings, I learned much about the

State Department’s research structure and attitude. ey took a dim view

of contract research. ey felt that research into foreign affairs or studies

that might support policy making in foreign affairs had great sensitivity

and was best done in an atmosphere of secrecy with respect to “outsiders.”

eir attitude was that they would rather not have the outside world know

they were studying subjects that might be of immediate operational importance, and clearly this could not be avoided if they hired people on contract. Ergo, outsiders could simply not study important affairs of state. e

State Department did have about $150,000 for contract work, which they

tied to the problems of the “country desks” and which might be used, for example, on studies of elites in Africa or estimation of the long-term consequences to Panama of a second canal. But most of the State’s study or

research was performed inhouse and was not discussed by this group. Later

65

Chapter 6 • Bureaucratic Interactions and Attitudes
views of this work that I obtained showed such results as narrative descriptions of events like the rebellions in the Congo in the early 1960s,

which might contain some “inside” information but little analysis of causes

and effects, and which struck me—a purely personal view, and, of course, I

do not claim to have seen all of their work—as not much different from the

analytical dispatches by well-informed correspondents that one could have

read in the newspapers.

By the time of our second meeting, State had also formally established

the Foreign Area Research Coordinating Group, which was to serve as a

clearinghouse for all information on foreign area studies—drawn from all

government-supported contract work, summarized, and disseminated to all

departments. e impression I had at the time was that this effort represented the primary occupation of the External Research Group in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. e State attitude toward research

became important because it affected how the DOD and the social scientists interested in work overseas were to view the State Department when

State was given government-wide responsibility for reviewing research on

foreign areas.

State’s attitude toward counterinsurgency was, at the time, also interesting and especially frustrating in view of our involvement in Laos and

Vietnam. ey appeared to consider problems of internal conflict a diversion from their normal areas of concern, outside the main interest of foreign policy and diplomacy, and something that would, if played down long

enough, eventually be resolved in the normal course of international relations. is was not because of any expressed aversion to the conception of

counterinsurgency as a method of countering Communist activities, such as

those in Vietnam, or because of any unhappy connotation that the term

might have—possibly some such attitude existed, but I did not detect it at

the time. Rather, the attitude of those in the State Department with whom

I spoke was that events in foreign countries were all interrelated, and it was

not State’s “style” to single out some sequence of these events for special

consideration. Events in Vietnam would be handled in due course by traditional methods, and it did not seem that even a burgeoning war would

disrupt their system, cause them to establish a special effort, or require coordination and research planning outside the “normal,” diffuse channels

they had established.

State’s attitudes toward research at the time are summarized by Lyons’

statement that “the Foreign Service . . . leans almost exclusively on the tra66

The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy
ditional historical and institutional analyses favored by the political realists, when it does not proceed simply on the basis of intuition. . . . e conservative attitude . . . its recruitment policies, its emphasis on short-term

goals, its limited research system—all tend to discourage acquaintance with

recent trends in social science.”1 eir response to the war evoked the following from a wholly different source. Chester L. Cooper, who worked on

the problems of Vietnam in the CIA, the White House National Security

Staff, and later, on Ambassador Harriman’s negotiating staff, has written:2

. . . But time after time during 1964 and 1965, McNamara and

his subordinates seemed to be crying for political guidance and

leadership from the State Department. It was slow in coming.

e State Department seemed resigned to playing a reactive,

even peripheral, role during the early 60s. e war in Vietnam, it

was felt, was Pentagon business. . . . By and large, the non-defense elements of the government were neither psychologically

nor organizationally able to come to grips with an insurgency

that was quickly getting out of hand. None of the courses given

at the Foreign Service Institute, and none of the experiences of

AID specialists and Foreign Service officers elsewhere, seemed

relevant to what was going on in Vietnam.

us, Nagle, as a member of State Department bureaucracy, was reflecting what seemed to be the general climate of opinion and attitude at

State.

My own graphic illustration of these attitudes, other than that received

during the Camelot crisis, occurred in two related incidents. Early in 1965,

after the Defense Science Board’s report recommending certain research

was sent to the State Department, I suggested to Nagle that some subjects

had arisen during the course of that work that appeared to be of interest and

importance to the United States but were really beyond the scope of DOD’s

direct concern. Among these was the question of understanding the political groups we undertook, implicitly or explicitly, to support or oppose by

our policies in the developing countries. Another subject which seemed important was that, since events in Vietnam were obviously not going as

smoothly as the early predictions might have led us to wish (this was the

period of unstable government under the “generals” after Diem’s overthrow),

one should undertake some studies leading to understanding of feasible

“fallback” positions in Southeast Asia in case things in Vietnam did, in fact,

not work out as they had planned.

67

Chapter 6 • Bureaucratic Interactions and Attitudes
I offered to have the funds made available and the research undertaken

in such a way that State could formulate the problems and participate in the

general direction of work. State’s answer, as I remember it, was that the

State Department did not believe that such work should be done under

contract. I later probed quite deeply to find out whether the work was being

done by State inhouse. Eventually I came to believe that these were longrange, “iffy” sorts of problems, which, since they did not present themselves

for immediate decision, were simply deferred in the analyses State was performing to support its own policy making. State was concerned with much

more immediate futures and problems. One can suppose, also, that the

thought of seeking alternatives in Vietnam was bureaucratically and politically unattractive in 1965.

In another case a year later, I asked a high State official whether any

study was underway on the problems of the growing rebellions in Portuguese Africa to help build an understanding of the forces at work there

so that, if we were forced into a policy crisis by some future events, we would

have the knowledge needed to formulate the policies wisely. e response

was that this subject was too sensitive to study—“If it even became known

that this was under study . . . ” ey may have been right. e subjects were

certainly sensitive ones to study; and there are similar ones today. On the

other hand, I have not observed recently that we are necessarily developing

the best knowledge and expertise for formulation of policies about such

problems (although it must be admitted that our policy of no action in that

area seems to be working reasonably well, thus far).*

It became apparent, as a result of these interchanges, that with a serious war building up in Southeast Asia, the DOD rightly or wrongly, appeared to be the only government organization that saw the need to

undertake research on problems associated with that war and was gearing

up to try to meet them. But the others were interested, and because they

faced budget problems and political problems, they were glad to let the

DOD take the lead, and they encouraged us to do so.

At the May 8, 1964 meeting, an idea was born that was to persist or be

rediscovered often in various forms. e idea was to establish a formal,

high-level interagency coordinating group to review research needs in this

general area, propose projects, and see that they were undertaken. It was

68

The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy

* e wars of separation of these Portuguese colonies from their colonial masters and establishment of

their independence came later, during the 1970s and beyond.
suggested at the time that this group might report to the Special Group

(CI) and it was agreed that this would be worth further exploration. Again,

problems of budget exchanges were discussed. We confirmed our earlier

intuition that neither the Budget Bureau nor Congress would be especially

happy to have money that was appropriated for one department transferred

to another. On the other hand, it seemed that each department could let

contracts in its mission area at the others’ request, and that each could work

with and advise the DOD if the DOD with its larger funds were to let such

contracts. us, the problems were not viewed as insurmountable, even

though “clean” exchanges did not appear to be in the cards.

And so, while Congress and the news media were later and continually

to deplore the lack of interdepartmental coordination on research having to

do with foreign policy matters, and were to call for more and more coordination, those most deeply and directly involved had initiated the coordination at an early date. It is ironic, too, that at these meetings AID and

DOD, rather than State, were the ones who raised questions about the sensitivity of performing research in and about foreign countries, and initiated

discussions about ways in which these sensitivities might be respected and

the research prevented from causing problems between those countries and

the United States. Of course, while “the DOD” on one level had such concerns, on another level and independently, “the DOD’s” actions were to lead

before too long to just the kind of problems that were feared.

69

Chapter 6 • Bureaucratic Interactions and Attitudes

Chapter 7

e DSB Study

It is almost axiomatic in the American system that an idea welling up from

the bowels of a bureaucracy needs the recommendation and approval of an

outside, respected advisory group before it can receive the official imprimatur. Despite the fact that these new ideas originated virtually at the top

of the DOD research leadership, and that they were based on recommendations contained in a series of studies by recognized experts in the field, the

decision to increase social research on counterinsurgency problems, which

would involve budget changes and specific contracts, started a whole new

ballgame. It is perhaps proper that the opinions of the experts who were responsible for social research within the DOD could not be accepted at face

value, since the nonexperts in the Department could not know how these

opinions were colored by past prejudices and current bureaucratic constraints. And when the work is to begin “at eight o’clock on a Monday

morning,” the specific problem is not the same as that contained in the reports of the more generally concerned study groups. So a new study group

was formed.

To obtain expert advice on specific work to be done in the expanded

program and about what would seem to be a reasonable rate of expansion,

and to obtain the advice from a level and source that would carry the weight

and authority of “the best people in the field” with the upper structures of

the DOD and the Services, and with Congress, DDR&E turned to the

Defense Science Board. e Defense Science Board was created in 1956 in

response to a recommendation of the Hoover commission “that the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Research and Development) appoint a standing

committee, reporting directly to him, of outstanding basic and applied scientists. is committee will canvass periodically the needs and opportunities present by new scientific knowledge for radically new weapons

systems.”1 From this beginning, the scope of the board’s membership and

studies came to encompass all of the DOD’s technical, scientific, and associated management efforts. In 1964 and 1965, it consisted of 28 members,

8 of whom were drawn from public bodies, such as the Atomic Energy

Commission, the National Academy of Sciences, National Science Foundation, National Bureau of Standards, and NASA. e others were selected

on the basis of their eminence in any of the fields of scientific research and

engineering with which Defense R&D might have to be concerned. Study

71
tasks were assigned by DDR&E, who might be acting on his own or on behalf of the secretary of defense. e board’s chairman and vice chairman

were appointed by the secretary of defense on the recommendation of the

DDR&E, and very often its reports were addressed to the secretary of defense “through” the DDR&E. Eminent scientists, not members of the board

proper, could be added to special subcommittees or “panels” of the board to

carry out specific studies.

At the time of these events, Dr. Frederick Seitz, who was the president

of the National Academy of Sciences, was also the chairman of the Defense Science Board. (Although this connection between the National

Academy and the DSB no longer exists, it was not as tenuous as might be

thought at first glance. e academy was formed by an act of Congress in

1863, in part because eminent scientists of the day were seeking an organized way to contribute to the Union war effort.)2 A Behavioral Sciences

Panel was appointed, under the chairmanship of Dr. Lyle H. Lanier, a

member of the board and the executive vice president and provost of the

University of Illinois. e panel included, besides Lanier, Ithiel de Sola

Pool, who had participated in the Smithsonian studies; Dael Wolfle, the

executive director of the American Association for the Advancement of

Science; and omas Caywood, one of the founders of the Operations Research Society of America and a leader in the field. On April 21, 1964, Dr.

Harold Brown initiated the work of the panel with the following charge:

Conduct a study and evaluation of research and development

programs and findings related to ethnic and other motivational

factors involved in the causation and conduct of small wars

among the peoples of Southeast Asia.

It was not unusual for a member of the DDR&E staff to work with a

Defense Science Board panel performing a study requested by DDR&E. In

this case, I worked with the Behavioral Sciences Panel as executive secretary, and Rains Wallace, who joined the Pentagon as director for behavioral and social sciences under the Deputy DDR&E for Science and

Technology in August 1964, participated in the panel’s meetings and helped

write the report.

e work of collecting information on ongoing programs and planning

for the future, which had been initiated with the ad hoc DOD committee,

met an immediate need; the DOD committee became, in effect, a support

group for the DSB panel. e panel heard from the services and ARPA

72

The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy
about what work was being supported and what they thought the needs

were. ey met with the major contractors and scholars who were doing

the work. In addition, they were briefed by the military commands from

overseas and Washington, who represented potential “users” of the research

results, on how they viewed the developing problems overseas and on the

problems they were encountering trying to provide military assistance in

Vietnam and elsewhere. Particular attention was given to the special needs

and problems arising in the course of the Vietnam War. Rather than taking the position that they would solve the problems with tactics and hardware, and yet without dismissing those as unnecessary, the military “users”

reiterated their view of the importance of understanding people in the

countries where they were working; of understanding the motivations of

troops to fight or not to fight on our side and on the other side; and of what

makes a good advisor able to relate to and work with his counterpart.

I had written to Brigadier General John K. Boles Jr., a thoroughly professional soldier who had gone to Vietnam to head the Military Assistance

Command’s Joint Research and Test Activity early in 1964, and with whom

I had a very close working relationship, about the work of the committee,

describing the kinds of problems it was concerned with and posing a list of

questions, including the following:

• What capability exists in Vietnam for such research now?

• Do opportunities and data exist to explore the psychological

strengths and weaknesses of the Viet Cong?

• Is it possible to work on such studies through the medium of

prisoner-of-war interrogation, as was done in Korea?

• Has the South Vietnamese government ever carried out opinion surveys in the cities and villages?

• What studies of the kind I had outlined did he feel would be

necessary and feasible?

In response, Boles said “Generally, I think that the studies cited in your

letter are excellent, and if performed successfully, would go far toward helping us get a handle on defining our CI problems—something which we really have not succeeded in doing yet. Unfortunately, the war here greatly

complicated the problems involved in conducting such research; it is a great

pity that these studies were not carried out in Vietnam five years or so ago

when it was more peaceful, because the results would certainly have been

73

Chapter 7 • The DSB Study
most helpful then and now. . . . It is generally acknowledged that insurgent

movements can be successful only where the established government has

lost, or failed to gain, the support of its people. If . . . research techniques

could be applied in a given country to determine the degree to which the

people . . . support its established government, we would have an extremely

valuable tool for evaluating the real danger represented by an insurgent

movement. is tool undoubtedly would help us in advising a friendly

country . . . ” He then proceeded to answer the questions, generally to the

effect that there was no research capability in Vietnam; that the South Vietnamese government had been very sensitive about the performance of research there, but that this sensitivity was evaporating under the increasing

pressure of the war; that MACV (U.S. Military Assistance Command,

Vietnam) and the Vietnamese government would therefore cooperate in

the performance of research, but that research would be difficult because of

the insecurity in the countryside. Of the possible subjects for research mentioned (to be described shortly), the two most important were viewed as

the problems of advisor/counterpart relationships, and the psychology and

motivation of the Viet Cong as they might be explored through interviews

with prisoners and defectors.

Boles later visited Washington while the panel was in session and spent

a day discussing with them the problems and needs of research on the insurgency and counterinsurgency in Vietnam. He stressed the relative failure of the “hardware approach” in solving the problems of insurgency.

Although not deprecating those efforts and recognizing the contributions

that they were making, Boles reported that it was generally recognized by

the military in Vietnam that hardware research would not provide the answers to the struggle in Vietnam. He felt this general recognition had improved the climate for research, and he indicated that this was reflected in,

among other things, General Westmoreland’s frequent comments in staff

meetings on the need for and desirability of social science research.

Other high-ranking military visitors to the panel—men such as Air

Force Major General Anthis, who had been in command of U.S. air operations and advisory efforts to the South Vietnamese Air Force—added to

the list of specific questions. ese encompassed such problems as teaching

American advisors more about the nature of their task, especially to keep it

from being viewed as solely a military job; assessing what aspects of American counterinsurgency advisory programs should be emphasized for the

greatest effect; and studying the problem of grassroots leadership in Viet74

The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy
nam to advise the government on how to strengthen such leadership, which

seemed at the time to be the exclusive property of the Viet Cong. e problems of knowing how one was doing against the adversary in the counterinsurgency conflict and of obtaining data for evaluation and planning,

loomed very large in all of these discussions. Further, a number of difficulties in performing research in the field, including those of assuring the understanding of the American military below the very top levels; of obtaining

the support and cooperation of the South Vietnamese government; taking

the time, against political pressures for great speed, to evaluate long-term

social programs properly; and the sheer difficulty of being able to take systematic data in the field under adverse conditions—all problems that were

to plague the DOD’s field research efforts later—were brought out.

At the same time that it was concerned about what work needed to be

done, the panel started to explore the capability of the research community

to undertake that work. It was concerned with what “state of the art” might

be. A study by the Institute for Defense Analyses of the materials being

gathered by the services was commissioned to ascertain the then-current

status of the ongoing programs and the availability of qualified research organizations and personnel. What had previously been in the category of

rather vague generalities now received much more careful definition. e

work categories that the ad hoc committee of the DOD had decided to use

for organizing the project listings were defined more precisely:

(1) Political studies: analyses of national or international political interrelationships, looking toward the qualitative elucidation

of counterinsurgency problems.

(2) Operations research, systems analysis, and economics: operations-research or systems-evaluation studies related to specific

operational problems in Vietnam or elsewhere; generally, but not

necessarily military oriented; and possibly including problems of

tactics and doctrine, but not selection or evaluation of hardware

equipment or systems.

(3) Persuasion and motivation, psychological operations: studies

of attitudes; social, economic and political behavior; motivation

of individuals and groups; interpersonal and intergroup relationships and responses to various stimuli in such relationships.

(4) Manpower, training and selection research: research into requirements for training programs; preparation of standards and

tests for personnel selection; and development of criteria for

measuring the effectiveness of selection and training procedures.

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Chapter 7 • The DSB Study
e problem relevance, which had earlier been dealt with but not resolved, was explored much more deeply. Still another group of research experts* was convened and asked to review the ongoing and proposed DOD

studies, expressing their opinions as to their relevancy to counterinsurgency

in two categories: directly relevant studies and supporting studies, which were

not specifically relevant to counterinsurgency but would give useful information concerning methodology or general behavioral processes. us, while

the problem of relevancy was always a troublesome one, there came to be

some expert judgment about the applicability and utility of individual projects from outside the operational community that was responsible for undertaking the studies. Detailed information on who sponsored work within

the DOD, the kind of work sponsored, contracting patterns, and the research organizations was compiled, and the dollar allocations within the program were listed according to subject, sponsor, country of interest,

organization performing the work, etc. For the first time, there was a clear

view of the DOD’s efforts and immediate plans in this area. Some of the results are shown in tables 3, 4, and 5, which follow. Note that the plans for fiscal year (FY) 1965, even at this time, included higher expenditures than FY

1964, partly as a result of the services’ responses to the urgings of the Smithsonian reports and partly as a result of the work of the ad hoc DOD committee that I had convened prior to the Defense Science Board panel’s study.

e DSB panel report was positive and reflected the acceptance and

elaboration of previous ideas on what was needed and how it should be obtained. Further, there was some very specific advice on where to go next. e

assignment to study “small wars among the peoples of Southeast Asia” had

been stretched considerably, but no one objected. After reviewing the postWorld War II world situation, the report stated:

is world situation has added an essentially new dimension to

the responsibilities and requirements of the Department of Defense (DOD). In addition to dealing with the problems associated with the confrontation of nuclear powers in this space age,

the Department must now assess the potentialities for internal

conflict and subversive revolution in underdeveloped countries

and take appropriate steps to help prevent insurgent movements

in those areas from growing into communist dominated governments hostile to the United States. Obviously, this broad mis76

The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy

* Joseph E. Barmack, City University of New York; Alex Bavelas, Stanford; Launor Carter, Systems Developent Corporation; Max Milliken, MIT; and Jesse Orlensky and Alfred Blumstein of IDA.
sion must be carried out within the general framework of the

U.S. foreign policy, which is established by the president and implemented primarily through the Department of State.

In recognition of the growing seriousness of the internal-war

problem in developing countries, in August 1962, overlapping

operational responsibilities were assigned to the government departments concerned. us, it is required that DOD activities be

closely coordinated with those of the State Department, espe77

Chapter 7 • The DSB Study

Table 3 • FY 1964 program distribution and planned increases for the following

year.

FY 1964 FY 1965 Change

Direct Support Total Direct Support Total Direct Support Total

(thousands (percent)

of dollars)

By DOD component

Army 2,305 1,890 4,204 3,106 1,798 4,904 35 -5 17

Navy 280 280 560 560 313 873 100 12 56

Air Force 393 209 602 724 382 1,106 84 83 84

ARPA 2,200 437 2,637 3,477 437 3,914 58 0 48

TOTAL 5,178 2,825 8,003 7,867 2,930 10,797 52 4 35

By area of work

Political studies 562 145 707 813 195 1,008 45 34 43

Operations 1,841 1,788 3,629 3,301 1,869 5,170 79 6 5

research,

systems

analysis,

economics

By technical area

Persuasion 1,617 574 2,191 2,151 649 2,800 33 13 28

motivation, and

psychological

operations

Manpower, 1,158 318 1,476 1,602 217 1,819 38 -32 23

training, and

selection

research

TOTAL 5,178 2,825 8,003 7,867 2,930 10,797 52 4 35
cially with programs of the Agency for International Development (AID). With regard to the collection, evaluation and dissemination of information, the DOD shares the mission with

the State Department’s regular foreign-service agencies and also

with the U.S. Information Agency and the Central Intelligence

Agency. Effective interaction among all these agencies is essential to the successful conduct of this country’s foreign relations—

in the broadest sense of that term.

It is significant that the Department of Defense is the only

agency assigned explicit responsibility for carrying out research

and development in support of the internal defense of developing countries friendly to the United States. is does not mean,

of course, that the other agencies are prohibited from doing research bearing upon this general problem. AID, for example, has

research funds and is planning a considerable expansion of its research effort; but its studies would not be concentrated upon so78

The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy

Table 4 • Average size of studies.

FY 1964 FY 1965

Contractor Number of Average Number of Average

Studies Number of Studies Number of

People People

Universities 30 1 34 1

Nonprofits:

SORO 20 1 22 1.5

RAC 15 3 15 3+

RAND 7 1+ 4 2.5

HumRRO 13 1.5 13 1.5

Other 7 1.5 6 2+

Inhouse government 4 2.5 9 2

Industry 5 2 4 3

Foreign universities 1 11 1

Unknown 6 3

TOTAL 102 1.5 114 2
cial conflict and insurgency. An adequate research program with

this focus would have to be conducted mainly by the Department of Defense.

e ongoing DOD programs were evaluated and criticized quite severely:

(1) e overall level of effort is seriously inadequate to meet the

DOD’s need for knowledge about incipient and active insurgency

in critical areas of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. e small

amount of work being done overseas is oriented toward Southeast Asia, chiefly South Vietnam. ere is little research regarding Latin America and other parts of Asia, and there is none on

Africa. Accentuating the meagerness of this Defense effort is the

79

Chapter 7 • The DSB Study

Table 5 • Distribution of funds, by country studied.

FY 1964 FY 1965

Country Direct Support Total Direct Direct Support Total Direct

(percent) (percent)

South Vietnam 1,211 1,211 24 1,571 1,571 20

Southeast Asia 388 388 8 617 617 8

Asia 25 15 40 0.5 66 16 82 0.9

Latin America 417 417 8 685 685 9

Africa

Middle East 80 156 236 2 30 181 211 0.4

Multiple countries 1,716 256 1,972 34 2,305 180 2,485 30

Overseas, 399 91 490 8 1,068 98 1,166 14

not specified

USSR and 160 260 420 3 160 275 435 2

Communist China

Europe 105 105 110 110

United States 544 544 544 544

Not country-oriented 642 1,398 2,040 13 679 1,446 2,125 9

Unknown 140 140 3 686 80 766 9

TOTAL 5,178 2,825 8,003 7,867 2,930 10,797
dearth of overseas research in the behavioral sciences by other

organizations. University research, for instance, by no means fills

the gap.

(2) Specifically, there is a great need for up-to-date basic information about the major cultural and political groupings within

the developing countries that are of special significance to the

United States. e ethnic, religious, economic, and political conditions conducive to social conflict can be adequately understood

only through intensive, systematic research performed within

each country . . .

(3) Since most of the current research consists of comparatively

small, unrelated projects, the overall program needs better focus,

greater continuity, and a more systematic structure in all its aspects—including basic research on relevant behavioral and social processes, applied research on the phenomenology of

insurgency and counterinsurgency, policy studies, and an evaluation of the effectiveness of counterinsurgency operations.

(4) Most of the programs are of an unidisciplinary nature, although an adequate attach upon the problems of social conflict

and insurgency would involve several different disciplines. e

major programs, at least, should be multi-disciplinary—involving

not only different kinds of behavioral scientists but also specialists from the information sciences and operations research.

Specific areas of work were recommended in some detail:

1. Political Studies

. . . Over the range of research in this area, from policy studies

dealing with the effects of alternative governmental actions to

the examination of the characteristics of insurgent populations,

there is an urgent need for substantive information to improve

the planning and execution of policy. Political action must be

planned, coordinated, and integrated with military action; otherwise, there is a risk that counterinsurgency operations . . . will

fail.

Research on fundamental sources of stability and instability in

emerging nations, as well as more nearly applied research on the

characteristics of specific political systems, is desperately needed.

. . . In a case of current importance in Southeast Asia, we appear

to be in deep trouble partly because there has been no systematic

political research in Vietnam.

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The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy
In politics of revolution, overt political behavior is drastically different from that in stable democratic or totalitarian systems. . . .

Experience gained in a more stable political environment is probably not directly applicable. Suitably posed research questions,

on the other hand, can lead to the successful development of improved descriptive and analytical information for operational

problems . . .

Systematic research is needed, not only on the internal politics of

revolutionary political behavior but on the international analogue

. . . the conflict between the Soviet Union and Communist China

may well have important implications regarding future Communist support for wars of national liberation . . . there is a need

to explore the political alternatives open to the United States regarding international intervention of a different type than was

used in Vietnam, along with implications of the possible success

of national liberation movements in other areas with respect to

U.S. policy.

Examples of the types of studies suggested are as follows:

• Exacerbation of insurgency by Communist countries

• Vulnerabilities of political systems to infiltration and exploitation

• Characteristics of insurgent populations

• Types of insurgency and internal violence

• Impact of civic action on local politics

• Impact of large-scale foreign support of indigenous governments on the structure of local support

• Differences between urban and rural insurgency

• Political implications of military counterinsurgency operations

• Political role of indigenous military institutions

• Political effects of alternative government policies

• U.S. foreign-policy equivalents to communist national liberation movements

• Political indoctrination and organization in Viet Cong-controlled villages

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Chapter 7 • The DSB Study
2. Operations Research, System Analysis, and Economics

. . . Since extensive commitments in the field of counterinsurgency

are relatively recent undertakings by the Department of Defense,

not much prior work is directly applicable. Little of the research

reported reflects a systematic program in operations research related to counterinsurgency. A more serious deficiency is that inadequate consideration is given to variables of behavior . . . the

character of counterinsurgency operations is such that behavioral

aspects are often critical . . . behavioral variables can be used to a

greater extent in operations research and systems analysis.

In addition to the economic analysis of production and distribution systems under conditions of insurgency, research on the operational and economic consequences of civic-action programs

is needed. . . . We need to devise basic strategies concerning the

application of civic-action resources with a view to . . . desired

effects and the relationship . . . to long-term programs of political and economic development.

. . . it is necessary to study paramilitary forces supporting the internal-security mission of the regular military services. Most of

the pertinent research done so far has emphasized the regular

military mission, to the exclusion of the parts played by the police and the militia . . .

e following list illustrates the types of research problems that

the subcommittee believes are appropriate topics for systematic

operations research:

• Information requirements for counterinsurgency planning

• Modeling of this counterinsurgency environment

• Analysis of indicators of potential insurgency

• Analysis of behavior as an indicator of attitude

• Use of Vietnam data base for indication of progress in the

war

• Studies of food-distribution system in Vietnam and how it

feeds the Viet Cong (or other insurgents elsewhere)

• Analysis of Viet Cong logistics

• Analysis of Viet Cong tactics and operations

82

The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy
• Research on the telecommunications in counterinsurgency

environment

• Research on the economic infrastructure of village environments

3. Persuasion and Motivation, Psychological Operations

. . . e direct measure of success is the extent to which the control of people, not the destruction of armies, is achieved. With this

object in view, the motivation aspects of the conflict became far

more important in counterinsurgency than conventional warfare.

In the existing programs, it is apparent that there is little systematic research in (1) the sources of political power in rural environments, (2) the types of motivation for granting or

withholding political support, (3) traditional patterns of communications in general, and (4) the sources of, and reasons for,

behavior destructive of the existing society. is information

might be obvious in a totally repressive society, but in the mixed

milieu of a typical underdeveloped country it is not so easy to

determine . . .

. . . ere is an important need for quantitative data on the anthropological, sociological, political, and psychological aspects of

societies in which insurgency is a threat. In Vietnam, we now appear to be in a difficult situation because our decision to commit

ourselves to a certain kind of counterinsurgency action was based

on insufficient knowledge of the sort of people we were dealing

with and the way they might react to our efforts and those of

their own internal groups.

e following list represents only a small proportion of the studies that would compose an adequate research program:

• Dynamics of village counterinsurgency: bases of the village

support for one side or the other

• Viet Cong motivation

• Use of traditional religious beliefs by counterinsurgents

• Systematic study of elite and mass beliefs, behavior, and interactions

• Potential sources of support for insurgency

• Outlets for aggression and antisocial behavior

83

Chapter 7 • The DSB Study
• Responses of the passive villager to insurgent terror

• Patterns of insurgent recruitment

• Rural intervillage and intravillage communication and influence patterns

• Influence of traditional elite-peasant relationships on feasibility of successful rural counterinsurgency

4. Selection and Training of U.S. Advisors

Until very recently, the primary emphasis of social science research

on our military operations in developing nations has been on the

indigenous peoples, despite the fact that an interaction between

the indigenous population and the U.S. military personnel is involved and the success or failure of this interaction may facilitate

or prevent the attainment of U.S. objectives. It seems probable

that we have concerned ourselves least with the side of this interaction we should know most about—that the performance of

many advisors has been dramatically unsuccessful.

. . . Psychology has contributed greatly to the selection and training of many kinds of people in widely varying jobs. ere is every

reason to expect that the use of psychological research techniques

would considerably improve the military advisor’s effectiveness.

. . . In brief, it will be necessary to:

(1) Study the relationships of U.S. and indigenous people and

the factors that may increase or lessen the effectiveness of

cross-cultural interchange. is may be done through studies

in the field, the systematic debriefing of returned advisors,

and the study of research findings already in existence.

(2) Define the objectives of military-advisor system, and set

up methods for determining the degree to which these objectives are being achieved in specific situations.

(3) Develop proficiency measures that may be applied to military advisors who are still in the field or have recently left it.

en combine these measures to serve as criteria in evaluating various selection instruments and alternative training procedures.

It should be noted that these tasks imply a need for closely and

continuously observing military advisors in the field—in this

case, not for the purpose of rating individual performance. . . .

84

The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy
Opposition to allowing this observation will be great,* particularly on the part of higher-level personnel in foreign areas who

tend to perceive such evaluations as invidious or threatening.

. . . research that is not based on (realistic performance) criteria

may actually result in selection and training procedures worse

than those that have grown up informally.

As soon as some reasonably reliable criteria are available, work

should begin to develop a procedure for selecting individuals who

are likely to perform well and rejecting those whose chances of

performing successfully are low . . . **

It is unfortunately true that procedures for training military personnel who must develop relationships with foreign nationals

have been constructed in an informal, hit-or-miss, inconsistent

manner . . .

It is generally assumed, for example, that the highest priority

should be given to teaching the potential advisor the language

of the country in which he will serve. is assumption may be

correct, but it is possible that a man who has only the rudiments

of the language but possesses other useful knowledge, skills, or attitudes might, in fact, be more effective than someone who can

fluently reveal his inadequacies or prejudices . . .

Finally, there is little point in having effective selection and training procedures if they are inappropriate to the personnel-assignment system or if they are emasculated by a bureaucratic system.

For this reason, an immediate and continuing operational analysis of the system by which personnel are assigned to counterinsurgency activities is required . . .

In addition to its specific research recommendations, the report took

account of some other special areas of concern. First, the suggestion was

made that the “soft” sciences be “hardened” by combining operations research and social science research techniques. Particular study areas where

it appeared that such combination could be useful included the development of indicators of potential insurgency, indicators of progress in counterinsurgency, and, particularly in the last case, improving the operational

database being built in Vietnam (work in this area was later to lead to the

85

Chapter 7 • The DSB Study

* As, indeed, it was later found to be.

** Note the intended extension to this area of performance of a technique that was eminently successful in connection with hardware (pp. 23–27).
Hamlet Evaluation System, which became, for good or ill, one of the foundations of the government’s assessment of progress in war). e report recommended that in areas of active or threatened insurgency the military

commands organize operations research units with behavioral scientists as

participants to help in analysis of ongoing operations. (ere was a precedent for this in earlier British operations in Malaya.) It also pointed to the

Army’s Camelot Project, which had started some time before the report

was written, as an example of research in which systems research techniques

could be applied. It noted also that ARPA was thinking tentatively about

a feasibility study to find whether it might be possible to obtain sufficient

data on a social system to be able to describe it quantitatively and simulate

its behavior on a computer. (is program never started, having come to a

halt when Licklider left the Pentagon in 1965.)

Secondly, the report recognized that few people were appropriately

trained to perform competent research in the area of counterinsurgency. It

recommended that the underlying foundation of behavioral sciences research

personnel be built up through support of multidisciplinary centers for basic

research in selected universities. ese centers, of which perhaps five were visualized, would have both an “area” focus (e.g., Asia, Africa, Latin America)

and a “comparative international” orientation (e.g., the world Communist

movement and its methods in developing countries, and comparative studies of stability and internal conflict in developing countries). Specific criteria to make such centers as effective as possible were prescribed. ese

included commitment to a college “degree program”; avoidance of the usual

loose conglomeration of separate departmental efforts under a “study center” label; availability of interested and suitably oriented faculty; and willingness to base the program primarily on field research.

irdly, the report noted that two specially oriented programs merited

particular attention and support. e first was that of SORO, which was

viewed as the “principal large-scale effort supported by the Department of

Defense in the field reviewed.” e second was Project Agile, which was

recognized as the DOD’s only program specifically and wholly oriented toward the problems of counterinsurgency. With respect to Agile, the report

had this to say:

ese small-scale AGILE projects have been essentially exploratory in nature; for example, studies have been made of advisor-counterpart relations, mainly interviews with U.S. advisors;

urban insurgency; and the anthropology of the Montagnards,

86

The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy
tribal groups in Vietnam. ey have yielded much useful information and opened up promising areas for investigation, but,

with regard to the solution of these important, complex problems, they have barely scratched the surface.

Regarding SORO, the report said:

It is recommended that the Department of the Army continue

its strong support of the Special Operations Research Office: and

that SORO be encouraged in its effort to shift research emphasis from small, library-based projects to more comprehensive programs of empirical research conducted, at least in part, in overseas

locations. It should be recognized, however, that an organization

whose capability was developed for the first type of work will not

necessarily be adequate for the broader research. SORO’s staff as

a whole is seriously deficient with respect to mathematical-statistical capability, and it includes no professional economists . . .

Assuming that SORO can expand and strengthen its staff in the

directions indicated, it should probably be recognized as the principal DOD agency for behavioral science research directed

specifically toward the Defense mission of counterinsurgency and

special warfare. Furthermore, SORO should probably become

the primary point of focus within the DOD for studies of socioeconomic and political conditions in the developing countries.

By its contract, SORO should be permitted to conduct a reasonable amount of basic research related to its area of cognizance

(e.g., in the form of “institutional” funds) without having to secure specific Army approval of each project. More generally, with

regard to terms of reference and administration, SORO’s contract should be appropriately broadened so as to allow the kind

of flexibility in planning and conducting research that seems essential to ensure productivity.

us the DSB panel entered directly into the conflict that had been

going on within the Army regarding whether SORO should undertake research or continue to provide the library-search-service kind of activity that

DCSOPS felt was necessary to support its training and orientation programs. e panel recognized the essential weakness of this key link in the

entire research program that it was proposing and made sensible recommendations for strengthening it; these, as will be seen, could not be carried

out in time to avert disaster. And it subtly exacerbated the conflict between

the Army and the ARPA views of the role each should play. But the recommendations that had emerged from the internal and interacting dy87

Chapter 7 • The DSB Study
namics of both the DDR&E “shop” and the panel’s study efforts were

viewed in ODDR&E as exactly the right prescription for the further development of the program.

e Defense Science Board effort consolidated the results of all the

previous studies and planning efforts that had recommended and started to

implement an expansion of social research to help the United States in its

growing struggle against the “war of national liberation” strategy of the Soviet Union and Communist China (table 6). It critiqued the ongoing DOD

program, isolating inadequacies and opportunities. It surveyed the capability available, what it could do and what it needed to be made to do, and it

made very specific recommendations regarding subjects and areas for study,

who should undertake the work, and how they should go about doing a

creditable job of it. e report accepted the idea that the Defense Department needed and had the mission to do the work, and that it would do the

work because it had the dollars to do so; the change in values that would

88

The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy

Table 6 • Summary of impetus toward increased social research by the DOD

on problems of counterinsurgency.

Study or planning effort Date Auspices

First Smithsonian report 1960 DOD (Office of Naval Research)

funding to Smithsonian Institution

Limited War Task Group 1961 DDR&E, “inhouse”

Second Smithsonian report 1963 DOD (ONR) funding to Smithsonian

Institution

Defense Science Board 1964 DDR&E

Internal DOD programming

efforts through

Modest budget increases and 1962–64 Self-generated by services with

“getting organized” guidance from ODDR&E

Ad hoc Committee on 1964–65 DDR&E, Special Assistant (CI)

Counterinsurgency Research

Increased budget proposals 1964–65 Self-generated by services and ARPA

Ad hoc interdepartmental 1964–65 Initiated by DDR&E, Special Assistant (CI)

coordinating committee
subject the whole premise to question had not come about yet. In general,

this panel made an effort to relate its recommendations to the DOD mission, and it noted the need for coordination with and dissemination of results to other departments of government who were concerned with the

same problems. is report was thus the culmination of several years’ evolution of a set of ideas. It focused them and turned vague and shifting conceptualizations into concrete program ideas that could be funded.

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Chapter 8

e Wheels Start Turning

e DSB report was published and distributed within the DOD and the

other departments on January 20, 1965. While the panel was doing its work,

the normal cycle of program review, preparation of budgets, and planning

ahead for new programs was continuing with its inexorable momentum. In

order to incorporate the new program in the budget for FY 1966 ( July 1,

1965 to June 30, 1966), we had to instruct the services regarding what was

needed, receive their initial proposals, negotiate differences of opinion and

conception, incorporate the results in the draft of the budget and the written justification for the budget requests, re-coordinate the draft, and send

a final draft of the “presidential budget” to the secretary of defense by the

end of November 1964. en, he would review it as necessary with the offices of the comptroller and the systems analysis group (the latter, who originally earned the name “whiz kids” when Secretary McNamara established

the group in 1961, played no role in the events described here; the money

involved was too small for their notice, although several years later, in 1967,

they became involved in analyzing “progress data” from Vietnam). e

comptroller and the systems analysis group would have been working to

clarify various major issues for decision throughout the year; the secretary

would make decisions involving budget issues; he would iron out any remaining differences with the services and DDR&E (who could appeal, or

“reclama,” an initial decision); prepare his “posture statement” (which had

also been “in work” for some months); and send the budget to the White

House in time for review and incorporation of major new ideas (this one

was not “big” enough to receive such separate attention) in the State of the

Union message on January 1.

It sounds slow, involved, and tedious, and it was. If we wanted to increase the social research program associated with counterinsurgency by

additional funds to be expended during the following July 1, 1965, we had

to start thinking in August 1964—or a year earlier—about how much

money we wanted, for what it was to be spent, and how it would be distributed among the services and ARPA. e time lag until there were actually people working on the problems with the new funds might be as

much as two years, since once money was made available it might take most

of FY 1966 to define individual projects precisely enough to specify contract

work statements and go through the red tape of soliciting proposals, eval91
uating them, and negotiating and signing contracts. e bureaucratic

process thus required that, if we wanted to see any new effort at all before

July 1966, we had to start in the middle of 1964 to pave the way for it.

Some small starts could be made earlier through modest “reprogramming,”

but it would be difficult to rob Peter to pay Paul when both were already

doing much of what was wanted but had insufficient funds in the first place.

e expanded DOD program was intended to rely heavily on the DSB

report. e DSB panel, which had started its periodic meetings in April

1964, was planning to complete its work and write its report in the fall and

winter of 1964–65. Since we in ODDR&E had to start working on the

budgeting problem in August 1964, we were in the position, not for the

first or last time in government program planning, of having to start a program before we had done our homework, and with ideas only half formulated.

But this was not as bad as it sounds. By late summer 1964, the DSB

panel, and therefore Rains Wallace and I, had a fairly clear view of what was

in the existing programs and the shape of the recommendations that would

be made, although the details and specific issues remained to be worked

out. In August 1964, the preparation of an “interim” guidance memorandum from DDR&E to the service assistant secretaries for R&D and the director of ARPA was initiated. is became the first formal document

relating to the expanding program and was issued on September 2, 1964.

e “covering brief ” transmitting the memorandum to DDR&E for signature explained its purpose and summarized its contents: provision of

guidance to the services and ARPA; affirmation of the Defense Department’s mission for such work; asking that the military departments and

ARPA make a coordinated review of their plans and programs with a view

toward expanding the effort; asking that appropriate resources be provided

in the respective FY 1966 budgets; and indicating that more specific and

detailed guidance would be forthcoming upon completion of the DSB

study. e services and ARPA were asked to submit their preliminary plans

by October 15, 1964.

e pattern of responses differed only in program details from the more

definite plans that were made after the DSB report was published, and it

followed the positions that began to emerge in the early deliberations of the

ad hoc DOD committee. e Air Force proposed to almost double its relatively small program of research at universities. Since their budget for such

work had in the past been consistently reduced from the AFOSR requests

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The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy
by the upper echelons of the Air Force, this amounted essentially to the

very modest expansion from the work they were actually trying to undertake in any case. e Navy was cautious, expressing the opinion that with

some very small expansion they were doing about the right amount and

kind of work. ARPA proposed to expand behavioral sciences research, including a separate counterinsurgency-oriented behavioral research program

in Project Agile, from about three-quarters of a million dollars per year to

$5 million over the following five years. is included a substantial ARPA

contribution to the Counterinsurgency Information and Analysis Center at

SORO (on which more will be said shortly), which would absorb about

three-quarters of a million of this budget. ARPA’s proposal included a combination of individual research projects; regional research enters based on

universities overseas to undertake research in those areas with locally trained

social scientists; and the attempt to assess the feasibility of computer simulation of behavioral patterns for predictive purposes.*

ARPA anticipated major problems in the latter program arising from

the scarcity of reliable data and from differences between the value systems

of the builders and interpreters of the computer programs and results and

the groups being simulated. More generally, they anticipated that it would

be difficult to identify individuals both qualified and willing to do original

fieldwork. e host nations would be sensitive about such research and

would have to agree to it before any could be done. ey foresaw administrative, security, and language barriers to conducting research in such areas

as Vietnam. In all this ARPA was prescient; their reservations were not unfounded. However, the reservations were presented in terms of problems to

be solved, rather than reasons not to proceed.

e Army proposed roughly a $2-million-per-year increase in their

programs for FY 1965 and FY 1966, but noted that it would be very difficult to increase expenditures at a rapid rate, so that the expansion might be

delayed. ey proposed a detailed research plan which included what appeared to be carefully thought out programs in six areas: research studies of

counterinsurgency policy and planning; research on requirements for social science information and area studies; research on military psychological operations and the information and communication process within

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Chapter 8 • The Wheels Start Turning

* It has come to be both unfashionable and even gauche to think about computer simulation of something so subtle, delicate, and complex as a society. e reader must remind himself that consideration was

not being given here to doing it, but to exploring whether it should even be thought about seriously. In

another context, society accepts simulation of urban evolution (by Forrester of MIT)1 with equanimity

and even interest, even though this is at least as difficult and uncertain as what we were considering.
developing nations; research on the design and impact of civic action and

military assistance efforts for counterinsurgency; research on relationships

between Americans and local officials and populations in military operations in developing nations; and “counterinsurgency single-country studies.”

ey expected their total program to reach a level of about $5 million per

year in about three years. Other than their concern about the rate of expansion, they expressed no reservations.

By the beginning of 1965, the DSB report was near completion, and we

started to work on the draft-coordination-redraft cycle of the final guidance

memorandum that would launch the expanded program. is memorandum was issued by the DDR&E on March 1965. It tried to deal with all

of the problems highlighted by the DSB report and followed closely from

the recommendations in that report. e general nature of the work desired was reviewed. It was noted that areas, such as Africa and Latin America, about which there appeared currently to be little knowledge of the kind

needed, and virtually no research, required further attention in the DOD’s

study programs. Problems associated with military-civic action, internal security, and constabulary operations (all of these in countries receiving U.S.

military and security assistance) were identified as areas virtually neglected

in the existing research programs.

Attention was given to the problem of research quality. It was pointed

out that behavioral and social science research applied to Defense’s problems other than personnel management and human factors engineering

were still viewed with suspicion and had yet to prove their worth conclusively. ere followed recognition that the creation of high competence on

the scale demanded would have to be a long-term proposition, with an admonition not to support work of poor quality with unqualified researchers

solely for the purpose of expansion. For specific program guidance, the DSB

report was transmitted to the Services and ARPA. e Navy and Air Force

were instructed to elaborate the individual university and contract research

studies that were characteristics of their current research efforts. ARPA was

assigned the responsibility of creating a university-center program having

the general characteristics and objectives described in the DSB report. e

work it had proposed to undertake through Project Agile was encouraged.

e Army was singled out for major responsibility. is followed from

the nature of the Army’s program and from the magnitude of its responsibilities overseas. e Army had been responsible for much of the applied

behavioral sciences work that had to do with troop performance in the field

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The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy
and troop training and proficiency. Of all the Services, the Army was most

heavily engaged in Vietnam (at that point, with Special Forces and many

thousand additional military advisors) and had the most intimate contact

with Vietnamese forces as well as with the Vietnamese people in the countryside. Major responsibilities for advisory assistance in the use and maintenance of equipment; for training large numbers of troops; and for

counterinsurgency oriented programs, such as psychological operations and

military-civic action, as well as counter-guerrilla warfare, fell on the Army’s

shoulders. e problem of transforming research results into policy, training programs and curricula, and doctrine to which the Services adhered

was always a difficult one, and to the Army as a user would be in a far better position to do this than ARPA, which had no “troops in the field” and

was viewed with suspicion by those who did. It was therefore logical that

the Army should be assigned the responsibility by DDR&E, who supervised all DOD research under the law, for a major applied research effort

in the counterinsurgency area.

From the research plan that they had proposed the previous fall, the

inference that they understood the problems and could undertake the work

seemed reasonable. ey were directed to establish in the Washington, DC

area, a “centrally coordinated applied research effort” that would build on

their five-year program plan. ey were specifically assigned responsibility

for the major aspects of research on selection and training problems and

those associated with “special warfare.” eir responsibility included the establishment of a coordinating office, which would not strictly supervise but

would help keep related to each other all of the other service and ARPA

programs. In addition, the guidance memorandum pointed out that coordination would be necessary with the State Department, AID, USIA, and

CIA. e Army was instructed to invite representatives of those agencies to

work in residence with the headquarters of their effort and to work with

participating government organizations and research contractors. e general funding levels that had been proposed in the response to the earlier

guidance were accepted, and the services and ARPA were instructed to adjust their FY 1966 budgets accordingly.

As I worked closely with ARPA and the Services to try to ensure a coherent program whose parts were properly interlocked and coordinated, it

became apparent that ARPA, which had planned expansion of the work

under Project Agile, and the Army, which was moving forward with its own

expansion plans revolving initially around Project Camelot, were coming

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Chapter 8 • The Wheels Start Turning
into conflict. In response to the March 24 memorandum, the Army had

proposed to assume the total responsibility for at least the applied research

part of the overall program, and this had been granted by DDR&E. ARPA

was unhappy that the responsibility for coordination was assigned to the

Army, because it appeared to them that this infringed on ARPA’s independence as an agency reporting directly to DDR&E; and they feared it

would retard the expansion of Agile’s work in Southeast Asia, which was already underway, while they might have to wait for the Army to come up to

speed. e proposed Agile work was not in conflict with what the Army was

planning from the duplication point of view, but it was clear that the Army

and ARPA, if they both expanded rapidly and simultaneously, would compete for the same limited talent, and this would be no help at all to an orderly expansion of the program. It became apparent, therefore, that further

guidance was necessary to try to resolve the conflict.

We built on a proposal that had been made by the Army in response to

the March 24 memorandum by preparing another much more specific instruction to which ARPA and the Army agreed. e Army would create a

new office reporting directly to the Director of Army Research (a “shortcircuit” of the bureaucratic system not often used in the service bureaucracy). It would be staffed jointly by representatives from all the Services

and ARPA, as well as representatives of the outside agencies having an interest in the work. It would be responsible for direct supervision of the

Army’s work, but only for coordination of the efforts of other agencies. It

would also be the responsible point of contact with overseas commands

having to clear the work a priori and for translating research results into language and plans appropriate for the “user” community. is joint office,

which would in fact be little more than a coordinating committee chaired

by the Army, would be responsible for future planning of research efforts

and, through recommendations to its constituent agencies, helping to ensure that a coherent and useful program was undertaken. It was explicitly

stated that, while the military departments and ARPA might continue to

undertake individual applied research efforts, these would be coordinated

within the joint organization and would therefore become an integral part

of planning done by that body. At the same time that this memorandum

was prepared, letters were drafted to the secretary of State, the administrator of AID, the director of the USIA, and the director of the CIA, explaining what was being planned and soliciting their support. e “package”

was to go out formally in June, but this progress was interrupted by the explosion over Project Camelot.

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Chapter 9

e Army Moves Out Smartly

At this point, we had entered the indeterminate region between planning

and implementation. At some time in any effort, such as we are describing,

some of those who have been involved in the preparation of plans, being

aware that they will have implementation responsibility, shift their efforts

gradually from planning to action. Events develop slowly, even under pressure, so that the exact point in which the boundary between talk and action

has been crossed is difficult to define, although it can often be identified in

retrospect. In this case, the shift was in two stages: from relatively generalized DOD planning involving all the relevant agencies to specific plans

made by one of the action agencies—the Army—for its own efforts; and

thence to action by the Army, undertaken before either its own or the

DOD’s plans had been fully formulated.

is transition took place in a complex bureaucratic environment with

developing crosscurrents of interrelationship and conflict among parts of

disparate agencies, and between some of those agency “offices” and the individuals who served them under contract or as advisors. e external environment was also in a dynamic state, with the increasing war in Southeast

Asia lending to a sense of urgency while associated tensions at home and

abroad began to intensify. Let us recapitulate, briefly, before proceeding.

e DOD offered the essential lure, in effect a pot of gold in the form

of resources for potential support of social research in connection with Vietnam and other “wars of national liberation” and it lent to the attraction of

the resources a sense of mission reinforced by the president and many of

those he had brought into his administration—in the White House, the

Defense Department, and elsewhere. A number of influential members of

the social science community, who were aware of the past successes with

DOD-supported research in the behavioral sciences, encouraged the DOD

to believe that the kind of research they advocated could be equally useful

in the world of international affairs—a world partly outside the DOD, but

connected with its assigned tasks. ose tasks, in Southeast Asia, were related to an unfamiliar kind of war, of which the only apparently “known”

quality was that it posed a danger to the United States because it was being

encouraged and supported by nations we considered our adversaries. Members of the DOD hierarchy, civilian and military, who exerted influence and

control over the available resources accepted the advice of the social scien97
tists. ey believed it had merit since they perceived that much of the problem of Vietnam and similar conflicts lay in understanding societies, cultures, and relationships among people, rather than in improving weapons

and military equipment (or, at least, in addition to those more familiar activities).

e president had assigned responsibilities for counterinsurgency operations overseas to several agencies. ese were overlapping responsibilities, presenting opportunities for both productive cooperation among the

agencies and conflict between them. e DOD, having become accustomed

as a general matter to undertaking research and development to solve its

problems and to expanding the relevant R&D when the problems became

pressing, turned its attention with the same reflex to the specific problems

developing in Vietnam and Southeast Asia. In this, it was encouraged by the

presidential assignment of responsibilities, which included “relevant research and development.” e other agencies, some without research resources of their own, reacted positively to the invitation to participate with

the DOD, but with no resources and, in the State Department’s case, with

reservations. State met the DOD’s offer of research support and cooperation with overt cordiality but, it turned out later, deep misgivings as well as

an apparently irresistible bureaucratic interest in the opportunity to expand

its span of control in the research field. e response seemed to reflect State

Department attitudes that included reluctance to accept the character of

the Vietnam conflict as it was perceived by the DOD, and fear of studies

that were not performed by their own personnel, because such studies were

sensitive. While State had virtually no resources to support contract research, they had a substantial inhouse study staff. However, the linkage with

DOD was left to the part of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research that

was responsible for spending State’s minuscule contract research resources

rather than the part that did the substantive research.

Within the DOD, the situation was similarly mixed. Early on, there

had been no especially strong support for social research beyond that essential to improve the functioning of the Services’ men and equipment.

Now, the horizon was being expanded, and this expansion, pressed by a few

individuals on his staff, was being supported by the third-ranking official

under the secretary of Defense. In the Navy and the Air Force, those responsible for such research were cautious and saw mainly the opportunity

to expand the work of individual scholars that they supported in several

universities. Wanting a more massive and centrally coordinated effort with

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greater orientation to operational problems rather than underlying social

and political phenomena, the ODDR&E staff turned to the Army and

ARPA. Both responded positively, but they came into conflict with each

other and with ODDR&E as a result of the Army’s ambition and ARPA’s

desire to preserve the independence of its control over the work it funded.

An uneasy compromise was worked out, and it was also decided that the interested agencies outside DOD would be invited to join in the coordination and planning. us, any coordinating group, when it was established,

would be composed of individuals having mixed motives and organizational

loyalties and having diverse understandings and attitudes about research

and the real-world problems that were to be the subjects of research.

ose problems, during March–May 1965, were becoming more urgent. e United States was bombing North Vietnam and Marines were

landing in Danang, South Vietnam. e United States had rejected U

ant’s offer to help make peace. e antiwar movement in the United

States was becoming more vocal; “teach-ins” and demonstrations centered

in and around the universities were growing in number and intensity. Many

social scientists were involved and helping to organize the antiwar protests,

and their numbers would increase. e war protest movement was strong

overseas, as well, exacerbating sensitivity to “American foreign intervention”; and there was tension in Latin America over America’s counterinsurgency policies as reflected in Vietnam, and over America’s expressed

perception of rising Communist revolutionary agitation in Latin America

(which was believed by many in the United States government to originate

in Cuba).

Into this maelstrom, the Army’s early start toward implementing the

new DOD social research polices gradually began to intrude.

About August 1964, the Army had started to plan a large expansion of

its counterinsurgency-related study effort. Its nature was described in the

research plan submitted in response to the September 2 guidance memorandum from DDR&E. Initiating some aspects of the plan, the Army

joined with ARPA to establish a Counterinsurgency Information and

Analysis Center (CINFAC) at SORO. is center would draw together

available information about tribal groups, developing societies, and social

systems in various parts of the world, using library sources generally, but

adding first-hand information culled as needed from consulting experts

who had performed research in these areas. It started with the information

base that already existed to support the preparation of SORO’s Area Hand99

Chapter 9 • The Army Moves Out Smartly
books and would grow from there. Any government agency that needed

information about a foreign country or area in the “ird World,” for purposes of training, policy making, or what-have-you, could query the center

and expect, within a few days or weeks, depending on the amount and complexity of the information that had to be assembled, an answer reporting the

current state of knowledge. e center was not a new idea, but rather the

extension of an existing pattern to a new subject area. Other such centers

operated by appropriately qualified organizations, such as the Battelle Memorial Institute, had been established by the Defense Department to make

available to the scientific community the accumulated knowledge of years

of research in a variety of technical fields. e pattern was part of an attempt to deal with the well-known “information explosion.”

e work of the center was to include reports on such diverse subjects

as the progress of economic development under the AID program in South

Korea and the history of the village council in South Vietnam. Another

question that the center’s workers answered, which we shall discuss in due

course, figured large in Senator Fulbright’s later attacks on DOD social science research. Typically, CINFAC might receive 100–200 questions a

month, about half of them from DOD components and the others from

scattered agencies of government.

While CINFAC was being established, a document began, also August 1964, to float up into the Army “system” for approval, requesting allocation of funds to SORO for a project which was later named Camelot and

which had as its objective:

. . . to test in one country the feasibility of designing and developing, for strategic planning and other Army use, an advanced

system of early warning of internal conflict or its increased likelihood in foreign nations, together with concepts for early Army

reaction systems requirements.

e scope of the project was to develop the means for measuring “conflict potential,” estimating “posture effects,” and establishing information

collection and handling systems to feed data into the first two efforts. e

request for funds noted that “the study here proposed is a high risk, high

pay-off feasibility study.”

e genesis of the idea of measuring “internal war potential” is clear in

the words of the second Smithsonian report (see chapter 2), and elaboration of those ideas continued in the Camelot documents, as will be seen.

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However, this statement of a desired project seemed a far cry from the subtle kind of social research that was called for in the reports by the scientists.

It illustrates well what happens when an operating organization tries to incorporate results from research into its action capabilities. It was not so

much that the action part of the Army did not understand the subtleties of

the research or the scholarly aspects of obtaining results; it was, rather, that

generally the Army had to interpret the knowledge gained in terms of its

mission, as it understood that mission.

If the policy of government, illustrated by our entry into Vietnam and

by the organizational changes and mission assignments that had continued throughout the Kennedy and the beginning of the Johnson administrations, was to lend assistance to countries threatened by “wars of national

liberation,” and the U.S. Army was assigned a role as one of the instruments

of this policy, then the Army had to glean what knowledge it could to prepare itself to carry out this mission. In fairness, it might be noted that the

popular conception of the Army going off on its own to carry out nefarious foreign policy activities far beyond the scope of its military assignments,

which became common after the Army was attacked for the Camelot Project, was simply false. e Army was preparing itself to carry out a mission

that the president had ordered it to be ready to carry out, with the approval

and knowledge of Congress. e fact that important segments of Congress

later acted to change its approval does not obviate the fact that, at the time,

the Army was operating within the context of national policy agreed upon

between the executive and legislative branches.

However, the Army was certainly in sympathy with the assignment.

e terse and insensitive military language of its request for funds reflected

the beginning of this “user’s” translation of the language of the scientists

into the operational language necessary for its application of the research

results, and the translation reflected the Army’s view of what the scientists’

language was all about.

e project funding request was signed by Colonel Sullivan, chief of the

Human Factors and Operations Research Division of the Army Research

Office, whom we met earlier. Colonel Sullivan was an infantry officer with

a “can-do” outlook. In my years of working closely with him, I came to feel

that he understood full well the broader sensitivities and implications of the

social research that was being proposed; but he was not one given to questioning the aspects of the program that might cause difficulty. From his point

of view as a soldier, if the job was assigned, he expected that there would be

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problems and troubles (every assignment had them), and his overriding motivation was to overcome them in the best way he could. Because we had

worked together, he had been aware of the directions being taken by

DDR&E’s thinking in this program area, and he had had a preview of instructions to come. He concluded that the Army should “move out smartly,”

without waiting for explicit direction from above. He received tentative approval from the director of Army Research, Brigadier General Walter E.

Lotz (an electrical engineer) and from the chief of Army Research and Development, Lieutenant General William W. Dick Jr. By about December

1964, the project idea described in the August memorandum had evolved

into Project Camelot, which was to be assigned to SORO.*

From later task statements and documents describing the evolution of

the research plan, the idea that the predicting mechanisms would be developed through research in one country had developed into a much broader

study plan. ere would first be an attempt to gather in many countries various kinds of data describing the nature of the societies and how violence

might erupt and affect social change in those societies. ese data would

then be used to develop a “model” of a society in conflict and to select from

among the various existing but untested theories of social change those that

appeared to be valid. e consultants working with SORO had catalogued

from the literature about 800 hypotheses about internal war. Almost all of

them appeared plausible, but many appeared to be in direct opposition to

each other. For example, some economic theories stated that (a) internal

wars are generated by growing poverty, and others stated that (b) internal

wars result from rapid economic progress. Social theories postulated that (a)

internal war is a reflection of disorder resulting from great social mobility,

and also that (b) internal war is a reflection of frustration arising from little

social mobility. Political theories said that (a) internal wars are responses to

oppressive government, or that (b) internal wars are due to excessive toleration of alienated groups. It was first seen as necessary to sort out some of

these theories and to decide which ones had real validity based on historical data. Possibly many did, depending on the culture and circumstances,

and it would be necessary to establish these correlations empirically. en a

detailed description, or model, of social change in diverse societies would be

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* SORO had the habit of naming all of its projects. is made subsequent attacks on them easier and,

in the case of Camelot, added a new connotation to an old concept in the English language. In the

words of Dr. Vallance, the director of SORO, later testifying before the Fascell Subcommittee: “e label

‘CAMELOT’ simply emerged from the basic intent of the story . . . that is the development of a stable society with domestic tranquility and peace and justice for all.”1
constructed. From this model—and there could be more than one—the “indicators of internal conflict potential” would be developed. Finally, using the

models, the events in a single country would be examined in depth to ascertain whether the predictors were, in fact, valid ones—that is, whether they

would indeed predict. From here, it might be relatively straightforward to

apply the verified theories to strategic planning.

To run the project, SORO hired the late Dr. Rex Hopper, an expert on

Latin America from Brooklyn College, New York,* and assigned a few staff

people. I met Hopper only once; he appeared to stay very much in the background. He did not, for example, testify before the Fascell Committee.

Aside from Vallance and Bill Sullivan, our main contact with the project

was through a young political scientist, Ted Gude, who was very bright and

who appeared to do the organizing, much of the writing, briefing, and contacting of external consultants. SORO planned the work so that it would

remain unclassified and could involve many members of the scholarly community. ey planned to rely heavily on outside experts and enlisted many

consultants who were well known in such fields as anthropology, psychology, and political science. During spring 1965, a number of these consultants formed a working group that met one day a week with the internal

staff, helping to draft preliminary documents, research plans, and generally

to describe what the project was supposed to do and how it would go about

doing it.

SORO had planned to complete in the United States its preliminary

thinking and library research on theories of conflict, revolutionary warfare,

and processes of change in diverse social systems, during the winter and

spring of 1964 and 1965, focusing on several societies at a time. Overseas

research was planned to begin—again, largely library research—by September 1965. It was intended that such research would be undertaken almost simultaneously in some 21 countries—an expansion of overseas

research of unprecedented ambition and scope. Following from SORO’s

previous work on case studies of revolution, they built their planned research around such conflicts and planned to examine such historical or current events as the Argentina revolution of 1943; the Venezuelan revolution

of 1945; the Peruvian coup of 1963; Colombia since World War II; the

Egyptian coup of 1952; the Iranian coup of 1953; the Korean revolution of

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Chapter 9 • The Army Moves Out Smartly

* Dr. Hopper was chairman of the Sociology Department. He had explored the sociology of social movements, particularly of Latin America, and was coauthor of e Seizure of Power: A Century of Revolution.

He died of a heart attack not long after the Camelot events described in the following chapters.
1960; and Greece in the context of the Cold War. As rather remote possibilities that might later be found interesting, they also considered, in a very

tentative way, the Algerian independence struggle, the Congo since 1960,

the French-Canadian separatist movement, and several others. Chile was

not mentioned as one of the possibilities, although it figured very much in

the news later on. e amount of money to be spent was never very certain.

Ultimately, the Army allocated about half a million dollars for the first year

(only about half of which was spent), and then planned to spend about a

million dollars per year for three to four years thereafter.

Despite these ambitious plans, the project never really got off the

ground during fall 1964. e full project staff was never assembled or fully

organized. ere were many meetings, but the output consisted of generalities, never becoming specific about research hypotheses and how they

would be tested; what data would be gathered; or what the social system

models would consist of. at is, the “research plan,” without which a study

in the social sciences (or in any other scientific area) cannot be undertaken,

remained vague and formless. In its report, the DSB took note of Project

Camelot, saying:

. . . Presumably, as Project CAMELOT gets under way, there will

be such (i.e., systems-oriented) staff additions (at SORO) and a

corresponding methodological reorientation, but this matter

should be kept under continuing review by the ODDR&E.

By January 1965, Rains Wallace and I were quite concerned about, and

discussed with Lyle Lainer and Harold Brown, the increasing evidence that

SORO management might not be up to the broader tasks being planned

for it. We considered the possibility of asking the Army to change the management of SORO, but this seemed inappropriate at the time. e evidence

was still largely in the form of random observations, unformed fears, impressions, and hunches; it was insufficient to justify broaching this delicate

question to the Army, and it was never raised outside the circle of those

most concerned in ODDR&E. Several times later during that spring, I had

talks with social scientists who were not involved in Camelot but who visited SORO and discussed the project with its staff and management. Uniformly, they reported that they believed that SORO did not know what it

was doing. ese inputs served to reinforce the concerns reflected in our

subsequent actions.

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We had several talks with Colonel Sullivan, who then put more pressure on SORO to prepare and present a firm research plan. About the time

we were preparing the March 24 guidance letter (in February), we received

a document from SORO entitled “Project CAMELOT: Design and Phasing.” Among the most important problems the document presented were

these:

• Diffuse wording, still not pointing toward specific research tasks

and problems. For example,

Since it is not possible to specify a priori the exact form of

possible models of internal conflict and internal war, it is necessary to develop a broad range of information requirements

for the case studies so that many types of models can be developed and tested with the data.

e initial models developed in the theoretical design effort

will have as a primary objective the specification of the types

of models that may prove valuable to the project.

e research design for the individual analytical case studies

and the individual social systems studies will be planned to

include the information requirements for all of the various

models.

Clearly, the thinking was circular. Which models? What would

they look like? How could they plan to get data to construct

models of which they had not yet conceived? What data would

they seek? Would they randomly amass data on all conceivable

subjects and then try to process it? A disastrous end for such an

undertaking could be readily predicted.

• is led, of course, to more specific concerns about the data

problem per se. e general tone of the discussion was that they

would have more data than they would know what do with; but

there was no indication that they would know or try to determine a priori what data were needed, whether they might exist

or be available, how they would obtained, how SORO would

obtain access to sources. None of this had yet been explored

after six month’s “work” nor did it even appear to have been recognized as a problem.

• ere was a section that talked about small group experimentation “particularly as concerned with concepts, such as cohesion, control, socialization, goal development, and motivation in

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primary groups.” e purpose of such experimentation, the validity of its results in terms of large social systems, or the possibility of doing it in the cultures and situations they would be

concerned with, and how it would relate to the objectives or

final results, were not dealt with.

• e plan still read as though the program would be done primarily by outside consultants, with little effort by the SORO

inhouse staff except loose coordination. In our view, systems

analysis of questions of this kind required that the technical

work be tightly coordinated, carefully planned, and divided into

subtasks to be performed by a cohesive, inhouse research staff.

Consultants could help, but they could not do the job themselves. us, this was not shaping up as a coordinated program,

but rather as a loose conglomeration of somewhat related studies by individual scholars who had their own diverse interests in

the general area, and who were, it seemed, to do Camelot tasks

when those were defined as spare-time jobs. is moved opposite to the DSB recommendation for improving social science

research methodology.

• Finally, the rush to go overseas about six or eight months after

publication of this “plan,” in view of the state disarray of the

plan, was frightening.

Wallace and I called for a meeting on the subject and met with Sullivan, Gude, and Vallance at ARO in early March. We discussed in detail

the problems we saw, and Gude responded by describing the thinking of the

group of consultants then meeting periodically with the staff and promised

to pay more attention to the specific research questions in future writing.

(ey later did prepare a very detailed document of information requirements which, when it surfaced in Chile, made it look as though this were

a strictly intelligence-oriented operation by the U.S. Army. e relationship between intelligence and research in this area had been recognized by

the Smithsonian panel and was a troublesome one, which I will come back

to in some detail much later.) Gude noted that there was to be a meeting

of the key consultants and a number of distinguished scholars, forming a

technical advisory group, in August. en, the detailed and final research

plan would be worked out. e staff would be on board and, he assured us,

we would be satisfied with the project. After the meeting, Wallace and I

decided privately that, if the August convocation did not produce these results, the project would be cancelled.

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We were now in a dilemma. DDR&E was preparing to issue a guidance paper giving the Army major responsibility for the total program, and

the Army capability seemed to be weak, indeed. But all of the programmatic results of the previous year’s bureaucratic work had evolved in directions desired by both the DOD and many members of the social science

community. e Services and ARPA, despite their diverse concerns, were

responding positively, making plans and allocating budgets. At various

points in previous years, the organizations directly responsible for research

in the social sciences within the Services had also responded to recommendations for increasing the work by requesting the budgets, which then

had been turned down at the top service levels. is was not happening

now. e question was, should we at this point call a halt until the Army

could solve its problems of management and research capability and risk

losing credibility and the ability to restart afterward; or should we go ahead

and try to fix the Army’s problems as we went along? Inevitably, bureaucratic momentum won out.

Although, in retrospect, this was obviously a mistake, it seemed a reasonable risk at the time. SORO was still working inhouse and unobtrusively (we thought). Money was not being spent at a high rate because of

the small staff. We had the ultimate control of the Army’s budget to use as

a club. erefore, we decided to go ahead with the guidance, but we retained our private determination to have Camelot cancelled, while the

Army might be allowed to go ahead with the other parts of its six-point

program, if the project did not shape up in August.

After the flurry of activity involved in getting the March 24 guidance

letter out, I had another inconclusive discussion with Gude and decided to

put on paper what was bothering me most. Since we were still trying to get

the Army turned around rather than turned off, the situation appeared to

bear handling with kid gloves. Being aware of the power of an official complaint to a Service or contractor from a member of the DDR&E staff, I

wrote a personal letter to Gude rather than a formal letter to Sullivan or

Vallance. In it, I reviewed the situation regarding Camelot as we saw it; I

pointed out the novelty and difficulty of taking a systems approach to the

study of a major social problem; and I dwelt on the problem of getting the

idea accepted, both by the social science community and the operational

community. I noted that just doing the project could affect the social system that the project was about, if the latter were defined to include the ambassador, the military commanders, and the whole U.S. decision-making

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apparatus as well as people and government in the country in question. In

effect, just by the act of undertaking the research we were effecting social

change, and we had to tread very gingerly. eir plans were as yet imprecise

and uncertain. erefore they should not plan to be in 21 countries overseas by September, but rather should hope to start by then to arrange to do

research in one country over the winter; they could then learn to test data

sources, the climate of acceptance, etc. If successful, they could plan, some

months later, to start preparing the way for research in two or three additional countries. at is, the problem should be approached more slowly,

and the schedule should be extended considerably. I did not know when I

wrote this letter that it was already too late, because Rex Hopper had sent

a personal letter to a colleague in Chile a few days earlier that would literally destroy SORO’s programs and seriously undermine the remainder of

the DOD effort.

In the course of my work, I had made it a practice to travel to various

overseas commands, especially in Southeast Asia, to obtain a first-hand

view of the problems of warfare, field operations, hardware needs, and of

doing research in the field. In late April, I decided to go to the Panama

Canal Zone where the headquarters of the United States Southern Command (Commander in Chief, South, or CINSCO) was based. With the

growing attention to Vietnam, Latin America, which seemed vitally important in view of the conflict with Cuba and Castro’s promises to stimulate revolutionary movements elsewhere, had received little attention. In

the Canal Zone, the Army had a tropical research center where environmental research and equipment testing were performed to obtain data that

might be applicable to the jungle environments of Southeast Asia. ere

were training facilities operated by CINSCO’s component commands to

train the Latin American military in such diverse skills as military organization and aircraft engine maintenance. ARPA and SORO both had field

offices there; and there were other activities relevant to my responsibilities

in ODDR&E. I would also obtain my first “official” view of the problems

in that part of the world, through the eyes of the U.S. military command,

and pave the way for the trips I hoped to make later to countries in Latin

America. At the same time, I took the opportunity to tell General Porter,

the commander in chief, about our views of the counterinsurgency R&D

problems, our growing interest in related social research, our plans to increase Army responsibility in that area, and the possibility of undertaking

more research of this kind in Latin America.

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is was an interesting time for a visit. e government had just been

overthrown in the Dominican Republic, and the situation regarding the

possibility of a United States role in that area, if any, was unclear. Although

General Porter was obviously busy, we had a lengthy discussion during

which he stressed the delicacy of his position as overall commander of all

the military advisory groups in the various Latin American countries, and

his concern that the DOD not undertake any research activities in Latin

America without his knowledge. I raised the problem of freedom of inquiry; would he try to control the subjects or the results of research? He said

that, while he had no desire or intention to influence research results or

methodology, he could not accept contacts with local government officials

and populations by DOD-supported researchers unless he were able to answer any questions that might be raised by their presence, and unless he

could intervene to change or delay plans for visits to Latin American countries if particularly sensitive matters or events arose. I assured him that no

projects would be undertaken without his first being briefed on them, and

that no researchers would be sent to any Latin American countries without a “theater clearance” from his command, as was required by the operating regulations of both the Army and ARPA. I told him the Army would

come down to brief him in detail and left after several days in Panama and

the Canal Zone, just as the U.S. Marines were landing at Santo Domingo.

On my return to Washington (in early May), I held another meeting

with the group of research directors of various government departments.

ey had already received the Defense Science Board report, and I told

them of the March 24 guidance letter and of the developing plan for the

Army to establish a coordinating office in Washington in which they would

be invited to participate. Bill Nagle of the State Department raised the

question of the State’s Foreign Area Research Coordinating Group, for

which he was responsible. He felt that it should coordinate the planned

program rather than the Army, since it was already in existence and the

subject was “foreign areas.” I pointed out the DOD’s responsibility for supervising efforts funded out of its appropriation, and that this responsibility could not be given to another agency of government. Moreover, there

were many agencies and departments represented on FAR in addition to

the five most immediately concerned with the problem, who were represented at this meeting. FAR was obviously too large a forum to do more

than exchange information. I promised, however, to keep FAR informed

“officially,” and welcomed their advice and suggestions for new research

projects. FAR was, in fact, briefed a number of times on the DOD efforts.

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(It was also at about this time that I wrote to State suggesting studies that

we would be willing to fund under the cognizance, with results described

earlier.)

e discussion was inconclusive, and I had the uneasy feeling that FAR

was too tempted by the obvious opportunity for extension of its domain.

But when the meeting ended, I thought that the position I had stated was

understood and accepted. I also believed that our agreement was confirmed

in later telephone conversations. I was therefore very much surprised when

in late May I received a letter from Nagle that started “I am herewith amplifying the terms of our telephone conversation, in which I was pleased

that you so readily accepted my view that any new inter-agency foreign area

research mechanism should be under the Foreign Area Research Coordination Group . . . ” and then proceeded to describe how FAR, rather than

the Army, would establish the coordinating mechanism. But since the new

DDR&E memo and a letter inviting State to assign a staff member to the

Army’s new office were in final preparation and about to go to DDR&E for

signature, I judged that this would either set the question to rest or provide

a high-level forum for arguing it. e package did go forward about June

10 for DDR&E signature, and I felt quite relaxed about the whole matter.

I was in for another nasty shock when, on June 14, I received a call

from Nagle. He informed me that the State had just received a confidential cable from Ambassador Dungan in Chile that said that a Communist

newspaper on Saturday morning, June 12, broke a story under the headline

“Yankees Study Invasion of Chile,” sub headed “Project Camelot Financed

by the U.S. Army.” e cable then complained that the ambassador had not

known of any such research project; he was very disturbed that this activity should have been undertaken in Chile without prior notification and

he asked what was going on. He considered the effort to be seriously detrimental to U.S. interests in Chile. With this, Nagle said he would be in touch

and hung up. I informed DDR&E and called SORO to find out what had

happened.

e next few days were extremely hectic. e story was picked up by

Radio Havana and then by Radio Moscow, and then appeared in innerpage dispatches in American papers. We were frantically trying to find out

what had happened in Chile, of all places, since there had been no plans for

research there; no visits were authorized, per my promise to General Porter;

and this was the first I had heard of anything having to do with that country. Operations in the Dominican Republic by American troops were still

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very much in the news, and the two stories were being linked together in

the dispatches.

e dry and concise language of material that was subsequently prepared for but not presented to the Fascell Committee (we decided to let the

Army present its own story) makes interesting counterpoint to the confusion of the events:

a) e Chilean newspaper that carried the story was El Siglo, the

Communist Party organ in Chile. e story was subsequently

picked up by Radio Havana, Moscow Domestic Service, and

London’s Reuters.

b) No research related to project CAMELOT had ever been

planned or conducted in Chile. However, three contacts by the

Special Operations Research Office (SORO) personnel with persons in Chile were identified:

(1) Dr. Rex Hopper, Director of CAMELOT, had stopped

in Chile on personal business for two days in early April. He

had attended a social science research meeting in Rio de

Janiero in late March—the meeting being totally unrelated

to project CAMELOT. While in Chile, he informally discussed CAMELOT with two personal friends.

(2) On April 5, 1965, Dr. Hopper wrote a letter to Dr. Galtung, a Norwegian social scientist working with the UN in

Chile, inviting Dr. Galtung (who had been at Columbia University with the other members of the CAMELOT staff ) to

participate in a planning conference to be held in Washington in August. A brief description of the project was given, including the fact that it was sponsored by the U.S. Army. e

letter offered a fee of $2,000 for the entire month of August.

(3) Dr. Hugo Nutini, an anthropologist from Pittsburgh University, had been a consultant at SORO on Project

CAMELOT during February–April 1965. Dr. Nutini, a native Chilean now a naturalized U.S. citizen, was scheduled to

go to Chile on other business in April. On the initiative of the

project director, he was asked to informally assess the interest of academic and governmental officials with respect to the

possibility of doing some related research in Chile (apparently, in terms of Chile as an example of orderly social

change) and to determine what indigenous resources existed

to do the research. is was to be done in the “natural course

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of events” of Nutini’s other business, and he was to be paid as

a consultant when he returned. A portion of his fee was advanced to him. Dr. Nutini talked to approximately 150 persons in Chile, including governmental officials and academic

personnel.

As I later reconstructed the story from various sources, it seemed that

members of the Santiago University community had been upset when Galtung, who was very much opposed to American intervention in Vietnam,

had told them of this new evidence of American military perfidy; they had

contacted Chile’s foreign minister, who had in turn gone to Dungan; while

they were trying to sort the matter out, other faculty members had given the

story to El Siglo.

Two other occurrences from these few days remain vivid in my memory. First, when I learned from SORO that Hopper had sent the formal

Camelot task statement to Galtung as an enclosure with his letter, I checked

back to it. When I saw the words, “Project Camelot is a study whose objective is to determine the feasibility of developing a general social systems

model which would make it possible to predict and influence politically significant aspects of social change . . . ” (emphasis added), I knew that the

whole idea of doing research in Latin America was in trouble, and possibly dead.

Second, Wallace and I had been scheduled to meet with the staff of the

Senate Armed Services Committee as part of our beginning effort to explain the expansion of the social science program to Congress. We did have

this meeting on June 22 and reviewed with the staff director all the activities that led to the new program plans: the background; why we thought the

research was necessary; what the research might accomplish; the DSB report; and our current plans. e staff director had read the Camelot news

items and inquired. We explained what the project was, what we thought

had happened, and how we hoped to correct the problems. We expressed

our hope that this would not hurt the program plans too severely. We noted

frankly that we felt it would be hard enough to convince Congress of the

value of the work, and that the Camelot news would make it more difficult.

We stressed the relatively modest pace of the program expansion and

budget, reminding him of the small number of people the budget represented. We discussed the continuing coordination we had maintained with

ARPA, the Services, and the State Department. He seemed interested and

sympathetic, but obviously made no commitment. So, we could see the be112

The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy
ginning of the problems that we had believed we would have to prepare for

in any case. Having done our internal work in DOD, we now had to face

the outside world, which we presumed would want to be convinced, and it

looked none too easy even under the best of circumstances. e current circumstances were far from that.

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PART III

DONNYBROOK

Prefatory Note: A Personal Interlude

e next weekend, June 26, began as a peaceful one. We had not heard much more

from the outside world that week about Camelot, and our investigation of

SORO’s jumping of the gun in Chile was proceeding. As the chronicle of their

stumbling unfolded, we made plans to assure that they could not do that again;

and next week, we would decide what to do about the project. On Saturday, my

wife and I drove a 500-mile round trip to take our two girls to a summer camp

in Pennsylvania. We returned, dead tired, at about midnight, looking forward

to seven weeks of relative quiet. For the first time in 10 years, we were going to

be alone together for more than a few hours. At about 8:30 on Sunday morning,

we were awakened by a phone call from Colonel Sullivan—had I seen e

Washington Star that morning, and what time could I come to a meeting at his

office? He sketched out the problem briefly, we arranged a time, and I rushed out

for a paper. On the front page, again in the dry language of the brief later prepared for the congressional committee:

On 27 June 1965, an article appeared in e Washington Star

alleging that the Department of the Army and the Department of

State were feuding over the unauthorized intrusion of DOD into

the field of foreign policy matters and that Department of the Army

was conducting research in Chile without letting the State Department know about the project.

e consequences were to be great and to unfold over the next five years or

more. Not the least of the causalities, but perhaps not large in the general scale of

things, was our peaceful summer.

Chapter 10

e Tip of the Iceberg

e Camelot news was to send a shock through the American social science world, starting a period of self-searching, questioning, and witch hunting that was to disrupt both the established value system and relations

between social scientists and the government. DOD research in the social

sciences became big news and, for a time, it seemed as though hardly a day

could pass without a story about another DOD probe into areas that were

coming to be deemed “none of its business.” e State Department “moved

in” to broaden its scope of control over all such activity and, in particular, to

exercise control over at least this part of DOD research; this created a countercurrent of concern in the social science community. While the DOD

tried to put its house in order, Congress took a closer look at what it was

up to and, as the record will demonstrate, did not like what it saw. In the

next fiscal year, the program was cut back essentially to where it had been

before the new efforts were started. But, more important, it seemed to me

that Senators McCarthy, Fulbright, and Mansfield took DOD social research overseas as a symbol of what they viewed as the DOD’s expanding

and improper grasp of foreign affairs, and they used this as one of the elements of what were to be years of opposition to the DOD’s more general

role overseas.

All of this did not, of course, take place solely because of the misguided

actions of a few social scientists in a foreign country. e news of the Army’s

“research project in Chile” broke in a period of heightening concern about

the Vietnam War, when the further evidence of American interference in

a foreign country’s affairs in the Dominican Republic had exacerbated the

Vietnam irritation immeasurably and had confirmed the administration’s

opponents’ view of what Senator Fulbright called “the arrogance of power.”

American bombing of North Vietnam had started in February 1965, just

about the time the Defense Science Board’s report was published. e public debate, along with the demonstration, teach-ins, and other opposition to

American participation in the war, was building up during spring 1965 and

was to lead to the first peace march on Washington during the following

November. “Dissent” was becoming a fashionable word, and the Camelot

news gave many social scientists a cause célèbre within their own house to

add to their growing dissatisfaction with American behavior overseas.

117
e sensitivities of all Latin America had been rubbed raw by the entry

of American troops into Santo Domingo, which was viewed as reversion to

the policy of the “big stick.” It would not have taken much for any Latin

American to have believed any story about American intervention anywhere on the continent. e evidence, as far as they were concerned, existed in Chile in the form of the Camelot plan’s detailed description of the

kinds of information the project’s staff and consultants had said they

wanted: political party alignments; social conditions; army and police organization and roles in society; economic and social maldistribution and

discontent—as the phrase goes, “the whole bit.” Many other American

scholars were working in Latin America at the same time, under private

foundation and university sponsorship, and all came under suspicion. And

before too long were to come the revelations, starting with the news that

Michigan State University had allowed some of its staff to be employed

under contract to the CIA to train police in Vietnam,1 that the CIA had

“penetrated” a number of American universities and the National Student

Association. e American community of students of foreign societies

could foresee the end of its welcome to perform research overseas—everywhere, perhaps, but in sensitive Latin America especially.

us the time for DOD to expand its interest in studying revolutionary war and the structure of foreign cultures turned out to have been inauspicious, and only a slight misstep was required to shake the profession

to its roots. SORO’s contact with social scientists in Chile was that misstep.

e issues that were raised were relatively few, but they were fundamental. e legitimacy of counterinsurgency as a strategy for the United

States, and as a subject for study by the American community of social scientists, was questioned. e word changed from a name for a strategy to a

symbol of all that was considered reactionary in American foreign, and even

domestic, policy. e propriety of the DOD’s supporting research into the

function of social systems was challenged; the fact that the DOD was carrying out presidential policy was forgotten. e problem of how the DOD

controlled what went on under its research contracts became a crucial one,

involving complex issues of centralization of research management, political sensitivity, and freedom of inquiry. It became an article of faith that the

State Department should have control of anything having remotely to do

with foreign policy or, indeed, with research in or about foreign countries.

e fact that DOD could get money to support research in these areas,

while State apparently could not, was deplored but not questioned from

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the State point of view; many years elapsed before the next step—of trying

to get the money for State—was taken. e further question was raised,

and became ever more persistent, as to whether the Defense Department

should display any interest in foreign policy at all. On the one hand, the

DOD was condemned for trying to learn something about its task, since if

it tried to do so this implied it was seeking control for foreign policy. On

the other hand, the military were condemned for being insensitive to the

nuances of international affairs and diplomacy. Either way, the DOD was

out of line.

State’s attitude toward and ability to undertake research were never explored, but underlay the uneasiness of the social scientists about the role

that was given to State. is concern led to the further question of whether

any part of the government could support such research without having its

motives questioned. Next in turn came the problem of personal ethics—

whether social scientists could properly lend themselves to purposes of government—and from there, full circle, to the growing schism between the

scholarly world and the Defense Department. Issues that were never raised

explicitly but were also of fundamental importance (and remained so) appeared in the role of the press, with its devotion to a combination of truth

and sensation; in the question of whether valid scientific research could be

performed under the conditions of public scrutiny and disorder in the field

that obtained; and whether the research results would be of any particular

value in the long run, in any case.

All these issues are easily and briefly stated in retrospect. But they developed painfully and over a considerable period of time in a jumble of external events, internal meetings, and bureaucratic infighting that were

emotionally charged and kaleidoscopically juxtaposed. e only way to gain

perspective and some sense of logical sequence, even now, is to look at each

of the many threads in turn, showing as the occasions arise how each interacted with the others. In doing this, it will be convenient (as it has been

up to this point) to refer to “the press,” “the Congress,” “the social science

community,” and others, as though these were monolithic entities. But

surely the reader has observed by now that within each of these entities

were diverse individuals and groups, each with unique motivations that

sometimes reinforced and sometimes conflicted with the motivations of

others. It is, of course, out of the actions of interactions among these various participants that the evolution of events developed, as will become clear

in the succeeding chapters.

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Chapter 11

e Press Has a Field Day

Suppose we start with the press. Its role was crucial. It brought the Camelot

fiasco to the public’s attention and stimulated the interest of members of

Congress in DOD social research. It fed, if it did not trigger, the bureaucratic conflict between the State and the Defense Departments. When all

was said and done, the press could claim much of the credit for having

brought the DOD’s supposed misbehavior to public account.

But its own behavior was interesting. e press’ concern was with the

surface phenomena and with their more sensational aspects. Fundamental issues were almost never raised, but the DOD’s efforts to undertake social research efforts overseas were never lost as the target. e background and the

reasons for the DOD’s activity were barely explored; although, as we shall

see, that was partly the DOD’s fault. Some of the press stories were quite accurate, although these seemed to get less prominence than the others. Most

of the stories had a few of the facts and wove them together with half-truths

and surmise, so that the output seemed always to be full of distortions or

misinformation osculating with the truth. Some of this could be taken as

good, clean fun; some as haste or carelessness; and some seemed calculated.

e story that really triggered the furor was not the original dispatch

that Reuters had picked up from Radio Havana and the Moscow Domestic Service. It was Walter Pincus’ front-page story in e Washington Star on

June 27, headlined “Army-State Department Feud Bared by Chile Incident.” e article told of “a growing conflict between the State Department

and the Pentagon”; revealed that the U.S. ambassador to Chile had cabled

the Department about the “Army-sponsored study begun there without his

knowledge” (obviously information leaked to Pincus, because the cable was

classified); talked of State’s “open-mouthed amazement” at the DOD’s

growing interest in foreign policy and social science research; and expanded

at length on State’s view of the foolishness of trying to do research on social systems, and on how the DOD could get research money, while State

could not. ree days later, Secretary McNamara received a letter from Senator McCarthy, asking for details about the project and the State-DOD

conflict.

In a continuing series of articles over the next few days, Pincus described Senator McCarthy’s preparations for a Senate investigation and,

121
little by little, described some aspects of the Camelot Project, making it

seem, however, as though SORO were already undertaking research without a by-your-leave in Venezuela, in French Canada, and elsewhere. e

disparity in funds for research between Defense and State was stressed continuously, at first comparing the $6 million said to have been ultimately

envisioned for Camelot* with the annual $140,000 or so for State’s external research, then pointing out how difficult it was for State to get its internal $4.2 million INR budget past Congressman Rooney. Pincus

mentioned DOD studies in the behavioral and social science field funded

at “$20 million, an amount far above anything that could conceivably be

requested or received for such studies by any other Federal agency . . . ” without inquiring as to what work was covered by that budget, and leaving the

implication that this was all for “foreign affairs research”—a misconception

that persisted. Whereas Pincus had said only that “research in Chile” had

been started without State’s knowledge, a Newsweek article on July 5, in the

breezy style of the weekly news magazines, went a step further, stating that

“Dungan may be some time getting a complete answer to his cable. For

one thing, the Army’s Project Camelot seems never to have been called to

the attention to top State Department officials.” is idea—that the Army

had started a study about foreign policy on its own initiative without informing State—persisted in most later writings, even as recently as a note

in the May 1971 Scientific American1 about “a covert research effort in Latin

America financed by the Department of Defense.”

As a matter of simple fact, aside from the discussion I had with the

group of departmental research directors and FAR, the record shows that

the Army had briefed diverse groups in State on the project at least a dozen

times starting in August 1964. A member of the INR staff had met with

the group of consultants at the weekly SORO planning meetings in spring

1965. One of those briefed at State was Walt Rostow, then chairman of the

Policy Planning Council, who was reported by the Army attendees to have

found the proposed research interesting, to have seen “no objection of bureaucratic nature” (in the words of the Army report), and to have expressed

his pleasure that the External Research people had already assured DOD

of interest and cooperation. (Despite all the later problems and publicity, he

never said this publicly, and Secretary Rusk testified in August that all

Camelot contacts with State were minor and that the project was never

known at the policy level.) e SORO team had also briefed a behavioral

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* But see chapter 9, p. 97.
science advisory committee of the National Academy of Sciences that had

been established at Army’s request to advise the project, with State Department representatives present. As late as May 25, 1965, Nagle had written to Vallance thanking him for keeping the State Department so closely

informed of Project Camelot. Most of this information was made known

to the congressional committees having an interest in the problem, and was

published in the record of the Fascell hearings later,2 but little of it appeared

in the press for reasons that we shall explore shortly and that were partly,

but not wholly, the fault of the press.

e knowledge of SORO’s and DOD’s efforts to keep State informed

made Pincus’s claim that there was “open-mouthed amazement,” as well as

a memorandum in State deploring the project, particularly irritating. It

seemed to me to be obvious that Pincus was being fed his information from

the State. It also seemed obvious that some people in the State Department, at least, had reservations about the general area of DOD research

and about the particular project and were expressing them privately within

the department. At no time, although there had obviously been many opportunities, were such reservations raised with anyone in the Army or

ODDR&E during all the meetings among Army, DOD, and State Department representatives the previous year. One was let to wonder why, if

State were deeply concerned about the potentially adverse impact of such

research on American foreign policy (as they later would claim to be), they

did not mention those concerns while they had the opportunity to prevent

the adverse events from taking place. Since, as I was told, their representative to SORO knew of SORO’s plans to contact Galtung, and presumably

knew that even some of SORO’s consultants had warned against it, a single phone call would have changed the entire outcome. It is not surprising

that, at the time, we in DOD attributed a certain bureaucratically oriented

malevolence to their actions; this seemed in keeping with what I had interpreted as a power play in the weeks before the Camelot story broke and

was reinforced by the subsequent behavior, as will be seen. e Fascell subcommittee was led to remark that, “We cannot condone the type of interdepartmental rivalry which was evidenced in the steady stream of ‘leaks’

originating in the State Department, undoubtedly intended to preclude any

other disposition of this proposed undertaking. is can hardly serve to advance the interests of our foreign policy.”3

ere followed a spate of articles and interest in the DOD’s adventures

with the social sciences in “trade” magazines, in various newspapers, in Sci123

Chapter 11 • The Press Has a Field Day
ence magazine (which printed one of the more calm and accurate accounts),4

and even in Punch, which added a welcome touch of friendly humor in the

midst of all the sound and fury.5 After the Camelot Project was cancelled

in early July, e Washington Star crowed editorially that, “thanks to an exclusive article by the Star’s Mr. Pincus . . . the strange excursion of the Army

into sociology in other lands was brought to light . . . this is a rather strange

garden path for the Army to be exploring, and the State Department was

properly outraged. . . . After some behind-the-scenes conferences, the Army

decided it might better abandon the $700,000 . . . ”—again, misinformation

that the Star’s editorial writer, at least, might have checked with its own

Mr. Pincus, but his outlook was obvious.

Toward the end of July, I was called by John Goshko of e Washington Post, who was covering Latin American affairs and the State Department at the time. He said he had heard about a recent Camelot-type flap

in Brazil and asked if I could tell him about it. He said that he knew about

a contract ARPA had with a company to do research on counterinsurgency

in Brazil and that State had received a message of protest from the ambassador; however, he wanted to know if we had “killed the contract.” I explained to him that nothing of the kind existed or had happened and

reminded him that, while I would be perfectly willing to talk with him

about it in detail, the rules of the DOD news game at the moment required

that he first direct his inquiry to Public Affairs Assistant Secretary Arthur

Sylvester. He said he would do that, but, as far as I know, he never did. I assumed he had to file his story before some close deadline passed.

e project in question was in the counterinsurgency area, but was far

simpler and more direct than Camelot. It was intended to explore, from

newspaper data available in any library, whether the reported patterns of

violence in a country could be correlated with social change well enough to

serve as an “indicator” of the onset of violent revolution. Whereas Camelot

wanted to analyze the nature of the illness in detail, this project desired

only to determine whether symptoms of the illness could reliably be identified from surface phenomena. Of course, not everyone believed such

analysis was necessary or would be successful, since it could be argued that

an informed and knowledgeable observer could easily describe the condition of a sick society and predict its convulsions. But the opinions of the “old

hands” varied with their antecedents and political coloration and, in many

countries, political and social violence waxed and waned without any fundamental social change taking place. It seemed reasonable to try to use more

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rigorous analytical methods to determine whether some patterns of events

were more likely than others to indicate when such fundamental change

was about to take place. As it turned out, the study was only moderately successful—but that was not then, and is not now, the issue. e real issue was

whether objective analytical inquiry could shed light on the problem and

should be undertaken.

In this case, the study team was originally supposed to visit some countries in Latin America to gather data in local libraries. But when the

Camelot news broke, ARPA immediately changed these plans. e ambassador to Brazil had learned of the project through State and, believing

the intent was still to visit Brazil, which had been one of the countries on

the itinerary, had cabled his concern—and was reassured by cable, ending

the “flap.” However, the story by Goshko the day after he called me described the “Brazil project, like Camelot,” as “designed to study ways of influencing social and political change in developing nations . . . ” It then

described “the Army’s” (sic) plans to undertake the project in Brazil and

how the ambassador had stopped them, then saying that “since last Friday

the matter has been the subject of hurried discussions between State and

Defense officials”—an exaggeration bordering on fabrication, to say the

least. Subsequent articles told how the project was “suspended,” and an editorial in the Post said that “the Army, undeterred by Secretary McNamara’s

death warrant for Camelot, was blithely moving ahead with its Brazilian inquiry . . . ” It then castigated the Army for undertaking research that was

“not only gratuitous but grossly insulting.” An article by Walter Pincus in

the Star on the same subject carried the misinformation that “sources indicated the impetus to cancel Camelot came from the White House,” and

this was perpetuated in other, later writings by social scientists. Again, as we

shall see, the facts were wrong but the orientation was obvious.

It seems, in retrospect, that at least some reporters and editorial writers feel free to weave a tale creating an impression they want to convey,

without necessarily having, or feeling the need to find, all the facts in the

case. Perhaps many, or for all I know most, reporters try to find out as many

facts as they can consistent with having to meet their deadlines. It does

seem difficult for many of them to keep their value judgments from getting

in the way of objectivity.

About this time, there had also been a Pincus story about the Navy’s

“Project Michelson,” undertaken at the Naval Ordnance Test Station in

California.6 is story revealed that the Navy was using money (about

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Chapter 11 • The Press Has a Field Day
$250,000 per year) from its Polaris Program for studies by social scientists

of the political aspects of strategic deterrence. e article quoted the chief

scientist of the Office of Naval Research as saying that “as a pioneering

venture, it would be a good idea to see what the so-called soft sciences . . .

could bring to bear on the . . . desirable and undesirable features . . . of sea

based deterrents.” Titillating report titles, such as “Risk Taking and Risk

Avoidance in Soviet Foreign Policy, 1945–62,” and “e President’s ‘Slipof-the-Tongue’ on Cuba, August 1962,” were quoted. Congress did not

know about the project and again inquired. is added to jangled nerves in

the DOD. Once again, and in a completely different area, the DOD’s attempts to understand the social implications of military force, in application and as viewed from various aspects of public policy, were made to seem

somehow improper.

At this point, it was decided that something concrete had to be done to

terminate State’s destructive campaign of leaks to the press about DOD’s

study program. A telephone conversation between Harold Brown and

omas Mann, then the undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs, resulted in an agreement to limit distribution of messages about these projects

within the State Department, while DOD would take steps to change research project titles that could be misleading and damaging when taken out

of context. e rationale, on which both the Sate and Defense officials at

that level agreed, was that the appearance of the information in the press in

distorted form was providing every opportunity for the destruction of a research program still deemed important for national security. is was not

the only case where the question would arise of how much information

about the government’s activities could be made public or withheld in the interest of furthering those activities; e Pentagon Papers provided a more celebrated example, and the issue will surely reappear in the future. e more

fundamental question, of course, was why the DOD did not make a public

defense of its position and in its program, if the latter were so important.

A number of the social scientists who had contributed to the growth of

the DOD effort, some of whom were beginning to feel repercussions in

their professional lives because they had been associated with Camelot,

pleaded with us to release a full and coherent story about the project. e

Army did, too, and with good reason—they were essentially taking the public “rap” for having carried out a DOD policy they did not originate. Presumably, if the overall research programs made sense, even though some of

it might not have been as well thought out or executed as others, and if the

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program were supported by and based upon the best, most knowledgeable

scientific opinion that could be marshaled to advise the DOD over a period

of years, explaining this to the public would have provided a better basis

for judgment and rational argument than the flow of fragmentary, incomplete, and inaccurate stories that actually reached the public.

ere were several reasons for the DOD’s reticence, not all based on

sound logic. First, there was the problem of the acute embarrassment caused

by Camelot itself. e first reaction of a bureaucracy—and most of those in

it—when it feels itself caught out or under fire is protective. Feelings of

guilt follow embarrassment and, closely thereafter, the desire to become as

inconspicuous as possible. en, there was the context. All the stories, at

first, were about projects having to do with Latin America. In the prevailing atmosphere in that area about American intervention, following on the

heels of the landing in the Dominican Republic and the publication of the

Camelot task statement about predicting and influencing the course of social change, it seemed impossible to compose a discussion of the rationale

for a program involving DOD interest in Latin American social systems

that would not exacerbate international sensitivities even further. Our feeling in DOD was that anything that DOD said about such interests would

make matters worse and that the United States would be better served if the

DOD simply took its lumps, kept quiet, and let it blow over. (Of course, it

would not blow over, but at the time the dimension of the problem were not

fully appreciated.) Next, there were social research projects of much more

immediate importance to the DOD in Vietnam and elsewhere in Southeast Asia that were not getting any publicity, that were classified, and to

which it appeared unwise to draw attention under the circumstances. Some

of these studies were discussed before the Fascell Subcommittee and a little bit about them became part of the public record. But that record of

closed hearings was not published until December, and the press had in the

meantime turned its attentions temporarily to other matters.

e initial inclination within the DOD was thus to remain silent. is

was reinforced by the general attitude of the DOD’s upper hierarchy toward

discussions with the news media. It will be remembered that, early in McNamara’s tenure, it was easy for any journalist to talk with any official and

that many leaks of positions opposed to those of his administration had

plagued Kennedy’s early attempts to establish civilian control over the services. Tight controls were instituted; the rule became that a reporter who

wanted to interview an official must submit his request to the Public Affairs

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Office. If an interview were approved by that office (after suitable consultations), a representative from the office would sit in on the interview. is

was undoubtedly intended to ensure that officials did not depart very far

from “approved” policy, but in my years in the Pentagon I never found it

particularly inhibiting. One could always meet the demand for information by holding a “background discussion” not for attribution. e rule could

also be viewed as a means to help insure against misquotation or distortion

by the journalist that could be attributed to the interviewee to his embarrassment. e other side was that the rule placed the decision about what

subject matter could be discussed with the press under strong centralized

bureaucratic control. is was part of the pattern that led to the accusation

of “management of the news” by the DOD.

is issue is more complex than the simple facts might suggest. While

in a democracy the public is entitled to know what is happening inside government, the director of a major department of government needs to assert

some policy control over his staff. If each member of the staff is free to express his dissenting or critical opinions on important issues, publicly and at

will, such control can become a shambles. e courts have, on occasion,

ruled that the risk must be taken; but the bureaucracy has shown no signs

that control of public statements on policy is being foregone. e system of

“checks and balances” can be seen to have many facets.

Be that as it may, the Public Affairs Office decided that nothing should

be publicly said about Camelot by the OSD, and this was not likely to be

reversed at higher levels. As had been pointed out in the March 24 guidance memorandum, this area of research had yet to prove its worth. In view

of the larger foreign policy and defense issues under debate at the time,

such as the increasing virulence of the war in South Vietnam, the bombing of North Vietnam, the intervention in the Dominican Republic, and the

ever-simmering military force structure issues, such as that over the F-111

airplane, the subject of social research in foreign areas was not likely to appear important enough for the leaders of DOD to rush to its defense

against public opposition; and therein lay its greatest vulnerability. While

it was doing no harm, it could be tolerated as an experiment. More, in the

internal discussions between DOD and State, the right of the DOD to

study the problems that directly affected it and its ability to carry out its

mission was supported strongly. But if the work got into enough trouble to

warrant a public attack on it, there were limits beyond which even its

strongest supporters at high levels did not feel they could go to save it.

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The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy
us, the DOD kept quiet and took its punishment (with the Army

bearing the brunt, because it had the largest program and also was the contracting agency through which ARPA usually carried out its own work),

while the press helped several more projects come apart at the seams over

the next several months. e DOD’s silence, it seems in retrospect, probably added to the appearance of guilt and whetted the appetite of the press.

is was a result that might have been foreseen; but even if it had been, it

probably would have made no difference to the decision not to respond.

One of the first of the additional projects to suffer was the new journal, Conflict. is was to be a “quarterly Journal of Revolution and Change,”

published by SORO in their new role at the center of the DOD’s applied

research program. Volume I, Number 1 had, over the previous year, been

prepared for distribution about July 1965, throughout interested parts of

the government and the research community. e first issue would have

made a strong beginning. It contained, among other things, an article about

Vietnam by Henry Cabot Lodge; an article by an eminent China scholar,

William C. Johnstone, about Communist Chinese counterinsurgency in

Tibet; a description of the State Department’s National Interdepartmental Seminar by its director, Ambassador R. A. Kidder; and a section of articles about the history, geography, and politics of Colombia by a list of

distinguished scholars as well as e New York Times correspondent in Bogotá, and General Andrew O’Meara, former commander of the U.S. Southern Command. But this section on Colombia, juxtaposed as it was in July

against the background of attacks on the Army’s research interest in Latin

America, caused the Army to have second thoughts. With the agreement

of DDR&E and the OSD Public Affairs Office, it was decided to postpone distribution of the first issue of the journal until a more propitious

time. is intelligence was somehow picked up by Walter Pincus, who used

it as the basis for a story in e Washington Star on August 17. It was no

longer possible to release the journal quietly, and it quietly died. With it

died the opportunity to establish another forum of exchange of information

important to government officials and those who assisted them.

e same article by Pincus mentioned two additional SORO projects—Colony and Simpatico. e first, which was being carried out by a

SORO anthropologist in Peru with Peruvian government approval and assistance, had been underway when Camelot broke. It involved observation

and analysis of Peruvian army efforts to assist the economic development

and integration of the Indians into the trans-Andean highlands into the

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Chapter 11 • The Press Has a Field Day
Peruvian economy and society. e results of the study were also intended

to assist the U.S. Army to develop its “civic action” doctrines for military assistance to the armies of the developing nations. It will be remembered that

the 1963 Smithsonian report had recommended, as an important area of research, the study of the constructive role that the military in developing

countries could play in improving social conditions. “Civic action” was a

fundamental part of the American military counterinsurgency doctrine, but

it was generally taken on faith that it was a good doctrine. It was recognized

that it would be important to obtain some real data to ascertain whether, in

fact, assistance by a country’s military forces in local economic development, education, and technical training did build social cohesiveness and

political awareness in a country’s outlying areas.

is, too, is a question of value judgment as well as objective observation. Civic action could be viewed as a means by which a military dictatorship can indoctrinate its population and thereby eliminate opposition to

itself. Some of this flavor adhered to the Army’s efforts in the press reports.

e study was completed prematurely under stringent constraints in Peru,

and it was to be continued in Bolivia where a similar Bolivian Army development effort was being planned. But the American ambassador in Bolivia became skittish as a result of the publicity over Project Colony and

the Camelot furor and, although the Bolivian government and CINSCO

had agreed upon and approved the project, it was cancelled at the ambassador’s request.

Simpatico, which had been planned earlier but begun in summer 1965

while the Army was under fire, had a more spectacular demise. It, too, was

concerned with military civic action—specifically in the strife-torn country of Colombia. A psychologist and an anthropologist were working in a

remote area of the country where the Colombian army was trying to pacify

the ubiquitous banditry and terrorism of many years’ standing by gaining

the support of local villagers. Using structured questionnaires and such psychological “instruments” as the thematic apperception test,7 the researchers

were trying to learn the villagers’ attitudes toward the government, the army,

and the turbulent events in their society. While questions later arose regarding the scientific validity of their techniques in that setting, this was not

the question at the time. e Colombian government was fully aware of

the project, having approved and welcomed it, and maintained close contact with the research results in which it obviously had a strong interest.

e two American researchers had arranged to hire a Colombian research

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The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy
firm to carry out most of the fieldwork. us, the project was following the

two precepts for study in foreign countries suggested in the 1963 Smithsonian report: it had local government approval and interest, and the local

research community was involved.

e trouble arose during an election campaign when the Colombian

government was attacked by its opponents for permitting, or perhaps even

using, the perpetrators of Camelot to undertake similar nefarious “espionage” efforts in Colombia. e story of the blowup appeared in e New

York Times on February 6, 1966. According to that story, the Colombian

researchers, who were politically oriented against the government, had objected to the nature of the information sought in the research and had taken

their complaints to the opposition party. e Time’s news article became

the subject of a speech the next day by Senator Fred Harris of Oklahoma

on the Senate floor; he questioned the propriety and advisability of DOD

undertaking social research at all. Senator Harris was soon to start hearings

on the creation of a National Social Science Foundation to do such work.

On Sunday, February 13, an article by Dan Kurzman in e Washington Post

discussed the question of DOD social research overseas based on Simpatico

news. In the well-balanced article, Kurzman pointed out the reasons behind the DOD’s stated need for the research and the fears of opponents of

such DOD research that “the Pentagon hopes to determine the minimum

amount of social and economic support that must be given the peasants

and the lower class groups in order to avert a revolution.” But the more

general attitude was reflected by the headline that said “Hey Señor! Do You

Beat Your Wives Often?” e study did not survive.

us, in the six months or so after Camelot became a public issue, the

press had shown again, as it had many times elsewhere, that it could raise

an issue that was to change profoundly how the government went about its

business. It became the means whereby Congress became aware and involved. As we shall see, it stimulated and reinforced discussion among diverse parts of the interested scientific community who might otherwise

have tried to resolve the questions raised in a more leisurely, quiet, and reasoned atmosphere. It helped establish the relationship between the events

of the DOD social research program and the broader issues that were concerning the nation. It imposed the reporters’ and editors’ value judgments

on the news, and thereby initiated reconsideration of the value system under

which the DOD was involved overseas and was undertaking research to

support its involvement. It allowed itself to be used by one part of the fed131

Chapter 11 • The Press Has a Field Day
eral bureaucracy to attack another for reasons that appeared not to have

been purely those of the high principle. And, of course, it was the rapid

drumfire of press reports, almost universally critical in tone and attitude,

that caused the DOD itself to take another look at what it was doing, and

how, and to try to change its approach.

It is, perhaps needless to add (but nevertheless too tempting to resist)

the personal note that this view, from the “inside,” of the functioning of the

press on an important issue makes one loath to take at face value any other

press descriptions of important issues and events where there is no personal

knowledge and experience.

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Chapter 12

e DOD Puts Its House in Order

e news stories, the editorials, the congressional reaction, and the State

Department all seemed to convey the tone that the DOD was a dullard

who had somehow stepped out of line and needed to be prodded and

watched, lest he do so again. But the DOD was not, before or after the

Camelot story, unmindful of the problems and the sensitivities involved in

the social research it sponsored. And before it was prodded, it moved to try

to limit the damage and prevent a recurrence. e sudden realization that

faith in the discretion of the presumed experts on social studies might have

been misplaced led to what was consistently fought by the researchers and

research managers as overreaction, but what the overseers of the research

consistently forced to go further. e first problem was to reduce vulnerabilities elsewhere. In ODDR&E, we started an immediate search to ascertain which researchers were overseas, where, and under what circumstances.

Where their presence was known to local American authorities and local

governments—largely in Southeast Asia—we could relax somewhat. Where

their presence was not known, the attempt was made to have them come

home. It had become obvious that ambassadors everywhere had become

uneasy and hypersensitive. From our point of view in ODDR&E, as well

as that of the ambassadors, it would not do to have DOD-supported researchers discovered by the press to be working in “their” countries. However, the service research managers who had given grants to university

scholars to study overseas objected strenuously. e scholars had been working overseas for years without such problems developing. ey had intimate friends and contacts within the governments and scholarly

communities where they were doing their research. Interference with these

scholars’ academic freedom was, they said, unwarranted, and the scholars

had given sufficient evidence over the years that they could be trusted.

is posed, for the first time in this context, an issue that was not to be

resolved until the DOD and the university social science community separated, by more or less mutual agreement, and with some considerable trouble for some of the individuals involved. But this is getting ahead of the

story. e result of the reflex was the review, on an individual basis, of each

of the few cases where researchers were found to be overseas. A decision was

made in each case as to whether the damage—to the project, to the scholar,

to the DOD, to foreign relations—would be worse if the research were to

133
be interrupted or left alone with the risk of surfacing in the press; and a

few people were asked quietly to drop their research and come home, at

least temporarily.

In the meantime, the spate of news stories about Camelot and the gradual unfolding, in our private councils within the DOD, of the story of

SORO’s lack of discretion had confirmed our earlier fears about the project and its leadership. It became clear as the days went by that it could not

pick up where it left off with any semblance of credibility. What little faith

we had in SORO’s ability to do the work was destroyed as their lack of sensitivity to the explosive issue of interference in Latin American affairs became apparent. e decision was therefore made to cancel the project, and

the discussion turned to how the other pieces of the overall program might

be reassembled. e cancellation became a political issue when the DOD

was notified on July 5 that Congressman Dante Fascell, chairman of the

Subcommittee on International Organizations and Movements of the

House Foreign Affairs Committee, was planning hearings on the Camelot

affair and inquiring whether DDR&E would be willing to testify. Work on

the cancellation memo was rushed, and the memo was sent from Harold

Brown to the secretary of the Army on July 7. It stated simply that the recent events surrounding Camelot had shown that the approach to research

of that type needed modification. In part, it would have to be handled so

as not to be open to distortion in the Communist press abroad and not to

embarrass the United States if performed on an unclassified basis. It was

clear that, although the type of research represented by Camelot remained

important, the usefulness of the particular project was destroyed. erefore,

it was requested that the project be cancelled, and the Army was asked to

formulate a plan to carry out the research to provide the military forces

with the information they would need if they were called upon to engage

in counterinsurgency assistance abroad. It also suggested that the handling

of the events leading to the Camelot furor raised questions about the effectiveness of SORO’s management. erefore, the Army was asked to look

into that, too, although they were given liberty to use SORO to assist in the

preparation of new research plans.

Although a lengthy press release was drafted, the one finally issued said

simply:

e Defense Department announced today that the Army’s Project CAMELOT has been reevaluated in the light of preliminary

planning conducted to date. It has been concluded that the proj134

The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy
ect as currently designed will not produce the desired information, and the project is therefore being terminated.

While somewhat disingenuous in ignoring the current furor, this was

an accurate reflection of the facts. But it was not used by the press—the

image of lack of credibility had been created. e newspapers played up the

juxtaposition of the cancellation and Vallance’s testimony before the Fascell subcommittee, as though it had been spitefully arranged. e cancellation was attributed to McNamara, or the president, or the State

Department’s influence. e DOD image and the overseas social research

program suffered some more.

A few days later, there was an exchange of phone calls and letters between Secretaries McNamara and Rusk, initiated by the latter (or, quite

likely, by someone on his staff ). An American professor was questioning

European government officials as part of a study, under Navy auspices, of

the “strategic thinking of European elites,” and Rusk was informing McNamara that the governments were protesting. It turned out that the project had begun under private foundation sponsorship, but had been picked

up and expanded by Project Michaelson. e professor had not told his interviewees of his government support—raising another issue that was to

reach its peak when the CIA scandals broke in 1967. But the professor’s

connection was previously known to the State Department through routine

reporting and information exchange. It can generously be concluded that

the heightened sensitivities of the period changed their view of it and made

any officials involved less receptive in their attitude. It did not seem to be

noticed that the State Department officials who knew of the project earlier,

but raised no “red flags,” might be equally culpable. Secretary Rusk was

promised that, “In the future, Defense or Military Department support for

studies involving the use of such [interview] techniques abroad will be individually coordinated with your Department before implementation.”

On July 12, a memorandum from the secretary of Defense to all parts

of the DOD stated that:

Hereafter all studies done in or for the Department of Defense,

the conduct of which may affect the relations of the United

States with foreign governments, are to be cleared with the Office

of the Assistant Secretary of Defense (International Security Affairs) before they are initiated.

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is was welcomed by us in DDR&E as a useful step to protect our efforts from what had by then begun to appear (to us) as a calculated effort

by State to destroy those efforts. e period of negotiation with our counterparts in ISA followed, intermixed with preparations to meet the Fascell

subcommittee and intense negotiations with State that will be described

later.

e Brown-Mann telephone call that had resulted in agreement about

leaks and “titles” had also elicited the intelligence that the DOD’s attempt

to study problems of revolution and insurgency overseas were still viewed

with favor, at that level at least, and that, in view of recent events, cooperation between the departments was all the more to be welcomed. e “package” of memos and letters that had been prepared for signature in June,

asking the Army to establish a joint office for social science research and

inviting the other agencies to participate, appeared particularly appropriate

in view of all the accusations about unilateral and uncoordinated DOD activity in the area, and it was dispatched on July 16. It was a forlorn hope.

Friendly and encouraging answers were received from all the other agencies, and the services began to designate people for the office. But the appointment of representatives from outside the DOD was delayed for one

reason or another. Later congressional action on the budget rendered the effort pointless anyway, and it all came to naught. Once again, however, the

DOD was on record as recognizing the sensitivities and responsibilities associated with what it was trying to do. Once again, the record was private;

it never reached public attention and had no impact on later events.

Shortly thereafter, on July 18, another guidance paper was issued by

DDR&E regarding the work in question. e paper had, of course, been

“coordinated” with ISA and State, as well as with key members of the social science community who were made aware of its contents. It dealt with

the problem of sensitivity of studies of foreign social systems related to

counterinsurgency and spelled out detailed guidelines for the conduct of

such work. It pointed out, first, the danger that could arise from having the

complete nature of research projects in counterinsurgency of interest to the

DOD widely known. Since such work could be injurious to United States

foreign policy and therefore to the national security, it properly came within

the definition of research that could be classified. If any of the research were

to be unclassified, it would have to be divided into small, individually innocent tasks. e issue of whether the DOD—or other agencies with action responsibilities—could under any circumstances undertake studies of

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the kind in question was not yet raised within the DOD; that was to come

much later. Guidelines were established for clearance of projects. ese were

different for contract researchers and university scholars working under

grants. Unequivocally, contract research projects were required to be cleared

by the military commander responsible for American DOD activities in

the county where the research was to be carried out; the latter responsibility included checking with the American ambassador and the local government. No travel was to be undertaken without specific, separate

clearance for each trip.

It had been made known to us by several people in the university community, largely those working with ONR and AFOSR grants, that that

community did not feel it could tolerate such stringent constraints on its activities. We were still at the time sympathetic and sensitive on the issue of

academic freedom. In their case, therefore, although prior coordination of

projects was required, and the existence and details of the projects had to

be made known to overseas military commanders, ambassadors, and governments, the freedom to travel and undertake the research once a project

had been initiated was left to the discretion of the scholar. He was, however,

to notify his sponsor when such activities were undertaken.

ese instructions were later to form the basis of DOD’s continuation

of its research in this area, even though there were overlays of instructions

from ISA and the State Department. e contract organizations presented

no particular problem—they accepted the work with the conditions attached—and there was no attempt to control substance, only procedures

[we were to learn later (see chapters 18 and 19) that the separation was not

easy or even possible to maintain, in most cases]. But even with our nod to

the sensibilities of the academic community and their sponsors in the services, both objected to the lesser degree of control with which they were

asked to abide. e academic community made the point that once a study

was agreed upon, they were the best judges of how to go about it. Clearance

of their projects and control of their movements and contacts would

amount to control of their work. Despite the mounting evidence to the

contrary, they insisted that their discretion was to be trusted and that any

regulation at all amounted to interference with and control of the academic

process. We were sympathetic, but it seemed obvious that some controls

would have to be instituted if there were to be any research at all. e guidance memorandum tried to reconcile the arguments and establish special

conditions for the academic researchers, but the problem did not go away.

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At about this same time, there was much discussion of the titles and the

public image of the work. e problem seemed to be that in the sciences

that were more esoteric in the public view—for example, physics or chemistry—the public accepted that there would be a specialized language and did

not question it. “Social science” was a different matter. e public expects

that studies involving people will be described in plain English. e fact that

psychologists or sociologists or anthropologists may have developed their

own specialized languages—jargons—to go with the particular techniques

of their research is much less recognized. e problem this poses is that, if

their work is described in plain English, the public often does not see what

there is to study; examples will emerge later of studies whose results appeared obvious after they were obtained, although they were not always predicted in advance. And if a study is described in technical language, it appears

to some that jargon is being used to cover up something that should be obvious. Unfortunately, that is often true. In the words of the House Armed

Forces Appropriations Subcommittee report on the DOD R&D budget

that year, some “studies appear to be concerned with trivial matters on which

intelligent people should not require studies in order to be informed.”1 e

further problem, however, is that there is often disagreement among reasonable people about what is trivial or obvious. e earlier DSB report had

made a fairly solid case that there was very much that was not known. e

problem was to convey this message outside DOD. DOD officialdom at

higher levels was, of course, sympathetic to the public’s problem, because the

project descriptions were not couched in their language either.

Steps were initiated to have all descriptive material on social science

projects, especially that which might easily become public information, reviewed for language and to have at least the statements of the projects’ objectives, if not the descriptions of the research techniques used, couched in

plain English. e connection between the research task and the DOD’s interest and mission was to be made clear. We even toyed with the idea of

making up a list of proscribed words, apparently simple words that seemed

always to elicit a negative emotional response in some quarters—examples

might be, “cross-cultural,” “motivation,” “socio-political,” “attitudinal stimuli,” “cognitive skills”—but common sense prevailed. is was an extraordinarily difficult instruction to put across to those who were speaking in

their accustomed, everyday language, and the attempt to shield the social

scientist from the outraged senator or amused newsman remained a struggle through the years.

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The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy
A month after the latest McNamara and DDR&E instructions, on

August 10, 1965, ISA issued its more detailed instructions for clearance

procedures. In general, the control to be exercised was prudent but permissive. It was pointed out that “it is the manner in which the proposed study

is to be conducted, not subject matter per se, which is at issue.” ISA would

not address subject matter unless there were some other legitimate ISA interest or duplication that might not have been apparent to the initiators. e

fact that the subject matter could be crucial if the fact of the study were

made public had still not penetrated, but it would very shortly. e key point

of the instruction was that it continued to leave to the judgment of the

sponsoring agency within DOD the decision as to which studies required

special attention and clearance.

is was to change again within another month. At that time, Mr.

Vance, the deputy secretary of Defense, learned of a study planned by one of

the services to explore public and congressional attitudes toward a particular kind of weapon system, one that was at the moment very controversial

with respect to Vietnam and otherwise. e exploration was to use interview

techniques. It was a small study to be done wholly within the United States

and had not even been brought to DDR&E attention (it did not have to be,

then). e next day, September 10, a memorandum from Mr. Vance directed

that each military department and OSD “designate a single representative

who will review and approve all RFP’s (requests for proposals) and contracts

or grants for research outside the physical sciences . . . ” is was broad and

restrictive, indeed. e person generally designated in each agency was the

general counsel. He had been given no additional staff and was busy enough

without this added duty. Strict implementation of this directive could be

counted upon to bring all social and behavioral science research to a halt; and

clearly, other studies using operations research or systems analysis and having to do with the effectiveness of military operations, weapons systems, and

force structure could also be included.

As Rains Wallace pointed out in a memorandum to DDR&E on the

subject of controls and clearances, a “bureaucratic hydra” had been born:

For example, a contract with a university psychology department

to examine foreign research publications on programmed learning would, in addition to the regular review procedures required

for any contract and some procedure for terminology review, be

cleared by a special representative in the particular Military Department, ISA, and possibly the State Department before the

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contract could be released for bid. A contract to evaluate the effectiveness of a computerized system for personnel assignment

would receive the regular review, the terminology review, and the

political and public relations review. Even assuming that the various reviewing agencies would limit themselves to the specific

aspects assigned to them (which seems unlikely), it is apparent

that the opportunities for delay and infanticide are tremendous.

He also pointed out that the inclusion of behavioral and social sciences

together in all of the review instructions was penalizing the majority of

work in these areas (which was internal to the DOD, carried out in the

United States, and needed for things like recruitment, human performance

assessment, training, and human factors engineering) for the difficulty

caused by a small fraction of the work. He proposed separating the categories into psychological sciences and social sciences and subjecting the latter only to the required additional review. is was not accepted.

But after many months of trial, the stringency of the review requirements was relaxed somewhat in implementation. e kinds of studies requiring review were sorted out, and only certain studies required detailed

examination. In the ARPA case (the one with which I am most familiar), all

such studies went to the OSD general counsel for review when in the planning stage and before money was committed. Delay rarely exceeded two

weeks, except in those cases where a real issue existed and warranted the

delay. A response could be obtained in a day or two if needed. After this, it

did not require further review at this level unless a substantive change was

being considered. us, while at first the internal controls appeared onerous

and unworkable, they were applied sensibly and did help the DOD exercise

more positive control over the conduct of work that remained controversial.

At the same time, steps were taken to help the DOD sort out what it

could and should try to do in the area of social research and to smooth its

interaction with the social science community. Within a few days after the

first Pincus story, I was called by George Murdock, an anthropologist from

the University of Pittsburgh who also headed the Social Science Division

of the National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council (NAS/

NRC). I went to see him at the NAS/NRC offices in Washington, and he

put the problem straight and frankly: something had to be done about

DOD’s social science research since it seemed out of control and recent

events were endangering all social science research. I accepted this as a legitimate expression of concern. In retrospect, it probably foretold the atti140

The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy
tude of most of the anthropologists, who became the first, the loudest, and

the harshest against their colleagues undertaking work for government

agencies having operational concerns overseas. Out of the discussions with

Murdock arose the idea of establishing an NAS/NRC Committee on Social Sciences to examine DOD’s need and its role and to see what might be

done to improve the situation. e DDR&E accepted the idea and, in fact,

felt it would be worthwhile enough that he initiated a requested to the NAS

to establish the committee.

e request pointed out the difficulties of work overseas, its sensitivity,

and asked the NAS to explore how the DOD could accomplish the needed

research without, at the same time, creating antagonisms and suspicion on

the part of foreign governments. It asked also for advice on how the problems could be studied in such a way that the Communist press would not

pick them up and, by adverse publicity and distortion, create conditions

under which the work would be impossible to do. ere was still no thought

that the DOD should not do such work or that it was improper. In fact, the

discussions at high levels within DOD, with the State Department (until

Rusk’s testimony before Fascell), and with members of the social science

community showed that there was still a general feeling that the DOD’s research program was necessary; the point was made everywhere (and in Fascell’s later report) that the problem with Camelot was not what was

intended to be learned but how it was done.

A number of problems had to be resolved. One was the makeup of the

committee. Hostility toward the DOD was becoming widespread in the

social science community. It was not necessary to establish a committee to

say that the DOD should not do social research since there were by then

many sources of that advice; one was needed to deal with the problem of

how such research should be done. It was obvious from the comments of

many social scientists reported in the press that the DOD position would

not at this time be generally understood or accepted. erefore, it was desired that at least some people on the committee be familiar with how the

DOD worked and with the problems it faced. is is a problem in all bodies established to review public programs—it appears, for example, when

the Atomic Energy Commission establishes a committee to review radiation standards. ere is a public presumption of conflict of interest if the

committee members have worked with the agency; but not much help can

be expected if they do not understand intimately how the agency works,

and they are not likely to understand this if they have not worked with the

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Chapter 12 • The DOD Puts Its House in Order
agency. erefore, a good deal of thought and discussion went into the

makeup of the nominees to the committee, and the balance among their

backgrounds. en, it had to be decided whether the National Academy

should deal only with the DOD problem and whether it was proper to fund

the committee from the DOD. Obviously, the other agencies were concerned, and the committee should have broader interests. But it was pointed

out that traditionally one agency can perceive a general need and take the

lead in asking the academy for assistance, with other agencies joining later

in the sponsorship.

e letter requesting that the committee be established was sent on

July 28, 1965, but it was November before all the problems were resolved

and the membership arranged; the first meeting was held on November 9.*

State was immediately invited to participate. ey were, of course, interested in the problem. But more to the point, they had been assigned review

responsibility over all research having to do with foreign areas, and the social science community was deeply concerned about whether the State review procedures and controls might not be so restrictive as to strangle all

research overseas. us, the DOD had taken another step to try to put its

house in order by asking for external review of its efforts by the scientific

community and by starting to build a focal point where the DOD, the State

Department, and the social science community could converge and seek

help in an impartial arena. It was also hoped that this group might help

reestablish the atmosphere of acceptance that had been created by the earlier committees of social scientists who had advised the DOD (note that

there was some overlap in the membership) at the same time that they

helped the DOD fit into the new world that had been created, in part, by

its own efforts.

e NAS/NRC Committee later broadened its effort to examine the

more general problem of the sponsorship and use of research in the social

sciences by government. Reports were issued in 19682 and 1971,3 and Lyons’

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* e members finally appointed to the committee before the first meeting were: Dr. Gabriel A. Almond,

Stanford University, political science; Dr. Alex Bavelas, Stanford University, psychology; Dr. Albert H.

Garretson, New York University, law; Dr. Allen R. Holmberg, Cornell University, sociology and anthropology; Dr. Morris Janowitz, University of Chicago, sociology; Dr. Lyle H. Lanier, University of

Illinois, psychology; Dr. Wilbert E. Moore, Russell Sage Foundation, sociology; Dr. Karl J. Pelzer, Yale

University, geography; Dr. Ithiel de Sola Pool, MIT, political science; Dr. Herbert A. Simon, Carnegie

Institute of Technology, psychology; Dr. omas C. Schelling, Harvard University, economics; Dr.

Alexander Spoehr, University of Pittsburgh, anthropology; Dr. George K. Tanham, e RAND Corporation, political science; and Dr. Donald R. Young, Rockefeller University, anthropology (chairman).

e membership varied somewhat through the years, of course.
book about social science and government, e Uneasy Partnership,

4 grew

out of his work with the committee. Although the committee was established initially to give immediate advice to the DOD, its pace, resulting from

the time it took to explore the issues in depth, was such that it did not influence the DOD’s program. In the next few years, as a sponsor of DOD applied research using social scientists overseas, I was asked to meet with the

committee a few times. I was not offered, nor did I ask for, advice or guidance from it. Having been set up for one purpose, the committee then took

on a life and direction of its own. We shall return to its reports in due course.

It was now obvious that unrestrained research in the social sciences

supported by the government and having to do with problems that had important political implications was not going to work. e mechanism—

which included American researchers, overseas military commanders,

ambassadors, foreign governments, foreign scholars, parts of the foreign

press, the American press, and growing parts of the American scholarly

community that were not directly involved—was too delicately balanced

and offered too many opportunities for something to go wrong to offer

hope that overseas research on matters of substance and sensitivity could be

carried out without rather strict controls. Perhaps a hundred researchers

could be discreet, establish effective working relationships, and carry out

their work with delicacy and tact. If the hundred-and-first did not and this

led to a blowup, the work of the other hundred was immediately jeopardized. Moreover, the idea was growing in the U.S. press and in Congress

that it was improper of the DOD—and even other operating agencies of

government—to carry out studies of social systems. e DOD was therefore pulling in its horns, as well as trying to find alternative means to undertake the work it did wish to accomplish. is would soon have an

important effect on its relationships with the university community (see

chapter 17).

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Chapter 12 • The DOD Puts Its House in Order

Chapter 13

State Seeks Control

e State Department raised the issue of who would control research on

“foreign affairs.” e questions of what research was needed by the country, or how it was to be performed, and if not by DOD then by whom were

not raised until much later and in a different forum. By a series of maneuvers that left us in DOD breathless and on the defensive, State gained the

sympathy of Congress and the public for its own position. e problem for

supporters of the social research program in DOD, then, became that of

trying to reassert some reasonable limits on the power State had gained. In

this, we were aided by the Budget Bureau and, perhaps surprisingly, by some

members of the social science community.

After the June 27 meeting in Colonel Sullivan’s office on the Chile

blowup, there was virtually no further ODDR&E contact with members of

the Sate Department until after the Fascell hearings well into August. e

series of stories about DOD research overseas, fed by what seemed to be a

carefully orchestrated sequence of leaks from State, led to the high-level

telephone call described earlier. By then, other events occurred to keep the

program in the news. But the earlier series of stories did manage to create

an appropriate climate for State’s later coup.

ere was in the interim a lengthy private correspondence between

Harold Brown and Ambassador Dungan in Chile, who had known each

other before. In that correspondence, the positions of the two departments

were laid out clearly; it was unfortunate that the correspondence was never

made public. Dungan, although he was not a career foreign services officer,

reflected perfectly what we in DOD took to be the State Department view

of social research (perhaps he, too, had a member of his staff who was a foreign service officer prepare the initial drafts of the letters for him). He expressed anger at what he considered the bumbling and clumsy interference

of the military in affairs that were properly his concern; if DOD had money

to throw around, he said, he could hire two more good political officers who

would be worth more than any number of research projects. He questioned

whether the kind of research planned by the DOD was feasible or useful

at all, and he questioned the propriety of DOD’s funding research in foreign countries, regardless of coordination with foreign governments and

collaboration with foreign scholars. e DOD position—that it was deeply

involved overseas and needed the information that the research could pro145
vide and that there seemed no other agency with the concern and the

budget to obtain it—did not sway him despite apologies over the occasional

clumsiness of some of the researchers. e tone of his letter seemed to offer

no room for doubt that the diplomatic staff made no mistakes, while the

DOD’s representatives almost invariably did in dealings with foreign governments. Of course, the conflict between military and civilian was strong

in Latin America, and America military assistance with its uses and abuses

was always very much an issue, so that one could hardly have expected him

to take a calm or dispassionate view.

On Saturday, July 31, I had gone to the office to try to dispose of some

of the backlog of other work that had piled up during the initial stages of

the Camelot battle. On opening my safe, I found there—apparently delivered to and deposited by my secretary while I was at a meeting the day before—a letter from Secretary Rusk to Secretary McNamara, which had

come to me for preparation of the reply.* e reply was due on the following Monday, August 2. e “Dear Bob” letter indicated that he (Rusk) was

due to testify before Dante Fascell’s subcommittee shortly and, before he

did, he would like McNamara’s concurrence with a proposed letter, draft attached, for the signature of the president. e proposed letter, at first glance,

gave the secretary of State ironclad control over “government-sponsored

social science research in the area of foreign policy.” ese words were to become the centerpiece of later arguments and maneuvers.

us I learned of the bureaucratic ploy which, being forewarned and

therefore forearmed, I was able to resist in the future. is consisted of joining an issue needing extensive consideration and discussion without leaving time for such consideration and discussion in the hope that the issue

would be resolved in haste and in State’s favor. Fortunately, on that Saturday, those who had to agree to any proposed reply before it could go to the

secretary for signature, especially Harold Brown and John McNaughton,

the assistant secretary (ISA), were both in the Pentagon and available.

e reply did not explicitly request that the proposed letter not be sent

to the president for signature. Instead, it reviewed briefly the problems of

and the need for research and pointed out that five key agencies were involved: State, AID, DOD, USIA, and CIA. It proposed that a research

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The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy

* It has been said of Washington officialdom, that no one in a responsible position ever writes a letter

he signs, or signs a letter he writes. While this may be somewhat apocryphal, the incident to be described

would not destroy the legend.
council be established at the level of assistant secretary to review economic,

social, and political research needs for all the agencies and decide among

themselves what should be done and which departments or agencies should

undertake particular tasks. e decisions of this group would be binding or,

in the case of argument, sent to the cabinet level for resolution. us was

escalated an idea that had germinated during the earlier discussions among

the research directors of the agencies concerned. It would persist and reappear in various forms for many years.

e letter of reply, addressed “Dear Dean,” was signed “Bob” on Monday, and sent, with the anticipation that it would discourage the secretary

of State from having his proposed letter signed by the president. Great was

our surprise, therefore, when on Wednesday August 4, Secretary Rusk, in

his testimony before the Fascell subcommittee, revealed that the president

had just sent him the following letter, dated August 2:1

Many agencies of the government are sponsoring social science

research which focuses on foreign areas and peoples and thus relates to the foreign policy of the United States. Some of it involves

residence and travel in foreign countries and communication with

foreign nations. As we have recently learned, it can raise problems

affecting the conduct of our foreign policy.

For that reason, I am determined that no government sponsorship

of foreign area research should be undertaken which in the judgment of the Secretary of State would adversely affect United

States foreign relations. erefore, I am asking you to establish

effective procedures which will enable you to assure the propriety

of government-sponsored social science research in the area of

foreign policy. I suggest that you consult with the director of the

Bureau of the Budget to determine the proper procedures for the

clearance of foreign affairs research projects on a governmentwide basis.

Along with his publication of the president’s letter, Secretary Rusk sent

a letter to all agency and department heads in the government, informing

them of the president’s instructions and saying that to implement it he had

established a “Foreign Affairs Research Council.” is was to be chaired by

the director of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research and to include representatives of other offices in State, such as the regional bureaus, the Office

of Politico-Military Affairs, and the Policy Planning Council. Supported

by a staff (which came to include the very people we had been dealing with

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Chapter 13 • State Seeks Control
before Camelot who had expressed desire to control DOD’s research program), they would “formulate policy for departmental action with respect to

Government-sponsored research bearing on foreign affairs . . . determine

Department needs for foreign area research . . . (and) . . . also examine Government sponsored research projects in terms of the foreign policy risks . . .

and means for reducing such risks.”2 Over the same period of time, during

which DOD was trying to exercise control over its own program, and into

fall 1965 (and beyond), the discussions and conflicts with State were to revolve around the last of these assigned responsibilities.

e first argument about State’s responsibility to review and exercise

control over DOD’s (and other agencies’) research arose within DOD itself. is was over how to deal with State. ose of us in ODDR&E who

had been involved from the start were firmly convinced from discussions we

had had with State before the Camelot affair, and from what we had observed of and read into their behavior since, that it was pressing hard to

gain a stranglehold on the DOD research program. ISA took the position

that the president’s letter was a reasonable expression of policy and that a

means had to be found to implement it. ISA therefore wanted to cooperate from the start to help State organize to review overseas research;

whereas in ODDR&E, we wanted to hold back to see precisely what State

had in mind before offering anything. e resolution of the argument was

brought about primarily by State itself. Before Sate published its proposed

review procedures, ISA had sent to it for review a project description for a

policy planning study to be performed by Henry Kissinger (then at Harvard), regarding a problem of national security originating overseas. It was

a project that John McNaughton personally felt was important and should

be undertaken. State reviewed the project and refused to clear it, arguing

that it was too sensitive; whereupon the intra-DOD positions converged,

focusing on the issue that State was extending itself to judging the substance and deciding on approval of DOD’s work rather than (as Rusk’s letter had stated) limiting itself to finding means for, and advising on, reducing

the risk that might have been involved.

In this, DOD was supported at the many discussions with State by the

Budget Bureau, whose policy remained that one department of government

should not exercise ultimate control over work done by another using money appropriated for that work by Congress. Enforcement of this policy position was

doubtless aided by the fact that one or two key Budget Bureau positions were

occupied by people who had formerly been with the Defense Department.

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e issues involved were several and all interacting. First, State was planning to establish a staff to review the work that would be larger than the

total DOD staff in ISA, ODDR&E, and the services responsible for planning, contracting for, and overseeing it. is appeared to be Parkinsonism

with a vengeance; it was obvious to us in DOD that the work of review was

less than the work of planning and implementation, but (we assumed) would

be extended “to fill the time available,” delaying or stopping virtually all work.

Secondly, and more fundamentally, the question arose as to whether a group

of people who had never performed or managed research could sensibly review it. (We assumed that State would appoint such people to its council.)

How, for example, could they understand what research techniques were

“sensitive,” if they had never employed them? How could they appreciate

the interaction among problem definition, methodology, and results, if they

had never been through the process themselves?

is issue so troubled a number of the social scientists who were aware

of or involved in the DOD programs, and many others who had performed

research under other government agency sponsorship (including the National Science Foundation), that they took it up directly with State and also

with the newly formed National Academy of Sciences committee. It led directly to an invitation to State to attend the first meeting of that committee. Even those social scientists who were not sympathetic to DOD efforts

feared the potentially stultifying effect of review of social science research by

those who had never performed any and who had purely bureaucratic motives. us, in this time of shifting alliances, DOD found strong support

where, in the absence of the threat, none would have existed.

e argument then shifted to definition of the scope of the work that

State would have to review. At first, the staff of the Foreign Affairs Research

Council proposed that they should review all work with foreign policy implications. ey stated that, in their interpretation, any American presence

overseas had such implications so this would include virtually all R&D performed overseas. We in DOD pointed out that overseas programs had many

facets. e services were supporting work in basic physics and chemistry at

foreign universities. ere were weapons and equipment being tested in

Southeast Asia related to the war there. ARPA and the Army had research

programs overseas to measure the parameters of the physical environment

affecting, for example, how off-road vehicles could move through jungle

and rice paddies or how radio waves propagated through the jungle for use

in designing communications equipment. ere were also operations re149

Chapter 13 • State Seeks Control
search studies in Vietnam, Europe, and elsewhere of military operations and

their effectiveness; and there were detailed studies of the motivations, organizations, and operations of guerrillas in Vietnam and ailand. None of

these appeared to us to fall within the definition of “social science research

in the area of foreign policy.”

With Budget Bureau support, we insisted that the scope of State’s review process be limited to a literal interpretation of those words: that is,

work performed by social scientists to help determine what foreign policy

should be or the implications of alternative foreign policies.* It seemed that

very little of the DOD program, or of the research called out in the DSB

report, fell in the area of this definition. e State made the point that even

hardware research could cause foreign policy problems if done improperly.

But we noted that no such work was ever undertaken without the approval

and general supervision of U.S. military authorities responsible for DOD

presence in a country and of the government of the country itself. We also

noted that if State wanted to include everything, amounting to hundreds of

millions of dollars per year of research and development overseas, their

staffing problem (both in numbers and disciplines) was hopeless. Nor did

we see how they could undertake such an effort without getting into the

substance of the work, which was, except for research that fell within our

literal interpretation of the words in the president’s letter, far beyond their

competence and responsibility.

Another key question was whether classified research performed wholly

within the United States should come within the scope of State’s review

procedures. By definition, analytical and study work was classified if its public disclosure could jeopardize the foreign policy and the national security

of the United States. If it was classified, and therefore not disclosed, and not

performed overseas, we did not see how it could “adversely affect United

States foreign relations,” and therefore we did not see why the secretary of

State should have to exercise his judgment over it. State’s position, as with

the ISA study they had blocked, was that “if word of the study gets out . . . ”

But even at that juncture, DOD’s record in such matters was not bad; most

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* As with so many documents drafted for interagency or international purposes, the words in the president’s letter that caused so much argument probably reflected the originating culture. State’s and others’ insistence that all work overseas was “foreign policy research” or something akin to it probably arose

not from deliberate distortion but from the inability of those without technical training to focus precisely on definitions of technical matters that had no meaning for them. Conversely, DOD was likely

to see the technical differentiations in detail, but to miss the nuances of policy implication with which

it was unfamiliar.
often, word got out when others in government or outside the DOD chose

to publicize a study if they learned of it.*

We pointed out again the impossibility of the task of reviewing for foreign policy implications all classified research performed within the United

Sates. For example, the RAND Corporation alone might have some dozens

of study projects underway in any one- or two-year period and, since in

some way almost all of them dealt with the defense and national security

or the United States and therefore with the strategy or tactics of military

operations that could take place overseas, would State, in addition to the Air

Force and OSD, insist on reviewing all of RAND’s programs each year and

approving or disapproving all or parts of it? And, suppose that in the freeworking atmosphere of that organization one of the researchers decided to

undertake a brief study to analyze a recent speech of Ho Chi Minh or De

Gaulle (an analysis that no one in State or DOD might know about until

the research results were published)—would State insist that their permission would now have to be obtained in advance?

ere were also procedural problems. In the draft of proposed clearance

procedures that State “floated” for comment on August 27, 1965, it was proposed that State “must be informed of a proposed project before a request

for bid is made . . . or a contract is concluded,” in addition to “names of researchers and indication of the time of proposed field work . . . ” In our interpretation, this meant having to go to State with each project at least three

times—before proposals were solicited; before the contract was signed; and

before work could begin—and maybe more if contract renewals or repeated

trips abroad were involved. In addition, it separated procedures for State,

Defense, CIA, AID, USIA, and the Arms Control Agency from those for

any other agencies. In the case of the first group, State “approval” would

mean, the draft said that “State believes that on balance the value of the

project outweighs risks of possible adverse effects on foreign relations.” It

also stated that “the timing of consultations with or notifications to missions [i.e., U.S. embassies in the countries in question without whose agreement the research could not be undertaken even by DOD rules], will depend

on the nature of the project.” For the other agencies, a project “will be presumed cleared unless other State action is communicated to the agency

within fifteen days . . . ” of notification about the project to State. us, State

was at the same time proposing to exercise judgment over substance by judg151

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* ere was a certain amount of self-discipline within the DOD community in those years before the

celebrated exception of e Pentagon Papers.
ing the value of the research to sponsoring agencies whose missions were

different from its own and setting the stage for indefinite delay of projects

to be undertaken by a few agencies over whose work State would thereby

have established domination. But while it was seeking such authority, it was

also denying its own responsibility for the work in case something should go

wrong again, since they also stated that “clearance is not necessarily an endorsement of the need, method or value of the project.”

None of this sat very well with any of the agencies involved, including

ISA and the Budget Bureau; and the social science community also raised

a storm. Arguments over all of these issues continued until State published

its instructions in final form on November 18, 1965. By then, compromises

had been worked out that met State’s minimum requirements, but still resolved all the key issues in a tolerable way for the DOD. Instructions began

with a definition of “Government-sponsored foreign affairs research,” as

including:

. . . research programs in the social and behavioral sciences dealing with international relations, or with foreign areas and peoples,

whether conducted in the United States or abroad, which are

supported by grants or contracts awarded by agencies of the

United States. In-house research is not included.

Projects involving foreign travel or contacts with foreign nationals,

sponsored by DOD, USIA, ACDA, AID, or CIA, were required to be submitted for clearance (not “approval”). ere was a list of expectations

wherein the need for notification was left to the discretion of the departments or agencies themselves. e exceptions included projects sponsored

by any other agencies; projects involving foreign travel in which contacts

abroad were to be made with American officials only; unclassified projects

not involving foreign travel or contact with foreign nationals; and projects

that initially would not require such travel or contacts, but were exempt

until these were required. Ambassadors were to be kept informed of all

overseas work and travel by the sponsoring agency or by State, as might be

decided for each case. Classified projects planned to be conducted wholly

in the United States with no foreign contacts were completely excluded

from clearance requirements. A project would be cleared once; routine contract administrative actions, renewals, repeated trips abroad on a cleared

project, and the like did not have to be submitted for clearance again. All

projects were presumed cleared if State did not respond to a submission in

15 days.

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It was stated explicitly that “Research projects will be reviewed only for

the purpose of avoiding adverse effects upon United States foreign relations.” Possibly as reassurance to the social science community, State added

a preamble quoting Secretary Rusk to the effect that

. . . e Department has reaped some benefits from the research

of others and, in general, has welcomed the interest of other departments in social and political research on foreign affairs.

In addition, ARPA made an informal agreement with State regarding

the work of its field units in Southeast Asia—Vietnam and ailand. Since

ARPA’s program directors were in continual contact with CINCPAC and

the local U.S. military commands, embassies, and ships, all work done by

them was closely controlled without the need for State’s intervention.

erefore, the ambassador’s approval was presumed to be substituted for

that of the State Department, since they would have to ask the ambassadors

in any case. Projects started by ARPA field units did not have to go through

State clearance procedures in Washington, but it was agreed that State

would be kept informed of such projects. Although ARPA tried several

times to have this agreement confirmed in writing, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research refused, in effect, holding over ARPA’s head the threat

of accusation of lack of coordination with State if something went wrong.

But nothing ever did.

By the time State’s final instructions were issued, tempers had cooled;

many of those deeply involved had departed or were about to depart from

the government (including myself, temporarily, and Nagle) and “the system” settled down into a new routine.

ARPA projects, at least (those were the ones with whose fortunes I remained familiar), went through the steps of R&D program review, clearance by the OSD General Counsel, clearance by ISA, and, if necessary

State, in addition to the various military, embassy, and other overseas clearances required by DOD and ARPA internal procedures. e entire process

took several months—for some projects perhaps a year. But the two steps

that had initially been the most feared—review by the general counsel for

propriety and germaneness to the DOD mission and review by State—seldom, if ever, added more than a month to the process. In later years, there

even came to be some cooperative work between DOD and State.

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By the time this routine had been established, however, Congress and

the social science community were giving ever-closer critical scrutiny to the

social science research program and its ramifications. ese are two other

threads of the chronicle that must be picked up in July 1965 and followed

into succeeding months and years.

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Chapter 14

Congress Becomes Interested

As we have seen, the international furor over Camelot in Chile and the

news stories about State-DOD infighting over matters that had a strong

foreign policy flavor stimulated the interest of several members of the

House and Senate. As far as it appeared in public, DOD was inserting itself into matters that were State’s responsibility. e events in Chile showed

that we [DOD] were not doing a very good job of it. All of the news stories were sympathetic to State. is state of affairs, not unnaturally, bore

further investigation.

Senator McCarthy, who was then coming into the lead among those

opposing the Vietnam War, had been the first with a query to the secretary

of defense after Walter Pincus’ first article and had hinted that he would initiate a formal Senate inquiry into the matter. He later deferred to Congressman Fascell, whose committee held hearings over the period from July

8 to August 4, 1965. In the words of the committee’s report:1

For the past 3 years, the Subcommittee on International Organizations and Movements has been conducting a continuing investigation of ideological operations in foreign policy. From the

beginning of that study, the role of the behavioral sciences—what

they tell us about human attitudes and motivations, and how this

knowledge can be applied to governmental undertakings designed to carry out the foreign policy of the United States—has

been of keen interest to our subcommittee. Reporting on this

subject almost 2 years ago . . . the subcommittee acknowledged

the contribution that the behavioral sciences can make to the

achievement of our national objectives on the international scene,

noted that the bulk of foreign affairs research in this field was

being performed by or for our Military Establishment, and

warned that the heavy concentration of effort in this particular

area may lead to over-militarization of our foreign policy.

e DOD was to be treated more gently by this group than by any

other in its entire history of dealing with Congress on problems of social

research related to its overseas programs. But the key issues, as far as Congress was concerned, were raised here. ey were elaborated later by the

Senate, and the congressional view of the DOD image and motives then

took an even less sympathetic turn. e issues were the propriety of the

work DOD undertook; coordination of such work within the executive

155
branch; and the responsibility of the State Department and other agencies

for studies related to foreign policy. Other questions were raised about such

research, and it was fascinating to see how the military, in responding to

them, could be its own worst enemy in this regard.

In its report, the subcommittee took the position that the knowledge

the research sought was of importance to the DOD:2

To sum up, the U.S. Military Establishment, in carrying out its assigned missions, continually comes into contact with individuals

and institutions in foreign countries. Our own military personnel

abroad—some 1 million today—must draw upon knowledge obtained through behavioral sciences research to avoid situations and

activities which can cause friction, antagonize local foreign populations, and create other difficulties. At the same time, “wars of national liberation” with which the free world is confronted are unlike

conventional wars and new instruments are needed to fight them.

ere are no fixated frontlines in those conflicts. e problem here

involves the behavioral patterns of the insurgents, as well as of the

people of the nation where the war is being fought. To do their

job in assisting the nations defending themselves against Communist subversion, U.S. military personnel—and the people who

are being aided—must understand the motivations of the enemy,

its weak points, and its strengths. Behavioral sciences research helps

to provide this basic information. It constitutes one of the vital

tools in the arsenal of the free societies.

But then it moved on to the basic problem as it had emerged:

Nevertheless, as the recent experience with Project Camelot has

demonstrated, some U.S. research efforts can provoke extremely

unfavorable reactions abroad not only from the Communists and

their sympathizers but also from academic and political groups

that are generally friendly to the United States. ere exists in

every country a sensitivity to foreigners probing into delicate social and political matters. Also, the level of sensitivity varies according to who does the research and its subject matter. Careful

attention to these factors is certainly indicated in the allocation

of responsibilities for research on subjects related to our foreign

policy, in the preparation of research designs, and in the selection

of foreign areas for on-the-spot field investigations.

Further problems arise when the military become involved in foreign affairs research, and when the scope of such undertakings appears to exceed the bounds of the legitimate interests of a particular

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research project’s sponsors. In both instances, the motives of the

sponsors often are suspect. . . . It is not entirely surprising, therefore, that the U.S. Army’s sponsorship of Project Camelot aroused

some concern. What is more to the point, however, is that others

who have more central responsibility for the conduct of our foreign

affairs and who are directly involved in the task of promoting economic and social progress in the developing countries, had not initiated this type of research themselves.

e issue was posed more graphically by Congressman Donald Fraser

of Minnesota during Dr. Vallance’s testimony:3

e fact that this kind of basic research is being undertaken on

behalf of the military I don’t find to be a discredit to the military.

I find it to be an indication of a lack on the part of our Government of someone else who should have more central responsibility for this kind of research.

Our military assistance programs are primarily in the hardware

field, although we also finance some of these civic action programs. Should this be considered an opening wedge to the study

of the processes of development, the cultural changes and breakdowns, and so on? Should this be the entire wedge for this kind

of basic research? is suggests to me there is something wrong.

Not on your part because you are doing a job, but in terms of the

assignment or allocation of responsibilities within our Government.

Basically it seems to me that what we do in this field has to be

placed in some context. If it is true that the Army or the military

or Defense requires certain intelligence information so that they

can better predict and project their own planning, that is one

thing. But ultimately our goal for these nations is the development of mature economic systems predicated on their own sovereignty. When we are working with these nations to help them,

it seems to me it ought not to be the military that is providing the

main thrust for this, and the research that is involved ought not

to be flowing from the military.

I make the statement so that you can comment on it, but it

should be taken in no way as a criticism of your work because I

think your work is important and valuable.

I only wish there was an agency of our Government that was not

military which was sponsoring this research because I think the

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Chapter 14 • Congress Becomes Interested
problem of development of these countries is very crucial, that Defense ought to be playing a very secondary role in this concern.

At this point, then, the DOD was not being blamed for what it had undertaken. Rather, its involvement was considered unfortunate and inappropriate, and the State Department was being questioned for not carrying

out the logical responsibilities it should have assumed in the area.

Along with this fundamental question went the subsidiary one of how

such work was coordinated across the government. Again, the facts of the

case had been brought out but did not appear to the subcommittee to provide enough substance. Its report stated:4

Second, there is no single focal point within this growing Government-wide effort for a sustained and fruitful collaboration with

private scholars and the academic community. e Department of

Defense, it is true, receives counsel from the Defense Science

Board which, at least on occasion, included representation of the

behavioral sciences. e relationship here, however, is limited by

the Military Establishment’s primary concern with military matters. e Arms Control and Disarmament Agency has its own Social Sciences Advisory Board, which focuses upon subjects of

interest to that Agency. e Department of State, through the External Research Staff and other offices in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, compiles information about private research

pertaining to foreign affairs and, as necessary, seeks the advice of

individual specialists on particular problems that the Department

may encounter in the field of behavioral sciences research. ese

and related arrangements are in themselves specialized and fragmentary.

To help correct these deficiencies, the subcommittee recommends that there be established an Office of the Behavioral Sciences Adviser to the President. Such office could provide the

direction essential to an effective Government-wide effort in the

field of behavioral sciences, develop mutually beneficial longterm relationships between the government and the academic

community, strengthen both the formulation and implementation of foreign policy, and assure orderly development of the

Government’s programs in this field.

is recommendation was not different in spirit from the recommendation that had been made in the McNamara-Rusk correspondence. Another variant with significantly different implications was to be made later

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by Senator Harris of Oklahoma, when he initiated hearings on the subject

of a National Social Science Foundation. But the issue being raised was, in

a sense, a response from a different quarter to the question asked in the 1963

Smithsonian Report: “Is it polite to study friends?” e response here was,

first, that it depended on who did the studying and, second, that such study

was so politically sensitive that a responsible focus in government at the

highest level must be provided to pass on it. It appeared that the subcommittee, whose report was published well after the president’s letter to the

secretary of State was written and signed, did not believe that State would

or could carry out this responsibility successfully and felt it should be centered in the White House. at was unlikely to happen, of course, because

the prevailing view did not rate its importance as high as the committee did.

And, as always, it would be easier for the president to pass it on to the Secretary of State than to try to grapple with it when the value of such work did

not appear obvious to him or his subordinates in the White House.

e question of the value of this social research and whether it should

be done at all ran as an undercurrent through the hearings alongside the

issue of its role in affairs of state. Questions in this area were raised explicitly by Congressman H. R. Gross of Iowa. He made no secret of his feelings about researchers hired by the government who, he said, purported to

tell the military how to do their business:5

Mr. Gross: Who does let those negotiated contracts with the universities to provide the brainpower to run the military departments?

Mr. Deitchman: Contracts with universities are let by the military departments and ARPA.

Mr. Gross: Are you mixed up in this business of war gaming in

Vietnam?

Mr. Deitchman: No, sir.

Mr. Gross: Do you have anything to do with that?

Mr. Deitchman: No, sir.

Mr. Gross: Do you know about it?

Mr. Deitchman: Yes, sir.

Mr. Gross: Tell the committee a little bit about it. I don’t think

they know about this war gaming in Vietnam. . . . All right. I

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Chapter 14 • Congress Becomes Interested
guess we all know what war gaming is, what fighting a war is,

but what I am talking about is why the Pentagon hired a private

contractor with some so-called civilian smart boys to go over and

tell the military how to fight the war in Vietnam. is is what I

am talking about, the war gaming I am talking about. If you

know anything about this, tell the committee, please.

Mr. Deitchman: When civilians are hired to help with a war

game, they know about data gathering and analysis of data. War

games are done with military people. e military people work

with them. ey use the civilian firm to assist with the mathematical aspects—

Mr. Gross: I am glad to know the military people work with

them. Apparently they don’t work with the military.

Mr. Deitchman: ey work together. When the military wishes

to study a war gaming situation, it obtains the assistance of a firm

that can help with the statistical analysis of what has happened

in the war game, and they study any military situation this way

as a matter of learning about how such situations may work.

Mr. Gross: Tactics, strategy, it is all wrapped up in the same bundle, isn’t it? at is what we were told yesterday.

Mr. Deitchman: e only war games I know about that are done

with contractors are games that look to tactics. Games that look

to strategy are done by the military, by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Mr. Gross: What qualifies this civilian contracting firm to have

an understanding of military tactics and strategy in Vietnam?

Mr. Deitchman: eir long experience in working with military

people on such problems.

Mr. Gross: How long have they worked with them?

Mr. Deitchman: I am not sure what firm you are talking about.

Among the firms that I know the military use, there has been

experience since World War II and even prior days in working

with the military.

Mr. Gross: You mean they have military personnel in these contracting firms?

Mr. Deitchman: Yes, sir.

Mr. Gross: Why doesn’t the Pentagon avail itself on an inhouse

operation of this military personnel?

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The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy
Mr. Deitchman: Many times it does. ere is a division of labor.

Mr. Gross: I have taken more than my share of time.

Mr. Fascell: Mr. Rosenthal?

Mr. Gross: And gotten nowhere, incidentally.

Congressman Gross opened an area of questioning that led others on

the subcommittee to come to share his view. e issue was not Camelot

but the study of the Viet Cong based on prisoner-of-war interrogations

that had been undertaken by the RAND Corporation. It had been mentioned in our prepared testimony and, after the above exchange with Gross,

Congressman Rosenthal of New York asked about it. e study was described by Major General John W. Vogt, then chief of ISA’s Policy Planning

Staff. e transformation from what the scientists who had initiated the

project understood it to be, to what the committee was told, was appalling

to me, and the researchers shared the responsibility for the transformation.

e study was called “VC Motivation and Morale.” e original intent

was to learn something about the nature of the Viet Cong revolutionary

movement, including answers to such questions as what strata of society

its adherents came from; why they were adherents; how group cohesiveness was built into their ranks; and how they interacted with the populace.

While much is now known on the subject, almost nothing was known when

the work was conceived and begun. is was to be a study of social systems,

and the people who did it had to know, a priori, something about the particular social system—about Vietnamese society, culture, history, and about

events there since World War II. Preferably, at least some of them would

know the language and would be known to some important Vietnamese officials, easing the problems of access to and interaction with prisoners. ere

were not many people with such qualifications in the entire United States.

If there were a few in the military or intelligence communities, they were

likely to be heavily occupied with immediate operational problems associated with the war and would not have had the time to spend several months

on these detailed questions—important as they were. e military and the

DOD could be faulted if they ignored the questions (which, in my view,

they did for much too long), but they did not ignore them indefinitely. ey

found the appropriate experts, and as a matter of convenience they gave a

contract to the RAND Corporation, an instrument of the military system,

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Chapter 14 • Congress Becomes Interested
to perform the study. is all appears, even now, eminently reasonable, and

it might even have struck most of the members of the subcommittee that

way. But this was not the story they heard.

After the first part of the study, dealing with the questions outlined

above had been completed and the researchers had come home to prepare

their report, while another member of the RAND organization had gone

to Vietnam to continue the study. With the concurrence of the U.S. military command in Vietnam, he had begun to probe into current VC operations—how they organized; how they operated in the field; their methods

of recruiting and military training; and their reactions to the increasing

American air and ground combat operations. is approached much more

closely to straight military intelligence. Nevertheless, it was welcomed by

the U.S. military community because, in the hurried buildup of the MACV

organization, the military intelligence part of that organization had remained rudimentary (although ultimately it carried on this aspect of such

work itself ).

In late 1964 and early 1965, the first translated interviews from this

new direction of the RAND study were just coming in, and they were very

exciting to the military in Washington, whose contact with events in Vietnam, however frequent, must perforce be limited and fragmentary. It was

these results, not the earlier ones, that the committee heard about. is happened largely as a bureaucratic accident, since it had been agreed in advance

that General Vogt, who was responsible for overseeing this study rather

than the OSD civilians, would tell the committee about it if the questions

were asked.

e reaction was predictable:6

Mr. Frelinghuysen: I don’t mean to sound skeptical of what I have

heard of this study of the Viet Cong. However, it should be a natural responsibility of the military to interrogate prisoners and

come up with some intelligent conclusions about the nature of

the opposition, and the fact that the opposition is changing as

they draft people and so on.

I wouldn’t think it would take a wizard to know, whether you are

talking about aborigines or sophisticates in Washington, that people have meals in the evening; anyone could draw whatever military conclusions he wants from the fact that they have evening

meals. ere may be something of more substance that couldn’t

have been obtained through conventional channels. On the face

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of it, it would seem to me that you might come up with the idea

that such a survey wasn’t getting us anywhere except to increase

our understanding that it was not easy to beat the Viet Cong.

I can’t help feeling some sympathy with Mr. Rosenthal’s position.

We haven’t spelled out exactly what it is that all this massive effort

is accomplishing. It really is a massive effort, as there are not so

many behavioral scientists around and we are trying to concentrate a good many of them in particular areas. What is this contributing to our understanding and the effective use of our force,

whether it is military or otherwise? . . .

General Vogt: Let me give you an example. e military man is

interested, of course, in finding out what is difficult for the other

fellow in fighting his war, what is it that really makes it difficult,

what kind of an operation on our part would impose extra-heavy

burdens on this fellow.

We have discovered through this study that I have described here

that one of the things that they find most difficult is the business

of having to move a camp from point A to B repeatedly. We have

discovered quite a few things about it.

When we talk to the fellows who are actually involved in this

fighting, we find that they have been fighting all day and we have

forced them out of their encampment area, they have to find another place, locate sources of water, provide means of getting that

water up to the main part of the camp, dig trenches, put up a

warning post.

ey have to go through a very elaborate business of re-establishing a new location and encampment. is wears them out

when they have to do it periodically. Just physical digging of the

trench and working all night so their position is secure before they

can go to sleep is a back-breaking proposition to them. is

changed our feeling about how they lived.

Mr. Gross: Did you have to hire a consulting firm to tell you about

this? e more you gentlemen from the Pentagon talk, uniformed

and civilian, the more you indict your own establishment for lack

of inhouse capability to do the things for which you are supposedly trained and for which we are spending one hellavu lot of

money.

at is implicit in what you are saying. You go out and hire people to tell you how to run the establishment known as the Penta163

Chapter 14 • Congress Becomes Interested
gon and pay a fee to these so-called nonprofit institutions to tell

you how—excellent salaries to those boys at the top levels in these

outfits, I may say parenthetically. e more I hear you talk, the

more I am impressed with your admission that you just don’t have

the capability to run the establishment over there, that you have

to go out and hire these people to do it.

How did the consultants that have been sent over to Vietnam find

out what time the Viet Cong eat supper? Are they up at the front

where the mortar shells are falling and machineguns are going, to

find out when they eat supper, the Viet Cong? Or did the first increment of American soldiers sent in there, or Marines or whatever they were, did they find out when they eat and provide this

information at some rear area?

You know the answer to this. You know that we already knew all

about what time the Viet Cong usually eat supper. We didn’t have

to send consultants over there to find that out.

Some years ago, Walter Reed Hospital put out handbooks, if you

may call them that, on the habits of the Viet Cong and South

Vietnamese. ey are available and have been for several years.

Go get them. ey are enlightening. You didn’t have to send any

consultants over there, I hope, to tell the military how to fight the

war . . .

Mr. Frelinghuyen: Your illustration disturbs me. e fact that the

research has uncovered the fact that it is an effort in a jungle to

move from one place to another seems to me a conclusion that

could have been drawn by a child. Surely it could be drawn by

anyone who has had the experience of being in a jungle. Anyone

having to move from one place to another, as the Viet Cong

makes our own side move. As an illustration that is a good illustration of where we should not have to depend on something outside the establishment.

I don’t mean to sound critical when I say this. What disturbs me

is the fact that we are going to spend 3 man-years to come up

with a conclusion that in a jungle it is hard for people to move.

It is hard for people to move in a military sense under any condition, and of course in a jungle it is harder.

Here, then, was another illustration of how the subtle understandings

of the social scientists could be distorted when they were accepted and retranslated by those with operational responsibility and without the train164

The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy
ing of the social scientists to look at problems their way. e study, which

had been intended to elicit the basic workings of a revolutionary movement

and the motivation of its adherents, had been made to seem like a routine

examination of minor enemy tactical operations. While it might be possible to make a case for civilian assistance in the former area, the latter should

have been derived from straight military intelligence. But, of course, social

scientists had abetted these oversimplifications and distortions by the way

they themselves changed the direction of the study. Discussions such as this

must have led to the remark of the Appropriations Committee regarding

some of the work not needing study by intelligent people.

ere were other bases for the congressional attitude, as well. During

summer 1965, after the Camelot fiasco and while the committees were still

deliberating about the DOD budget, Rains Wallace and I went to visit one

of the committee staffs to discuss the social science program. e members

of the staff were interested in the reasons for DOD’s efforts. ere was a

lengthy discussion of the background to the DOD’s social science research

efforts and the need that had led to its expansion in the current directions.

e conversation turned to research in the villages in Vietnam—of how

anthropologists and other social scientists go about gathering and interpreting language and culture; of the substance of what had been learned

about the intricate paths of the Vietnamese political factionalism and the

complex roles of their diverse and strange (to us) ethnic and religious

groups, such as the Hoa Hao and the Cao Dai; and of the importance of

learning about and understanding these things if American military personnel were to work successfully with their Vietnamese counterparts.

One of the committee staff remarked after this discussion was over that,

all this notwithstanding, his congressman believed that if he wanted to

know what a Vietnamese villager thinks, he would go and talk with one for

a while, and he would know. He saw no need for expensive research projects to learn what any politician can find out, and does find out, in two or

three days. It was a cold comfort to reflect afterward that some congressmen evidently do not find out because they fail to get elected, even where

they speak the language and know, and are part of, the local culture. Nor, at

that time, did many politicians, even Vietnamese, talk to the Vietnamese

peasants even for a few hours. In any case, interviewing was not enough.

Knowing what to ask for (in the Vietnamese language), arranging not to appear as an important politician (so that people would talk frankly), and

making sure to talk to a representative sample are all required to find out

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what is really going on. Nevertheless, the differences in outlook between

research-oriented R&D managers and politically oriented congressional

staff were highlighted, unmistakably.

e Appropriations Subcommittee, later supported the full House and

the Senate, reduced DOD social science budgets by almost precisely the

planned increase for FY 1966. Ironically, quoting Dr. Robert Sproull, a

physicist and director of ARPA, who said during his testimony:7

I might add that this is a very difficult field in which to be sure

one is sponsoring only high quality work. . . . It is a field in which

it is very difficult indeed to tell the articulate linguist from the really promising scientist.*

e committee reduced the ARPA, Air Force, and Navy budgets for behavioral sciences by $500,000 each and took two bites out of the Army

budget—$500,000 from the “behavioral and social sciences” part of the “military sciences” “line item” and $1 million from the “human factors research”

“line item” from which SORO was funded. e program was thus set back

to where it had been when the DSB panel undertook its study. Some parts

of the DOD had been stimulated to look into a new class of problems, and

this was to continue later. But the entire concept of research contained in the

DDR&E directives and the DSB report had been nullified.

e congressional actions thus far had been rather benign in comparison with what was to follow. On September 15, 1965, Senator Fulbright

made a speech on the floor of the Senate8 in which he reviewed the recent

events in the Dominican Republic in great detail. His main point was that

the United States had to face and support the prospect of social revolution

in Latin America, but that the opportunity to side with the forces of freedom and social advancement had been missed in the Dominican Republic

when we acted to support a military regime he viewed as corrupt out of

what he considered to be unreasoning fear of communist elements that had

sided with rebels. Almost in passing, he remarked:

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* Some social scientists of my acquaintance were later to express their indignation about this statement,

pointing out that the difficulty existed primarily in Dr. Sproull’s mind and that the distinctions could

be made by trained social scientists whom Dr. Sproull had only to consult to be instructed on the subject. Of course, in view of the performance Dr. Sproull had just observed on the part of some trained

social scientists who had participated in Camelot, he might be forgiven for being uncertain about whom

to consult.
. . . one notes a general tendency on the part of our policymakers

not to look beyond Latin American politicians’ anti-Communism. One also notes in certain Government agencies, particularly in the Department of Defense, a preoccupation with

counterinsurgency, which is to say, with the prospect of revolutions and means of suppressing them. is preoccupation is manifested in dubious and costly research projects, such as the

recently discredited Camelot; these studies claim to be scientific

but beneath their almost unbelievably opaque language lies an

unmistakable military and reactionary bias.

So much for Dr. Vallance’s “stable society with domestic tranquility and

peace and justice for all.”

In a now virtually ancient work entitled, How To ink Straight, Robert

H. ouless remarks that “words which carry more or less strong suggestions of emotional attitudes are very common and are ordinarily used in

the discussion of such controversial questions as those of politics, morals,

and religion.”9 In the brief passage of his speech, Senator Fulbright expressed the new attitude that had grown toward the American military and

the DOD as a result of the Vietnam War and the attitudes that were being

espoused by diverse members of the American public and the majority of

the social science community in the universities about America’s participation (the more emotional words in the universities being “intervention”

or even “imperialism”) overseas. e death of DOD’s Camelot bespoke the

death of Kennedy’s Camelot that had helped spawn it.

is was the beginning of Senator Fulbright’s effort, which was later

joined by Senator Mansfield, to reduce the DOD’s influence on foreign

policy. In part, he attacked DOD research on problems overseas as a manifestation of that influence. He made periodic speeches about DOD’s “research on foreign policy,” often inserting lists of projects into the record

whose titles illustrated the whole range of DOD’s interest in foreign countries and overseas conflicts.10 We shall see some of their impact shortly.

e articles of Walter Pincus had told of DOD’s “$20 million for social science research.” Our testimony before the Fascell subcommittee had

broken this down11 (it was actually $27 million in FY 1965), showing that

about $5 million of this had to do with “studies of foreign countries, counterinsurgency, and unconventional warfare,” and military assistance, with

about an additional million for “foreign areas information”; and the point

was made that of this sum only about 1.5 million was actually spent in over167

Chapter 14 • Congress Becomes Interested
seas research and the related work that had been described in our formal

statement to the Fascell subcommittee. But in his later testimony before

that subcommittee, Secretary Rusk said that “the foreign affairs research community spends at least $30 million per year in support of contract studies

that relate to foreign policy [emphasis added]. . . . $30 million spent in the behavioral and social sciences can have a far-reaching impact upon foreign

affairs. ese studies were contracted out by . . . the Defense Department,

by AID and ACDA . . . less than 1 percent of this amount is spent by the

State Department.” Later, in his June 1966 hearings on a National Social

Science Foundation bill, Senator Harris noted that “e Federal Government spent approximately $35 million last year for social and behavioral

science research in foreign countries” [emphasis added].12omas Hughes,

head of State’s INR, later guessed that the DOD share of this might be

“roughly 12.5 million” of the social science contract research relating to foreign areas and foreign affairs.13 is was later contrasted by Senator Harris with State’s “measly $200,000.”14 From all this, the impression conveyed

was that DOD’s “social science research on foreign policy” was large—much

larger than it actually was in terms of people working on the problems. is,

of course, made it look much more threatening than it actually might have

been. State’s approximately $4.5 million and 300 people devoted to the

same problems inhouse15 were disregarded in the public debate, apparently

(and perhaps in fact) being considered irrelevant.

Senator Fulbright, of course, was concerned about the fact of the work

and its orientation. Much other work, unrelated to foreign policy, was swept

up in his net as the lists of projects in the record show. He (or, more likely,

a designated staff member) followed the subject closely; whenever a news

article appeared that referred to it or a request for bid or pertinent contract

information was announced in the forum of the Commerce Business Daily,

whether the subject was a contract or a DSB study or a column about a research project in ailand, a letter from Senator Fulbright to the secretary

of Defense followed, asking for particulars. Most of the time, the carefully

written responses to his letters were followed by silence, leading us to hope

that the particular question had been satisfactorily answered. But of course,

that was a vain hope.

In 1968, amid the tensions of the peak of the American buildup and

employment of combat forces in Vietnam, Senators Fulbright and Mansfield made a major attack on Defense Department “social science research.”16 Among the study titles that were cited as examples of the military

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establishment’s interest in matters far beyond their sphere were a study of

the economy of India and a report entitled “Witchcraft in the Congo.” e

first study had been justified after the Chinese attack on India in 1965 as

necessary to plan the military assistance program then being undertaken

to assist in the strengthening of India’s armed forces. It was designed to

help formulate a policy of loans, grants, and assistance in building an arms

manufacturing industry; the justification being that for the last item, at

least, something had to be known about the Indian economy’s flexibility

and capacity for expansion.

e Congo “study” was not a study at all, but represented a summary

paper written in answer to an Army question put to the Counterinsurgency

Information and Analysis Center at SORO (see p. 100); the latter was now

reorganized and renamed the Center for Research in Social Systems

(CRESS) and separated from its contractual relationship with American

University. is was the time when the United States was providing a small

amount of assistance to the government of the Republic of Congo against

a group of rebellions that threatened to tear it apart. American policy was

that stability in central Africa depended on the Congo remaining a viable

nation. While there was no vocal quarrel with this policy on the part of

Congress, the sensitivity to the possibility of American involvement in wars

in developing nations was such that a storm was raised over four transport

aircraft sent to transport Congo government troops from one part of that

huge, underdeveloped country to another.17e Congo rebels called themselves “simbas” (lions) and were reported to have convinced themselves by

diverse magical ceremonies that they were invulnerable to bullets. Mindful

that the British had some success in Kenya with a “de-oathing” ceremony

to undermine the psychological effect of the Mau-Mau blood oaths, the

Army asked CINFAC what qualities there might be in the beliefs of the

Congo rebels that would offer similar opportunities. e paper on “Witchcraft in the Congo,” the product of a few days’ work by the center, was the

response to the question. While this was explained, such studies and reports remained symbols of the DOD’s interest in studying foreign peoples,

which Senator Fulbright believed was an improper activity for the DOD to

undertake.

It appeared obviously necessary to the DOD to try to counter the effects of this furor. Dr. Donald MacArthur, Deputy DDR&E for Science

and Technology (i.e., responsible for overseeing all of DOD’s scientific research program), his assistant Rodney Nichols, and I visited the staffs of

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the House and Senate Armed Services committees and Armed Services

Appropriations subcommittees. We explained the nature of the projects in

question, showed the context of the large scope of the work in which they

were embedded, and tried at length to justify the studies as were done. We

also explicitly made clear DOD’s attempts to ensure that all such research

was relevant to the DOD mission. We agreed that some fraction of the

work might be subject to argument in this respect and that the DOD was

willing to make adjustments to meet the will of Congress in these areas,

but we expressed the feeling that it seemed highly unfair to have one or

two studies—and minor ones, at that—singled out as the basis for an attack

on the entire DOD research program.

e conversations ranged over the philosophical problem of performing specifically oriented basic research. Basic research could always be

shown to have ultimate relevance to DOD problems. For example, research

in the sciences of materials had led to improved engines and armor; research in basic physics led to new forms of detection systems (some of

which would also be applied later to prevent airplane highjacking); research

in lasers led to communications and range finding systems. But the research

itself did not always have the application in view, and one could not always

expect a researcher working on the frontiers of knowledge to understand

immediately what the ultimate application would be. (is, in fact, became

the key argument of those in the universities who wanted to reject all

DOD-supported research as evil.)18 In the social and analytical sciences,

the DOD (since Camelot) was making much more of an effort to ensure

the direct and obvious relationship between research subjects and applications that appeared necessary to justify such work.

One of the Senate staff members at this point asked about RAND’s

“VC Motivation and Morale” studies. I pointed out that these had developed most of the information and deep understanding (beyond the “orderof-battle” analyses of primary concern to the military intelligence

community) that had become available in the past three years about the

National Liberation Front, its adherents, its ways of relating to the population, and its means for keeping its own members under tight organizational control. Much of this knowledge was reflected in Douglas Pike’s book

on the Viet Cong.19 Moreover, the methodology for such a study, primarily

the means for gathering and analyzing relevant data in an alien culture, had

been integrated into the work of the intelligence community. e work was

obviously directly relevant to the military’s problems.

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None of this persuaded any of the staff members of the four committees. While as individuals they might accept and understand our explanation of the studies and analyses, they pointed out that Congress was

becoming extraordinarily sensitive about DOD research. Ordinarily, DOD

research in the physical sciences was viewed quite permissively; but with

the rising antiwar sentiment and with the university community disengaging from and making attacks on classified DOD-supported research on

campus, and in some cases on all DOD-supported research on campus, all

DOD-supported basic research was coming into question. e controversial studies and analyses DOD insisted on supporting, representing less

than 1 percent of all the DOD’s $300-plus million worth of basic research,

was jeopardizing all the rest, and they did not think they could defend any

of it unless DOD backed down on the 1 percent.

If we needed confirmation that the staff were accurately reflecting the

attitudes of their principals, we could pay heed to Senator Stennis’s remarks

on the floor during one of the discussions on the subject initiated by Senator Fulbright:20

I consider that [social and behavioral sciences] to be the softest

spot in all the [DOD] research and development program, although I did not have intimate, personal knowledge about it.

us was another nail driven into the coffin.

Senators Fulbright and Mansfield delivered the coup de grace the following year. But we have already moved far ahead of other parts of the story.

It is time again to backtrack and see what was happening elsewhere. Before

we do, however, let us pause for a moment’s reflection.

We spent many hours in DOD trying to devise ways to placate Senator Fulbright with respect to this particular problem. It seemed to us that

he was, at the same time, castigating the DOD for being a blundering, ignorant, trigger-happy giant and, yet, objecting when the DOD tried to

learn enough to act in a more educated enlightened way. Surely, some of us

thought, if we could meet and reason with him, we could convince him of

the logic and the need for most, if not all, of the research and studies DOD

felt it had to undertake to play its role properly. But we finally concluded

that this would serve no useful purpose. We assumed ultimately that, from

his point of view, if the DOD were studying foreign areas, this must inevitably appear to be undertaken against the contingency that the DOD

would have to operate in those areas. And if DOD expected to do that, it

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had enough power and influence in the government to make the planning

a self-fulfilling prophecy. Senator Fulbright made clear his belief in the

September 15, 1965, speech that the DOD exerted too strong an influence

on foreign policy in any case, and that this influence was, in his own word,

“reactionary.” Whether this was so or not, it appeared logical to us as a next

step that if the DOD could be prevented from studying foreign areas, this

would at least symbolically reduce its appearance of influence; if this acted

over the long run to reduce its influence in fact, all to the good.

is interpretation of the senator’s views did seem to fit with what he

said on the Senate floor. For example, in 1968:21

. . . I would like to see if we could not begin to get this matter

under control. . . . Not only does it not produce anything of value,

but it is also affirmatively bad to go around messing in a foreign

university and studying the civilian life of foreigners and what

motivates them and so on, and especially under the auspices of

the Defense Department.

It gives the impression that our country has become 100 percent

militaristic, which I know is not so. I do not want it to become so

[emphasis added], and nobody else here wants that to happen, either . . .

And, again in 1969:22

I suppose that in some areas psychological understanding is necessary and helpful. If we had had any understanding of the psychology of the Vietnamese, I do not think we would have gotten

into that war. ere was a complete lack of understanding of what

the Vietnamese people were like. I cannot say it would not have

been helpful.

I do not think that particular one has any relation to the military

responsibility [emphasis added]. I doubt that the military is the

proper one to handle it simply because they are not familiar with

that type of activity.

In addition, the senator said often that in many ways the Camelot Project was misguided and stupid; and each time he allied with it the thought

of DOD’s improper role. If his outlook was as we surmised, it became clear

to us then that we were involved, purely and simply, in a clash of convictions

and beliefs in the political arena. No amount of explanation would help. So

we kept answering the senator’s letters as reasonably as we could, hoping to

assuage his wrath each time, but inexorably losing in the broader conflict.

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Chapter 15

Social Science Has Second oughts

e reaction to Camelot by the news media caused annoyance and some resentment in the DOD, but the media had reacted to DOD doings of

greater magnitude in the past and this new reaction was no surprise. at

many members of Congress should see impropriety in DOD’s social science

research was also readily comprehensible, if regrettable. State had telegraphed its attitudes and moves well in advance. e clamping down of

controls by the chiefs of the DOD was taken as a natural consequence for

a program that had caused embarrassment while it lacked intrinsic support.

But it is also fair to say that the depth of the anti-DOD reaction, the emotional soul-searching, and the virulent condemnation of their esteemed colleagues by members of the social science community was very much

unanticipated by all of those social scientists and others who had a hand in

trying to build the program of social research related to the problem of revolutionary warfare.

e fundamental issue was presented as an ethical one, although, as we

shall see later, it carried overtones of political conflicts among social scientists. It was voiced in many forms, but basically it came to the question of

whether, by working on applied problems to help government achieve its

purposes, social scientists were not violating their academic freedom and

professional ethics. Implicit was the view that study of social processes from

the viewpoint of avoiding violent rebellion was reactionary, and that revolution, violent or not, should be studied and supported as a beneficial and

necessary instrument of social change. It was not expressed explicitly, but in

a large segment of the social science community that had been deeply disturbed by the Vietnam War, the value system had changed.

e violence of the reaction was a shock, in part, because the documents supporting and encouraging the DOD’s efforts to enlist social scientists in these endeavors were in the public record and presumably known,

at least within the social science community. And, as the Harris hearings

later showed, it was also well known that ONR and AFOSR supported research by social scientists in foreign areas and about problems of foreign

policy; some of the academic community had found this support welcome

and respectable. rough all the years past, there had been no complaints

of the sort that were now being raised. Whence the change? It was com173
plex and multifaceted, and, one must add in fairness, it was far from universal in the community.

e case against the DOD and its adherents was staked out, as it were,

in two articles published soon after Camelot “broke.” Most later writings

and discussion represented elaborations on the theme. e articles were by

Irving Louis Horowitz, professor of sociology at Washington University,1

who later testified before the Harris committee2 and edited a book, e Rise

and Fall of Project Camelot,

3 and by Kalman H. Silvert,4 a political scientist

specializing in Latin America, who was with the American Universities

Field Staff and also testified.5 Silvert’s revised article also appeared in the

Horowitz book. e Silvert article appeared in July and that of Horowitz

in November. ey punctuated a cacophony of letters and articles in diverse journals, especially from Latin American scholars; and they elevated

to “scholarly” debate the barrage of news articles, congressional statements,

and investigations already described.

It had already become clear that the Camelot news had reinforced an

atmosphere of suspicion in Latin America that was affecting all American

researchers there, including those supported by university or private foundation funds. Silvert pointed out that American research on Latin America was not well supported, had few adherents, and few students who

understood the sensitivity of Latin American scholars to domination from

the north. He remarked that “e extremely noisy debacle . . . cannot be explained in the narrow terms of the few bumbling individuals or even of

misguided policy; the ground for today’s disgrace was well prepared by the

ethical incomprehension, cavalier attitudes, and tolerance of ignorance

manifested by American universities and scholars for many years.” He questioned whether scholars could preserve their “academic” freedom and still

work for the government on policy problems, specifically “. . . how does a

scholar under contract know that he is adopting one hypothesis instead of

another for truly scientific reasons, rather than because of a particular applied interest or even political prejudice? . . . do these scholars think themselves beyond the lures of money, prestige, and personal political passion?”

e statement, one might add, would seem to apply to many other scholarly activities as well.

ese relatively gentle statements of parts of the problems were elaborated further and from a different point of view at a meeting of the Social

Science Research Council held in September 1965, in which I was invited

to participate. e council is a nonprofit organization formed in 1923, rep174

The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy
resenting the various social science disciplines. It is privately supported to

“articulate and advance the research interest of imaginative and highly competent social scientists wherever they may be.” Its board is designated by the

professional associations in the individual disciplines;6 thus, in some sense,

it represents the entire professional community. e subject of this particular meeting was the problem of “access” in foreign area research. I was

asked to join a panel discussing the problems of government-supported research overseas; and at the heart of discussions was a search for the lessons

of Camelot.

Two points that were made in the course of the panel discussions, and

in later conversations I had with members of the council, stood out. e

first, which led me to realize that Camelot was not so much the cause of the

furor as it was the trigger for a bomb that had long been ticking, had to do

with the problems created in Latin America by privately supported American researchers. is was the question, as alluded to by Silvert, of their attitude toward local scholars—a certain arrogance—a feeling that the

Americans were coming to put the local people under the microscope rather

than to work with them on their problems. is had been manifested by

such incidents as American professors taking their data “home” for use in

their own publications rather than analyzing them abroad with their foreign colleagues. And there were a large enough number of researchers in the

various countries of Latin America to irritate the people they interviewed—

sometimes the same people were interviewed on similar problems by two

or more completely independent researchers. Of course, all research in Latin

America was not like this, but there was enough like this to be remembered

and to create the near-hostile climate into which Camelot intruded. ese

sensitivities, and sensitivity to official American activity, were obviously mutually reinforcing.

e second major point was whether, if such research results as DOD

desired were really needed, they could not be obtained by some independent, “objective” agency, such as the National Science Foundation. is was

a complex issue indeed, even more so when viewed in retrospect. e immediately obvious problem was whether an agency needing applied research

results—specific answers to such specific questions as those raised in the

Defense Science Board report—could seek the necessary research and information through an agency designed for basic research, one that depended on scholars to originate proposals on subjects that interested them,

for work to be performed according to their own schedules. It did not seem

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Chapter 15 • Social Science Has Second Thoughts
likely, and the Fascell subcommittee was to recognize this, saying in its report, “Research activities should always be related to each department’s or

agency’s specific operational responsibilities.”7 In any case, the basic research questions and the applied questions were likely to be only remotely

related to each other, necessitating some work by the operational agency to

translate one into the other. erefore, the problems of getting the applied

work done could not entirely be evaded by fobbing them off on a foundation organized for basic research.

A more fundamental difficulty was the shifting into a new context of

the ethical problem facing individuals, or hiding their sources of support if

these happened to be the DOD or the CIA. e implication of the suggestion to shift support of the work to a government foundation was that,

if the operating agencies could not undertake to support overseas research

directly, perhaps another innocuous agency could do so by providing a

“cover” when the scholar himself was not supposed to. By then, the innocuous agency would have to take the money covertly from the one desiring the work, a process later forbidden to the CIA and the DOD; or it

would have to ask Congress for the money publicly and that would “blow

the cover.” It was evidently not yet recognized that it was the combination

of the nature of the question and the fact that the U.S. government was

asking it that raised hackles overseas, not the subsidiary issue of what instrument that government selected to obtain the answers. e increased

frustration attending this realization was to embitter many in the social

science community even more against the U.S. government, and came later

to be reflected in the harshness of the “New Left’s” attacks on those who

worked with government support.

Earlier, Horowitz expanded on this problem and on the related ones.

Regarding the support of the research by the Army and its meaning, he

said:

In deference to intelligent researchers, in recognition of them as

scholars, they should have been invited by Camelot to air their

misgivings and qualms about government (and especially Army

sponsored) research—to declare their moral conscience. Instead,

they were mistakenly approached as skilful, useful potential employees of a higher body, subject to an authority higher than their

scientific calling.

What is central is not the political motives of the sponsor. For social

scientists were not being enlisted in an intelligence system for “spying” pur176

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poses. But given their professional standing, their great sense of intellectual

honor and pride, they could not be “employed” without proper deference for

their stature. Professional authority should have prevailed from beginning

to end with complete command of the right to thrash out the moral and political dilemmas as researchers saw them. e Army, however respectful and

protective of free expression, was “hiring help” and not openly and honestly

submitting a problem to the higher professional and scientific authority of

social science.

But, of course, that last had been done in 1958–63, and the Army was

following the advice proffered at the time.

After attacking the project as scientifically unworkable (because it was

not designed to take a morally “objective” view), Horowitz went on to say:

In one Camelot document, there is a general critique of social

science for failing to deal with social conflict and social control.

While this in itself is admirable, the tenor and context of

Camelot’s documents make it plain that a “stable society” is considered the norm no less than the desired outcome. e “breakdown of social order” is spoken of accusatively. Stabilizing

agencies in developing areas are presumed to be absent. ere is

no critique of U.S. Army policy in developing areas because the

Army is presumed to be a stabilizing agency. e research formulations always assume the legitimacy of Army tasks—if the

U.S. Army is to perform effectively its parts in the U.S. mission

of counterinsurgency it must recognize that insurgency represents a “breakdown of social order . . . ” But such a proposition has

never been doubted—by Army officials or anyone else. e issue

is whether such breakdowns are in the nature of the existing system or a product of conspiratorial movements . . .

It never seemed to occur to its personnel to inquire into the desirability for successful revolution. is is just as solid a line of

inquiry as the one stressed—the conditions under which revolutionary movements will be able to overthrow a government. Furthermore, they seem not to have thought about inquiring into

the role of the United States in these countries. is points up the

lack of symmetry. e problem should have been phrased to include the study of “us” as well as “them.” It is not possible to make

a decent analysis of a situation unless one takes into account the

role of all the different people and groups involved in it; and there

was no room in the design for such contingency analysis.

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In discussing the policy impact on a social science research project, we should not overlook the difference between “contract”

work and “grants.” Project Camelot commenced with the U.S.

Army; that is to say, it was initiated for a practical purpose determined by the client. is differs markedly from the typical academic grant in that its sponsorship had “built-in” ends. e

scholar usually seeks a grant; in this case the donor, the Army,

promoted its own aims. In some measure, the hostility for Project Camelot may be an unconscious reflection of this distinction—a dim feeling that there was something “non-academic,”

and certainly not disinterested, about Project Camelot, irrespective of the quality of the scholars associated with it.

He also indirectly accused the social science community of remaining

silent about the project because it did not want to jeopardize its sources of

support in the DOD.8 us was the motif of corruption of the scientists

joined with that of imperialism of the sponsor.

At the same time, Horowitz castigated the State Department for taking part in “a supreme act of censorship”9 and for missing the moral issues—all the executive branch (at least that part having to do with foreign

affairs) became part of the immoral system. R. A. Nisbet was to write later,

in apparent contradiction,10 that whether behavioral scientists make the

contribution of research results to the military directly or through foundations or universities is a matter of operational significance but not an ethical matter. But then he rejoined Horowitz, pointing out that the unethical

aspect of their behavior was the failure of the social scientists to tell the

Army that the project was professionally and scientifically unwise. To others’ accusation of moral failure on the part of the social scientists, he added

the failure of purely professional ethics. He went on to stress Congressman

Royball’s question at the Fascell hearings: “Wouldn’t the fact that the Army

was heading the project itself create a problem in many countries?” is,

Nisbet felt, the scientists should have pointed out. at is, instead of taking the Army’s money to do the job the Army wanted done, they should

have demurred and pointed out to the Army that it was improper for it to

spend its money that way.

us far had we come from the judgments, values, attitudes, and recommendations of the 1963 Smithsonian report. And, as Silvert, after asking “How many scholars who knew of this widely publicized project actually

wrote to SORO questioning the wisdom and ethics of the matter?” pointed

out in a footnote, “. . . e writer was requested to join in Project Camelot

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last year. He declined, but raised no troubling questions.” In other words,

the realization of the problems now being identified came after, not before,

the hue and cry about Camelot was raised.

It appears that what was at least partly involved can only be labeled as

professional rivalry—a fear on the part of some members of the community

that their sources of overseas research data (their professional life’s blood,

one might say)—was being jeopardized by other parts of the community.

Gabriel Almond, who was at the SSRC meeting described previously and

was, at the time, the incoming president of the American Political Science

Association, was reported in a newspaper article by Walter Pincus11 to have

said at a luncheon session of the association’s convention where Camelot’s

consequences were being discussed that the great expansion of social science

activity by American scholars abroad had, in addition to resulting in some

cases of poor preparation and understanding, made “legitimate” foreign research difficult for all U.S. scholars. at is, he seemed to be suggesting that

the field was getting too crowded and this made things difficult for those

already there. Others at the meeting were reported to have spoken against

support of research by the DOD, describing such events as an academic

(not DOD-supported) survey of Latin American diplomats (presumably

“legitimate”) running into trouble when the diplomats feared the researcher

represented the CIA or another U.S. government agency. us, it was implied, the field was not only becoming overcrowded, but that the new entries were sowing distrust of everyone.

One is also tempted to speculate about whether the emotionalism of

the reaction to Camelot did not bespeak a certain feeling of guilt on the part

of some of the social scientists who decried Camelot the loudest. All the elements were there. Many of them had been taking DOD money to support

their work or their colleagues were taking DOD money. is had been

combined with other money for general support, a procedure that had not

been thought unethical at the time. Many of them knew of Camelot—they

did not speak out against it until their Latin American colleagues pointed

their accusing finger. e outcry reminded them that their own behavior

had not been impeccable; some of them, too, had displayed signs of the arrogance of their particular power—in this case, ample money to go abroad

and undertake research of more interest to themselves than to their foreign

colleagues. And, underlying it all, a deep and growing dissatisfaction with

their country and its part in what was becoming a dirty and unwinnable war.

ere was much sensitivity abroad on this subject, as I was told at the time

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by a number of scientists who were in contact with their foreign counterparts, especially in Latin America. All of this, it is now clear, was simmering in the background. Camelot acted like a mirror in a room when the

light was turned on suddenly; in an instant, many social scientists saw

themselves as they believed they were viewed from the outside. ey were

unhappy with the image and they turned violently on their colleagues and

their colleagues’ mentor, who were responsible for turning on the light and

who they could accuse of having caused the trouble. And they undertook

their own share of soul-searching and self-accusation.

us, the history of the war and the DOD’s experiment in social research remained intertwined. From the time the United States entered the

war in Vietnam in an expanding role and the research experiment was conceived, until the time the experiment saw the light of day in a glare of accusatory publicity while the United States found itself deep in the war with

no resolution in sight, the value system had changed in an important part

of the American intellectual community—including key members of Congress, many social scientists, and important representatives of the press. Almost every one of the original premises, given in chapter 3, was overturned

for this group:

• Communism in Vietnam, or anywhere, was not a threat to the

United States, nor was Communism in small countries necessarily in sympathy with the sources of Communism—the

USSR and China—who were no longer monolith.

• America’s relations with developing nations should recognize

the urges of their people toward greater freedom; if those urges

led to violent revolution, the United States should support it

instead of supporting reactionary and suppressive “status quo”

regimes.

• “Counterinsurgency” was the means by which these legitimate

urges toward freedom, possibly expressed in revolutionary action, were suppressed; it opposed revolution and represented

intervention by the United States in the affairs of developing

nations to aid and abet such suppression by their dictatorial

governments. It was not a morally acceptable strategy for the

United States.

• e DOD (along with the CIA) was the American instrument

of counterinsurgency; its support for studies of foreign peoples

was therefore unacceptable because its motives were sinister.

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• Social scientists who worked for the DOD and other “missionoriented” agencies were giving up their academic and intellectual freedom.

One does not have to agree with or accept all or part of either set of

premises to recognize that a change had taken place. Perhaps it was not a

change in values; perhaps, one could speculate, the two sets of values existed

side by side in American life. One was in the ascendancy for a time, until

events let to the resurgence of the other. Sometimes the shift took place

within individuals; at other times, different individuals gained the public

attention. Whatever the explanation, the new premises gained even wider

acceptance. ey evolved over time into a new sort of catechism, which is

illustrated in the extreme by the following passages from Michael Klare’s

article in e Nation:

12

Every imperium has been faced with the task of finding enough

troops to maintain hegemony over colonial territories without

straining the financial and manpower resources of the mother

country. e occupation army of an imperial power is always outnumbered by the indigenous population of a colony; when a liberation movement has secured the active support of sufficient

numbers of people in a country to offset the technological advantage of the occupier, the colonial reign is doomed.

Like all imperial powers of the past, the United States has been

obliged to employ mercenaries in order to maintain a favorable

balance of power in its colonial territories. In fact, a primary objective of our Asian policy is to install client regimes in each

country that can be compelled to supply native troops for America’s counterinsurgency. . . . Since even when in control of the

governmental apparatus the ruling junta is dependent upon U.S.

aid to finance development projects and meet military payrolls,

Washington can insist that such regimes provided troops for

combat against insurgents in their own or neighboring countries.

In Southeast Asia, the Department of Defense (DOD) found

that the use of indigenous troops in counterinsurgent operations

creates problems that do not arise in actions against an external

enemy. Since such troops are sent against their own countrymen—and often against members of their own village, or even

their own family—serious questions of motivation and morale

arise. . . . To develop a research and development (R&D) program for our mercenary armies, similar to the extensive R&D

program for the American Army, Defense Secretary McNamara

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in 1961 established an on-going program of counterinsurgency

research known as Project AGILE.

. . . In the area of behavioral research, AGILE has sponsored research on ethnic minorities thought to be potential sources of

mercenaries (e.g., the Montagnards of South Vietnam), and on

the development of strategic doctrine for the armies of client

governments.

e anthropologists, in particular, felt that they had been “used”—a

feeling reinforced by the revelations of CIA support for scholarly and university research and institutions. Shortly after the Camelot news broke, the

American Anthropological Association met (November 18–21, 1965) and

a violent argument ensued over whether the members of the association

should be permitted to perform research for action-oriented agencies of

the government. A resolution to explore the ethics of sponsored research

was introduced13 and referred to the Committee on Research Problems and

Ethics headed by Professor Ralph Beals of UCLA, then the president of the

association. At a meeting a year later (November 19, 1966), the association

argued about the report of its committee and referred it back to them for

further work. A “Statement on . . . Research and Ethics” was finally approved by the membership in April 1967.14 It was lengthy and established

many guidelines for anthropologists’ professional behavior. Among its statements were the following:

I. Freedom of Research

1. e Fellows of the American Anthropological Association reaffirm their resolution of 1948 on freedom of publication and

protection of the interests of the persons and groups studied:

Be it resolved:

(1) that the American Anthropological Association strongly

urge all sponsoring institutions to guarantee their research

scientists complete freedom to interpret and publish their

findings without censorship or interference; provided that

(2) the interests of the persons and communities or other

groups studied are protected; and that

(3) in the event that the sponsoring institution does not wish

to publish the results nor be identified with the publication,

it permit publication of the results, without use of its name

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and sponsoring agency, through other channels—American

Anthropologists 51:370 (1949).

To extend and strengthen this resolution, the Fellows of the

American Anthropological Association endorse the following:

2. Except in the event of a declaration of war by Congress, academic institutions should not undertake activities or accept

contracts in anthropology that are not related to their normal

functions of teaching, research, and public service. ey should

not lend themselves to clandestine activities. We deplore unnecessary restrictive classifications of research reports prepared

under contract for the government, and excessive security regulations imposed on participating academic personnel.

3. e best interests of scientific research are not served by the

imposition of external restrictions. e review procedures instituted for foreign area research contracts by the Foreign Affairs Research Council of the Department of State (following

a presidential directive of July 1965) offer a dangerous potential for censorship of research. Additional demands by some

United States agencies for clearance, and for excessively detailed itineraries and field plans from responsible scholars

whose research has been approved by their professional peers

or academic institutions, are contrary to assurances given by

Mr. omas L. Hughes, director of the Bureau of Intelligence

and Research, Department of State, to the president of the

American Anthropological Association on November 9, 1965,

and are incompatible with effective anthropological research.

4. Anthropologists employed or supported by the government

should be given the greatest possible opportunities to participate in planning research projects, to carry them out, and to

publish their findings.

e resolution, which was approved by a 12-to-1 mail vote,15 effectively

prevented most anthropologists from participating in work for the DOD

since they could not easily suffer the antagonism of their peers and continue

as part of their professional community. A minority opposed the constraints

implied by the resolution, but the general orientation of the group included

attitudes toward applied research completely antithetical to any usage of

the results of their work by government for its purposes, except, as noted,

in case “Congress declares war.” e definition of “public service” in the

sense of the resolution is subtle, indeed, under these circumstances. What

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was really meant, one presumes, was that they could engage in the form of

public service that met with general favor in the professional community at

any particular time. Moreover, some of the anthropologists later showed

that they could be rather hard on their fellows who did not wish to march

to the same drummer.

With the condemnation of research on problems applied to ends these

social scientists disapproved of came a new view of their role. In addition

to avoiding what they viewed as unethical involvement with government,

they came to view it as their responsibility to change the policies with which

they disagreed. Showing some cleavage even in these ranks (since the view

did not square with the lofty detachment advocated by Horowitz), it was

determined that research was no longer to be the sole objective. Political activism was to follow the knowledge gained through the research. is reflected in the various resolutions against the Vietnam War, or against

specific operations in Vietnam, such as defoliation or the use of napalm,

passed by many professional organizations. While this might appear as a

new attitude, it is clear that the social scientists were acting in the “tradition” of the physical scientists who had developed nuclear weapons during

and after World War II, when the latter resolved that scientists must assume

a share of social and political responsibility for the uses to which the results

of their work are put. Camelot appeared to be the social “atomic bomb” that

led the social scientists to share the physicists’ view. Typifying the attitude

was a “draft declaration of Latin American specialists on professional responsibility,” circulated for signature in October 1965. It said, in part:

We considered it our individual and collective personal and professional duty to promote improved conditions of human life,

political and economic independence, political and social democratization, and economic development in all countries of the

hemisphere. We pledge ourselves in our work and in our private

activity always to promote and never to hinder the achievement

of those goals. Whenever U.S. government policies conflict with

these goals, we consider it our duty to promote alternative policies

[emphasis added].

While these words are high-minded, idealistic, and in keeping with

American values, they appear subtly different from the general concern for

the survival of mankind expressed years earlier by the physical scientists.

ere are narrower, more culturally oriented implicit value judgments here,

which suggest that the framers and signers of the resolution would decide

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(presumably agreeing among themselves on what policies would and would

not meet the goals) what policies were suitable and desirable for “all countries of the hemisphere.” But the pattern was set, even if the community

bent over so far backward that they tainted themselves with the sins for

which they castigated the government. e politicization of the sciences

had begun and was to continue apace as a subject for debate and conflict in

the scientific community.16 Of course, it could be argued that all client-oriented research is political if the client is political. e scientist can then

choose, if he wishes, the political orientation of the client he works with. We

will examine this question in detail in the last chapter of this book.

In all that has preceded in this chapter, we have referred to the “social

science community.” It must be clear, however, that this “community” was

not monolithic. I have already alluded to a certain amount of what appeared

to be professional rivalry underlying the strength of the reaction to the

Camelot revelations. ere had been, in fact, what might be termed a

“DOD social science establishment”—the group, and many others like it,

that had participated in the Smithsonian studies and whose members, with

many colleagues, worked with the government and with the DOD. ese

men were some of the key people in the development of a strong association of social scientists to which the government could turn. eir role and

position are ably suggested by ackray:17

In 1962, W. H. Auden could say, “When I find myself in the

company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed

by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.”

. . . e demand for apparatus beyond the pure of any one society or institution and the continually increasing need for federal

support have also contributed to changes in the social system of

pure science. Perhaps the most obvious of those changes is the

emergence of the new breed of dominant dukes. Unlike either

the elegant amateurs or poor professionals, these men draw their

fame, their monetary, intellectual, and social rewards, and their

power in society directly from their enormous scientific ability.

ere were, it might be noted, a number of such “establishments.” Another included many leaders of the professional associations (e.g., some of

those serving on the NAS/NRC committee, or as leaders of the SSRC),

who had become vocal against DOD-supported work but who, nevertheless,

were not willing to go as far as the more radical members of their groups in

condemnation of the government and any relationship with the government

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by social scientists. Both these “elite” groups were represented on the newly

formed National Academy of Science Committee, and in that forum their

differences were muted. But the group that had been working closely with

the DOD was attacked by the other indirectly in the press and in the professional societies; the attackers came to assemble many more supporters

than the group sympathetic to the DOD. e latter tried in a number of

ways to defend themselves, but the DOD, as with most bureaucracies, had

become a rather impersonal and ungrateful master, made the job harder by

refusing to enter the fray in the media, where much of the battle was being

fought; and by refusing to agree that those who had been associated with

Camelot could enter the fray officially on the DOD’s behalf.

ese social scientists could, of course, have discussed their work without violating any trust. e problem was that the government did not wish

to speak up regarding its need for Camelot, or something like it, or about its

need for the support of the social scientists who had been helping it. Without this kind of support, the latter could only appear to be a small, beleaguered group who had been caught out and were now trying to explain their

malfeasance. Many of these social scientists simply “dropped out.” ey went

back to their own work quietly and with great fortitude in view of the damage that was being done to them professionally. ey did not switch sides or

join the attacks on the government or on their colleagues. A few maintained

their ties with the government and undertook a more active defense.

In an editorial in the American Behavioral Scientist, “A. de G.” asked:18

1. Is it not true that since 1940, the Army, Navy, and Air Force

have contributed incomparably more to the development of the

pure and applied human sciences than the Department of State?

2. Is it not true that the State Department might on dozens of

occasions have sought much more extensive research and intelligence facilities than it has actually sought or employed?

3. Is it not reasonable that the Armed Forces’ mission in respect

to insurgency should include research on areas where revolution

might occur?

4. Are Cuba and Santo Domingo, Lebanon and Vietnam, and

other cases, too, going to stand as historical proof that the Army

can send men in to be killed but cannot help anyone go in to

forestall by preventative understandings the occasions of killing?

5. Is “clearance” so vital to an ambassador that a large, important

activity should be destroyed for want of it?

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6. Is it wise for any agency to seek to get a few more research

funds by invidious comparisons with the worthy research efforts

of another department of government?

7. Are leaks, false assertions, quotations from anti-American

sources, and other tactics to be condoned in treating problems of

scientific research? 

8. Should the Social Science Research Council, the American

Political Science Association, the American Psychological Association, the American Association of University Professors, e

American Sociological Association, the American Historical Association, and the American Anthropological Association, in

conjunction with various international counterparts, have acted

promptly to investigate the situation, inquiring, among other

matters, whether issues of freedom of inquiry were not present?

And, while they are at it, might they not investigate the ugly and

distorted articles carried in the Washington press, particularly

e Washington Star, against Project Camelot and social science

research?

9. Should Senator McCarthy and Ambassador Dungan be reproved by agencies of opinion for acting hastily, crudely, and quite

possibly wrongly in the Camelot incident?

He then commented:

ere is absolutely nothing an American can do in any country

of the world to avoid all criticism from all quarters of the country. Should American companies surrender a billion dollars of

French investments because General de Gaulle makes menacing

noises toward them? Why then should American professors surrender? e task of the American ambassador is to defend American rights, not to surrender them, and certainly not to surrender

them out of pique.

Project Camelot was an open project, conducted by the American University, with Army funds, to solve problems of pressing

and universal interest in the present day. It was skillfully manned,

well planned, and supported by some of the best foreign scholars in Latin America. Certain State Department officials have

little to be proud of in the incident. ey may have harmed the

national defense effort and impeded social science.*

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* is and the preceding quotes are from Alfred de Grazia, “Government and Science: An Editorial,”

American Behavioral Scientist Vol. IX, No.1 (September 1965), p. 40. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Sage Publications, Inc.
But most of the defenses were private. is was unfortunate, because it

allowed continuation of the one-sided public view of the controversy (although it is doubtful, even now, whether the press would in general have

presented the other side fairly if it had been argued in public). Dr. Joseph

E. Barmack, chairman of the psychology department at the City University of New York, who had been a consultant to the DOD, wrote to the

dean of his college with respect to the Silvert article:

Silvert’s article on first reading appears to be a dispassionate, objective assessment of the state of American social science research

in Latin America. However, on closer examination, he had seriously distorted the analysis and I am afraid his article may do

more harm than good. He has transformed the problem of getting more social science information about Latin America and

other areas into a problem of ethics, a problem of academic status, and unwittingly, into an overestimation of academic versus

real world values. e available facts do not support his analyses.

He goes on to question . . . whether social scientists who are consultants to the Department of Defense should have a haven in a

university. He believes that any such consultantship compromises

objectivity. is is a gratuitous interference. Problems of involvement with a client are common to all applied fields; in medicine,

in industrial psychology, in clinical psychology among many others. However, ways have been developed for dealing with clients

objectively and ethically. Political science is not a science but a

technology. It is an applied field, too.

ere is a serious risk in his proposal of discouraging academically based people working on problems of the government. e

risk is that the academician will isolate himself from the problems of the real world and preoccupy himself with trivia or

pseudo-problems. ere is also a risk in restricting research on

government problems to people in government. ey are far

more vulnerable to the biases of the power structure than are the

university people.

Ithiel de Sola Pool, who had participated in the DOD’s efforts from the

start and was to remain active in them afterward, wrote privately to Senator McCarthy:

e press reporting of the relationship between the Defense Department and the State Department in regard to social science

research on foreign areas has been misleading. ere has been no

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lack of effort on the part of the Defense Department to keep the

State Department continuously informed about its social science

research activities. e problem is indeed the contrary one. e

research people in the Defense Department recognize that the

kind of information they need about places like Viet Nam, the

Dominican Republic, or other countries in which they have future responsibilities are often also the kinds of information that

the State Department should want. ey have urged the State

Department to conduct serious social science research on foreign

areas, too, but to no avail. e research that the Defense Department has supported in the social sciences is in general absolutely

appropriate to its mission but that does not exclude it being also

useful to the State Department. Ideally, one would expect close

liaison and cooperation in securing studies of such topics as the

organization of guerrilla forces and the conditions under which

the populace will support them or resist them. In fact, the support of serious research has been left by default to the Defense

Department, which has taken its responsibility seriously, while

continuously informing the State Department and involving it as

much as possible.

e absence of an effective State Department role in research

may be attributed to two factors: expectation of congressional

non-support and prejudice on the part of some persons within

the State Department against social science research as such.

e social sciences are but one way of viewing what goes on in

the world. e national policy maker should have available to

him several sorts of information coming through different channels and collected by different methods. He has the information

collected by foreign correspondents and reported in the press, he

has the reports of experienced foreign service officers, he has intelligence reports. In addition to these three channels, he should

also have studies by social science foreign area specialists. Each

of these channels has its advantages and its defects. e press,

the F.S.O.’s reports, and intelligence reports are far more topical

than anything an anthropologist or political scientist or area specialist might provide. On the other hand, recent events in the

Dominican Republic have demonstrated once more how fallible

the ordinary channels can be. e social scientist tends to spend

months or years in one place interviewing systematically chosen

samples of hundreds of respondents and uses a variety of other

devices for providing extreme depth to his observations. Had

there been some good anthropological or sociological studies of

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the Dominican Republic going forward, American and OAS

policy makers would be in a much better position now to interpret intelligently the realities and needs of the situation.

. . . e question has been raised, however, whether the ambassador should not have a veto on governmentally supported research

activities. In many cases, the answer is, of course, “yes.” e answer, however, turns out to be fairly complex. Clearly the kind of

thing that it was erroneously alleged Project Camelot was doing,

namely conducting a Defense Department sponsored survey in

a country, should only be done with the knowledge and approval

of the ambassador. [What I understand happened in that case

was that a university researcher used the Camelot name without

authorization.] On the other hand, a great deal of scientific research these days is partly or indirectly government supported.

Clearly a university scholar carrying on his work overseas should

not feel that because some government research money has gone

into his funding, he should either be authorized to say his is a

government activity or be required to check out his research plans

with the local mission. e major universities in this country that

are engaged in archeological, anthropological, and sociological

studies abroad will not accept the constraint that their studies

will have to be politically cleared just because they have received

some NSF or NIH or ARPA or ONR money. e scientist continues to think of himself as a private university researcher and

should be encouraged to do so. at is why the issue is complex.

But such representations made little difference in the general drift of

events. For one thing, the drift of opinion in the entire intellectual community favored those who were attacking the existing order. e other “establishment”—the one including the leaders of opinion in social science

professional associations—was being given their day in court. Almost exclusively, they were the ones called upon to testify before the Harris committee. e testimony was diverse, subtle, and sensitive. ese men were

not radicals by any means, and criticism of their colleagues was muted. ey

were trying to learn the lessons of the immediate past and to see ahead to

what should be done about them. But almost universally, the testimony

ended to reinforce the new value system that was emerging. e idea of a

separate National Social Science Foundation received strong support, and

it was reflected in a bill Senator Harris introduced in 1969 to establish such

a foundation (a bill that was not enacted by Congress).19

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One of the few premises of the old system that was not overturned or

attacked in the testimony before Senator Harris, or in any of the other forums where the issues were being argued, was the idea that socially oriented research was “good”; was important; could help solve social problems;

and should be undertaken. Not surprisingly, all the social scientists who attacked the DOD, and those who testified before Senator Harris, continued

to support this view. And the DOD itself—or those in it who still cared,

and there were many—continued to hold this premise and to act upon it.

e subsequent events and consequences were many, important, and instructive. ey are the subject of the next chapters of this book. But first,

two more observations are in order. ese are personal observations, but

they do bear on the later evaluation of the meaning of these events.

It was interesting to note, first, that the social science community—

that part of it that attacked the DOD and the researchers who had been

working with the government—became very unscientific even as it made its

attacks on the supposed distortion of science that Camelot represented. It

must be granted that many of the arguments against DOD research on foreign social systems, and those pointing out implicit biases of the military

sponsors of such research and the risk that participating social scientists

would share those biases, have some validity. But, as in any deep and serious public controversy, the arguments that had been initially made in favor

of the work did not immediately lose their validity. ere remained two

sides to the question, especially since the social scientists involved, and many

of the military and civilian officials at the upper levels of DOD who supported them, believed that the country was on a path essential to the maintenance of its position on the international scene and should be helped to

follow that path as wisely as possible—not to establish and maintain an

overseas “empire,” but to maintain a position protecting itself against many

forms of indirect attack by others avowedly trying to destroy it. e sometimes conflicting desires of ensuring assistance to social development overseas in consonance with basic American democratic values and preventing

deterioration in American foreign relations while carrying out a foreign

policy in the American interest motivated all of them.

One would expect the news media and the general public to move from

one view of foreign policy to another through advocacy of a new set of arguments replacing an older set. is is in the tradition of American politics.

But one would not expect this from those who called themselves “scientists,”

and for whom “objectivity” was supposed to be the most fundamental pre191

Chapter 15 • Social Science Has Second Thoughts
cept of their intellectual lives. ose who attacked their colleagues for not

having paid attention to both sides of the social political issues then proceeded to be just as biased on the other side. None of the writings, testimony, speeches, or resolutions by social scientists examined both sides of the

issues fairly, trying to draw a balanced assessment that could enlighten and

uplift the public debate. For example, Horowitz, in the preface to his book,

states that he did his best to interview all parties involved in Camelot—critics as well as supporters of the project. But to my knowledge, he did not interview any of those in OSD (civilian or military) who had created the

conditions that made Camelot possible about their motives for doing so.

While many of those people were not officially available to the press, they

would have been available to Horowitz. One must conclude that the exclusion reflects an unconscious bias for the positions he was already taking.

Nor did Horowitz (or any other of this group), after accusing the DOD of

ignoring the possibility of beneficent revolution, explore concurrently the

possibility that all revolutions might not be in the best interest of the societies where they took place.

In Horowitz’ writings, and also in virtually all that others in the social

science community wrote about Camelot, the many errors of fact that had

originally been perpetrated in the press stories were picked up and repeated

uncritically. None of the social scientists who entered the fray as the issue

became more intense took the trouble to investigate sufficiently to get the

facts straight, much less to understand and describe the background of

events that had led to Camelot in the first place. If the earlier group who

had worked with the encouragement of the DOD could be accused of looking at only one side of the questions they were dealing with, those who accused them were doing the same. Both groups based their writings on the

values and premises they held and did not look at the implications of the

possibility that opposite values and premises might exist concurrently.

Another aspect of this question involves the very question of morality

and ethics that the DOD’s opponents raised. e “anti” chorus was very

strong, and the condemnation of their colleagues was loud and frequent. In

the morality that was growing in opposition to the Vietnam War, “dissent”

became the watchword. If you were in dissent, you were “concerned”; if you

felt “concern,” you had to take an activist’s role and become “involved”—

against. “Constancy”—a fundamental property of what earlier generations

knew as “character”—did not receive attention or was rejected. If you felt

the government was wrong, you should not try to help change it; you must

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oppose it. If a commitment had been made to help it, and government did

not instantly follow your advice, the commitment should instantly be rejected.

One wonders, when thinking about the social scientists who desired to

continue to help and who suffered ever more virulent attacks for their trouble, what is more virtuous: to remain steadfast in one’s convictions against

all opposition, or to sense the winds of change and allow one’s self to be

wafted whichever way they blow? Truly, Camelot and the reaction to it both

raised and reflected one of the great moral issues of our time. e analogy

has been drawn, by some on one side of this issue, between the United

States at this time in its history and Hitler’s Germany. One who had adult

awareness at that earlier period instinctively rejects the comparison. But it

will be left to the more dispassionate historians of a later generation—those

who were not “involved”—to judge, if ever a final judgment can be made.

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PART IV

DOD KEEPS TRYING

Prefatory Note: A Personal Interlude

At the end of January 1966, as the immediate furor over Camelot came to an end and

many of the other research and development efforts I had tried to stimulate seemed (unlike the social research program) successfully launched, I left the Pentagon and returned

to the Institute for Defense Analyses. In the relative peace and quiet of an atmosphere removed from the daily crises of the government bureaucracy, I had a chance to sort out my

thoughts about the stimulating two years just past. ere was enough to do of immediate

interest, and I lost track of the DOD’s efforts to apply the social sciences to counterinsurgency problems. I knew that ARPA was continuing its attempts, and I was aware that

SORO was sinking back into its original pattern of library studies after changing its

name and many of its research personnel. I had no contact at all with the Air Force and

the Navy programs, but assumed they had returned to the earlier pattern as well. If I

thought about it, I was certain that they would try to carry on but would have a harder

time of it; and this was confirmed by the few items of news that came my way.

e return to IDA turned out to be just an interlude. In August 1966, Dr. Charles

M. Herzfeld, who had been Sproull’s deputy in ARPA and had then replaced him as director, asked me to join ARPA as director of Project Agile. During my earlier tour, Herzfeld

and I had worked together closely. We shared many accomplishments in stimulating research and development efforts in the physical sciences and engineering related to the ongoing conflicts in the world. In addition, he strongly believed in the importance of applying

the social sciences to the DOD’s problems overseas; he often risked the displeasure of his superiors in the DOD to make the point and support this part of his program. As director of

Agile, I would be in a position to initiate and supervise directly some of the important efforts that, from ODDR&E, I could only try to persuade the services or ARPA to undertake. And so, in November 1966, I once again entered the bureaucratic maze.

Although the social research effort was but a small part of the Agile program—running at a total of about $2.5 million per year, which it never exceeded—I still believed

in its importance. I felt that I had learned a few things about how to undertake such a

program. I was well aware of its sensitivity and the many obstacles to its success; and I

had no illusions about the permissiveness of Congress or the upper levels of the DOD.

Forewarned by earlier events and presumably forearmed, I set about building a program

in the social sciences that I hoped would be useful and important, and trying to establish

it in such a way that it could be protected from the worst ravages of the outside world until

it had had a chance to prove its value. e demand and impact of that world were, nevertheless, to pose continuing problems and crises; constant adjustments in subject matter,

choices of talent, and ways of doing business were necessary.

Chapter 16

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e first steps in reshaping ARPA’s program of social research on insurgency problems were designed to give that program as broad and solid a

base of executive branch support as possible and to reduce its vulnerability

to attack. In taking these steps, we adhered to the principle that the work

must be useful to the DOD, and therefore that it must be clearly and

demonstrably related to the DOD mission and operations. In this, we did

not go as far as Senator Fulbright would have wanted, since we still focused

attention on the overseas operations of the DOD and the allies of the

United States. But each project was defined in such a way that it dealt with

a problem that could be described in terms of international military and

military-related operations then taking place—for example, the Military

Assistance Program, if not actual warfare as in Vietnam—that rendered the

subject of the research of direct concern to the DOD.

Every effort was made to select problems for research support about

whose importance, both in fact and in appearance, there would be little

doubt. is was sometimes difficult when we had to respond to specific requests of foreign governments to the U.S. government or to requests overseas commands or embassies made of the DOD. But in such cases, there

was, at least, the fact of the request to help establish the legitimacy of the

work. We were most careful never to undertake work on our own initiative—that is, we never initiated a project simply because ARPA or the researcher happened to feel it was interesting. Wherever a project proposal

started—and it could begin with a researcher or with ARPA (presumably,

as a research organization that had been delving in depth into these problems for some years, ARPA should have some institutional knowledge of

what the important long-term problems were), or with an American military command or embassy (which had short-term problems and often

sought help in solving them), or a foreign government connected with the

United States through a military assistance agreement—we insisted that

the project could not start until it went through the entire approval chain

within the DOD and outside it.

It was recognized that this might often preclude what might appear to

be interesting and useful work; but that which was undertaken would, we

believed, be far better protected by several branches and layers of the government bureaucracy in case questions were raised about why it was being

197
done. Moreover, it would also be firmly connected with the “user” community so that the results would have a “home” for implementation. In effect,

this approach was intended to ensure that the research and the DOD origination that undertook it were instruments of policy and not makers of policy. If the work were attacked, all those who had requested and approved it

would have to be attacked as well. is approach had its obverse aspect also.

We found that most of the time, if a project were worthwhile, the case for

it could be made, while on occasion, if a member of outside officialdom

pressed us too hard to undertake a task that seemed too risky, or too sensitive, or useless, we could maintain friendly relationships while relying on

other parts of “the system” to help exert better sense and judgment.

Steps were taken to reduce the visibility of the work. is may seem

inconsistent with the efforts to ensure a broad base of support. But it is all

in the point of view. e innovator—and there have been a number—who

creates a new element of technology or makes a new scientific discovery

against all opposition, often “bootlegging” funds, is admired and frequently

rewarded. But if he fails, he is prepared to receive, and often does receive,

the censure of his peers and other elements of society. is seemed a risk

that would have to be taken. If the research provided obviously useful results that affected national policy in ways that were viewed as beneficial, it

would be accepted. If it did not, it would soon wither in any case. But it

needed some protection while undergoing the test, or there would never be

a chance to find out. is, in itself, turned out to be an interesting experimental research question of which there was sufficient awareness even at the

time.

At any rate, there was not very much that could be done to reduce visibility. e program was kept relatively small. It supported at various times

between 15 and 25 professional researchers and a number of foreign research assistants overseas in all the activities. An identifying label for the research program—“social science research”—was eliminated. All the Agile

programs were problem-oriented and identified by the subject of the research. We were studying real problems, and some of them required social

scientists, just as others required physicists or engineers. erefore, the program was identified and projects were distributed according to the problem

areas with which they were concerned—village defense, or troop training,

or civic action, and the like. And finally, since in most cases the projects

dealt with ongoing operations of both the American and foreign governments, much of it was classified. e intent was both to minimize the pos198

The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy
sibility of embarrassment to the United States and host governments where

the work was underway and, since the results were generally expected to

bear on policy and operations, to prevent knowledge of such results from

telegraphing the moves of the United States and its allies to others who

might use the knowledge for unfriendly purposes. e classification also

had the effect of making it harder for—but certainly not stopping—the

press from continuing its barrage of hostile or amusedly tolerant articles

regarding “DOD social science research.” All this may seem now to have

been rendered somehow sinister by the affair of e Pentagon Papers; again,

it is all in the point of view, and there appears no need at this point to do

other than relate the facts as they existed.

I had also determined early during my ARPA tour to try to orient this

part of the Agile program as much toward quantitative measurement and

analysis as possible. ere were several reasons for this. One was a continuing interest, which I shared and believed in, in furthering the intent of the

Defense Science Board’s recommendations about “hardening the soft sciences.” It seemed, on reflection and after extensive discussions I had with

Rains Wallace during the period we worked together, that if social science

were to be dignified by the name “science,” it ought to be able to do well the

first step of science, or that of measuring the phenomena with which it tried

to deal. In the words of Lord Kelvin:

I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking

about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it;

but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in

numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind;

it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in

your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science, whatever the

matter may be.

is was, in fact, the approach that helped make the work of the behavioral sciences for the DOD in the selection, training, troop performance, and human factors engineering areas so successful.

But there were many reasons why this aim was especially difficult to

attain in the counterinsurgency area, which we shall discuss later. Nevertheless, in addition to its desirability from a purely scientific point of view,

the approach would help focus the research on matters where there was

some chance of obtaining some data to support what would otherwise be

arguable opinions, helping thereby to reduce the speculative elements of

any study where so much more political sensitivity and controversy were

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likely to exist. It would, in particular, help to avoid pitting the judgment of

the researcher against the judgment of the political operator in an area

where the latter ruled. In this program orientation, the research would have

to be based on attempts to gather and analyze data, thereby dealing with

real events, places, and people and only with those phenomena where data

could be expected to exist. It would, by this means, have to deal with the

evaluation of situations, actions, and programs, rather than with predictions

about them. It would thereby concentrate on providing verifiable information for policy makers and operational program directors to use in the own

planning decision making, rather than trying to forecast in competition

with the judgment of these responsible officials what would be likely to

happen. is seemed a proper role for science.

us, the new pattern was set. It was restrictive and not exactly the type

of program that the social scientists who had authored the Smithsonian reports had had in mind. But it seemed nevertheless that if the social sciences

had anything to contribute, this should give them a reasonable chance of

doing so. Now let us see what happened.

Although the issue that emerged and conditioned the results were

many and complex, they can be grouped into four problem areas within

which there were many subtle variations: who could undertake the work

and how they could interact with the bureaucratic system; the problems of

planning and performing research under the diverse constraints that were

imposed; technical problems of the research and of performing it in the

field; and, how the results were used, if they were used at all. We will explore

each of those in turn, and then see how the outside world was responding

while all this was going on.

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Chapter 17

Estrangement from the University Community

It was clear from the start that the field of available people for the research

would be restricted. Many social scientists had made apparent their antipathy to the DOD and what it was trying to do, and the university community would obviously have to be approached very gingerly. On the other

hand, there was some strong feeling, not without justification, that at least

some of the researchers in the non-university community lacked the expertise, the political awareness and sensitivity, and, shall we say, the wisdom to undertake the research that was required. us, throughout the

entire process, there was a search for appropriate and willing sources of expertise and, as expertise grew, the field was narrowed to the point where

very few such sources remained.

e problem with the more hostile university scholars was brought

home rapidly—again, by the anthropologists. Within a few days of my entering ARPA, the entire social science program that ARPA had contained

since Camelot threatened to explode the way Camelot did. e first event

had to do with a proposal that had been submitted to ARPA in preliminary

form by a university-connected research group in the Washington area, regarding the possibility of studying some tribal societies in the Congo. e

leader of this group, without having had any indication about whether the

research proposal would be accepted, had set about arranging his team for

listing in the proposal. In the process, we later gathered, he approached an

anthropologist experienced in that area, giving him to understand that he—

the research director—firmly anticipated receiving an ARPA contract for

tribal research in the Congo. e anthropologist immediately raised a storm,

writing to the American Anthropological Association and the press, that an

attempt was being made to enlist him in intelligence activities for the suppression of Congo tribes in the conflict that was then in its final stages

there. Only a firm denial by ARPA that a contract existed or was contemplated allowed the matter to come to rest.

About the same time, I received a letter signed by Charles Keyes of the

University of Washington from a group that also included the anthropologists Lauristan Sharpe, Michael Moerman, and Herbert Phillips—all experts on Southeast Asia and ailand—saying that they had learned that

ARPA was about to undertake a massive social research program in ailand that sounded much like Camelot. ey wanted an explanation, and if

201
they did not get one or were not satisfied with the one they did get, they

would go to Congress and the press. e program they were referring to,

which came to be known as the Rural Security Systems Program, was just

getting underway. In the words used to describe it initially to Congress, the

purpose of the program was:1

[to] gather and collate critical information on the local geography, the way of life of the local people, and on their attitudes toward the Government; . . . set up and help maintain current files

on insurgent incidents and operations, and on the many Government programs and activities undertaken for counterinsurgency purposes in the northeast; and . . . provide assistance in

analyzing the effectiveness of various counterinsurgency programs, as well as helping, through analytical techniques to plan

further CI programs.

As part of the initial planning, ARPA (before my arrival) had let a small

contract with a social scientist, who had just left his association with an industrial organization to establish his own company, to conduct a survey of

the possibility for and interest in social science research in ailand. He

had written a form letter to some 300 diverse social scientists (I seem to recall that high number, but could be wrong at this late date), describing the

nature of the research contemplated and implicitly conveying the impression that many social scientists with their families would converge on

Northeast ailand to perform research in connection with the gradually

appearing insurgency there. It was through this means that the anthropologists who wrote to me had acquired the information that led them to

write; and I came face to face with the problem virtually on my first day

back in the government.

After some internal efforts to ensure that no such plan would be seriously considered by ARPA, I invited Keyes and the others who had written to visit me and talk about the program. ey were reassured that no

serious thought was being given to an effort of the kind described. But it

was also pointed out that a program was being initiated to help the Royal

ai government with full approval and agreement by that government, the

American ambassador (Graham Martin), and the State Department to resolve the problems of insurgency in its northeast provinces and to help it

ascertain in the process how it might go about developing this Appalachia

of its country to make insurgency there less likely. is was the very problem that troubled the anthropologists, since they felt that by providing this

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assistance the United States was increasing the pressure for rapid change

and modernization beyond the capability of the ai civilization to accept

it. is professed uneasiness manifested itself in a number of ways. One

was the suggestion that rapid social change was destroying a culture that

had yet to be observed and understood.

is argument appeared in a more explicit form shortly after this meeting, when we were informed that Peter Kunstadter, an anthropologist working with tribal groups in ailand, had expressed his concern to a fellow

anthropologist who was visiting him that if the DOD saturated the area

with social scientists studying the local people for “applied” reasons, he

would not be able to continue his research on the culture in its existing

state. Our interpretation was that, in effect, he was concerned that we would

be spoiling his museum.

After the discussion with Keyes and the others, they agreed that modernization was rapidly coming to all the peoples of ailand, both through

the offices of their own government and from the inexorable drift arising

from prolonged contact with the West, and that if the DOD were supporting research on how the changes affected people and on how to ease the

inevitable burdens of their cultural evolution, this was an objective which

they would not condemn. Having reached this happy conclusion to a delicate confrontation, I then asked whether, since they were among the recognized American experts on ai culture and history, they would be

willing to help us do a better job by helping in the research. e responses

varied. One said that if the work were later to be criticized, he would not

want to be associated with it but would rather be free to join the critics (although he later sent us a copy, which was very helpful, of his yet-to-bepublished PhD thesis on life in ai village society). Others promised

benevolent neutrality.

But one of the group decided that it was time to “put my money where

my mouth is” and to help us if he agreed with our objectives. is was Dr.

Herbert Phillips of the University of California-Berkeley, who became an

ARPA consultant and who, in the course of the next two years, was to provide much useful understanding of the background to the problems with

which ARPA was involved in ailand. He was to be attacked later for this

particular interpretation of ethical behavior; and Michael Moerman was

also to suffer, although his connection with the DOD was much more tenuous. Other anthropologists’ view of their efforts differed from theirs; an article appeared later in the New York Review of Books, describing the

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government’s association with social scientists, suggesting that behind a request for pure research, a research grant, or a consultant’s fee would be a

government that could use the knowledge gained to damage the subjects of

the very same research.2

e occasion for assessing this judgment was a “summer study” held by

the Institute for Defense Analyses’ Jason group,* in 1967. One of the Jason

group members, Murray Gell-Mann (who was later to win a Nobel Prize

in physics), was interested in ailand; was concerned over U.S. policy there;

and convened a group of government officials and social scientists knowledgeable about ailand to explore the policy questions. e group included

Phillips and Moerman. e objective was to learn what was known to

Americans about ai society and to assess the impact of American aid and

policy on that society. If useful information could be synthesized, it could

become a report to the government on the subject.

For three weeks, the visiting officials and social scientists spoke freely,

frankly, and not always complimentarily about ai society, ai government, and American activities there. As it turned out, the picture that

emerged was mixed; the group found some things it liked and some it disliked about both the ai government’s actions and American policy in

supporting them. ere was no special report, but detailed minutes of the

discussions were kept by the participants. rough what was later reported

to me privately as an act of theft by a student activist working in his office,

the copy of the minutes held by one of the attending social scientists was

made public in 1969. Not unexpectedly, the intent of the meeting was lost,

and an outcry ensued about the anthropologists who were helping the U.S.

government’s “counterinsurgency.” Phillips and Moerman were attacked by

members of the American Anthropological Association.3 e view now

strongly held (in 1969, when this news emerged) was that anthropologists

must keep themselves “pure” and must be willing to champion the oppressed peoples of the world, including those whom anthropologists would

define as “primitives” or “peasants.”4

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* Jason is a group of eminent university scientists, primarily in the field of physics, who devote a significant portion of their time to organized study of defense problems. Meeting at IDA periodically to

learn about those problems during the academic year, they then meet together in another location for

several weeks during each summer to perform substantive analyses of a number of those problems.

eir reports have been valued at and have been advisory to the highest levels of the DOD. In 1973,

their affiliation was transferred for administrative reasons from IDA to the Stanford Research Institute.
e arrogation to self of superior attitudes toward other peoples by

“defining” them was apparently lost on the authors of such words and the

community that agreed with them. But it was clear that any research to

gain knowledge that could be used, for any purpose, had become anathema

to them. It was not clear, however, whether it would be acceptable to use the

knowledge for purposes these anthropologists could agree with—for example, revolutionary protests—and was unacceptable only if they did not

agree. Or, were they honestly interested in science that could be called

“pure,” if such were definable? If the latter, would they, as their colleague in

ailand appeared to, require the peoples they wished to define and study

not to change while the “pure” scientists studied them? e positions of

various social scientists on these points are not clear even yet.*

In this case, the American Anthropological Association set up a board

of inquiry under the highly respected Margaret Mead to ascertain whether

there had been any wrongdoing. In its report, while the kind of research at

issue was condemned and some rules of ethics were recommended for anthropologists to protect the subjects of their research from government interest, the specific individuals were absolved of sinister motives and

malfeasance. But the association refused to accept this verdict and, in effect,

sent the committee back to find against the accused.5

Phillips and Moerman were not the only university scholars attacked

for association with the DOD. A scientist at a midwestern university who

was an expert on ai institutions and governmental systems undertook an

ARPA contract to explore the institutional problems of change in ailand

and, incidentally, how these affected and were affected by the various conflicts in different areas of the country. He finished the preliminary, exploratory part of his work, and we were negotiating with him for a contract

to continue while clearance for the project was being sought. He was well

known to ai social scientists and to ai government officials; the

prospects were hopeful. He planned several years of his future career on the

basis of the anticipated ARPA support, and he counted on his relationships

with ai government officials to assist in obtaining the data needed for his

research. When his past and planned work became known, I was told, he was

attacked by fellow faculty members and student activists, who demanded

that he give up the work or resign his position. Sadly, the contract was not

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* is lack of clarity was pointed out, as the original version of this book was written in the early 1970s.

However, judging from the reaction of the anthropological community to the recent Minerva Initiative (noted at the end of chapter 3), the comment likely still applies to many anthropologists in 2012.
worked out after all for a variety of reasons having to do primarily with the

American embassy’s view of the research; and so he suffered for naught.

Still another case involved Gerald Hickey, the anthropologist who had

devoted 10 years to study of the mountain tribes of Vietnam. His colleagues

granted that he was sympathetic to the Montagnard, had preserved his intellectual freedom, and had probably saved the Montagnard from extinction during the ravages of the war by interceding on their behalf with the

American and Vietnamese governments. Nevertheless, he was denied even

an office to work on a book at his alma mater, the University of Chicago—

the issue was not whether an office was due to him or available, but that he

had committed the unpardonable sin of accepting DOD money through

the RAND Corporation to support his work in Vietnam.6

ese incidents make clear that many of those who expressed their concern for academic freedom meant only a very special kind, and they were

not ready to grant true academic freedom to their own colleagues.

e impact of the general outlook of the activists on university facilities

and in student bodies was felt keenly in indirect ways as well. At least three

not-for-profit research organizations were working for ARPA in ailand on

a variety of problems in counterinsurgency, only some of which involved the

social sciences. ese were the Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International), the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory (now Calspan Corporation),

and the University of Michigan’s Institute of Science and Technology. All

three organizations were independent, but connected with their parent universities in various ways—through boards of trustees, sharing of research

funds in some cases, use of faculty as consultants, and use of full-time institute staff as part-time faculty.

In 1967 and 1968, as the Vietnam War was building to the peak of

American involvement, these organizations came under attack by members

of the associated university faculties and activist students for contributing

to “war research” and for being part of the military-industrial complex. e

work they were doing in ailand for ARPA figured strongly in these attacks for many reasons. In Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) publications, Project Agile assumed an image much like that of the CIA as an

object of condemnation for events in Southeast Asia. e faculties felt that

the government was corrupting their universities with classified research

and especially the counterinsurgency research. In the case of the Cornell

Aeronautical Laboratory (CAL), scholars of Latin American affairs at Cor206

The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy
nell University played a strong role in the attack because they reasoned that,

if CAL (which was actually a separate organization in another city) were

performing counterinsurgency research using the name of Cornell, this

would jeopardize their own ability to do research in Latin America, a la

Camelot. us, lengthy conflicts began that, in the case of SRI and CAL,

led to breaking the organizations’ connections with the associated universities. is was particularly painful in the CAL case because the separation

was accompanied by a long court fight over whether the university could sell

the not-for-profit laboratory to a profit-making financial combine, leading

to serious erosion of the organizational integrity and key staff of the laboratory. At the University of Michigan, the Institute of Science and Technology did not separate until many years later, but it gave up much of the

work that it ordinarily performed under DOD sponsorship.

All these events, most of which occurred over a two-year period in

1967–68, led to a gradual separation between the universities and ARPA in

this area of research. is was reinforced by problems within ARPA’s basic

behavioral research program, which was distinct from Agile’s program.

ose problems were typified by a study program in which ARPA had

funded a number of independent scholars to perform research in the Himalayan region. ere was no immediate, applied objective; as part of the

intention to build capability for overseas social research, ARPA had undertaken to support a number of scholars through university grants in studies of their own choice regarding the peoples of that region. Of course, it

could be argued, and would undoubtedly have been true, that the DOD

had ulterior motives; that, if at some time, for example, the United States

became involved in a further India-China conflict, the knowledge would

have applied value. But anyone’s published work could be put to such use.

e fact that the program existed came to public attention when one

of the scholars learned that his support came to his university from the

DOD and spurned the support. Senator Fulbright noted the incident on

the Senate floor.7 e Indian government disavowed the program, and

ARPA felt impelled to do so also.

e ultimate consequence of all these problems, however, was the

growth of the view in ARPA as articulated by Dr. Eberhardt Rechtin, who

succeeded Herzfeld as director in 1967, that research at universities on applied matters, which was classified and supported by the DOD, simply represented an incompatible set. ere were, in addition, problems of another

kind arising largely from the university researchers’ bent for seeking DOD

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funds to perform research of interest to themselves, but only incidentally of

interest to the government. For example, as late as 1968, one anthropologist, who had earlier been concerned that he not come under attack by his

colleagues for undertaking counterinsurgency research, indicated his willingness to accept ARPA support for an overseas linguistic study he had in

mind. erefore, the decision was made in mid-1968 that no further work

of this kind would be supported by ARPA at universities.

All of this took some time, however, and while it was happening other

experiments with institutions for research were also under way. One, inparticular, showed early promise of becoming a model mechanism for university scholars to undertake research of this kind if they wished to

independently of the institutional conflicts that were emerging in DODuniversity contractual relationships. Its genesis was some years before all

these events. An independent research organization—the Simulmatics

Corporation—had been formed that served as an “applied research outlet”

for a number of university professors and students. It had been active in social research of the kind (but not in the places) sought by the DOD. As far

as we in ARPA were concerned, a group like this had impeccable credentials and helped avoid many problems. ose who were members of the

organization, such as Dr. Ithiel de Sola Pool, who had long been associated

with the DOD’s social research efforts, could easily attract other wellknown scholars; among them were many who were experts on Vietnam,

had been there before, spoke the language, and knew many of the key Vietnamese figures who could grant “access” for research. e contracting mechanism would be with a private organization, not a university; and the

researchers would join it as individuals to study a particular problem.

In 1967, it was not difficult to see the trend of the university-DOD relationship, and the Simulmatics alternative appeared to be a mechanism

through which such problems could be avoided while we could still have the

benefit of university scholars’ expertise. erefore a substantial contract covering several research tasks in Vietnam was let, and we hoped that by this

means we could build an institution that could carry on the DOD’s work

in the social sciences overseas. It did not work out this way, but for a set of

reasons wholly different from those that might have been anticipated. ese

originated in the institutional constraints that will be examined in detail in

the next chapter.

e first problem arose from the administration of the company and its

general management of the work. Its expenditures overseas were, in the

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DOD’s view, loosely controlled in a pattern that was completely at odds

with the stringent reporting requirements of Defense contracting agencies.

Many expenditures were questioned by those agencies, such as the house or

“villa” Simulmatics rented in Saigon for living and office space. (e villa itself was not an unusual thing—researchers had to have someplace to work

and live. In this case, it was the “style” and the cost that upset the government auditors.) en, after agreements to spend certain amounts of money

on each task in the contract, the expenditures varied widely, apparently in

keeping with the researchers’ varying research priorities and opportunities,

so that it was hard to keep up with what was being done on which topic,

and it was clear that large “overruns” would be in the offing on at least some

of the tasks. None of this is to say that the company’s management was dishonest or excessively careless. It was, rather, a result of an ethical system

and outlook that differed markedly from that of its sponsors. e differences cropped up in many ways, in addition to the one associated with financial management. One of the others occurred in matters of family.

In general, researchers in Vietnam agreed to go under the same conditions as those obtained for the U.S. military, which, after 1963, meant that

no families were sent. All systems of ethics have their contradictions, and

this one was no exception. While the military could look with equanimity

on wives coming over on Vietnamese government visitor’s permits and

working for civilian contractors in Saigon (for example, Standard Oil or

BRJ-RMK, the large construction contractor), they felt strongly that it was

wrong for the wives to be employed by the company that their husbands

worked for. Yet a number of attempts were made by younger members of

this company to make such an arrangement. In another case, a university

professor, who joined Simulmatics to perform what became an excellent

study on an important subject, made his wife a member of his research team

and wanted his son to join them as a research assistant. His wife was, in fact,

a qualified psychologist, and the son was a social science student in college

who was well qualified to perform the research assistant’s tasks. e professor saw nothing wrong with this, since both could contribute to the research and, in his son’s case, he would do as well as any other research

assistant while the experience would be useful for his career. But, again, the

DOD auditors presumed it to be a “boondoggle,” and the matter had to be

sent all the way to Dr. Foster, and the DDR&E, for approval. e wife was

approved but the son was not; and it was clear that we would not routinely

go through “one more like that.”

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Other problems related to those of ethics, and with other overtones of

substance, arose from the very eminence of the scholars who agreed to do

the research. ey were very busy people accustomed to taking on several

jobs at once and using graduate students and research assistants to gather

data and perform analyses under supervision. is worked well in the

United States where they could keep close watch on what was happening;

but some of the procedure carried over into work in Vietnam, causing a stir

on several levels. First, it was not easy, administratively, for them to travel

between the United States and Vietnam, since a “theater clearance” was

needed for each trip, and sometimes such events as the Tet Offensive in

1968 could stop civilian travel to South Vietnam for some time. Second, the

DOD believed it was contracting for some months of the professors’ time,

thinking the time would be consecutive, and was distressed to learn that in

many cases the principal investigator had planned several short trips to

oversee much less senior, less expert researchers who would do most of the

fieldwork. Among other things, this meant that the data gathering—the

contact with foreign officials and population—would not be done primarily by the one who had been asked to do it because of his expertise, sensitivity, and “connections,” but by some junior researcher unknown to us and

in whom there was much less confidence.

e most serious of these problems arose in the area of “academic freedom” from a wholly unexpected (to us) direction. e scholars felt they had

undertaken a contract in which they were the experts who would specify

what should be done, when, where, and how. At least in part, any task was

not simply a service the experts had agreed to perform, but was of professional interest that coincided with their own research and career plans. (For

this reason, I believed, the researchers felt free to rearrange the funding associated with specific tasks.) When they arrived in Vietnam, they wanted

to get on with the job with complete freedom of movement and freedom

to see whomever it was necessary to see to get the work done. All they

wanted from the government was logistic support—assistance in arranging

meetings if necessary, communications, and transportation.

e view held by the military members of MACV and the military

representatives of ARPA in Saigon was different. ey felt, first, that they

were responsible for the safety of the visitors. “Getting around” in a wartorn country involved the provision of military aircraft and ground transportation at some cost to the government and adherence to some rough

schedule that depended on aircraft availability. To ensure the researcher’s

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safety it might be necessary in some cases to provide a military escort.

erefore, the military wanted some advanced planning about who was to

be visited by whom, when, and where. is led to a demand for a certain

rigidity in the research schedule that many of the social scientists from universities were not willing to countenance, since some research contact could

lead in a direction that might not have been anticipated in advance.

In addition, visits with Vietnamese officials could be sensitive politically

(or, at least, the official American community felt that they were), and individuals among the American military and civil authorities were not always

willing to give of their time freely to the many researchers in the area unless they felt they had some stake in the study, which was rare for most of

them. us, the military people responsible for monitoring the work wanted

advance notice of such visits for the additional reason that they could help

with the arrangements, clearing administrative roadblocks, and reassuring

themselves and those to be visited that the visits were necessary to the studies. e social scientists viewed this as an infringement on their freedom to

perform the research for which they had been contracted. While the military sponsors denied any intention to control the direction of the study, it

could not be denied that they exercised a measure of judgment with respect

to the answers to the question, “Why do you have to see so-and-so?” “He

might be a useful source of information,” which would be justification

enough for the researcher, was not always so for the military contract monitor. Not only did this inevitably mean that the military were in some degree imposing their views on how the research was to be done, it reflected

also a measure of concern about the view of the research that their superiors in MACV would express. Like all good bureaucrats, the military man

viewed a study that had been “approved” as an obligation that he had to

protect, even against the danger he perceived that the one who may originally have proposed it might destroy it by his own lack of circumspection.

And so the judgments about who to see included bureaucratic as well as scientific influences that the social scientists interpreted with some justification as interference with their work.

ere was no clear-cut right or wrong in all these differences; they were,

rather, the clashes that could be expected between two cultures who saw

the world through different eyes. All these differences led, through several

research tasks, to an increasingly strained atmosphere between the Simulmatics Corporation and ARPA. is was exacerbated by the freedom with

which some of the researchers talked to reporters (who pursued stories ag211

Chapter 17 • Estrangement from the University Community
gressively in Saigon), leading to periodic press stories; in one of them, a social scientist working for one organization expressed doubt about the validity of the work of the others (neither were identified in the story, but we

had a good idea who they were from the context). ese articles heightened

the feeling of sensitivity about the work at the upper levels of the DOD and

stimulated interest in the General Accounting Office, which was starting,

on congressional request, to investigate some of Agile’s overseas work.

Finally, it became necessary to make a judgment as to whether the

problems being created by this contract and the risks it increasingly posed

to other parts of the ARPA program were worth any results that might

emerge. e tensions obviously reduced the potential of the results to be

useful. ere had been one or two reports of unquestioned substance and

value, while the remainder were controversial in terms of their scientific validity or adherence to the desired work program; they were as yet incomplete while the allotted funds had been spent; or were being challenged by

officials who disclaimed their utility. Reluctantly, we decided to terminate

the contract. us, this experimental approach to enlisting university social

scientists in the research for the DOD failed, largely for bureaucratic reasons, despite all the promise it had shown at the beginning.

ere is a certain irony in this situation. When this particular program

was beginning, I had met with many of the group social scientists who were

going to Vietnam in anticipation of some of the very problems of working

in the wartime military environment that they later encountered. I had tried

to impress upon them that, as social scientists, they would have to learn

about and how to work with a strange (to them) social system of which

they might not be fully conscious—the U.S. military in Vietnam—in order

to perform research with respect to the social system in which they were

most directly interested—the Vietnamese, on both sides of war. Clearly,

this lesson had not been learned by any but one or two from this group of

social scientists.

us it came about that the DOD was inexorably separated from the

university social science community—even from those whose commitment

to the U.S. government’s purposes had not been changed by the Camelot

events—and often through no obvious fault on either side. is left private

research institutions as almost the only source of talent for the research the

DOD desired. is was not an unmitigated good source either. Private industry on occasion hired psychologists or sociologists to work with the hardware teams; but basically people from these disciplines were alien to the

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culture of this part of the “military-industrial complex,” their ideas never

took on the force that would have come with “critical mass,” and their contributions were minimal. Most of the not-for-profit firms had trouble attracting the high-quality social science staff needed for the research in a time

of problems, such as those described earlier, that some of them were having

with the universities. We were left, therefore, with very few sources of firstrate talent—the RAND Corporation, which had a social science department of long standing and excellent reputation, and one or two private firms,

such as the American Institutes for Research—specializing in social science

research of the quantitative character we were looking for.

RAND’s social science group at that time was composed largely of political scientists with a sprinkling of other disciplines, including anthropology. Many of the men in this group were “lone wolves” who preferred to

pursue their own interests and ends, and it was a constant struggle to ensure that the different parts of their work remained related to each other and

relevant to our needs. But some interesting and useful research, which will

be examined in another context, was performed when the circumstances

could be arranged that their interests coincided with those of the DOD;

this occurred mostly during 1964–67, when the group that had undertaken

to study the Viet Cong through prisoner and defector interviews was at its

full swing. Given the disciplinary orientation of the researchers, however,

much of their work had a particular methodological orientation whose validity was later criticized by others in the social science community for reasons that will be discussed in chapter 19. is lent an uncertainty to some

of their results that was most troublesome in a number of contexts.

e second kind of organization generally undertook measurementoriented research as visualized in the DSB report’s recommendations and

in the planning for the ARPA program. is, then, seemed the last, best

hope—and it was steadily eroded by the problems of field constraints on

subject matter and methodology that we shall examine in the following

chapters. We also tried to hire social scientists as part of the ARPA staff for

overseas research. Qualified people who were willing to join the government for a period of time could be found for this purpose. But the bureaucratic system raised a host of problems connected with salary, “job

description,” personnel ceilings, and the like, and it was virtually impossible to arrange for an available social scientist, who probably would have to

arrange leave from a university, and a desired task to meet at the same time.

erefore, we gave up that approach as well.

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It is appropriate to mention, in the context of the narrowing field of talent available to the DOD, the continual appearance of serious people who

made themselves heard, but whom I came in my impatience to view as a

sort of “lunatic fringe” who made the job harder by interrupting the always

difficult task of trying to make sense of a research area that appeared to

defy logical management endeavors. In one case, a proposal was made to establish a computerized system of extensive personal data on all of the population of Vietnam. It was thus hoped that the government would be better

able to do such things as collect taxes and, in particular, to keep more effective information on the movements of the Vietnamese population,

thereby helping to identify and subsequently isolate the Viet Cong from the

neutral or friendly population. We had to point out, first, that this would

put the United States in the position of imposing a system, a la George

Orwell’s 1984, on the Vietnamese that we were unwilling on moral and

ethical grounds to see imposed on our own population. In addition to this

moral question were a number of particular ones. One was the anticipated

difficulty the Vietnamese might have in mastering the highly sophisticated

technology that would be required. Another was the difficulty of access to

all the population in a war-torn country, and the subsequent injustice to

many who might miss being entered into the system. Finally there were the

many opportunities for graft and corruption, which the South Vietnamese

were displaying enough of at the time, that would be opened by the creation

of a data system subject to manipulation by those with appropriate motives

and access.

In a related context, we were approached by a psychologist who expounded the theory that one of the reasons the United States was having

such trouble in the war in Vietnam was that we could not get the Vietnamese government and population to behave as we wanted them to. She

proposed that the methods of operant conditioning, including punishments

and rewards for particular behavioral manifestations or desiderata, be applied so that eventually we could make the entire population of Vietnam

and its government behave in a way that the United States decided it should.

She professed to be able to induce the famous behavioral psychologist, B. F.

Skinner, to go to Vietnam to direct such an effort. Again, the question was

raised as to the morality of such an approach, which we certainly would not

tolerate in our own country. I also pointed out that there would be far from

unanimity within the United States as to what behaviors were desired.

Moreover, it was not clear that if pigeons, or even individual humans, could

be thus conditioned in the laboratory, this technique could be extended to

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an enormously diverse population of some 14 million people with a culture

alien to ours and under wartime pressures and field conditions.

e trouble with these and other spuriously clever ideas from this group

was that they were also occasionally visible to others at the upper levels of

the DOD. is added to the appearance of disorder and illogic in the view

they held of social research, and it made the program we were interested in

that much harder to justify.

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Chapter 18

Working within Constraints

ere was, of course, no choice but to work within the rigid system of approvals that had been established for all work overseas, especially including

research on social problems. Otherwise, nothing would have been done.

But acceptance of these procedures narrowed the scope and content of work

that could be undertaken very considerably and had a profound adverse impact on its real value. In effect, by allotting to various external power centers the authority to say what work could be done—or, more particularly,

what work could not be done—the DOD gave those centers rather than its

central R&D planning offices or its experts on research and social systems

(inhouse or contracted for) the final word in shaping the program and trying to make it useful.

e constraints on the work were never applied directly to achieve desired answers. As in the interaction between the university scholars and the

military described previously, there was to all outward appearances no deliberate and conscious attempt to restrict intellectual freedom or to mold research results to preconceived notions. Rather, the influences derived from

much more subtle interactions between the interests and policy premises of

those who passed on the work, on the one hand, and their view of the propriety and sensitivity of the work, on the other.

As soon as an ambassador or a commanding general was given the opportunity and responsibility to judge a research proposal, he must necessarily ask himself a number of practical questions. It was well known by

this time that some of the subjects of research could cause a stir. It would

first have to be asked, how great was the risk of this happening? It would

then have to be asked, was the subject important enough to take the risk—

whether the potential utility of the results that could be obtained justified

the trouble that might be caused? Inevitably, and because we are all human,

a subject that fell within the ambassador’s or general’s or admiral’s interest,

with hypotheses that fit his conceptions of the problem and the likely solutions, was likely to be weighed as more important and worth more risk

than a research problem that threatened to challenge those hypotheses, even

though in the long run the latter might prove much more important to

him. e definition of “sensitive” was thus elastic.

217
In addition, as far as these responsible leaders were concerned, a study

was a study—ideas of scientific methodology in study of the social systems

they dealt with on a practical basis every day were not within their training. If a sensitive question could be approached through an internal “staff

study,” this was equivalent to a scientific research project as far as they were

concerned, and often preferable. e difference could be explained, but the

going was uphill.

e same forces acted on the side of the host country, whose officials

had their own ideas of problems and hypotheses that were interesting and

important—often different from those of the Americans, and sometimes

more liberal or permissive in outlook, but always oriented to their own preconceptions. And, of course, the American ambassadors and military commanders did not pass on these matters entirely by themselves, although

they frequently gave them their personal attention. ey were at least in

part responsive to the opinions and judgments of directors of the subordinate agencies of the American mission or subordinate military staffs and

commands. erefore, the agency heads and staffs imposed their own ideas

as well—sometimes advocating a piece of work and sometimes opposing

it—all on different subjects at different times and for different reasons.

Any research proposal, therefore, had to fit a series of differently shaped

templates, and only a few came through the tests successfully and with a

significant problem left to study. us, the “approval” process acted also as

a selection process that molded the subjects of study in safe and sympathetic directions, as far as those in the hierarchy of power and operational

responsibility were concerned.

A number of interesting results emerged from this process. e “system”

would obviously be more permissive about research subjects farther from its

nerve centers. Approvals, therefore, were more forthcoming for work of

lesser significance or importance—with the proviso that there was a lower

bound, where if the work were insufficiently important it would be ruled out

as a waste of resources. is forced the research community, which was always pitting its own knowledge and expertise on the country and subject

against that gained by different means of the operating community, to tread

a fine line between narrow bounds in defining and proposing its research

subjects. ey could be neither very sensitive and, therefore, probably of

vital importance, nor of purely academic interest. Further, since all those

involved in the approval process had different ideas and desires, the researchers would approach one and then another, seeking paths of support

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and indifference; trying to avoid or soothe opposition; and trying to gain

advocates who could influence the ultimate decision. us, the definition of

research programs departed from objectivity, science, and analysis and became in large measure a political negotiating process whose outcome was

as uncertain as the outcomes of all other such activities. It was impossible

under these circumstances to define and carry through a coherent and logical research program where all of those parts were interconnected and mutually supporting. e program was somewhat more orderly than random,

but it was far from the logically planned sequence of studies in specific, interrelated subject areas that would satisfy the scientific mind.

Another consequence of giving the power of life and death over all research to operational authorities resulted from the fact that individual research projects often did produce interesting results. e research resources

overseas were in effect the resources of the authorities to manipulate, and

they knew it. erefore, particular research projects in areas of interest to

ambassadors, agency heads, or military staffs and commanders would be

requested by them. Knowing where the real power was, we usually agreed

to undertake projects requested this way. e subjects of the requests were

likely to be reasonably important in most cases. An applied social research

program in an area of conflict should be useful; and it would always be helpful to be able to tell Congress or the GAO that a project was undertaken

at an ambassador’s or CINC’s request rather than on the researchers’ initiative.* But this put more pressure on the fragile and relatively scarce resources, fragmented the program still further, stimulated a certain process

of “horse-trading” which politicized the research planning even more, and

consequently created underlying tensions that arose to haunt us at inconvenient times.

is continual negotiation for research approvals and resources forced

the individuals in the research community to involve themselves in numerous alliances with American and local government officials. As a result,

projects came to depend on the interests of those officials. Given the frequent turnover in overseas posts—changes of ambassadors, changes of military commanders, the annual rotation of officers in Vietnam—many a

project found itself in midstream, partly completed with the new officials

wondering why that particular effort had been undertaken in the first place.

Some significant fraction of projects was terminated prematurely and in219

Chapter 18 • Working within Constraints

* We used to keep a “Gabriel” file of such requests and of post-research thanks and commendations to

flash at appropriate times.
complete, and the utility of those that were completed was left very much

in question. And all of the negotiations took time. As the situation became

more complex and more and more actors came on the scene, the time between initial proposal and final approval to proceed stretched out until it

was a year and sometimes more. In the rapidly moving events of Southeast

Asia, the answer to a question that might take six months or a year to obtain through research was often desired and needed when the question was

put. By the time the resulting research project was approved (except for

those explicitly requested by the ambassador or commander himself ), the

question might well be passé—and even more so by the time the research

was finished. No wonder the new men on the scene questioned its existence and had low tolerance for its continuation.

ese, then, were the research planning and administration problems

that accompanied the determination and necessity to “go by the book.” Let

me illustrate a few cases.

Two areas of effort that had been singled out for attention in the earlier advisory reports encompassed the problems of military advisors—in effect, the implementers of policies determined elsewhere and military civic

action—the attempt to use a nation’s armed forces in nation building rather

than war. Two years after Camelot, these still seemed to be key problems,

and ARPA decided to try to undertake coherent, long-term research programs in each area through a cooperative effort with the Army.

On the advisor question, it seemed impossible to hope that thousands

of men could be found each year who would perform like Lawrence of Arabia. e evidence from many overseas areas was that only relatively few men

really succeeded in establishing the relationship that allowed them to be effective in “advising,” training, and furthering American policy. A few earlier

studies had hinted at the circumstances of success; but it seemed still to be

a matter of accident that the right man was found in the right place to the

right time. To a great extent, it seemed to be more a matter of personality

than training. What kind of person, we asked ourselves, was able to fit into

a strange environment and establish an effective relationship with a counterpart from another culture? What were the criteria according to which a

man could be predicted to achieve success in the job; and once he was selected, how could he best be trained for the job? And by what criteria would

it be known that he succeeded? Because he was well regarded by his counterparts? But suppose they did not learn well? What if he made enemies,

but his counterparts learned well what he had been assigned to teach?

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A proposed research program was built around such questions as these,

and we set about obtaining the approval of the authorities. Part of the data

obtained would have to include job performance ratings of many advisors

to be correlated with personality profiles, background, and training data.

At this point, the military commanders overseas balked. ey would not

allow probing into efficiency reports or interviews with their advisory staffs

despite any amount of explanation about the research design or preservation of anonymity in the results. One MAAG chief expressed the opinion

that he could pick a potentially successful advisor in one interview. Maybe

he could, but we knew some of his staff. However, the attitude was typical.

e program was never undertaken.

One small project in this area was initiated, however, in ailand, where

the chief of the Military Assistance Advisory Group was interested in improving relations between his men and their counterparts. e research design required comparative interviews with the American advisors and with

the ai military whom they were advising. erefore, the ai military establishment was brought into the discussions. As the result was expressed

by one of their generals, “We think it’s fine if you study what’s wrong with

your people, but we know what we think of our relations with you so there’s

no need to talk to our people.” And permission for that part of the project

was denied. e project was carried out by interviewing Americans only,

and it was changed to a one-sided effort in support of American training

for community relations. e original objective had been lost.

e civic action effort failed for a different reason. e philosophy of

civic action was that if the military forces of a government have contributed

to local development, this will create a benevolent image which will, in turn,

be transferred to the government and established authority as a whole. e

act of development assistance would, further, help make the government

more benevolent, and the local rural people would be less inclined to succumb to the blandishments of insurgents and revolutionaries. Finally, the

civic action would help develop the backward areas of the country, a good result per se. While all this was “doctrine” to the American military assistance

advisory corps, it seemed to the research community to be more in the nature of hypotheses to be tested and proven or disproven by research. Some

previous, isolated projects (Project Colony, described in chapter 11, was one)

and informal discussions with many advisors overseas had suggested that

the desired transfer of affections only sometimes took place—that it often

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velopment projects were carried out; whereas to the American military, the

important matter was what was done—build a road, or a well, or a school—

not who wanted it and who used it. ere were many anecdotes of civic action “demonstration” projects that led to raised, and later disappointed,

expectations; of projects undertaken because they made sense in one culture

but were ignored or counterproductive in another; and of claims for success

that went far beyond what a searching study of the facts would warrant.

A program of research was planned to find out whether the whole idea

of civic action made sense and, if so, under what circumstances it would

and when it would not. To do this, it was necessary to gather data systematically on many projects and to ask some searching questions. But then

the premises and “doctrines” of the U.S. military advisory staffs would be

open to question. We learned early that statistics on civic action projects

that were much touted were rudimentary or nonexistent. I was once told by

a MAAG officer in Iran about an “enormously successful” road-building

program by the local army unit. How many miles of road had been built, I

wanted to know, and where, and what were the roads used for? ere were

no answers. Moreover, we found that local governments were not always

anxious to learn that populations who were recipients of what the government believed to be largesse might, in fact, be more dissatisfied than they

had been before the largesse was distributed. So this research, too, was not

undertaken. An understanding of one of the fundamental premises of

American counterinsurgency theory, and of the conditions causing many

apparent successes and failures of military civic action in developing countries, had to be left to a few isolated, tantalizing studies and to many anecdotal, incidental, and unverifiable reports.

Another instance of the effect of sensitivity to the subject and possible

findings of social research occurred in an attempt to learn something about

the impact of the presence of American bases on local attitudes and cultural

change in ailand. With the lesson of Vietnam that such a presence could

have devastating effects, including inflation, destruction of traditional cultural life, and disruption of local government authority over its citizens, the

problem appeared a serious one. It was discussed with Ambassador Graham

Martin, with the idea that a serious study using social research techniques

might elicit enough about the nature of the dynamic interactions between

and within the respective communities—American and the local population—to point the way to solutions that would minimize the deleterious effects of the interactions and the inter- as well as intracultural tensions.

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Ambassador Martin’s response was that he knew perfectly well what would

have to be done to minimize the effects of the American presence. Any

such study might simply serve to critique or interfere with his approach

and possibly heighten ai sensitivity to the problem, none of which he

was interested in having happen. Ambassador Martin then went to a new

assignment and his successor, Ambassador Leonard Unger, agreed that this

was one of the most important problems he faced. But he, too, pointed out

its sensitivity. He would agree to a study if one could be defined that would

not stir up local government resentments and would not obviously interfere

with the outward tranquility of either community.

While we set about eliciting a research plan and proposal from a contract research organization, an unsolicited proposal in the same area for research to be undertaken in the same country came to us by coincidence

from a university source. is resulted from the initiation of Project

emis—a program to improve the research capability of the smaller universities—for which President Johnson, with congressional urging, had instructed several departments of government, including the DOD, to

allocate funds. A system of reviewing emis proposals had been established by DDR&E, and one dealing with the impact of a large American

presence on a traditional, developing society, submitted by Felix Moos, a

well-known social scientist knowledgeable about both the country and the

appropriate research techniques, had come to our attention. It appeared interesting, and some tentative inquiries were made of the ambassador. It became immediately clear that the subject was considered too sensitive to risk

the possible consequences of the kind of free access and movement that

university researchers would demand, and the idea was dropped.

In the meantime, the contract research organization had taken some

time to develop a plan for the research. When this was finally discussed

with the ambassador, we learned that after our initial conversations he had

asked one of his political officers to study the question and make recommendations; the subject was now closed to inquiry by the research community. Doubtless the political officer’s analysis (which I did not see) was

anecdotal and terribly unscientific. But it may well have been perceptive

and perspicacious. Certainly it satisfied the ambassador’s need for discretion

and unobtrusive inquiry. In the long run, the impact of the American presence was far less disturbing in this country than in Vietnam, even though

it was not totally unobtrusive. Clearly, this time, the tradeoff between the

desire to minimize risk and the need or desire for detailed information was

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resolved in favor of the former and, from the evidence, with reasonable success anyway.

It had been found that many of the studies undertaken in Vietnam had

produced highly interesting results. Studies of Viet Cong origins, organizations, and patterns of behavior in the villages; of the origin and problems

of refugees from the war; of the effectiveness of the paramilitary regional

and popular forces: and of problems faced by American advisors had given

the American military and civil authorities in Saigon information and understanding they did not have and were glad to obtain. For a time, in late

1966 and early to mid-1967, such studies reached a peak of acceptance and

popularity with those authorities. Two consequences of this success were

that the military command more frequently requested studies of particular

interest to them, and that the research community felt emboldened to propose studies that, it turned out, transcended the bounds of political acceptability. e effect in both cases was disastrous, and social research in

Vietnam rapidly passed the heyday of its support by the operational community.*

In one case, we were asked to undertake a study of psychological warfare in Vietnam with specific attention to three questions: the potential vulnerabilities of the Viet Cong to psychological warfare; what programs to

undertake to exploit these vulnerabilities; and how it would be known that

they were effective. e query came from General Westmoreland directly,

and a rapid but careful response was in order. Rather than go through

lengthy contracting procedures, we assembled a group of the country’s bestknown experts on psychological warfare and counterinsurgency, added the

support of military “psywar” specialists, and asked the group to accomplish

the study in a short time.

is group (including the military members who were easily convinced)

felt that if the questions were interpreted narrowly they would be too restrictive and that the study would have little value. To provide satisfactory

answers to specific questions about psychological warfare, they felt they had

to explore the entire area of the impact of military operations by both sides

on each other and on the Vietnamese population. e group pointed out,

for example, that it did little good to paint a stark picture on leaflets of the

Viet Cong as vicious monsters (a common practice) when the recipients of

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* Economic research is not included here; such research was initiated during this period and continued

to be useful and important to the American and Vietnamese planning efforts until the collapse.
the leaflets knew many of the Viet Cong as their relatives and friends and

knew that the issues were not clearly black or white, but gray and complex.

And they indicated that any attempts of the Saigon government to say that

it acted in the best interests of the population would be negated if the conduct of the war, with such activities as bombing of villages in response to

Viet Cong ground fire (even though there might be a deliberate effort to

draw fire), were destructive of the population and its possessions. erefore, the specific questions were answered within this broader context, and

a number of suggestions, both specific and general, were made for improving psychological operations and for affecting the enemy’s and the neutral

population’s attitudes by changing the conduct of the war.

e report ran into a multiple buzz saw. e broad approach had been

approved by General Westmoreland when it was discussed with him but

general supervision of the study had been delegated to lower staff levels.

Many of those who had stimulated the question and encouraged the approach that was taken, such as Barry Zorthian, the head of the Joint U.S.

Public Affairs Office ( JUSPAO), were gone, and there were new men in

their places. Not only did the report deal with some subjects on which the

collective military command did not want the opinions of civilian experts,

but its specific recommendations, which included proposals for organizational changes that appeared essential if the psychological warfare effort

were to be made more effective, cut across existing rivalries between the

military (MACV) and the civilian ( JUSPAO) psychological warfare practitioners. e analyses and recommendations highlighted shortcomings in

the operations of both and in their interaction and coordination. Neither

group would consider them seriously. In fact, the new arrivals on the scene,

who had already started to make changes according to their own ideas,

viewed these new inputs that reached them, apparently “from the blue,” as

gratuitous and inappropriate. It was said in the letter General Westmoreland signed on the subject, as it often is in such situations, that the report

was not really responsive to the request; but it was overtaken by events and

“we’re already doing what it recommends.” And that was the end of it, except for a marked increase in resistance to the idea of further research.

But the subject of the use of artillery and aerial bombing within Vietnam remained a troublesome one. Virtually all of the social scientists who

were in contact with the population had come to the conclusion, not based

on study but rather on scattered conversations with villagers and with some

American advisors, that more was being lost in terms of loyalty and respect

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of the population for the Saigon government and the Americans than was

being gained in hurting the Viet Cong by bombing and shelling of villages—even where it was known that they were Viet Cong strongholds or

where Viet Cong attacks against allied forces were deliberately based in

and mounted from the villages. Ithiel de Sola Pool, who had long worked

with and had excellent standing with the military community both in

Washington and Saigon, broached the subject of performing an extensive

field study, using interview techniques, of the “rules of engagement.” is

would try to determine, first, the impact of operations—air and ground—

on the general population and on the Viet Cong. en it would try to make

an objective assessment of what was being accomplished militarily against

the Viet Cong under the rules as they were. Finally, changes would be recommended for consideration that, based on the data, would be expected to

reduce the negative impact on the general population but still maintain, or

perhaps increase, the effectiveness of operations against the military forces

of the Viet Cong.

is was a technically ambitious scheme and, perhaps, impossible to

implement. But it dealt with one of the key issues in the prosecution of the

war and, for that reason alone, it might have been worth serious attention

and possibly a pilot study to test feasibility if only to make certain that the

question was explicitly considered. General Westmoreland, however, made

it clear when the proposed project was discussed with him that the subject

was not for study, and the matter was dropped.

e kinds of studies that were undertaken successfully in Vietnam generally fit the pattern of operations and philosophy for prosecution of the

war that were common among the military and civilian authorities in both

Washington and Saigon at the time. Some of these, such as the “VC Motivation and Morale” studies, have already been mentioned. Others included

support of the anthropologist Gerald Hickey in gathering information

about the tribal groups of the Central Highlands, which was used to assist

in trying to effect a reconciliation of the ancient enmity between those

groups and the ethnic Vietnamese; assistance in designing and implementing the Hamlet Evaluation System; establishment of computerized

systems for storing and comparing troop performance data taken at different times; logistic analyses; and the like. All this work presented problems

in scientific research methodology that those who reflected on it came to

feel was generally inadequate and was leading to uncertain and possibly

misleading results. ese problems will be examined in more detail in the

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next chapter. e point to be made here is that a theater of war offered little opportunity for careful adaptation and testing of research methods suited

to the situation and the local cultures. Such things take time, and results

were wanted quickly.

ose who approved the research programs assumed that methods existed to carry them out. Satisfactory outcomes could not be promised from

new and experimental methodological departures; and the researchers, until

they gained some experience, tended to assume that the methodology they

knew would be readily applicable. But, in fact, each study was in effect an

experiment with methodology. While some few social scientists appreciated

this early and sometimes adapted successfully, we began to realize that a

more orderly and deliberate attempt to improve the scientific basis of the

research was in order. e war environment was a poor place or such an effort—in terms of access to subjects, control of comparative situations, stability of situations, or any other desiderata for careful scientific work.

erefore, at the same time that work directly relevant to the war was undertaken in Vietnam, an attempt was made to pursue the longer term and

“iffy” experimentation with methodology elsewhere.

But the “official” climate “elsewhere” was scarcely more conducive to

such undertakings. In one case, we attempted to apply a new method of

eliciting the basic values and socio-cultural attitudes of a population in a situation of low-level insurgency in ailand, where it appeared that if village

culture and the changes affecting it were better understood the government

could be more effective in improving the lot of its people. It would seem on

the face of it that such values and attitudes would be obvious, at least to

the countrymen of the villagers. But deeper reflection shows that most

groups do not easily articulate their values and cultural orientations, and

that their attitudes often appear only in actions bespeaking tensions between groups and antagonism toward those in authority. One of the causes

of violence in social change appears to arise precisely from such divergences

between those in authority and the groups they are supposed to govern,

since the two are likely to have divergent cultural and social backgrounds.

ere could, for example, be as much cultural distance between a wealthy,

Western-educated Vietnamese, or ai, or Indian, and the peasant villager

in his country as there is between that member of the elite and his Western counterpart.

A standard approach to eliciting social patterns, norms, and values is

through the work of anthropologists, who live with the respective groups

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and come to understand them intimately over periods of years. Obviously,

if information were desired much sooner, other methods would have to be

tried. One could, of course, ask for the information from anthropologists

who had been working in the area for a long time previously, and this was

done. But in periods of rapid change of culture, attitude, values, and in multiple interacting communities, even an anthropologist might not have been

at all the places where such changes had taken place, and where it was important to know about them and about their subtle variations.

us, it would be valuable to have a method for assessing values and attitudes in a new area without reliance on the happy coincidence of prior

anthropological study or the need to wait years for new study. A novel

method for studying the values and attitudes of groups or subpopulations

had been devised in another context by the experimental social psychologist, Alex Bavelas.* At ARPA’s urging, a contract research firm proposed to

adapt the method to basic attitudinal studies in ailand. Known as Echo,

the technique called for obtaining a sample from the population of interest of answers to such questions as “List ten good things that can happen

to you”; or “. . . .that you could do”; and “list ten bad things”; etc. A group

from the same culture then placed the answers in like categories (e.g., “getting an education is a good thing” might appear in several forms easily recognized by one who shared the view) and ranked them according to

frequency of appearance. From these data, it would be possible to construct

a picture of the values of the population, uncontaminated by the values of

the researcher—what, in general, they felt was good, bad, or important.

Comparative tests of the method with groups of a given population, asking

them to express preference between the set of values obtained from other

members of their population by the Echo technique and another set of values obtained from another population, confirmed that the set elicited from

the test population was more satisfying to the population it described, permitting the inference that these were the values of that population.

Much work was necessary if the techniques were to be applied across

language and cultural barriers, and if it were to be extended to cover a

broader range of attitudinal data; it was not even certain that the “target”

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* At the time of these events, Dr. Bavelas, who was a professor of psychology at Stanford University’s

Graduate School of Business, had specialized in group psychology. During his career, he explored,

among other things, patterns of communication in task-oriented groups and had devised a number of

extraordinarily ingenious experiments in group psychology to trace paths and patterns of communication under various conditions.
population could accept and respond to Western conceptions of answering

such questions and grouping the answers in categories. Much more difficult would be the problem of extending the technique from simple elicitation of values to such detailed and subtle questions as attitudes toward

certain authorities, or responses toward specific actions of particular social

groups or programs. If it were successful, however, the method might offer

a rapid sampling technique more subtle, discriminating, and accurate than

the conventional opinion surveys, which could well be biased or misleading, but that the operational community was always ready to accept.

Some preliminary work in developing and testing of the technique was

done in the United States, and a proposal was made to try to develop it for

practical application in ailand. e proposal was greeted with official

skepticism, but the ambassador reluctantly agreed that preliminary tests

could be made with a sample population of ai nationals who worked for

the American community. is was undertaken, and the initial results were

encouraging. However, several untoward circumstances began to converge.

More money would have had to be added to continue the project at the

anticipated scale. But U.S. stakeholders clearly did not view it in a favorable

light, and there was serious question as to whether it would be allowed to

go further. e principal investigator, violating the rules he had agreed to

abide by, undertook exploratory discussions with members of the ai university community in Bangkok; while they were interested, their official

community—the Ministry of Defense, under whose cognizance all ARPA

work in the country fell—neither understood nor shared that interest.

Rather, it questioned whether a research project was being undertaken

without prior approval. And the growing congressional scrutiny was reaching the point where the preliminary methodological work in the United

States, essentially basic research using university students, would defy acceptable explanation. erefore, we decided not to pursue the effort further, just at the point where some payoff might have been in sight.

One of the key factors in this decision was our interest in another project, which to us appeared much more important and for which it was decided that it would be preferable to risk what little credit remained for social

research. We have already noted, in many different contexts, the view that

the social sciences had not yet learned to measure accurately the social behavior of groups of people. Most of the techniques available require interaction between the researcher and the subjects of the research. e fact of

the study, its subject, and the presence of the researchers all affect the so229

Chapter 18 • Working within Constraints
cial system studied in ways that are uncertain and difficult to assess. We

had already become concerned about the validity of some of the prisoner interview results in Vietnam where, in at least some of the cases, there was

reason to suspect that the outcomes of interviews were in the direction the

interviewee believed the interviewer desired. us, it seemed that the

Heisenberg principle of physics—the instrument of measurement affects

what is being measured—applied in social research, perhaps even more

markedly.

We concluded that it would be highly desirable to develop, for the situations of concern, what Webb had termed “unobtrusive measures.”1 We

wished to see whether, instead of having the researcher interact directly

with the social system under study, it would be possible to discern attitudes

and responses to events, government officialdom, and government programs

from behavior that could be observed indirectly or at a distance. Such an approach is not new, but had not been applied in a non-Western village culture that was in the process of modernization and in the beginning throes

of revolutionary political change through guerrilla warfare.

e task would require successive steps of research beginning with the

known interactive methods and gradually changing them, comparing the

results from each step with those from the previous one, until analysis based

on such data as routinely gathered village statistics or provincial archives

could be tested for interpretation of attitudinal and culture trends in the

village society. We wished to test whether it would be possible, for example, to find from such data whether young men were leaving the village and

where they were reappearing, since this would say something about the drift

of traditional family patterns; it might be possible to do this from routine

census data. Or, the record of interaction with officialdom for routine business purposes might be correlated with particular economic changes described in other statistics. Would any of these economic and demographic

changes correlate with other social change, such as variations in religious

practice? And, if so, what could all of it tell about the day-to-day life of a

society in transition? In particular, would it be possible to show that routinely gathered statistics and other “neutral” observations were correlated

with particular attitudes toward local government, institutions, and behavior that bespoke instabilities of fundamental character in society?

It was conceded that this would be an extremely difficult task. But the

methodological problem converged with a practical one—the budding insurgency in Northeast ailand. is was replete with the usual factors of

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injustice within the society and stressful interactions among the rich and the

poor, the young and the old, in a situation of rapid social change. And there

was apparent political stimulation, training, and material support for the

insurgents from Laos and North Vietnam, across ailand’s northeastern

borders. ere were the usual village propaganda meetings, raids on police

posts, and assassinations of government officials. e Royal ai Government, with diverse political, economic, and social advice, with American

financial help, and with American military assistance, had undertaken a

large number of programs to provide physical security in the villages, local

economic development, community development, modification of the political system, and paramilitary training for local defense forces. e approach was a combination of trying to improve economic conditions, trying

to provide the villages with some means of defending themselves against

guerrilla raids, changing police and military procedures to make them at

once more effective against the insurgents and less irritating to the general

populace, and amnesty for guerrillas who returned voluntarily to the fold—

all in an attempt to convince both the general population and the insurgents

to give their loyalty to king and country.

But the problem was, precisely, that no one knew whether the multiplicity of programs undertaken by the ai government was satisfying the

population or not, whether it was meeting their aspirations or frustrating

them, whether it was gaining their loyalty or driving them deeper into revolution. As is usually the case, these activities were measured by physical inputs and outputs—how many roads were built, how many wells were dug,

how much the crop harvest increased, how many village police were trained,

and so on. e crucial questions of attitude and aspiration, which would

determine the outcome in the long run, were anybody’s guess.

In one Northeast ai province, for example, the governor became famous for a vigorous program of development associated with amnesty for

terrorists, and it appeared that the number of insurgent incidents was declining markedly. He was the hero of the American community. But a native ai political scientist, who undertook a study of village attitudes with

ARPA support, said he found evidence that the villagers were unhappy because they felt that in order to get any attention from the governor one had

to become a Communist terrorist first. Was this “normal” grousing, or did

it bespeak a volcano rumbling under the surface? ere were as many judgments on this as there were people who considered it. is was just one of

many indicators that better means were needed for such assessments.

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We decided to combine the practical and methodological problems to

see whether it would be possible to learn more about which programs were

successful and which were not, so that the government could plan its moves

based on more accurate feedback from past efforts than it had been able to

obtain thus far. At the same time, the attempt would be made to develop

newer, unobtrusive, and easily applied techniques for making such assessments. is was to be a major undertaking planned as part of the Rural Security Systems Program (see pg. 202) that would last five years, which we

called Program Impact Assessment. While Americans would initiate the

task, it was planned so that the entire responsibility for assessment of government programs would become that of the ai government and would

be supported by a trained staff of ai researchers who would be distributed

as appropriate among the government agencies involved. is means that

the staff would have to be educated and trained in methods of social research. It was planned that a cadre of American- and European-trained

ai social scientists would be involved from the beginning. Hopefully, they

would be responsible for all the planning and the work by the end of the

third year, and the Americans associated with the project would become

advisory and supportive.*

is ambitious effort faced three major hurdles beyond those of undertaking and developing the technical aspects of the project. First, Ambassador Unger was very cautious. While he appreciated the methodological

problem, this was of relatively minor concern to him. What concerned him

most was the difficulty and risk of having American researchers who were

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* is project was one of the prime targets of the agitation and adverse publicity regarding participants

of university social scientists that was described earlier. Its morality was questioned; the project staff were

accused of working with American imperialism and reactionary local government to find ways to suppress the population. e accusation was made that the sophisticated approach would help the government repress an already underdeveloped and underprivileged peasantry. ere is, of course, always

the question of how the results of research will be used. In this case, the members of the research community who were involved were well aware that providing data on popular attitudes and responses to

programs could have a negative result. However, detailed knowledge of ai society indicated that, in

many respects, the government, while it was an oligarchy, was rather more flexible than most such governments in responding to the demands of external events as they were expressed through popular behavior. e hope was that, in examining very closely how the population was responding to particular

programs and in trying to devise programs that would cause responses of satisfaction and popular support for what the government was trying to do, the government itself would become more closely involved with its population, starting a cycle from which there would be no return and in which the

relationship between government and governed might evolve in mutually beneficial directions. Obviously, there was no certainty that this would happen. It is clearly a matter of individual judgment and

decisions as to whether one believes it is worth making the attempt or that the attempt, once made, will

have the desired outcome.
outside the official American community in a position to probe into the details of local government programs that, unavoidably, would have to involve

some analysis of local politics and the American mission’s interaction with

those politics.

Second, it was not all certain that local ai politicians would be in a

position or have the desire, against their vested interests, to change programs if they found them to be ineffective or counterproductive. is would

also be true of the leaders of the American mission agencies, such as AID’s

U.S. Operating Mission (USOM) in Bangkok, which was responsible for

supporting most of the ai security-related development programs, since

they often had some stake in any local program, having urged its implementation, having helped to plan and fund it, and in some cases having

conceived it and then negotiated long and hard to have it accepted. It was

quite possible that in these circumstances both local and American officials

would have preferred not to know of the faults and failures of the programs

if these were identified by the research studies, and would ignore them or

find ways to attack the validity of the research if results of this character

emerged. On the other side, we saw evidence that the local ai social scientists were likely to be young and idealistic, so that they might prove fertile ground for revolutionary ideas and actions if indeed the above outcome

should come to pass.

e third major problem occurred within the DOD itself. In keeping

the character of insurgency and counterinsurgency, which represented a

type of warfare departing far from and encompassing much more than

purely military affairs, most of the specific research in the Program Impact

Assessment effort was to deal with the economic and social development

aspects of government actions rather than with the military aspects. is

raised the question of whether the work was appropriate for the DOD to

undertake and whether it could be defended before Congress, since we were

making every effort to assure direct and obvious relevance to DOD’s mission and responsibility.

To resolve the last problem, all the written material on the program

was given a military conflict-oriented cast, which distorted it from the beginning. We tried to minimize the distortions, but did not feel able to describe freely what was intended in all its subtle ramifications; and this had

adverse consequences later. It was the language of defense-oriented counterinsurgency, stressing internal security problems and inhibition or modification of armed rebellion, that the university community, when attacking

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this program, picked up and perhaps justifiably gave the negative interpretation that they did.

e first two problems were closely interlinked. From the research point

of view, the question about the potential response to negative results could

only be answered in the doing—by obtaining specific results and seeing

what effect they had. But this approach did not suit the ambassador all at

once. He would, I am sure, have preferred that the proposal not be made at

all. He agreed to have one American social scientist, Dr. Paul Schwartz of

the nonprofit American Institutes for Research, who was to be the leader

of the research group, come to the country and work in the embassy, more

completely defining the program and working through the official American community to probe delicately toward the local government agencies

and obtain their reaction, based on specifics rather than on generalities they

were not likely to understand. If successful, then more American personnel

could appear, and the program could be advanced slowly.

It is a tribute to this principal investigator’s ability to grapple successfully

with real-world problems that, after three months, the ambassador was urged

by key members of his staff and agreed to give the go-ahead for a broader

and more intensive effort. e program moved within six to eight months

from dealing with innocuous subjects far removed from the substance of

the counterinsurgency problem to evaluating some of the action programs

that were at the heart of the local government’s social development and

counterinsurgency effort, such as community development, police training,

and road building, using indigenous ai researchers and with the full support of the ai government agencies responsible for those programs.

is sounds like, and it was, one of the few success stories in this rather

gloomy narrative. However, its path was not easy. Despite the great attention

to “doing it right,” the program suffered from the problems outlined earlier

and from others as well. One of the first and most difficult tasks was to help

the ai government officials understand the nature and potential value of

the work. e first year of effort devoted much attention to this with the

consequence that methodological soundness, and its attending time and

complexity, was sacrificed in favor of early results that would demonstrate the

principle of evaluative research. Essentially, then, the first year and a half was

devoted to the opening phase. It would be another two years (1969–71) before it would be possible to tell whether the work could be undertaken with

the necessary sophistication and would have the desired impact.

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In the meantime, the usual turnover of official personnel continued (including my own final departure from the Pentagon in September 1969).

at was also the time when Senator Mansfield persuaded Congress to write

into law the conception of “relevance” for DOD research that had been one

of the principles of operation for ARPA’s social research program. And, of

course, the principle then took on the rigidity of enforcement that distinguishes legal requirements from the flexibility of voluntary action. As a result of this pressure, and with no strong advocate for social research

remaining, the ARPA program succumbed, consciously or not, to the general trends affecting all research having to do with counterinsurgency and social systems. us, the planned five-year program, after two years and just at

the point where payoff was imminent—or at least at the point when one

might determine whether any payoff was in the offing and how it might be

brought about—appeared as though it, too, would die. A successful effort

was made to have the AID mission in ailand assume support of the project. Since the programs that were being evaluated under the Program Impact Assessment effort were largely under AID cognizance, this appeared

appropriate. Shortly after this was agreed—over a year after it was decided

that ARPA could no longer support the work—Congress reduced the AID

program. In addition, the report of a presidential commission recommended

disbanding AID and the distribution of its functions to other agencies.2e

research continued into 1973, however, gradually moving along the path initially charted for it. At any stage of its existence, it was not certain that it

would enter the next stage. e methodological developments were advanced, and the ai government has gradually been assuming responsibility for the evaluative activities, so that the project itself succeeded. However,

the ultimate question—whether the work has had the desired impact—still

cannot be answered.*3

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* is was written in the initial draft of this book, and it remains true today. An informal history of the

program that I wrote in 1970 after leaving the Pentagon concluded that only two aspects of the program could definitely be termed successful to some degree: (a) the creation of a border control mechanism that prevented infiltration across the Mekong River in the northeast—a relatively simple task

because boats on the river could be detected by radar and then inspected by river patrols to try to ascertain whether their occupants were farmers crossing to market their products or infiltrators in disguise;

and (b) the development of a progress measurement system based largely on population activity statistics that the ai government was willing and able to implement. I am unaware of any indicators as to

whether these results persisted beyond the end of the large American presence during the Vietnam

War or whether, as stated by General MacArthur about old soldiers, they simply faded away as the

American military effort in Southeast Asia came to an end. One major conclusion drawn privately by

the ARPA participants in the program (myself included) was that trying to undertake a rigorous “systems approach” to a politically charged societal problem in a wartime environment had proven impractical. It remains for a future evaluation of the results of the Minerva Initiative to learn whether that

conclusion remains true.
us, again, an attempt to undertake research work requiring long-term

program development and stability was distorted and interrupted by shortterm and extraneous considerations having nothing to do with the merits

or requirements of the work. e pace of events in the real world and the

time required for exacting and careful scientific work appear incompatible

to say the least.

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Chapter 19

“Technical” Problems

All of the issues dealt with thus far have had to do with defining the problems on which research studies could be performed and with obtaining the

agreement of the entire “system” that these problems should be studied. e

next important step was to gather data in the field based on sound research

designs and to extract useful and reliable results from those data by means

of sound scientific analysis. e research designs and the analyses had to be

planned together, of course, because no amount of analysis could yield valid

and reliable results if the research design did not provide for the necessary

and appropriate data to be taken. e constraints of field operations profoundly influenced the research community’s ability to fulfill this, its raison

d’être and supposed stock-in-trade.

A number of adaptations of American social science methodology had

to be made to work across cultures. To obtain the information on attitudes

toward events and on aspirations that was desired from local subjects of research, it was first necessary to determine whether the “instruments” of

measurement were valid in other cultures. A number of techniques for crosscultural research—for example, Hadley Cantril’s self-rating scales1 and Bevelas’ Echo technique, already described—existed that would have to be

redeveloped for and tested in the specific cultures where they were to be

used.

ese were used occasionally; and Phillip Worchel of the University of

Texas was also able to adapt such methods as the thematic apperception

tests for use in Vietnamese culture. Primarily, however, straightforward interviews were used, and the value of having social scientists undertake the interviews appeared to lie mainly in the fact that some of them—those with

appropriate training in psychology—could structure the interviews in a neutral way so that more information could be obtained than would be obtained

by a layman, and it would be obtained in a form that could be checked for

internal consistency. But even this was often not done well, especially when

the researchers were of disciplines, such as traditional political science, that

had not especially trained them in the necessary approaches.

One innovation, a matter of necessity, made most of the studies possible in the first place. However knowledgeable the research professionals

might be about the countries, their histories, their people, and contempo237
rary events, most of those who were anxious to undertake this work (the anthropologists were the primary exceptions) had not been there and could

not speak the language nor did they have the deep and intuitive feeling for

the culture that would accompany real fluency in the language. Some attempted to learn the language but, in the few months or year available to

them for language training prior to undertaking research, they could only

learn enough language for normal pleasantries and to request necessities of

life, at best.2 Almost all the researchers, therefore, turned as a matter of necessity to the most ready expedient—the use of intermediaries who were

bilingual local nationals—for administering questionnaires and assistance

in reduction of the raw data represented by the responses.

is approach had two main advantages in addition to expediting the

performance of the studies. American researchers who were new to the local

scene had much to learn “on the job” about the local culture and background, and their interaction with their indigenous research assistants

helped to accelerate the process markedly. In general, the assistants were

university students, or even graduates often in the social sciences, and they

were quick to understand what was wanted and needed. Further, when the

questionnaires were taken to the field to be administered, the foreign presence of an American researcher, which could be expected to influence the

respondent’s attitudes and answers, could be minimized or eliminated.

ere was, however, another side to this. First, the bilingual capability of

the research assistants was highly varied, so that it was not clear what effects

their translation and retranslation of questions and responses between two

languages would have or what variability would be introduced into the results thereby. ese biases were almost never themselves the subject of investigation (e.g., by having other individuals translate back to English a

question that had been rendered from English to Vietnamese, for comparison with the original). e expedient was essential if any work were to be

done at all in the time available, and other pressures on the research designs

inhibited attention to what appeared at the time to be a fine detail.

en, it would nevertheless be known to the respondent that his questioner was somehow connected with the government (because only the government in most places would undertake such studies),* and the indirect

connection with the Americans could be inferred. In one case, a local social

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* In some cases, where local universities’ scholars undertook social studies on their own, the local press

accused the government of having inspired them clandestinely.
scientist with excellent credentials criticized an entire area of research because, he said, the respondents were slanting their answers to questions according to what they felt the government wanted to hear. He offered to

undertake a replication of some of the research, since he was not connected

with the government, to illustrate what the differences in the responses would

be. Some further confirmation that he might be right was offered by comments of an American anthropologist in the area who lived among the people and spoke the language fluently and understood the culture intimately.

e experiment appeared worthwhile. But it was never undertaken for

reasons that were largely political, and that illustrated well the further problems of working even with the most highly qualified indigenous social scientists. For it was found with experience that, while the idea of separating

politics from scientific objectivity is deeply ingrained in Western philosophy, it was much less firmly held in the non-Western cultures with which

our program interacted.* In almost every case, it was found that the local

social scientists wanted to use their research either to provide data that

could be used for political purposes (which therefore made their “objective”

analysis of the data suspect), or to use the fact of their working on a subject related to affairs of state as a stepping tone to political power. us, the

desirable trend, which appeared a priori “good,” toward involving qualified

local nationals in social research that was intended to be objective had its

own built-in limitations.

e combination of the press of time, sensitivity of research subjects,

and wartime constraints and dislocations all interfered with the planning

and implementation of scientifically sound research designs. In a detailed

analysis of most of the research studies performed in Vietnam, Webb3

showed that in all but one or two studies there was little or no attention to

the basic qualities of research design that would have given scientific validity to the studies. For one thing, the studies were begun at one point in time

in a dynamic situation, after the forces driving the changes had had a profound impact, since few had thought before the conflict started that it might

be of interest and importance to explore the initial conditions. us, there

were virtually no baseline data comparable with that now being taken against

which to compare and to assess the effects of change. ere had been academic peacetime research in Vietnam by university scholars and by the

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Chapter 19 • “Technical” Problems

* As we have seen, the attempt at politicization of social research in the United States was one of the

consequences of Camelot and the Vietnam War and was (and still is) a radical idea in the American

scientific context.
French, and these results served as broad and unstructured guides for those

who wanted to search them out; but it was obviously difficult to compare the

situations of refugees or Viet Cong defectors before and after they became

refugees or defectors. In the first case, it was not known who would become

a refugee, and villages varied enough so that study in one did not necessarily apply in another, although broad and generalized (and therefore not very

informative) inferences might be risked; and in the case of the VC, there

was obviously no opportunity for conscious and structured access to the people before they became defectors. In addition, the society had been in rapid

flux and turmoil since the Japanese invasion in 1942, so a “baseline” in, say,

1958 would be of uncertain value for comparison with 1964 and beyond.

ere were, however, opportunities to compare “before and after” on a

local scale and in particular subject areas, but these were not often seized.

Even when such a plan could be made deliberately, events were more likely

than not to interfere. One study in Vietnam, for example, planned to determine the effects of a new government-sponsored “village TV” program.

With advanced knowledge of the program, surveys of attitudes on particular subjects were undertaken in villages where the government planned to

place television sets before the villagers were aware of the plans. ere were

then to be periodic surveys after TV entered these villages; and it was not

planned to have control villages that would not have TV to pinpoint any effects of TV more exactly in terms of attitude changes over time. e trouble was, when the TVs were distributed, the researchers had no influence

on the operational plans, and the sets did not go to the originally planned

places, so the careful research design was destroyed.

Since most studies were performed by means of straightforward interviews, they included all of the weaknesses and biases that this implied. Only

a few studies used more than one method to gather attitudinal and historical data, so results based on data from different methods could not be compared; the variability due to the methodology itself could not be ascertained.

Before-and-after comparisons and control groups could rarely be built into

the designs. erefore, the studies represented, primarily, the taking of a

single data point in time relative to any events, and such observations could

be made by almost any intelligent observer not necessarily a social scientist

trained in sophisticated methodology.

Even these crude observations often lacked statistical validity within

their limited scope. In those cases where it was possible to compile data

from a large sample of respondents, it would be found that more often than

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not it had been impossible to randomize the choices of a subject with respect to the uncontrolled variables and still obtain a large enough sample

of each population to achieve statistical validity. A sample of prisoners, for

example, would cover a span of several years in the time when they joined

the National Liberation Front, how long they had been members, and when

they became prisoners. Similarly, the experiences of individuals in the Viet

Cong of the sample, and where these occurred, varied widely (even a hundred-mile distance in Vietnam could mean vastly different conditions of

combat and interactions with the population). And access to prisoners anywhere was determined far more by the political desires and whims of the

Vietnamese government officials who provided that access than by the desires of researchers for the requirements of their research designs.

By the time a sample of as many as 150 prisoners was sorted into

classes, where even a few of these variables could be considered fairly constant for a study of why they joined and why they defected, there might be

only one or a few individuals in any group described by particular values of

the variables: and there were rarely enough individuals in a single group

(e.g., people in one age group who came from one village at about the same

time) to allow statistically valid comparison of the effects of one variable

(e.g., the difference between relatively well off and very poor villagers). e

next sample of 150 prisoners was likely not to have individuals from the

same population as the previous group at all. erefore, even though in time

a very large group including well over 2,000 prisoners was interviewed, scientifically significant results could not be derived from the interviews.

Similarly, although attitudinal research was performed in villages, this

was usually done on a one-village-at-a-time, one-time-each basis, so that

comparisons between villages in different circumstances with statistically

significant numbers of villages, to explore in detail the effects of specific

events was rarely possible. Even worse, studies on related subjects were never

started with similar hypotheses to be tested (if, indeed, they started with

any). And even when the samples might be similar, the parameters describing them were not standardized—for example, one study might divide

the male population into age groups of “zero to 15, 16–25, 25–40, and over

40,” while another could consider groups of “under 15, 16–45, over 45.”

How, then, is it possible to draw conclusions about a particular age group

based on all the available data? us, although some numbers of studies

might be undertaken on particular questions, the data usually could not be

combined or the results compared very precisely.

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is is a very sketchy outline of some very complex problems in research design. A detailed review would bring to light many more subtle

problems. But the problems mentioned are not subtle, nor were the researchers, by and large, poorly prepared for the technical aspects of their

tasks, inept, or intellectually incapable of understanding research design

problems. Why did such crudities creep into the work? e answer lays in

the exigencies of field research in a country at war and also in the misconceptions many of those who supported the idea of such research held about

what was involved in actually doing it.

e most critical problem was that of “sensitivity.” As we have noted in

several contexts, the readiness of high-level, operational directors or commanders to permit entry of researchers into particular geographical areas,

or to talk with particular people, varied inversely with the interest and importance they attached to the subject under examination. ere were many

reasons for this: fear that a delicate situation would be disturbed; fear that

unfavorable information might be made public; or a desire, perhaps, not to

obtain critical results that would lead “Washington” to want to meddle. But

it became almost axiomatic that the more substantive and important the

problem requiring the research, the less access would be permitted to the

sources of necessary data.

ese inhibitions were unevenly distributed and took many forms for

there were subjects of importance on which those in control genuinely desired information. But even then, they kept a firm and stultifying hand on

the reigns. Permission might be given to enter one village in a “hot” area,

while a sound research design might require interviews in eight. Access

might be given to one group of defectors who had not held very important

positions in the party apparatus, while permission would be denied to see

a few “high-level” defectors whose motivations for joining the party, if understood, might be indicative of the requirement for a whole new outlook

on the nature of the opposition. e variation of the methodology might be

restricted by constraints on time and access and by explicit direction, so

that certain techniques could not be used; or the number of researchers who

could go into the field was limited, so all the data could not be gathered in

the requisite form in the available time. Of course, all studies on important

subjects did not suffer from such constraints, but enough of them did to establish a tendency on the part of the researchers—who were vitally interested in and captivated by their work—to gather whatever meager data

could be obtained under the constraints that were imposed and to try to

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The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy
make the best of whatever data they could gather in later analyses. is invariably made for single or small samples of observations across broad

ranges of variables without careful sampling or control of important parameters and consistently worked against good research design.

e time pressure was one of the most important factors. We have already seen in another context that results on most subjects were needed

“yesterday,” often for understandable reasons. Since carrying out the full effort on a complex research design could take a great deal of time, the temptation, when the researcher felt himself in a position to influence policy,

was to cut corners. e time pressure and the need to “produce” worked in

more subtle ways, even on those projects where the overt need to hurry did

not exist. In the Program Impact Assessment project, for example, while

one of the main objectives was development of methodology, this had to be

disguised by promising early assessment of real programs (this, despite the

reluctance on the part of officialdom to hurry into such assessments). e

methodological problem was two-fold, however: development of indirect

measurement techniques to observe and interpret social attitudes and behavior; and development of approaches whereby the responsible local government officials would desire, permit, and participate in the application of

those techniques. While the first could be disguised in the act of obtaining

substantive results on program evaluation, the second could not be evaded;

it was necessary if any research were to be done at all. erefore, the first

program assessment efforts had to be highly simplified in keeping with the

level of sophistication of the officials involved, and they amounted to little

more than a demonstration of what evaluative research was like. By the

time this succeeded and interest was shown in proceeding to more elaborate and firmly based methods, the existence of the project was in doubt

because of its DOD sponsorship, so that it appeared the real substance

would never be reached. is pressure was later alleviated with the transfer

of responsibility to AID, but the budgetary vicissitudes of that agency in the

years around 1970 could offer no assurances of orderly process and completion either. is sort of problem, which in one form or another was endemic in almost all the work, made it difficult to keep science in the

forefront.

It was also found—to the surprise of many, including the social scientists themselves—that properly designed social research would be expensive;

this interacted with the generally somewhat negative external view of social research to constrain the limits to which rigorous design could be

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Chapter 19 • “Technical” Problems
pushed. For example, in ailand during 1968, the government was toying

with the idea of extending its capital-based TV network into the farthest,

least accessible reaches of the country as a means of enhancing social cohesion and reducing existing separatist tendencies. It requested help for a

pilot test to assess whether the impact would be worth the effort and expense. Here was a chance to undertake a study at a relatively leisurely pace,

obtain baseline data, establish controls, and give attention to all the details

that would make for a scientifically sound effort. We, therefore, worked

with the government to determine a group of villages where TV would go,

then identified villages where it would not initially but where the people

were likely to know about it, and identified others where there would be no

TV and it would probably be some time before people would know about

it—eight villages in all in a complex design with multiple controls and baseline data established for all. Before and after surveys would be made using

a number of different kinds of measurement “instruments,” and a fairly large

crew of ai field assistants had to be trained and dispersed to the villages

periodically. e villages were in isolated locations and had to be reached by

helicopter if months were not to be spent on each data-gathering sortie.

e project would have continued for two years, with periodic surveys to ascertain the impact of TV (if any) over time.

When the projected cost of the study was determined, we were shocked

to learn that, what was in effect a relatively small project to determine the

reaction of the population of a few villages to government TV, would entail a cost approaching a half-million dollars. It did not appear that, if Congress asked the questions, this could be justified—intuition said it might

“buy” $50,000 but not $500,000. So the project was scaled down with the

carefully worked out research design and, therefore, statistically valid, internally consistent, reliable results became the primary casualties. e Program Impact Assessment effort was also expensive; the upshot was that,

while it was underway, we put all our efforts and energies for political defense into it, so that all other such work suffered as we tried to keep the

total of social research within a tolerable budget figure.

It was easier to spend more money per project in Vietnam under the

pressure of wartime needs and MACV’s insistent requests for projects. But

whereas elsewhere there might be reasonable time to undertake carefully

designed research, even if we had wanted to in Vietnam we could not. e

combination of pressure for instant results and rapidly changing people,

situations, and conditions meant that nothing would hold still for carefully

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planned research no matter how hard we tried. We have already seen what

happened when we tried to undertake “before and after” surveys of village

TV in Vietnam. In the case of the prisoner and defector interviews, the

combination of access problems and movement of the war conspired to

prevent any thorough searching out of groups with even moderately uniform backgrounds. Similarly, the attempts to study the problems of refugees

in a province could be interrupted by major military operations of either

side that would change the situation, mix, and outlook of the population

being studied. e problem of measuring specific population parameters

under such circumstances was much like that of trying to measure the

length of a car from the side of the road while it moves past the measurer

at 60 mph. In the case of the car, instruments could be devised for such

measurements. In the case of the social systems, this was much more difficult because we had to observe the system “on the fly” even to determine

what to measure.

Most of the research community was well aware of the risk of biased effort in their work for all the reasons given. is had to be balanced against

the continuous pressure to undertake studies of this or that subject. In addition, the opportunity to study, learn about, and try to influence the management and course of an event as important as the Vietnam War in

contemporary U.S. history was one that no one in the research community—

workers and management alike—was willing to pass up lightly. erefore,

the perishability of the situation and the data were always balanced against

the purity and rigor of scientific research requirements. e urge to push on

at all costs inevitably relegated careful science to the back seat.

e impact of these imperfections varied with the task at hand. In the

case of motivational and attitudinal research, they could be profound, although the researchers always managed to convince themselves that there

were some deep insights and common threads that pointed toward “truth.”

In the case of studies performed to elucidate the patterns of more objective

events, such as a study that was undertaken to observe the interaction between Viet Cong and government operations in a village over a period of

time, or another in a Mekong Delta province to piece together the interlocking patterns of Viet Cong political and military activity in an area straddling one of their main supply routes, the effects of the biases were easier

to fathom and rectify. For in these cases, there were other data in the records

of the war and the military operational system and the memories of some

of that system’s members against which to check.

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A different pattern of biases appeared in the tasks that might be called

technical assistance—those in which the research community was asked to

help set up a data system (e.g., the Hamlet Evaluation System) and analyze

the results. Although all the researchers involved felt intuitively that the

kind of data that could be obtained and the circumstances under which

they were obtained by the operational commands in the field would inevitably bias the results, the operational community’s “headquarters,” driven

by ever more insistent demands from Washington for better “indicators” of

how the war was going, insisted on using the latest approach to analyzing

numerous statistics no matter how imperfect the data or how biased the

consequent results might be. ere was an interesting evolution here from

a relatively fruitless search for “indicators” of success through attempts to

solve analytical problems that dragged on and on without useful results because the basic data were simply not good enough to simply setting up a

computerized data system for the operators to use and then working with

that system to modify and improve it to remove biases which everyone

sensed intuitively were there but which no one could define rigorously.

At the same time, there gradually emerged two more aspects of research

in the field situation that had not been reckoned on when we started. e

first was what appeared to be the impossibility of integrating the quantitative and nonquantitative disciplines in social research in the field. Much of

this went back to the data problems that always existed. e social scientists

strove mightily to add quantitative statistical aspects to their work. Some

succeeded in some circumstances; but most of the time it was clear that, although they peppered their reports with tabulations and statistics, the chief

value of their work derived from the insights they reached intuitively as the

work progressed. ese insights were usually fascinating and instructive, although it might be hard to prove by rigorous analysis of the data that they

were generally valid or “true.” For example, while virtually all Viet Cong

prisoners claimed to have joined for ideological reasons—driving out the

American imperialists and their lackeys and variations thereof—their actual

reasons for joining seemed to be mostly very personal. ese could vary from

inability, for bureaucratic reasons, to attend a desired secondary school, to

love of adventure, to fear of the press-gang, to the fact that the prisoner had

lived all his life in a Viet Cong area and could conceive of no other way to

go. Many were motivated by real injustice that they had experienced or witnessed. But with the poor statistical samples that characterized these interviews, it would be difficult to know just how the different reasons for joining

were distributed across the prisoner population and, by inference, the pop246

The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy
ulation of Communist troops. Any program to entice defectors for amnesty,

or to induce surrender of Viet Cong units, or to inhibit Communist recruiting would, ideally, be based on knowledge of why most of those troops

were there. Ultimately, therefore, the insights about why men joined the Viet

Cong were interesting, but not of much practical value, nor could the “truth”

be “proved,” even though it might be sensed intuitively.

At the opposite pole were the operations research people, who manipulated any data they could get—because the military statistical system was

never, however much we tried to influence it, set up to permit detailed

analysis of events and their causes—attempting to find patterns of enemy

activity that would show the directions for counter operations best to succeed. Most of the time, these results were dry and told nothing the military

could not sense intuitively. For example, one lengthy report analyzing

dozens of operations proved only that the Viet Cong operated most of the

time at night and in a certain relationship to the waxing and waning of the

moon. Strangely enough, no one had previously demonstrated these facts

with assembled and integrated data; but once demonstrated, it was so obvious that the analysis did not appear significant.

ese differences between the disciplines seemed to result more from

profound differences in the mental “sets” of the quantitative and non-quantitative groups—subcultures within Snow’s two cultures,4 if one will—than

from simple matters, such as training. is was indelibly impressed on my

mind by a conversation between Murray Gell-Mann and Michael Moerman that took place at the Jason Summer Study on ailand mentioned

earlier. e conversation opened on the question of how many people might

be listed as authors of a seminal paper in Gell-Mann’s and Moerman’s respective fields. In physics, the number could be many, accounting for each

of those who contributed importantly to the theory or experimental verification of discovery. In anthropology, the author had “pride of ownership”

over “his” village, where his research would make his reputation, and he

must do this alone. He could not, and in his professional circles was expected not to, share the credit with anybody. Further, while the anthropologist would certainly try to adhere to rigorous practices of observation and

analysis, he would much rather be famous for a well-turned, insightful

phrase than for the extent and precision of his observations.

We never succeeded in bringing the two outlooks together by joining

the different disciplines in a single successful study. Occasionally, a social

scientist—almost invariably a psychologist—was employed who understood

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some of the mathematical approaches of statistics and operations research,

or an operations analyst was found who had an understanding of the patterns of motivation of behavior. e results were then impressive. (But that

did not mean that they were used, as we shall see.) Moreover, the appearance of the combination could not be predicted in advance because the man

who did the work not only had to be of the right discipline and background,

he had to be willing and able to go overseas to do it, sometimes without his

family. e selection process, though it was intended to be purposeful, was,

in effect, almost random.

e second aspect of the field research that gradually emerged was that

the field situation posed unanticipated but poignant ethical problems of a

kind different from the relatively broad questions of purpose and morality

that were appearing in the criticisms of the social scientists who worked

for the government. But the net effect on the researcher’s ability to serve his

conscience, his science, and his government simultaneously was the same.

e most obvious problem came about when the researcher, who spent

a great deal of time with the local population, gained their confidence and

started to learn about the inner events and motivations of the community

he joined. He might, for example, learn that certain unsuspected members

of the community were insurgents, or even that they planned some action

inimical to the local government or the remainder of the community. He

was at the spot to gain data of assistance to the local government, and supported by U.S. government funds allocated to help the local government.

us far, his problem was more or less standard, and in our experience most

researchers who faced it would favor their local informants and their information sources and keep quiet. But his problem usually went deeper. e

researcher had many acquaintances among the local population, and his

personal sympathies might go to the people in both rival groups. It was thus

not a question of having sold one’s soul to the devil, but rather of keenly felt

personal sympathies that might go both ways—more akin to the doctorpatient problem in a divided family. In all the years of this research program, the problem arose only a few times. In Vietnam, General Hickey had

managed to gain the respect of both sides and to maintain his detachment,

nevertheless, to the point where he could remain aloof at appropriate times

and yet not jeopardize their liking and respect for him. Many of the other

researchers were troubled by anticipation of the question, and some of us in

ARPA even considered the advisability of devising a policy to guide the researchers we supported. But in the end, it remained a matter of individual

judgment, and it must have been painful for many.

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Such intelligence-related aspects of the work affected the program in

other ways simply because of the uncertain boundary between field studies

to gain information for research and those by other agencies to gain intelligence. e confusion the question engendered on the part of some of the

congressmen who participated in the Camelot hearings has already been

noted. In another more complex case, a study was undertaken to explore

the impact of various psychological warfare gambits initiated by the government on changing attitudes in the villages of a Mekong Delta province

where the Viet Cong were very active in 1967 and 1968. e research leader

was a Vietnamese social scientist familiar with and widely acquainted in

the geographical area. e research technique to be used was that of arranging a number of “participant observers” in several villages to report what

was happening on the spot as the “psywar” schemes were implemented. e

latter might be as simple as passing out some small but valuable tool having a pro-government slogan on it or as complex as starting a series of conflicting but adverse rumors about the Viet Cong. It became apparent as the

initial phase of the study was coming to a close that the participate observer arrangements had led to the establishment of what could easily be interpreted as, and in fact could easily become, a private intelligence net. Our

Vietnamese scientist, we suspected, might not be above using it for political purposes in the ever-present Saigon intrigues in which he had displayed

some extensive interest during several conversations. is approached too

close to the boundary for comfort, and it was decided not to continue the

effort. We were aided in this decision by the fact that the research scheme

was found to be simply not very useful; the data obtained by this technique

were of an uncertain quality and not easily subject to checking by other

means.

Other problems of an ethical character have been mentioned earlier in

connection with the differing views of the university and military groups regarding project management, accounting for expenditures, employment of

families, and in the general antipathy between the two groups with respect

to the bureaucratic constraints and, in some cases, about how widely the

results of research could be published. e trend toward conservative interpretation of the issues by the government officials involved, including

myself, was continually reinforced by apprehension about the potential impact of adverse, critical, or satirical press reports and by the presence of the

General Accounting Office (GAO), which for a substantial part of the period under discussion was investigating the operations of Project Agile at

congressional request. One was not inclined to take risks with the GAO

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looking over one’s shoulder—or at least risks were taken primarily when

the stakes and the solidity of the work appeared high enough to warrant and

permit a strong defense. Many projects that might otherwise have appeared

“worth a try” were ruled out for this reason.

e net effect of these problems—the difficulty of merging disciplines

and ethical problems attending extensive field work—was that methodological innovation and careful research design that would run costs up

tended to be avoided in favor of getting the job done with least risk and in

minimum possible time. In retrospect, it seems that the appreciation of what

scientific research had to contribute in contradistinction to simply gathering

information about interesting subjects was largely lost. Studies were undertaken for the sake of doing the studies and, in all but a very few, considerations of careful and scientific research design to be certain of the validity of

the results drifted invariably to last place in the order of priorities.

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Chapter 20

Who Will Buy My Wares?

Despite all the problems, the overseas social research produced new knowledge and understanding, fresh and sometimes startling insights, wherever

it probed. If the research designs did not ordinarily lend scientific validity

and confidence to what emerged from most individual studies, the subjects

overlapped enough with each other, with the knowledge of the few anthropologists who had spent years in the areas being studied, and with the

efforts of operating people to make sense of related events, that it seemed

possible intuitively to separate that which “rang true” from that which

should be viewed with suspicion and distrust. Whether we had scientific

proof or not, we felt we were learning much that was new and valuable.

In particular, a picture of the diverse revolutionary movements of

Southeast Asia began to emerge with details of what motivated their members, explication of the points of conflict within the existing societies, and

with understanding of how these movements made their way through the

peasant populations, gaining or forcing adherents and destroying the writ

of the existing order and governments. e behavioral patterns of those

governments became clear also. ere emerged a detailed view of the traditional, cultural, and institutional constraints that put the governments at

odds with increasingly large segments of their populations. One began to

perceive and understand the emergence and expression in modern idiom of

age-old conflicts between diverse groups and subcultures and to trace the

twin impacts of change from a colonial to a nationalistic world and from a

traditional to an increasingly modern society.

e actions of governments could be put in perspective. It became possible to predict what actions might be effective and which would simply

exacerbate, or put a new twist on, existing conflict. One could usually foretell when a course leading to the latter result would be taken because to do

otherwise would run against deeply ingrained behavior patterns and might

threaten the continued existence of governing elites. It became obvious, for

example, that the ai government would use military force to try to put

down a rebellion among the Meo tribes in their northern provinces that

they half feared and half viewed as subhuman, rather than try to rectify the

effects of longstanding attitudes and injustices inflicted on the tribes by the

dominant ai population. Such a course seemed inevitable, just as did the

resistance of the white population of Mississippi to school integration in

251
1954. As another example, we found how and why in such areas as the

Mekong Delta region of South Vietnam accommodations could be made,

and were made, among local populations, governments, and insurgents

when this suited the best interests of all, with the result that conflict was

contained at a certain level and never got worse—although by mutual agreement it never got better either. ese were but two examples among a constant stream of them that emerged from the deepening insights that the

research results stimulated.

But, just as in Mississippi in 1954 and in following years there were

some members of the governing elite who recognized the inevitable and

were willing to accept change and seek reconciliation, there were significant

parts of the governments of these countries who were willing to try a departure from the past. In ailand, for example, there was one general in the

Communist Suppression Operations Command who tried to take an approach that combined efforts to lure adherents away from the terrorists and

attacks on their bases at the same time that ai army commanders were

undertaking harsh measures against villages suspected of harboring terrorists. And the point was, the United States was dealing with all such groups

and exerting the influence deriving from its presence, the distribution of

its military and economic aid, and the advice that went with them. us

the knowledge gained from the social research could have been used, with

perhaps some significant effect, to guide the advice and the disbursements.

is may have worked if the American community had approached the

problem with some coherence of viewpoint. But the American government

and its representatives overseas brought their own sets of complexes and

contradictions to the situation.

e United States was always ambivalent about whether it was simply

giving aid to be used freely by the recipients according to their own conceptions of need and utility, or whether it would use its aid to exert “leverage”—

to induce the recipients to do certain things and act in certain ways. It was

obvious that aid could not long be given for activities that defied the directions that a majority of Congress would approve; there was also the problem

that the various members of the American community in a country had their

own ideas about how economic or military aid (for whose oversight they

were responsible) should be used, and there was no unanimity on that score.

ere was a diversity of ideas and beliefs as great as, or greater than, that

within the host country and various American officials aligned themselves

with various sets of ideas or factions within the host government’s councils.

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On the one hand, there was also tension between the idea of assistance

willing and freely given with the desire not to earn the constant accusation

that the recipients were “puppets”; and on the other, the need to lookout for

Uncle Sam’s interests and dollars, according to one’s best understanding of

the situation, the conditions behind the appropriation of those dollars, and

the needs of the local government and population. And some solutions,

such as the idea of accommodation in the Delta provinces, were simply outside the range of acceptance by the collective value system that urged the

use of American as well as Vietnamese troops to try to suppress the Viet

Cong there. us, research might indicate the real possibility of reducing

conflict through accommodation among government officials, populace,

and insurgents, and some U.S. officials might want to use our aid to encourage that view. But to most of them, it would defy the idea of “winning,”

which was the reason we were there; and it would look much like a form of

corruption; and our resources would, some could say, be used to support

“the enemy”; and such a solution was simply beyond the pale.

ere is nothing new here; the description fits the pattern of real-world

political milieux everywhere. e point was that it was precisely to help all

groups involved to guide themselves by something better than “seat-of-thepants navigation” that the social research had been undertaken. Other products of the research had indicated how the American presence and aid fitted

into and affected the local picture, and the small amount of research on the

advisory function had shown ways in which advice at various levels might

be effectively given and sometimes willingly received. us, imperfect as it

was for all the reasons given and more, the research had developed results

that could be useful and that would meet the needs originally perceived.

All of the trouble and the problems would have been well worth wrestling

with if the research had fulfilled these ultimate ends. But the crazy-quilt

pattern of power politics and value conflicts made the use of the results an

“iffy” proposition—sometimes apparent and beneficial, sometimes hard to

trace, and many times patently nonexistent. On the whole, for all that it

taught some of those involved, the impact of the research on the most important affairs of state was, with few exceptions, nil.

A key problem of implementation arose from the difference between

the “language” of the research community and that of the operating community. Often, the social scientists wrote beautiful reports of their work. ey

presented the background to the study they were describing in all its intricacy and subtlety. e conditions of the study would be described, and the

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methodology, and the data sources, and how the results were analyzed. More

often than not, conclusions were presented, each in a paragraph or a page

with the qualifying conditions and subsidiary speculations. Recommendations were direct, but not necessarily any more brief. Buried somewhere, usually toward the end of the background discussion, would be a statement of

the problem being studied. is was the language of social research.

And the busy executive would not wade through it. He knew the background (he thought) and was indifferent to methodology. He wanted a concise statement of the problem studied and the results, and he would leave

the remainder to the appendices for others to judge. If the study could be

reduced to a one-page “fact sheet,” so much the better; but he would not

read a hundred or more pages of eloquent and often irrelevant verbiage to

get the answers to the questions he felt he already understood pretty well

(chances were, he did not understand them that well, but he was not about

to take the trouble to find that out). If the results challenged his intuition,

he was more likely to dismiss the report as poorly done than to inquire

searchingly into the basis for his own beliefs or ask for a critical review of

the report to see whether it might possibly be correct.

Now, there is an element of parody in these descriptions. ere were social scientists who wrote concise and lucid reports, and there were officials

who would read lengthy reports and learn from them. But the trend was the

other way for valid “cultural” reasons. Much as he wished to convey his results to the “user,” the researcher wrote also to satisfy his own need for thorough presentation of that which had occupied his mind for months or years,

and to meet what he felt would be the judgments of his colleagues about

his scientific ability and integrity an the soundness of his work. e “user”

was usually on a 20-hour day and days or weeks behind in all his work. Although he wanted to be enlightened and educated, he was willing to take

scientific rigor on faith and wanted the answers to his questions swiftly and

without the need to work too hard to get them. Along with his “fact sheet,”

he might have some brief judgments by his staff as to the validity of the

work and how seriously the results should be taken. Needless to say, the

staff might have their own fish to fry, and their comments might not always

do justice to the research results. us, the study report and the official

whose personalities matched, as it were, were a rare combination; but the

combination was essential for the work to be taken seriously.

ere were other impediments to acceptance of research results. We

have already seen the reasons for frequent lack of coincidence between the

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appearance of a study report and its teaching the official who originally

asked the question. In these circumstances, a report was not often able to

find its way into the hands and mind of someone who really wanted the results and was prepared to act on them. Or, as an alternative, a report on

some critical subject could reach the desk of the one who could act, but the

arrival was in a sense random; it could come at the wrong time and be ignored, or at the right time and influence events profoundly. In either case,

there was a large element of chance involved. Two examples are illustrative.

At about the time the United States entered into the Paris peace negotiations in 1968, some of us, including Chester Cooper, who was then

working with Governor Harriman on the search for a settlement of the

Vietnam War, became concerned that, whereas the North Vietnamese negotiating team and positions had both the venerability and rigidity of 20

years of Viet Minh doctrine, it was not at all clear that the United States

had either a unified position or an understanding of the implications of

some of the proposals that were being made. Since Cooper was in a position to influence the negotiating positions on our side, or at least to obtain

a hearing for new ideas and insights, it was agreed that State should ask

DOD to undertake some appropriate studies to illuminate some of the issues better. In due course, the requests arrived through appropriate upperlevel channels (from William Bundy to Dr. Foster), and the studies were

initiated. In some months, the first results began to appear. ey included,

among other things, a perceptive analysis from available prisoner interview

and Hanoi radio data of how the Viet Cong might view the advantages

and disadvantages to them and to the Vietnamese government of a cease

fire, which was being discussed at the time, and an historical analysis of

how the Viet Minh had used the issue of French prisoners of war to further their cause in negotiations with France at Geneva in 1954. But by the

time the reports appeared, the personnel composition at State had changed.

Cooper had left, and there was no one we could identify as really desiring

to have these reports. ey were distributed, but there was no feedback.

At about that time, however, I learned that a general with whom I had

worked closely during the Camelot crisis had become the military member

of the U.S. negotiating team in Paris, and I sent copies of the reports to

him. While the course of negotiations might be too slow to see whether

they had an impact, at least we got some feedback, and the U.S. negotiating team seemed to have enough time for some reading. As soon as this

general was replaced by another, the feedback stopped, although we still

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sent reports when they were completed. Ironically, by the time the prisoner

issue came to the fore, some three years later, and the report on the related

subject of the French prisoners could have warned of some of the booby

traps, that report must have been buried deep in the previous administration’s files. At least, it seems that it must have happened that way, from the

way the clear lessons about North Vietnamese use of the prisoner issue appeared to have been ignored.

In the second case, two reports, separated by about three years in time

on the same subject, met vastly different fates. e subject was the effectiveness of the regional and popular forces (RF/PF) in Vietnam—those

semicivilian quasisoldiers who had borne the brunt of the war in the villages

for all the years it had continued. It was obvious in 1964 and 1965 that

their ability as soldiers, their training, and their morale, left something to

be desired. When the opportunity offered, I had asked Jeanne Mintz—a

SORO social scientist who was interested in the problem—to write a report using the results of a small research project then underway. Based on

some 70 or 80 interviews with American soldiers and civilians who had returned from Vietnam and who had served there at all levels and all kinds

of jobs, the report—anecdotal rather than scientific—brought to light the

various problems the RF/PF faced: low pay; lack of training and leadership; neglect by the Vietnamese government; failure of survivors’ benefits—

all the things that would make for a poorly organized and motivated

fighting force.

e report was delivered and duly sent to all the places where it could

be of interest. But from the response, or rather the lack of it, and the lack

of action afterward, it seemed to have dropped into nothingness. ree years

later, another report on the subject was written. is was the result of one

of the few studies in Vietnam performed under the aegis of the Simulmatics Corporation by the psychologist Phillip Worchel of the University of

Texas after a request from the military command that was able to follow a

somewhat rigorous research design and careful scientific methodology. Interestingly, the results—the reasons making for good or poor RF/PF

units—were much the same as those that had emerged from the earlier,

cruder effort, which had been based on the intuition and experience of

American participants rather than on study of psychological motivations of

the RF/PF themselves. e second report was prepared, as well, in a style

designed to catch the official eye. But from all the response, it seemed that

it, too, would be consigned to limbo. en, on a visit to Vietnam in Octo256

The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy
ber 1967, I chanced to have a conversation abut the RF/PF with General

Westmoreland. When I asked, it turned out that he had not seen the report

but was interested; I had a copy in his hands the next day. 

In the ensuing months, it was clear that this time a research product

had struck home. Reforms of the entire RF/PF system were being instituted, and combat reports indicated that they were beginning to give a

much better account of themselves, often defeating North Vietnamese army

units. Of course, the time was right for such a change; it was the height of

the war and much increased emphasis was then being given to the pacification program in general. So the report on the subject finally entered the

system at the right time and at the right level and, one likes to think, it

helped rectify a problem when the awareness was there. On such chancy

stuff was the impact of the entire research effort based.

Part of this “impact” problem, of course, was the exact manner in which

often unexpected results struck the preconceptions of the recipient who

was responsible for the action. We have already seen how this interaction

helped shape the research program through selection of subjects for research. With respect to the research product as well, if the subject were

neutral or if the results fell in with the preconceived needs and desires of the

officials who would have to act on them, the research reports were well received and well used. For example, the continuing work to establish a reasonably sound statistical basis for interpreting the hundred or more detailed

“rating” questions that contributed to the Hamlet Evaluation System

“scores” for thousands of hamlets and villages was always viewed as necessary and helpful, and it helped shape that system into as reasonably rigorous an accounting of intangibles as the data would allow. Similarly, an effort

by an expert in psychological testing techniques to prepare culture-free

tests, independent of literacy, for assessing military aptitudes and guiding

the military assignments of conscripts led to the institution of an entire

new system for drafting and training the armed forces of a country (the

country was not in Southeast Asia). is happened because the country’s

leaders knew there as a problem and wanted to remedy it; they asked for,

and were receptive to, suggestions for change.

But on matters that challenged the old ways of doing things, or that indicated failure in a government program to which there was strong commitment by important officials, there was never such easy acceptance. One

of the major questions raised at the initiation of the Program Impact Assessment effort (described earlier) was whether anything would happen if

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programs were assessed as nonproductive or counterproductive, and ways

emerged to change them that ran against the cultural grain of interested officialdom. Was it worthwhile to spend considerable sums of money, displace people overseas, and undertake an arduous effort if the final outcome

would be to have the results of all this ignored? Obviously, it was decided

to take this risk. But in part, the awareness of the risk led to the very cautious approach, starting with relatively inconsequential programs, that both

the research and the official communities adopted.

After his Vietnam research, Worchel, who became the director of

ARPA’s large research unit in ailand (1968–70), suggested an indirect

approach to the acceptance problem. He postulated that the problem potentially facing officialdom was that of recognizing publicly that programs

and actions for which they were responsible were having deleterious or

counterproductive effects. When faced with stated conclusions and recommendations to do something differently, the admission of failure must be

explicit if the recommendations were accepted. e natural reaction was

defensive and resistive. e proposal, then, was that the research community should not draw firm conclusions or make explicit recommendations.

It should simply design its research to elicit the facts, making causes, effects,

and consequences very clear. ese would be presented to the officials, who

could draw their own conclusions and devise their own solutions.

In theory, this seemed a reasonable approach and entirely consistent

with the role of a social research investigator. e problem that could be

immediately anticipated, however, was that “none are so blind as those who

will not see”; confronting an official with incontrovertible evidence of the

consequences of his actions would not assure that he would act differently.

And, of course, it would be an unhappy lot for the social scientist to have

to ferret out data and interpret events based on them, and then have to refrain from drawing the inescapable conclusions and making the burning

recommendations, while watching the one who needed the assistance refrain deliberately from drawing those conclusions or acting inappropriately

(in the scientist’s view) on them. But one form of being ignored is in many

senses much like another, and it was decided to test this approach as part

of the Program Impact Assessment effort. Unfortunately, in the event the

delays attending the interagency transfer of the program were lengthy, and

the DOD overseas social research program began to wind down rapidly

shortly after this decision was taken. us, we in DOD had no opportunity

to test the viability of the approach. Even in 1973, after the program per se

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had been well accepted by the ai government, it was not clear that it

would have the desired effect on their social programs.

In another case, there was, at long last, the appearance of success in this

area without any certainty of the existence of its substance. We had given

a relatively modest amount of support to a ai social scientist to enable

him to carry out some studies of social developments in farming villages.

e objective was to ascertain whether some of the stresses of modernization were creating restiveness among the younger inhabitants and causing

them to join the insurgents. While some of the American social scientists

criticized the technical quality of his work, he managed to keep its political implications submerged and to make a reasonably complete report on

the attitudes toward the government and its works of key social groups in

the villages. ese results were sufficiently impressive to ai officialdom

that, some years after the work was initiated, the social scientist and his

ai coworkers were given an official position as a supporting research arm

of one of the agencies concerned with controlling insurgency in the country. is result alone was highly gratifying since it represented the hoped for

outcome of the financial support given to the individual under circumstances when the entire idea of supporting indigenous researchers overseas

was being challenged in Congress. However, the agency to which this research group was attached was not the one exercising the ultimate power of

decision in governance of the countryside. At the time of writing, therefore,

it is not yet clear whether the data developed and presented by this group

will be taken seriously enough at the high levels of ai government to affect the established patterns of official behavior.*

In matters where research results might have had a profound impact on

large-scale events and where they dealt with the fundamental premises, understandings, and approaches to matters of war, peace, and interactions with

foreign populations and governments, it proved impossible in the long run

for those results to have any effect at all. Secretary McNamara, for example, had established a standing rule that all “software” reports—operations

research and social research—emerging from DOD studies in Vietnam

were to be sent to him with a covering summary sheet, outlining the results

and their value. We knew that he read many of the reports that were sent—

especially those dealing with the impact and operation of the Viet Cong

and the Government of Vietnam (GVN) in the villages. A picture of the

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* Nor, viewed from a longer distance, was there the corporate memory to try to find out long after the

U.S. withdrawal of its massive Southeast Asia effort in 1975 and later.
events gradually emerged from those reports, showing how during that period (1964–67) the Viet Cong were gradually extending their writ among

the population; how the GVN through sheer ineptitude played into their

hands; and how American policy or local advice would often exacerbate

the situation or simply fail to have the desired effect. is is not the place

to dwell on the history of the Vietnam War. But it can be observed that the

knowledge transmitted by the reports could have had no effect because, by

then, the inexorable course of the war, with its attendant policies and behavioral patterns, had been set. e changes that might have been required

would run counter to the direction in which “the system” was already fixed,

and it is clear in retrospect that far greater forces than the observations of

a small number of researchers were not able to change it until the Viet

Cong themselves did so in a far harsher way, with their 1968 Tet Offensive.

But even when the system was more fluid and more open to suggestion,

those with responsibility for the grand sweep of events did not seek answers from those with research expertise. In one case, early in 1964, the late

George Carroll, a thoughtful official who was responsible for coordinating

Vietnam affairs in ISA and who had “connections” into the White House,

asked me whether our research had turned up any traditional Vietnamese

institutions on which a democratic government credible to Vietnamese

could be built. It did not take long to have a report prepared for him

(through the agency of SORO’s CINFAC) on the Vietnamese village councils. ese comprised a venerable form of local government, predating the

French in Vietnam, to which respected village elders were “elected” by approbation. Although the village-council system had been corrupted and

emasculated by the French and by Ngo Dinh Diem, who appointed his

loyal followers to the councils, it was still more or less respected by the village populace and was familiar to them as the local government that took

over when “the Emperor’s authority stops at the bamboo fence.” A system

of representation in which village councils were elected, and they in turn

elected representatives to higher bodies through district and province until

representatives were sent to the national government, would have been congenial to Vietnamese from ancient times. But on the day the memorandum containing this proposal and the descriptive report on the councils

reached Carroll, we were both astonished to hear the White House call for

national elections in the American style in Vietnam. To our knowledge, no

one familiar with Vietnamese history had been consulted before that proposal was made. Village elections were held many years later, but were never

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The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy
namese national elections in the American pattern, and their outcomes,

from that first suggestion until fall 1971 is well known.

Many experts on Vietnam pointed out to American officials from the

earliest days that the very choice of “hamlet” rather than “village” for significant attention bespoke American ignorance and was unfamiliar to Vietnamese. e hamlet was the smallest group of dwellings in heavily

populated rice-growing parts of South Vietnam and clustered where convenient to the rice fields and to the roads or canals to market. But several

hamlets made a village, and the village was the smallest administrative unit.

us, the creation of a system of “strategic hamlets” served to confirm the

isolation of the population away from their familiar informal groupings

and displaced from their land, their access to markets, and the graves of

their ancestors. is added to the already difficult burden of trying to make

that alien system succeed; and of course, it did not. Similarly, the later use

of a Hamlet Evaluation System in relation to pacification could show half

the hamlets in the country free of Viet Cong guerrillas, but would mask the

fact that guerrillas might command all or parts of the adjacent hamlets so

that few villages might be truly “pacified.” It was not until 1970 that this distortion of view in the American influence on the administration of Vietnamese society was rectified in the official recordkeeping on the war.

None of this is to say, of course, that these considerations, if reflected

earlier in official policy, would necessarily have changed the course of the

war very much. But it would seem that a necessary, if not a sufficient, condition for rendering assistance to one side in a society undergoing revolutionary conflict would be to understand thoroughly the forms and traditions

of that society. en, at least, reforms could have a starting point rooted in

the culture rather than imposed and unfamiliar from the outside. In this, the

research community could have helped; but it was rarely if ever asked, nor

was much heed paid if it spoke. (is then begs the question as to why the

official Vietnamese did not point these things out. It is sad to have to note

that the urban elite, who were influenced by their French-oriented upbringing, that ruled a peasant multitude in turmoil were separated from

that multitude almost as much as were the Americans, and they could have

benefited equally well from the advice.)

Even on a more mundane level, policy and long-standing patterns of

operation transmitted from one soldier to the next could not be modified

easily. Some of the same reports that were sent to the secretary of defense,

including an excellent analysis of the American advisor and the reasons for

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his ability or inability to relate to his Vietnamese counterpart, were made

required reading for the MACV staff by General Westmoreland. ey may

have proven useful to some individuals, but as a general matter, the beneficial changes that could have been made in the selection, training, and assignment patterns of advisors or in some specific operations that affected

and interacted with the village population were rarely discernible. And we

have already seen that some vital subjects, such as the impact of the war on

the population, were not even open for study, even though the researchers

had already observed enough to suggest that then-current directions for

waging the war might be counterproductive. Much of the knowledge and

understanding of the motivations, organization, and operations of the Viet

Cong had their roots in the thousands of interviews the social scientists

conducted with prisoners, defectors, and villagers. e results may not have

affected policy, but they did eventually permit the assembly of a “Viet Cong

Manual” in English and Vietnamese that set forth what was known about

the Viet Cong and the NLF organizations and methods. is became a reference book and training aid and doubtless served in the education of thousands of officers and men concerned with trying to fathom the working of

that organization. is was a clear demonstration, again, that where research results could fit into the pattern desired by “the system” they could

be accepted. Even so, there was no way to ascertain whether the availability of this book made much difference in the struggle against the Viet Cong

in the villages after all.

is pattern of acceptance was not limited to Vietnam, which might be

said to be a special though all-pervading case. In another instance in 1969,

we had decided that several years of research in ailand—a country faced

by lesser, but nonetheless threatening guerrilla warfare—had amassed a

wealth of information that would be of vital interest and importance to the

officials responsible for determining American policy with respect to that

country. A volume was prepared that integrated the results of three years

and several million dollars worth of work into a fairly coherent picture of

conflict within ailand and its culture. e volume had the requisite “executive summary.” It was distributed to all those in the administration who

it was believed had an interest in and responsibility for policy toward the

country in question. A number of kind and complimentary letters were received in return.

But it was discouraging to learn that the staff of Henry Kissinger (who

had just become the president’s national security advisor at the time), whose

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understanding of the country and its problem would at the time be the

most critical for policy about ailand, had been instructed to prepare a

“fact sheet” on the report for his use. He had not time to read it all; all his

time was being taken up by the president. Of course, any fact sheet simply

represented a brief, one-sentence-each summary of the volume’s main

points. ese could not help but be assembled selectively and constitute a

very subtle form of recommendation for action. True, the recommendations

would, as sifted by the staff, be influenced by the knowledge developed in

the research. But the problem of educating a key official to the subtleties of

the policy choices on which he would be likely to have the final say would

not be met. Perhaps at that time, ailand was not important enough in

the larger scheme of things to warrant more attention, since peace in Vietnam was obviously first on the list. One never knew whether to be grateful

that the results of millions of dollars’ and many years’ worth of effort could,

by whatever indirect means, be given any hearing at all or to decry the

missed opportunities when they were not given the hearing for which they

designed.*

us far, we have been exploring whether and how the research results

could have any influence on events at all. To place the whole exercise in

somewhat better perspective, it must be noted that there were times when

we were fearful of that influence and wished fervently that it did not exist.

One such case occurred at about the time the prisoner of war interviews

from Vietnam were becoming available. Some of the DOD officials who

had initiated that work felt it most important that Secretary McNamara be

kept up to date on the results as they became known, and they arranged to

have him briefed periodically by the project director—a dangerous procedure with unevaluated research results. e project director played it straight

and pointed out that the results he was briefing were preliminary, or simply “impressions.” But it seemed to some of us that the nature of those impressions might possibly be highly misleading. In the particular matter of

the impact of the war on the population, the “impressions” were that the vil263

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* And indeed, at a later time (in 1974), reports were sent forward to the White House describing the

antagonistic relationship between the ethnic Vietnamese and the Montagnard in Vietnam’s Central

Highlands. At that time, however, we were in the midst of the “Vietnamization” program and of handing the warfighting to the Vietnamese Army preparatory to our withdrawal from the war and the country. I was appalled to learn that the Vietnamese Army had been given responsibility for command of

the Montagnard units, and indeed, those units decided they did not want to get involved in a fight between Vietnamese factions. So, when they were attacked at the Central Highlands town of Ban Me

uot, they melted into the forest, and the North Vietnamese Army exploited the opening to start the

drive south that brought them to the gates of Saigon not long afterward.
lagers were blaming the Viet Cong, not the Americans, for the death and

destruction—because the Viet Cong were there, that is why the bombs fell.

Some of us felt that even if this knowledge emerged from talks with a

number of villagers, it paid to be suspicious when the results of research

were so close to what one might want to hear. We did not know how seriously Secretary McNamara was taking these results, or whether he, too,

might share this suspicion. We felt that such stuff should not even be taken

to him until the “preliminary” data could be much better wrung out by detailed analysis. And so, we undertook to get the periodic briefings turned

off—itself a delicate procedure. About the time we succeeded, more extensive, detailed, and fully analyzed results began to be available; and they

showed that indeed the “preliminary impressions” had been warped, and

the attitudes described were not generally descriptive at all. e analysis

and later research studies of refugees and why they had left their homes

showed that the Vietnamese peasants blamed the war for their problems:

the Viet Cong, the government, the bombing and fighting—they simply

wanted to be left in peace. If someone on the outside wanted to blame the

Viet Cong for the population’s problems, or blame the Americans, he could

find support for either view in the interviews.

All of which illustrates that, much as we wanted the results of this social research program to influence events and policies, we were always treading a fine line between trying to get the work used and trying to inhibit

excessive and premature enthusiasm. e controls that were exerted had to

be based largely on the judgments of the research managers and a host of

other officials above, below, and to the side of them. In the long run, the

performance in terms of the main purposes of the research was spotty, to

say the least. Some few studies had a profound effect; some were helpful to

executive officialdom but most did not and were not. e chances of any one

study having major influence were small. e closer a study came to dealing

with problems in which important policy issues were at stake, the less likely

that it would matter. Many factors influenced the reception or impact of a

particular report, the greatest number of them accidental and unpredictable.

One conclusion that can be dawn is that to achieve a few relevant, highquality outputs that might have a predictably great effect, very many studies in related and overlapping areas would be needed. But the constraints

on social research in this context—internal and external—were such that

the necessary large volume of work could not be undertaken. When all was

said and done, therefore, an enormous amount of effort and adrenalin were

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expended to accomplish the relatively small amount of work that was completed with little certainty that any of it would be useful and great certainty

a posteriori that most of it would not be.

Now, this is nothing to cry over because such is the fate of much research, including that performed in the life sciences and that which leads

to hardware. But there are some important differences. Everyone knew, for

example, that hundreds of approaches had been or would be necessary to

find a vaccine for polio or to find cures for various forms of cancer and that

hundreds of millions can be spent following false leads before the few correct (because they succeed) directions are found. It is recognized and accepted, also, that in this work many individual research efforts will produce

nothing useful; many will produce interesting and useful knowledge or

methodology, even if they did not succeed in their original objectives. Similar occurrences are routine in attempts to develop new electronic devices

or new machines to perform old jobs more efficiently or to perform new

jobs. Sometimes, the projects that did not succeed could have been predicted in advance by specialists, but the projects go ahead anyway.

ere are many cases, in fact many cases never recognized, where Congress and the public have accepted with relative equanimity the expenditure

of $5 million and sometimes $50 million or more worth of bad physics or

bad engineering. e Mohole Project—to drill through the outer crust of

the earth for geological research—caused hardly a stir outside the scientific circles directly involved when it was cancelled. No one outside ARPA

noticed when I cancelled a clearly unworkable radar map-matching project I found when I entered there, even though the single project had already spent more money than a year’s entire social research budget. But the

threshold of forgiveness is low with respect to social research, and the expenditure of even $5,000 of public funds on something that appears unproductive can, as we have seen, call down the wrath of the gods on the

spender and place an entire departmental research budget in jeopardy. ere

are many reasons for this. Two important ones are the sensitivity of the subject matter, which is almost always higher in significant social research than

in the life and physical sciences and engineering; and the need, which is

generally not recognized with regard to social research as it is relative to

the other subject areas, for specialized expertise to judge the technical quality, feasibility, and value of the work. At least, in social research, the willingness on the part of the lay public to recognize when and why some

expertise may be needed to make a judgment is not very great.

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e point is that the recognition of the speculative nature of all research is not readily granted to social research, so that in the latter, where it

is paid for by the public, every project must count and, precisely because it

does not and cannot, there will never be enough projects for the few high

payoff, high impact efforts to have much probability of being undertaken

(note that the few highly successful projects described earlier accounted for

about 10 percent of the total expended on this program).

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Chapter 21

Of Time and Tide

While at one level of awareness we were learning about and trying to grapple with the diverse problems that may be called internal to the research and

its application, at another level we continued to feel the pressures of the

outside world. e interest of the press and Congress in DOD’s social research, especially that undertaken in Vietnam, did not abate. Although our

redefinition of the program made it less visible for a time, this could not and

did not last very long. If we were performing problem-oriented studies,

some of which were worked on by local social scientists, then we began

after a year or so to be questioned about the projects, whatever they were,

that were performed “mostly by social scientists.”

By describing them in “plain English,” assuring in the descriptions their

relevance to the DOD’s mission and their heavy orientation to the war in

Southeast Asia, we managed to stave off disaster. Not one Agile social science project was noted by Congress or cancelled by congressional instruction during 1966–69. But by adhering to the self-imposed rules outlined

previously, we had essentially put the handwriting on the wall ourselves. It

was obvious that any social research program tied to both the military mission and the war would not long survive the growing public disaffection

with both. In effect, then, we were simply buying time until the inevitable

happened.

Other than the congressional committees’ continuing questions about

diverse projects, the one positive action they took, ironically, was on the

question of “coordination.” However much we felt we took pains to ensure

that all interested branches of the administration were informed of and

were able to comment on our work and help shape our program, the congressional committees still believed we were going ahead with insufficient

intergovernmental coordination. In its report on the FY 1968 budget, the

House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee said of Project Agile:1

. . . this year brought out the fact that the program is being extended to other geographical regions [than Southeast Asia]. e

committee believes that much better coordination among the

various departments and agencies of the government is required

before a useful and meaningful program in many of these areas

can be undertaken.

267
is was to be a recurring theme. e Senate Foreign Relations Committee had continued to express its unhappiness with Defense “foreign policy research.” GAO (we supposed, at the committee’s behest, but we never

learned for certain) continued its probes and made its report. e House

Defense Appropriations Subcommittee’s report in 1969 (FY 1970 budget)

contained these words:2

Some studies in foreign countries raise the question as to whether

or not they should be funded under the foreign assistance program rather than in the Defense budget. Additionally, ARPA has

made no attempt to have participating countries share in the cost

of such projects.

Of course, the program was planned that way, since the rationale was

that these programs were in American self-interest to improve the effectiveness of our planning and implementation of military assistance programs. In retrospect, it is clear that the constant calls for more coordination

as they shifted ground were really reflections of a deeper dissatisfaction.

e above words showed that we were being hoisted on one of our many

self-made petards, and that Senator Fulbright was finally making his point.

In the summer of 1967, the Defense Science Board held another brief

study session, chaired by Rains Wallace, in which he and a number of the

social scientists who had participated in or managed the DOD’s behavioral

and social research programs tried to chart a new course in the after light

of the Camelot events and the effect they had had on the outside world’s

interest in DOD social research. Among other things, the report ranged

over the DOD’s entire social science program and selected “for increased effort and funding” in the area of “increasing understanding of operational

problems in foreign areas.” It said specifically:

Despite the difficulties attendant upon research in foreign areas,

it must be explicitly recognized that the missions of the DOD

cannot be successfully performed in the absence of information

on (a) socio-cultural patterns in various areas including beliefs,

values, motivations, etc.; (b) the social organization of troops including political, religious, and economic; (c) the effect of change

and innovation upon socio-cultural patterns and socio-cultural

organization of groups; and (d) study and evaluation of action

programs initiated by U.S. or foreign agencies in underdeveloped

countries. Solid, precise, comparative, and current empirical data

developed in a programmatic rather than diffuse and opportunistic fashion are urgently needed for many areas of the world.

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is goal should be pursued by: (a) multidisciplinary research

teams; (b) series of field studies in relevant countries; (c) strong

representation of quantitative and analytic skills; and (d) a broad

empirical database.

And it was also observed, with regard to the problems of involving firstrate professionals, that:

More high quality scientists could probably be interested in

DOD problems if DOD would more frequently state its research

needs in terms which are meaningful to the investigator rather

than to the military. . . .

While the full dimensions of the DOD’s problems were only slowly

becoming apparent at that time, it is easy to see now that the report was

bucking the long-term trend, and some in the DOD noted at the time that

such recommendations had passed beyond the realm of political feasibility.

e report reached the news,3 and its recommendations were quoted

extensively. Senator Fulbright immediately questioned whether the DOD

really meant to implement such recommendations. He was reassured that

the DOD would view them with caution and, in fact, they quietly died (at

least those recommendations having to do with research on and in foreign

areas).

Meantime, the National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council committee that had been established after Camelot had kept at its work.

Its base and interests were broadened, as illustrated by the title of the report

it issued in 1968: “e Behavioral Sciences and the Federal Government.”4

After cautioning that “ere is no assumption . . . that knowledge is a substitute for wisdom or common sense for decision making,” it went on to say

that “e behavioral sciences [anthropology, economics, history, political science, psychology, and sociology] are, nonetheless, an important source of information, analysis, and explanation about group and individual behavior,

and thus an essential and increasingly relevant instrument of modern government. . . . ere is need to be concerned as much with the development

of the behavioral sciences as with their use. . . .”

A number of recommendations were made: to strengthen the behavioral sciences and their role in federal policy planning; to use the National

Science Foundation as a source of support for basic research to build the

necessary “technical” base and underlying subject knowledge; and to achieve

better social science representation in the councils of science—the Office of

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Chapter 21 • Of Time and Tide
Science and Technology and the President’s Science Advisory Committee—closest to the head of government. ese will be of interest in a later

context (see chapter 22).

With respect to the kind of work we were trying to have done through

ARPA, the committee report recommended:

at each major department and agency, with the assistance of an

advisory panel of behavioral scientists, develop a strategy for the

use and support of the behavioral sciences and maintain under

continual review a long-range research program that includes:

a. A broad spectrum of research activities from applied research

to investigations of fundamental behavioral and social processes relevant to department or agency missions;

b. Opportunities through internal staffs and contract and grant

arrangements to utilize research resources both inside and outside the government;

c. Continuing programs for the systematic maintenance of historical and operating records as essential sources of research

data; and

d. Application of behavioral science knowledge and methods to

program evaluation and analysis with provision for experimental projects designed to provide relevant information for

future planning.

is was almost identical with the Smithsonian report’s recommendations, and represented advice that the DOD had diligently been trying to

follow since 1963. e report also stated that:

3. e major mechanism for relating research programs in international affairs on an interagency basis is the Foreign Area Research Coordination Group (FAR). FAR, however, is a voluntary

group of some 20 participating agencies with no binding authority over its members and no firm lines to the policy planning

process. e Foreign Affairs Research Council in the Department of State serves as another clearinghouse through its function of reviewing research projects for their sensitivity to foreign

policy issues. Neither mechanism provides a basis for defining

government-wide objectives for research in international affairs.

ere are no organized means of assuring that areas of research

essential to policy planning are supported and that cumulative

bodies of knowledge on international problems are developed.

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The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy
. . . the Committee recommends:

4. at, in the field of foreign affairs, long-range behavioral science research objectives be drawn up by an interagency planning

group headed by the Department of State, with the support of

the Office of Science and Technology, and that the research programs of all departments and agencies that operate overseas, including the United States Information Agency, Agency for

International Development, Department of Defense, and the

Peace Corps, be continually related to these long-term objectives

through the Foreign Area Research Coordination Group and

foreign affairs planning mechanism like the Senior Interdepartmental Group

us, a number of continuing threads—positive and negative—were

entangled. e idea of an interagency coordinating group once again reared

its head with (it turned out) about as much chance of being adopted this

time as any of the other times. And it appeared (to one not familiar with

the internal deliberations of the group) that State had finally found a

friendly ear for its contention that FAR should be in the driver’s seat for research having to do with foreign areas. In the last analysis, a recommendation to this effect by the NAS/NRC committee was mischievous because

the committee could ignore the key problem that had plagued the idea of

FAR control from the start: giving one department of government authority over programs in another department. But, worse still, FAR was, by the

report’s own findings, not organized for or adequate to do the job. While

the NAS/NRC committee hoped they could rise to it or be made to do so,

the negative advantages of the management practice of giving responsibility and authority for a job to a manager one knows in advance is inadequate in the hope that the capability will grow should by this time have

been obvious, at least in this context. is was the trap we fell into before

Camelot, in assigning work to the Army and its instruments, and there was

no reason to believe in this case that the outcome would be different.

At any rate, it turned out to be irrelevant, for Senators Fulbright and

Mansfield were preparing moves that would continue the trends against

social research regarding foreign areas, regardless of what the scientific community desired or recommended; and that they were to have much more

profound implications for basic science in general. In 1969, the dissatisfaction in Congress with the DOD, its wars, and its works was increasing.

ere was a new administration making a point of trying to bring the war

to a conclusion and at least somewhat agreeing that “priorities” had to be

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Chapter 21 • Of Time and Tide
“reordered.” In August of that same year, Senator Fulbright introduced an

amendment to the FY 1970 Defense authorization bill to reduce the DOD

research budget by $9.5 million—$3.5 million to be taken from Federal

Contract Research Centers, $1 million to be taken from “foreign research”

and “social and behavioral sciences,” and $5 million from Project Agile.5

e amendment was incorporated in the bill, which passed in the Senate

and was ultimately sustained in the House and in conference.

Shortly afterward, Senator Mansfield introduced another amendment,

which became Section 203 of the bill, that said:6

None of the funds authorized to be appropriated by this act may

be used to carry out any research project or study unless such a

project or study has a direct or apparent relationship to a specific

military function or operation.

In approving its version of the bill in September, the House Armed

Services Committee included Section 203, saying also:7

We interpret “military function or operation” in its narrowest

sense.

e final act included Section 203, of course. In introducing his amendment, Senator Mansfield stressed basic university research sponsored by

the DOD as the culprit, saying later8 that the DOD was supporting $400

million of “non-mission oriented research and development projects,” with

basic research “of the kind traditionally carried out in the universities at a

level of $311 million in comparison with $277 million for the National Science Foundation.” Congress, he said, “by writing Section 203 is giving clear

notice (among other things):

5. at primary responsibility for government support for behavioral science research and training conducted in foreign countries by universities in the United States be placed in agencies

and programs committed to basic research and research training,

particularly the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the proposed Center for Educational Cooperation under the International Education Act.

But though he stressed basic and university research, he devoted the

details of his reasoning to DOD research in the social sciences, giving a

long list of DOD-supported social science projects (ironically, not including any from Agile’s program) that he said were not relevant to the DOD

mission.

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The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy
e impact of Section 203 was not limited to social science projects,

however, nor was it intended to be, for Senator Mansfield indicated his intent to attain the “reasonable goal” of reducing the $311 million of DOD

funding academic research to no more than 25 percent of that funded by

NSF by the end of FY 1971. Yet it was only by FY 1973 that the NSF

budget was increased by more than $100 million above its previous level, so

that if this had been followed faithfully universities would have lost over

$200 million per year in support for scientific research.9 Senator Mansfield

thought that the president, “as a matter of national policy, might decide to

reduce the overall level of support for academic research. at latter, I would

add, would not be a national calamity.”

Only time will tell whether it was. But since DOD support for basic

science was one of the pillars upholding it, the Mansfield Amendment

(Section 203) can be said to have marked a turning point in national support for scientific research and the beginning of a leveling off and downturn

in federal budgeting for such research from which the universities and the

scientific community in general have not yet recovered.10 e immediate

impact of Section 203 was to eliminate about $10 million worth of DOD

research projects. However, there were now more stringent limitations on

the work DOD could support, and it appears that most other federal agencies are taking heed and are wary of supporting research that cannot be

shown to meet the same criteria of mission specifically in their own areas.

As we have seen in connection with the constraints on DOD work overseas, one of the best ways to stultify free inquiry into important questions,

“applied” or not, is to subject them to the test of being necessary to support

an immediate operational mission. And as Nichols has pointed out,11 the

Mansfield Amendment threw into focus the problem of science policy and

became a rallying point for those who did not believe the “tired rhetoric”

supporting R&D and felt there were better things to do with the public’s

money. If Section 203 was not the entire moving force behind the changed

national attitude to and support for science, it added a strong force to the

downward trend, and thus it seemed that the waves made by Camelot were

now, four and five years later, eroding much wider and farther shores than

just “DOD social science research.”*

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* Basic and applied research in the American economy has had a rollercoaster kind of history since the

time of the Mansfield Amendment. On average, however, total government-supported research and

development (R&D) increased by more than a factor of two from the time this was written to a peak

in FY 2008 (from roughly $60 billion to $110 billion in constant FY 2000 dollars, according to U.S.

government data at www.whitehouse.gov/files/documents/ostp/pdf/federal_rd_spendingchart.pdf ).
Senators Fulbright and Mansfield worked closely together to ensure

that the provisions of Section 203 were carried out. e occasion for a sharp

exchange with the DOD arose in October 1969, when Senator Fulbright

sent Dr. Foster, the director of Defense Research and Engineering, a clipping about a emis contract that had been awarded to the University of

Mississippi and asked whether the project in question did not stretch the

constraints of Section 203.12 Ironically, this was not a social science project

in the usual sense of those the senator objected to; it had to do with birds

and illustrated well the problem of what I have described as the “lunatic

fringe” among research scientists. For while, this project may not have done

as much violence to scientific, ethical, and humanitarian consideration as

the others from the periphery that had been seeking my own support; it was

“far out” enough to tickle a newshawk’s curiosity. e contract—a serious

one—was to investigate the possibility of training birds to perform various

military tasks. ere had been some recent experience in this area. It has

been shown, for example, that pigeons could be trained to recognize certain

kinds of routine military targets in an aerial photograph more reliably than

human photo-interpreters could, and that they could be trained to recognize people in ambush in real life, stop in front of them, and peck a radio

transmitter to give an alert. e contract apparently (I have no first-hand

knowledge of it, but am surmising from what I have seen written) intended

to see whether such skills and related ones could be extended in scope and

to other species of birds. It may well have been trying to stretch an originally interesting idea too far.

A group working with birds for such purposes had tried to obtain Project Agile support for their work for some years. I had declined on the basis

of my past view of some of the early results. ese demonstrated that, even

if an important range of skills could be trained into birds, the military system as a whole was unlikely to take the accomplishment seriously, and

therefore the effort would be a waste of money. But the bird’s trainers in that

case persisted and eventually found a source of support in the DOD. Perhaps this same group had turned up at the University of Mississippi—I do

not know—and perhaps the University of Mississippi group found support

elsewhere when their emis contract with the Army was eventually terminated. We had found that a determined and persistent group could eas274

The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy

Currently, as this is written, there is concern that the federal R&D budget will be cut drastically in the

drive to reduce the national debt without significant tax increases (Science Vol. 338, #6108, November

9, 2012, editorial, 722).
ily keep itself alive by following the money and adapting to the current

“buzz-words.” e news report described it thus:13

Flying Off to Combat?—Birds Alerted for War—Would you believe that war is for the birds?

At any rate, the response to Senator Fulbright’s letter on November 3

after explaining the bird contract, said that:14

e research programs of the military departments and Defense

agencies are under continual review by elements of DOD and

receive, in addition, the critical scrutiny of my office. It has long

been DOD policy to support only research which is relevant to

military functions and operations. Most of our projects in the research and exploratory development budget categories (from

which comes most of our university funding) are, in fact, relevant to many military operations. From time to time, however, we

eliminate support for research fields which are no longer relevant to DOD needs; high energy physics is a recent example. I

do not expect, therefore, that implementation of these sections

will entail any new type of review or selection. Nevertheless, Secretary Laird, Secretary Packard, and I have been instituting a

number of new management approaches which will provide a

basis for more coherent and explicit presentations to the Congress about the basis for our budget requests.

is triggered a storm. Senator Mansfield said on the Senate floor15

that “Congress, when it enacts its laws, does not attempt to waste time on

futile gestures. . . . It is very upsetting to see any executive agency disabusing the clear expression of congressional intent. . . . ,” and Senator Proxmire

added that “ere is no question that Federal research has been overwhelmingly sponsored by the Department of Defense in the last few years.

. . . If we provide funds for the Department of Defense, this is one area

where we do not adequately scrutinize them . . .” (is depended, of course,

on how much of the DOD’s $7-8 billion of RDT&E money is considered

“research.” Nichols has pointed out16 that the DOD share of federal support for university research went from 47 percent in 1955 to 14 percent in

1971, while HEW’s share grew from 19 percent to 45 percent, and NSF’s

from 5 percent to 18 percent.

So violent was the reaction that Deputy Secretary of Defense Packard

had to repudiate his DDR&E, writing to Senator Mansfield:17

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ere is absolutely no question that the Department will comply

fully with the law. I have directed all components to review critically all current and proposed research and development projects

and studies to ensure that they have a direct, apparent, and clearly

documented relationship to one or more specifically identified

military functions or operations. Any project or study which does

not fulfill the criterion of Section 203 will be terminated.

Congressman Daddario, head of the House Subcommittee on Space

and Astronautics, in his last term prior to resigning to run for Governor of

Connecticut, pointed out the dangers of this course of action:18

I fear that there exists today a very really danger that research in

the universities and elsewhere, now funded for defense appropriations and which should be continued in the national interest,

will be fatally disrupted by a mechanistic and legalistic application of the strictures of section 203. . . .

Congress must give urgent and immediate thought to arrangements that will identify and provide for the orderly, uninterrupted transfer and continuation of research adversely affected

by section 203, which should still be carried on in the national interest.

But the problem was not treated with urgency.

Senator Fulbright returned to the attack the following year.19 Noting

that he had been refused a copy of a study, he said was prepared for the

DOD by the Institute for Defense Analyses on the Tonkin Gulf incident,

as well as his continued irritation that the DOD was still letting contracts

on such subjects as “Soviet military policy” or “European security issues,” he

introduced a two-part amendment that, in his words, would:

First. Limit the Defense Department’s spending for research by

outside organizations on foreign affairs matters to not more than

the amount appropriated, or transferred by other agencies, to the

Department of State in the preceding fiscal year for such research; and

Second. Insure that congressional committees are given access to

Government-financed research studies carried out by private individuals or organizations unless “executive privilege” is invoked.

Senator Fulbright pointed out that, despite substantial budget cuts,

“e military is spending nearly 20 times as much on foreign affairs re276

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search as the agency assigned the primary responsibility for conduct of the

Nation’s foreign policy.

However, now that the primary objectives of all the years of pressure on

DOD’s “foreign affairs research” had been achieved, this represented but the

winding up of a campaign, as indicated by the following exchange between

Senator McIntyre of New Hampshire, who had chaired a subcommittee on

R&D of the Armed Services Committee, and Senator Fulbright:20

Mr. McIntyre

. . . e Defense Department’s foreign area research program has

always represented only a small part of its work on the behavioral

and social sciences. e great bulk of its effort has been expanded

in the areas of: first, human performance—studies of the performance of men under stress; second, manpower selection and

training—studies of the best methods for training men for various positions in the Armed Forces; and third, human factors engineering—studies to insure that military hardware is designed

for safe, efficient, and effective use under battlefield conditions.

e foreign area research budget of the department itself divided

into two components—foreign military security environments

and policy planning studies.

. . . e fiscal 1971 Defense Department budget included a request of $9.9 million for foreign area research. In light of the department’s reluctance to approve outright transfers of funds to the

State Department and in light of the policy expressed in section

203 of last year’s bill, the committee subjected this request to a

thorough, almost painstaking examination. As a result of this examination, it recommended a reduction of $3.1 million—over 30

percent—from the department’s proposed budget, brining it to a

level of $6.8 million. is reduction was directed primarily to work

in counterinsurgency operations and work proposed by the military services but deemed more appropriate either to the State Department or the International Security Affairs Office of the

Department of Defense. e remaining funds are earmarked for

projects which, while of interest to the State Department, bear a

clear relationship to the Defense Department’s own mission.

. . . As for the Defense Department itself, its foreign area research

budget now declined from $16.1 million in fiscal 1968 to a committee-recommended fiscal 1971 budget of $6.8 million, an overall reduction of 58 percent.

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I would like to ask my colleague, as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, what actions he has taken to increase State’s

own foreign area research budget in recent years, and just what

he feels has to be done by the Congress to get State moving in

this area?

Mr. Fulbright

. . . I do not know how to inspire the State Department to assert

its responsibility in this area. e State Department has not in recent years had very much influence in the budget process. Matters that are clearly within the State Department, such as the

exchange program, have been restrained very severely through

the budget and by action of the Appropriations Committee.

As a matter of fact, the Senator knows that all agencies other

than the Department of Defense have great difficulty when it

comes to getting money. . . . e State Department has had other

pressing budget problems and they have not tried very hard, apparently, to get more money for research. I have counseled that

they do so but there have been no effective results.

Mr. McIntyre

. . . e Senator just supported the amendment I offered, which

is an outgrowth of section 203, which is the application of the

relevancy test, which has given us quite a few problems in connection with the defense budget. is amendment is an attempt

to bring the National Science Foundation into this picture more

clearly as an institution solely devoted to research. When there

is budget stringency and a need to cut, the cut is too often at the

research end. is amendment points one direction in which we

have to go. But there have to be increases, too, in the research

budgets of other mission agencies. e State Department is one

of these.

It is said the Department of Defense is doing too much in research. e Department of Defense will meet that argument by

saying, “ose areas where we are carrying on research may well

go to the National Science Foundation and to the State Department, but we think these areas of research are important and

should be done, and no one else is now doing them.” So we will

need the Senator’s cooperation, as chairman of the Committee

on Foreign Relations, to bring about this reordering of research

within the Government today.

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Senator Fulbright then withdrew the first part of his amendment.

is appears as good a place as any to bring to a close this chronicle of

the DOD’s efforts to enlist social research in support of its overseas operational assignments. It is now time to look back and see what the broader

meaning of these events might be. But the stage might well be set by a

somewhat wry epilogue.

is is provided by still another report of the NAS/NRC committee

that, having published the report about social science research for the federal government in general and having experienced some turnover of its

membership, turned its attention back to the problem that originally led to

its creation: the DOD’s social science research program. After two more

years of deliberation and some drafting, it published another report, “Behavioral and Social Science Research in the Department of Defense: A

Framework for Management,” in February 1971. It is not necessary to dwell

in detail on its findings and its reasoning; suffice it to say that the nature of

the subtleties and sensitivities in social research overseas was recognized.

One area was that of the clash of values between the researcher and the

supporting agency, about which the report had this to say:

e most significant distinction among the categories of research

is that foreign military security—environments and policy—

planning research is inherently politically sensitive, while manpower research is not, although it, too, has had its controversial

projects. Indeed, research on man-machine relationships and

“human engineering” has an Orwellian tone, but by and large a

psychologist could work on problems of improving selection and

training choices through psychological testing without having to

confront possible conflicts between his own value system and the

value system implicit in the area of research. is is less true for

categories of security-environments and policy-planning studies. Regardless of questions of political sensitivity, much policyplanning research has to be done by and for the Department of

Defense because it deals with issues of strategy, force structure,

and budgets. The Department of Defense should not be foreclosed

from undertaking such research [emphasis added].

Another problem area was that of having applied research done in such

a way that basic knowledge could be applied to and influence real problems. e report’s words have a familiar ring:

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In the national security area, the methodology of social science

research now permits and warrants substantial funding for such

efforts as simulations of the operational environments that policy makers may posit as constituting the range of possibilities for

which the nation must be prepared. Computer-based simulation

studies on a large scale are likely to be expensive. ey may be

used either for fundamental research or for engineering development, and it is particularly difficult in the social sciences to

draw a dividing line between different stages of research and development. But, under whatever label, they constitute a qualitatively different mode of behavioral research than is encompassed

by the traditional expectations of many foreign-affairs practitioners, who believe that the social sciences can provide little or

nothing beyond humanistic, individual, historical research. e

limits of utility on “engineering development studies” in the behavioral and social science areas of Department of Defense research are not yet known with any precision. However, it is clear

that those limits have not been approached and that an adequate

effort to develop the engineering side of the behavioral and social science research has not yet been undertaken. e potential

for such work is perhaps especially great in the area of manpower

research (psychological testing mechanisms, for example), but it

also exists in the policy-planning and foreign-area spheres.

Among the recommendations were the following:

. . . e Department of Defense should actively seek the transfer

of responsibility for the support and management of foreign area

research, and it should strongly endorse the creation of a government-wide institutional structure—to which it would have

access and in which it would have a chance to voice its informational needs—in which this responsibility should be logged.

. . . e national security agencies jointly establish a task force on

social and behavioral science research priorities in the area of national security policy.

. . . e Department of Defense, in order to bring about a more

effective managerial relationship between the producers and consumers of research:

. . . provide funds for retrospective studies in the social and behavioral sciences designed to establish the relationship, if any, between basic research and programmatically useful results.

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. . . allocate funds for evaluative studies of on-going programs

that allow for the questioning of policy assumptions and the proposal of programs alternative to those under analysis, in order to

suggest how programs might be modified in the future.

And so, despite the subtle differences in context and appreciation of

the problems, it would seem that plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. e

lessons gained through eight years of trying to do what was recommended

anew had, apparently, not yet sunk in.

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PART V

REFLECTIONS

Chapter 22

“What Have You Learned”

During the Camelot hearings of the Fascell subcommittee, Congressman

Frelinghuysen asked:1 “What have you learned as a result of your experience

which has resulted in the termination of the project?” e only answer I

could give him at the time was the immediately obvious and superficial one:

we had confirmed our suspicion that the Army’s approach to social research

on the problem of revolutionary change would not work and, since the

DOD still felt it needed the knowledge and data that the research sought,

we would have to find another, more subtle way to get the job done. is

was, of course, not a satisfactory answer for Congress as they conveyed by

their subsequent action in cutting the budget for this kind of work.

e Camelot experience represented but the beginning of learning. It

led to experimentation with various approaches to the research and with diverse institutional arrangements for its support. With all that under our

belts, it is possible to answer the congressman’s question with more insight.

To state the conclusion first, it is roughly as follows: in our culture, government support of social research to help government’s own ends must be

approached with circumspection, great selectivity, limited purposes, and

careful attention to the potential effects of the very performance of the research, as well as the results, on the researchers, the objects of the research,

and the general public.

It can be argued that Congress had known this all along, and that the

proposition was stated in different words at the time of Camelot. But the

expression then was essentially a reaction to particular events. It referred

explicitly to the DOD, and it was stated in terms of propriety. It is my contention at this juncture that the lesson has wider application. If the reasons

for the problems and ultimate failure of the DOD program can be explained by factors more universal than those particular to the setting of an

unpopular war in unfamiliar lands then those factors should be identifiable

in other situations. If they are, then social research in those situations may

fare about as well (or as poorly) as did the DOD’s social research efforts in

its particular problem area.

It appears to me now that the key question is not the propriety of work

undertaken by a particular agency, but rather the feasibility of this kind of

work in the social and cultural setting of government trying to get its job

done in the public eye. It is a matter of how the parties to the research con285
tract interact and of the effect of their interaction on the subjects of research and on outside observers. Let us explore their motivations from the

vantage point of all that has passed.

To perform effective research, the social scientist would like to keep

the situation he is studying fluid but under careful control. He wants, ideally, to be able to examine all the important variables of the problem, keeping most of them fairly constant while others are varied systematically, and

data on their effects and interactions are carefully recorded. at is, he

would like to change some variables (here, conditions of a social group),

while others remain about the same, so that the effect of such changes can

be observed and analyzed in a systematic way. From the scientist’s viewpoint, this means that a social program should not “gel” very early. In fact,

the initial purpose of his research is also to ascertain the direction in which

a social program should be molded and guided before it is allowed to assume immutable characteristics.

e bureaucrat, on the other hand, has a job to do with operational objectives that, however defined, are normally viewed by him as clear and

straightforward. e task may be educating people, or raising them from

poverty, or helping them form economic institutions to create jobs, or helping them form quasi-political institutions to deal with the more formal elements of government. e achievements are likely to be measured as

concrete outputs; so many children in school; so many curriculum changes;

so many jobs; or so many neighborhood associations. Whether the children become educated or the jobs are “satisfying” takes too long to determine and is left for the next generation to judge.

While the program director wants to keep his “options” open at the beginning, this is not so much for the purpose of understanding the subjects’

responses thoroughly and adapting the program to them, as it is to help ascertain the overt signs of potential success—public acceptance and the accommodation of all the various political, economic, and bureaucratic interests

involved. Once the bureaucrat sees his path through this essentially political jungle, he wants to fix the program and change it as little as possible.

Each undertaking within the program represents a commitment of prestige

and money on the part of the bureaucracy in a visible arena. Changing the

program can easily be read by the bureaucrat’s political superiors and by the

public as a sign that the bureaucrat does not know what he is doing. In many

cases, there will have been, and may continue to be, vocal opposition to the

program, the effect of which is to cause the bureaucrat responsible for its

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implementation to fix its dimensions and parameters even more rigidly than

he might otherwise have been moved to do.

us, the ultimate desiderata of the researcher and the bureaucrat diverge from the beginning. e researcher wants to be able to design and

mold a social experiment so that its results can help design a better social

action program. e bureaucrat wants to get a job done, where that job is

likely to have been defined rather vaguely by the instruments of society at

large, and more precisely by himself and his colleagues. ese divergent motivations lead to clashes over matters revolving around timing and publicity. e bureaucrat has only so much time before he must undergo the usual

tests of bureaucratic success. e researcher, on the other hand, wants his research and data gathering to be paced by the changes in behavior and attitudes of the subject population. us, each of the participants has his critical

milestone. Events in the bureaucrat’s life are tied to budget cycles and electoral cycles, whereas events in the researchers life are tied to the evolutionary periods of attitudes and social institutions. e lengths of the respective

periods can differ by years or decades.

Among the main personal satisfactions for the researcher, other than

that in a job well done, are the fame and fortune that arise from making his

work known and having it recognized by his colleagues. It is important for

knowledge and for future programs that the current program’s vicissitudes,

the false starts and their effects, and the fortunate or unfortunate chance

variables be made a part of this published record. Since he is dealing with

a society and all its interacting segments, some of these variables involve the

people guiding the program as well as those affected by it. To the bureaucrat, publication of such information is anathema. His budget and his success lie not with his mistakes or with his learning processes, but with his

ultimate achievements. Exposure of his intermediate operations, especially

before his results are made apparent, exposes him to scandal in the press,

questioning by Congress, the displeasure of his superiors, and the machinations of his rivals. He is therefore motivated to suppress the material that

is the scientist’s nourishment.

e disparate motivations interact strongly with the events under study.

While the researcher’s ultimate objective is to affect them, the best usages

of science require him to observe them first. e operator, on the other

hand, wants to affect events immediately, and once he has found the means

to do so he wants to sustain their momentum. In some situations, such as

those that have been the subject of this book, the events, once initiated, may

be beyond anyone’s control, and they may move too fast for careful obser-
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vation. Moreover, as they become more important and sensitive, observation becomes more difficult because access to the population and the key

players is reduced. is happens partly for lack of time, but primarily because the stress of the events themselves makes both population and bureaucracy less willing to subject themselves to examination and less able to

perceive what is happening and to articulate their reactions clearly. e bureaucracy’s need for secrecy intensifies while it evaluates the effects of the

events, both on its own position and efforts and on the population that simultaneously serves and tries to lead.

If the bureaucracy controls access to the so-called target population by

virtue of its sponsorship of the research, it is able to enforce its need for

privacy or secrecy easily by denial of that access. In such circumstances, systematic collection of data becomes difficult, if not impossible, and the research is forced into an increasingly unscientific mode. e less rigorous

and carefully controlled the research becomes, and the less coherent and

definitive the data, the more the researcher is forced to make intuitive judgments to fill the gaps if he is not to give up altogether (and the impulse to

keep going, when the affairs under study are of vital concern, is difficult to

resist). But when the researcher, who is really an observer on the outside

looking in, makes intuitive judgments instead of reaching conclusions based

on data, these judgments place him in conflict with the bureaucrat, who is

really in control of the relationship and whose own judgments are the ones

that lead to action and (he believes) control his future. e researcher thus

finds himself increasingly less able to influence events and to achieve his

own professional objectives. If he becomes sufficiently frustrated, he will

turn on the bureaucrat in a mood of disaffection and criticism. And, of

course, the bureaucrat will fight back, using the ultimate sanction—withdrawal of sponsorship and money.

All these problems are, however, merely reflections of something more

basic—they are rooted in fundamental clashes of values among the participants in the drama of social research. Myrdal has pointed out that social research is not value-free.2 In the case of government supporting social

research to help achieve its ends, each of the participants has his own value

system. e researchers adhere to a set of premises about the world. (ese

were illustrated for the beginning of the events described in chapter 3). e

government must share these premises if it wants to employ the researchers

and if the latter are to be willing to work for that government. In finer detail, the members of the government bureaucracy must share values with its

leaders—the president and his appointees—if the president expects the bu-
reaucracy to carry out his instructions effectively. e frustration of President

Kennedy with the State Department was an illustration of the consequences

when such a coincidence of values fails to exist within the executive branch.3

e population being studied must also share premises and values with researchers (or at the very least they must feel neutrally about any differences)

or they will not respond to the researchers as the latter go about their business

of gathering information about the population. Suspicion on this point led

South Vietnamese officialdom to control carefully the American researchers’

access to particular prisoners; and there was, in turn, suspicion on the part of

at least some American researchers that respondents were telling them only

what the respondents thought the researchers wanted to hear. is suspicion

was a tacit recognition that ideas of “objective” inquiry play a different role in

Vietnamese and the other Eastern cultures than they do in our own.

A high-level ai government official once asked me why American

anthropologists were so interested in the hill tribes on the fringes of his

country. If they came to ailand for research, why did they not study the

ai (i.e., the dominant ethnic group)? No amount of explanation of the inherent interest these anthropologists had in learning about primitive and

disappearing cultures would quell his suspicion that the tribesman were

being examined to satisfy ulterior purposes in the control of ailand’s border areas. It also emerged in this conversation, interestingly enough, that

study of the ai culture might lead to data proving the ai ancestory of

peoples in neighboring countries; those countries had been formed, it was

told, in part by the accretion of provinces striped from ailand by the

French and the British. is proof of their ai origins could support hopes

of reconquest, just as study of the hill tribes could fuel suspicion of further

colonialist adventures. e basic idea of performing research primarily to

know, taken for granted by the Americans, was alien to local officialdom. Of

course, that officialdom had occasions to learn of policy recommendations

made by the “objective” researchers that were inimical to its own interest—

for example, that rebellious hill tribes could be “pacified” by changing ai

law to accommodate the swidden agricultural and other customs of the hill

tribes, instead of forcing the tribes to accommodate to laws not written

with them in mind. Even the people being studied assumed that the researchers were there with some ulterior purpose, and indeed the researchers

often had to earn their welcome by demonstrating support for the people

they worked with if they became involved, by their very presence, in issues

affecting those people. e Americans’ desire to be wanted and helpful

against injustice fell right in with these local purposes.

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ese examples illustrate the need for consonance or reconciliation of

values among the major participants in social research. Of course, the government bureaucracy, the researchers, and the population being studied are

the ones directly involved in the issues. But the majority of the public also

has values, premises, and points of view. Although this public is composed

of many diverse elements, it is probably a safe generalization that is tolerant of “long-hair” stuff, such as social research, if that research does not

challenge its ideas of propriety, thrift, and suspicion of the obscure or dishonest in government and its activities. Should such a challenge arise, the

press is ever ready to expose it and Congress to act by cutting off funds and

otherwise prohibiting the activity. ere will be no outcry of opposition to

reduction of research, especially social research, by the general public.

is is not to imply that any of these responses are “wrong” or unjustified. Again, Myrdal4 has made the point that values operate on two levels.

One is a “higher” level that in our society specifies what is “right” and

“wrong” in the view of the vast majority of the people—for example, in our

society, adherence to the Ten Commandments can be considered “right”

and coercion is “wrong.” Most people adhere to values at this level more

when acting or reacting as part of a group than as individuals. en there

is a lower, or “practical” level, where individuals reconcile their sometimesunhappy daily interactions with their fellows for personal interest and gain

with the higher level of social objectives that continues to hold the lure of

ultimate attainment. When events are important enough to shake people

out of their daily interests and to make them feel that some group is violating the higher values, the response is natural to want to call those violators to account; there is likely even to be a certain unconscious assuagement

of conscience in this, relating to their earlier support or tolerance of the undesirable behavior. As we have seen in connection with the Vietnam War,

when members of the press and the university community of social scientists began to turn against the war, those performing social research for the

government in connection with the war came, to them, to acquire the same

sinister qualities and motives that were ascribed to the government, especially to the U.S. military that was actively prosecuting the war.

Further, I have noted earlier that in social research on substantive questions a phenomenon akin to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle appears

to operate. e fact and means of measurement and observation affect and

change the phenomena being observed and all the participants. Even if they

begin supporting the government view, the researchers will elicit facts and

insights and will form new viewpoints that lead them to understand the

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government approach and programs differently and, quite likely, to want

to change them. e government bureaucracy will, in the fashion of all bureaucracies, recoil defensively. e population affected by the government

programs—the subjects of the research—will become sensitized to the issues by the very fact of the research. at population’s outlook and its responses will change; and these changes will become more widely known

and will affect the more general public, whose views and tolerance will

change as well. e more fundamental the issue, the more likely that these

changes will take place. e closer to the problems of human survival and

dignity the issues of concern, the more profound and emotionally charged

the changes are likely to be. e longer the research takes, the more likely

that these changes will occur before it is completed. For reasons such as

these, even if government initiates the alliance with science, that alliance is

unlikely to continue amicably until the task is done.

Seen in this light, the events, conflicts, and outcome of the Defense

Department’s attempt to use social research to help it grapple with the

problems of revolutionary warfare on a world-wide scale are easy to understand. Viewed in retrospect, Camelot and the subsequent storms were

simply the shocks of adjustment as stresses were relieved and the entire intricate, delicate structure of relationships took on a new form.*

All of this is, of course, speculative theorizing that cannot be “proved”

with the evidence I have available. But it seems to me to meet the test of

reasonableness, and it appears to be supported by extensive and detailed

observations made in the course of the program we have been examining

here. If there is more general value to those observations, the conclusions

derived from them should apply to other social research programs that have

been of interest to and supported by the government. While social research

is not my field and I claim no special expertise in its history or applications,

my meager readings suggest that this wider relevance does indeed exist. It

seems appropriate to close with a few observations as to why I believe this

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* It is worth interjecting at this point that this kind of conflict between the value systems of “players”

and observers still takes place (in 2013) during this period of conflict in the world of Islam that spills

over to affect the more politically settled and democratic parts of North America and Europe and parts

of the Asian Far East. In the current case, there has been little publicity about the results or impact of

the Minerva Initiative mentioned earlier, but the same clash of values between “thinkers” and “doers”

can be seen between those in government who are, for example, trying to deal with the string of wars

in the Middle East and the punditry that plays the role of the outside observers—the “researchers” of

Camelot days. An obvious area where this operates, for example, is in connection with the role of women

in parts of Islamic society that are trying to recapture the ancient glory of Islam by rebelling against

Western notions of the “equal” role women should play in society, and many other such areas can be

identified as the “jihadist” conflicts spill over into Western societies.
is so. Others may find that it is a worthy subject of research to test more rigorously the hypothesis I have tried to convey.

It is readily observed, first, that the kinds of phenomena encountered

during the DOD’s overseas research efforts in Southeast Asia were not

unique to that program or the situation. Sommer5 has written of the difficulties of performing field research in such areas as the black ghetto. ey

include the inability of the researcher, especially if he is white, to overcome

his obvious “separateness” from the group being studied; the aversion of

both observer and observed to the “prying and spying” that attends the

gathering of social data; fear of observing illicit behavior; lack of patience;

and personal danger and discomfort—in short, all the problems encountered by the DOD’s researchers in Vietnam and elsewhere, even apart from

the added difficulties imposed by interactions with officialdom. As to the

latter, Campbell6 has observed in connection with such events as the Connecticut clampdown on speeding in 1955 to reduce highway deaths, that:

. . . . given the discrepancy between promise and possibility, most

administrators wisely prefer to limit evaluations to those the outcomes of which they can control, particularly insofar as published

outcomes or press releases are concerned.

Moynihan confesses that “I have been guilty of optimism about the use

of knowledge gained through social science in the management of public

affairs.”7 He points out that, in the first half of the twentieth century:

Social science was asked. . . . to attest to the equality of the races;

to legitimize the demand of wage workers under capitalism to

organize and bargain collectively; to provide measures of intellectual worth so that applications for college admissions and such

might be judged by objective criteria; to prescribe measures for a

high-level functioning of the economy. All these it did.

But, he asserts, the “old symbiotic relations” between social scientists

and social activists are breaking down over the problems of implementation.

He also notes that:

e methodology [of social science] is now quite beyond the

comprehension of non-social scientists. In particular, it is beyond

the ken of the lawyer class that tends to wield the levers of power

in American government.

is all sounds familiar. It is reinforced by all the signs of malaise in the

partnership between social science and government on the domestic scene

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The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy
brought out in a lengthy 1967 staff study, “e Use of Social Research in

Federal Domestic Programs,” for the House Committee on Government

Operations.8

e more recent signs of disaster or indifference emerging from value

clashes in government-supported social research and experimentation are legion. e affair of the Blackstone Rangers in Chicago,9 the failure of the

Clark Plan10 for restructuring the District of Columbia school system, and the

repudiation by the president of the recommendations of his commissions on

pornography11 and population12 provide examples of the heat that can be generated when the social scientist espouses a view in his work that is not shared

by the public or the government that supported the work. e failure of powerful research results to influence institutions when the findings challenge

established values is illustrated by two court decisions (in California and the

District of Columbia) requiring equal taxation for and distribution of educational funds among jurisdictions13, 14 in the face of the Coleman findings15

that educational success and funding are not correlated; and by the failure of

the results of the New Jersey income tax experiment16 to change national and

state policies opposed to financial support for the working poor.

ese are all questions that go to the very heart of the deep social ills

that plague modern American society.* If they cannot be studied with government support or, if when they are studied the results are ignored or rejected, how can the social scientists who have tried to rationalize the issue

be more effective in helping the government and the public to recognize the

true nature of the phenomena and seek solutions that appear to be more in

keeping with the facts that might emerge from study? Or, stated otherwise,

are there ways in which social scientists and government can undertake investigations to shed light on these complex questions so that society can

gain the resulting knowledge, even though the findings may challenge the

prevailing values? Experience has shown that there may be some ways.

First, the results of the DOD’s efforts, and the burgeoning of evaluational research in connection with government programs that are avowedly

experiments, show that where clash of values is not a severe problem social

scientists can be employed to design experiments and evaluate the results.

A measure of social experimentation is coming to be accepted. Such things

as the New Jersey income tax experiment, experiments with educational

293

Chapter 22 • “What Have You Learned”

* And the reader will be able to judge how those social ills have changed through the years even as the

general statement continues to hold true.
contractors who are willing to accept the “payment for performance” principle for teaching children to read, and health insurance experiments all

show that in areas where society is willing to countenance some slight departure from the norms—where no one’s ox is particularly being gored—

social scientists can help design the experiments and evaluate the results.

But even here, caution is necessary. We know that members of the public cannot be manipulated just to collect objective scientific information

even if the results are obviously important to the public at large. It is now

recognized as an ethical principle that some type of informed consent is

necessary before people should be involved in an experimental manipulation. Moreover, the results may or may not be used, depending on the circumstances and motivations of those involved, as we in the DOD learned

during the Program Impact Assessment effort. A 1970 report on evaluation

in the federal domestic programs17 points out that “e recent literature is

unanimous in announcing the general failure of evaluation to affect decision making in a significant way.”

Submerged value clashes can rise to the surface, or early results can

stimulate them. A good recent example came to light when a group of Stanford Research Institute (SRI) contracts to evaluate preschool education

programs were suspended by HEW because SRI was accused by two young

lawyers of wasting the $12 million involved.18 One defense that was given

against this charge, to the effect that since “e government was consciously

investing in building up a capability in this field. . . . there might well have

been some waste . . . as there was in the early days of defense contracting,”

can be viewed in juxtaposition with the remark made by the lawyers that the

$12 million “could have financed a whole class of students through Stanford.” Large expenditures for research, with a substantial fraction “wasted”

in learning a new area, are still more likely to be overlooked in the physical

than in the social science arenas.

Second, the social scientist can contribute as a consultant; he can give

his knowledge to government administrators and planners directly or

through advisory committees. Many have been effective in such roles. But

they must recognize that situations may arise in which their greatest contribution to society may be the publicity attending their resignation from

such positions. e conflicts of values and objectives can obviously work in

the person-to-person consulting relationship as well, and the one who could

continue to be heard (and paid) must have a high frustration tolerance insofar as the following of his advice is concerned.

294

The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy
295

Chapter 22 • “What Have You Learned”

e social scientist can, as an alternative, join the government as an administrator at least for a time. He can then use his knowledge gained from

his past research to try to “move the system” and have some of his ideas implemented. is has the greatest advantage that he need not depend on a

government-to-scientist relationship or on the vicissitudes of sponsored research to make the attempt. But he will have to recognize at the outset that,

even as a member of the bureaucracy—indeed, particularly as a member of

the bureaucracy—he will face the same constraints that he would have faced

as a researcher trying to work under the sponsorship of that bureaucracy or

the constraints faced by any other government official trying to get a job

done. He will, again, have to have a very high tolerance for frustration (or,

if one will, patience), and temper his commitment to the ideal with satisfaction about what he finds possible, which is likely to be very much less

than he had initially hoped for. He will have to give up being a scientist

and behave like an administrator.19 Eventually, the constraints and the environment will impose on him the values and outlook of the bureaucracy.

In addition, the intellectual capital he brought with him to the government

will become stale, outdated, and obsolescent; he will find himself routinely

administering the few good program ideas he was able to have accepted

without disasters imposed by internal bureaucratic conflicts or the curiosity and sensation seeking of the press. And then it will be time for him to

leave the government.

If the social scientist explicitly wants to undertake extensive research on

the key social issues of the day, he had best do so with private sponsorship.

is is not to say that he would always be successful, even then. But the

constraints and conflicts of sponsorship will be smaller; he will not have to

face accountability for using public funds for purposes the public does not

approve. He will run less risk (but, nevertheless, some risk) of being accused

by the subjects of his research of being the representative of their oppressors. And he will be in a better position to be responsive to and concerned

only about the demands of his interests, his profession, and his peers. Of

course, his impact on society may still be small, distant, or irrelevant. But to

the extent that the flow and evolution of the ideas of the age can have an

impact on what people believe and on what government does, he will, by

having eschewed government sponsorship, be in a position to press the logic

of his findings at least as effectively as he could from the base of government sponsorship and probably more effectively.

And so, I am led to the final thought deriving from the experiences described in this book. As they did in the context of those experiences, the
community of social science is likely to urge and has urged that increased

government support of research on the great social problems of the day.

With due recognition for the government’s need to collect data to help it

plan and evaluate the social programs it is expected to undertake, I have

reached the conclusion, nevertheless, that the opposite of the social scientists’ recommendation is in order. e research is needed, without question.

Some of it, especially in the evaluation area, is necessary and feasible for

government to sponsor. Beyond this, its support should be subject to the

economic and political laws of the intellectual marketplace. And the government should do less, not more, to influence the workings of that marketplace. It should support less, not more, research into the workings of

society. It should select that which it does support carefully, attending only

to those ideas and objectives finding ready acceptance elsewhere. It will find

soon enough that it is, itself, subject to the effects and influences of research

on social problems performed outside its purview. In the area of learning

about societies, their values, and their behavior, I now believe that government can be most effective if it follows, rather than leads.*

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The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy

* And, at this distance from the events, some additional thoughts come to mind.

e first is, that since much of what we had hoped to learn in the program that spawned Project

Camelot could fall under the aegis of the intelligence agencies, perhaps it would be useful to task those

agencies with eliciting those data and judgments. Likely this is done—I have been far enough removed

from such activities that I have no way to confirm or deny this, but a Google search for social data

rarely comes up dry, and those data must come from somewhere, both inside and outside government.

A second thought is that, since the time of Camelot, the use of polling to anticipate how populations

will respond to government actions has become routine and extensive. One hopes that social scientists

somewhere are examining how poll results correlate with and emerge from a population’s value system

and its culture; how that relationship interacts with those of the leaders of government and what they

hope to accomplish by the actions they take; and how they evaluate their success or failure.

And finally, the reader should not think that bureaucratic infighting of the kind described here is a

thing of the past. We can expect such infighting to go on forever since it represents a quest for commanding organizational positions and control of budgets, people, and actions. Recent examples—ironically, still involving the State and Defense Departments—emerge from the wars in Iraq and

Afghanistan. In his book, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, (New York: Knopf, 2006) e Washington

Post reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaran describes in detail the arguments between Ambassador Bremer

and the U.S. military commanders about “deBaathification”—eliminating from the Iraqi government

all elements of the Saddam Hussein regime. is process included disbanding the Iraqi army, which

threw many thousands of trained, armed men into the civilian economy with no sources of income and

no work for them to do. e results of this action are well known as the history of what amounted to a

brutal civil war in the country and an extension of the need to extend the deployment of American

troops far longer than had initially been anticipated. Another argument of this kind involved the use

of private security contractors to protect American civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan (see

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/05/AR2007100500865.html). is

activity led to an international furor over what appeared to be random killings of civilians by members

of the Blackwater USA firm (who, ironically, included many former U.S. servicemen, especially from

the Special Forces). As noted earlier, the context may change, but bureaucratic behavior, being an extension of the culture that spawns it, changes only in detail not in character.
References

Foreword

1 Alexander Leighton, Human Relations in a Changing World:

Observations on the Uses of the Social Sciences (New York: E. P. Dutton

and Company, 1949), p. 128.

2 We also benefited greatly from an oral history conducted by two

scientists working with the U.S. Marine Corps. Sheldon, Bob, and

Yuna Wong, “Military Operations Research Society (MORS) Oral

History Project Interview of Mr. Seymour J. Deitchman,” Military

Operations Research 15:2, 2010, pp. 61-106.

3 Tim Ingold, “Introduction to Culture,” Companion Encyclopedia of

Anthropology, T. Ingold, ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 329-49.

Chapter 1

1 “Two Communist Manifestos.” Texts of statement issued in the name

of World Communist Leaders Meeting in November 1960 and of an

address by Premier Khrushchev on January 6, 1961, e Washington

Center of Foreign Policy Research and e Johns Hopkins University,

pp. 51-2.

2 Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., A ousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the

White House (Cambridge: e Riverside Press, 1965), pp. 358-78.

3 Originally published as an editorial. “e Differences Between

Comrade Togliatti and Us,” Peking People’s Daily, December 31, 1962.

Reprinted in English in The Washington Post, January 3, 1963.

4 Remarks of Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara at the Annual

George C. Marshall Memorial Dinner, Association of the United

States Army, October 10, 1962.

5 e Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, John F. Kennedy:

1962 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1963).

6 W. Rostow, “Address to the Graduating Class,” United States Army

Special Warfare Center, June 28, 1961. Printed in the Congressional

Record Vol. 108, p. A-6013, August 6, 1962.

297
7 Hearing before the Department of Defense Subcommittee of the

Committee on Appropriations for 1963, House of Representatives,

87th Congress, 2d Session, Part 2, pp. 49-50.

8 Ibid.

9 LtCol G. J. Gillert Jr., “Counterinsurgency,” Military Review, April

1965.

10 See, for example, U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on Foreign

Relations, Laos, April 1971. A staff report prepared for the

Subcommittee on U.S. Security and Commitments Abroad

(Washington DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1971).

11 Gillert, p. 27.

12 e New York Times, p. 28, May 6, 1962; and p. 1, May 13, 1962.

13 Composite report of the President’s Committee to Study the

Military Assistance Program, W. H. Draper, chairman, August 17,

1959.

14 Jesse Orlansky, e State of Research on Internal War, Institute for

Defense Analyses Research Paper P-565, August 1970.

Chapter 2

1 “Behavioral Sciences and the National Security,” Report No. 4 with

Part IX of the Hearings on Winning the Cold War: e U.S.

Ideological Offensive, prepared by the House of Representatives

Subcommittee on International Organizations and Movements of the

Committee on Foreign Affairs, pp. 68-72, December 6, 1965.

2 Charles W. Bray, “Toward a Technology of Human Behavior for

Defense Use,” American Psychologist Vol. 17, pp. 527-41, 1962.

3 Ithiel de Sola Pool, A. J. Coale, W. P. Davison, H. Eckstein, K. Knorr,

V. V. McRae, L. W. Pye, T. C. Schelling, and W. Schramm, Social

Science Research and National Security, prepared by the Research Group

in Psychology and the Social Sciences, Washington, DC: Smithsonian

Institution, commissioned by the U.S. Office of Naval Research,

Contract No. 1354(18), Task Number NR 170-379, March 5, 1963.

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The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy
Chapter 3

1 U.S. Department of State, A reat to the Peace—North Vietnam’s

Effort To Conquer South Vietnam, 2 parts, Department of State

Publication 7308, December 1961.

2 George A. Carver Jr., “e Faceless Viet Cong,” Foreign Affairs Vol.

44, No. 3, p. 347, April 1966.

3 See, for example, Hans Morganthau, “A Political eory of Foreign

Aid,” American Political Science Review Vol. 56, pp. 301-9, June 1962.

4 “Ethical Standards of Psychologists,” e American Psychologist,

January 1963. Amended by the APA Council of Representatives in

September 1965 and December 1972.

Chapter 4

1 Gene M. Lyons, e Uneasy Partnership, Russell Sage Foundation,

p. 151, 1969.

Chapter 5

1 Helen S. Milton, “Cost-of-Research Index, 1920-1970,” Operations

Research Vol. 20, No. 1, pp. 1-18, January-February 1972.

2 U.S. Departments of State, Justice, and Commerce, and the Judiciary,

and Related Agencies Appropriations for 1965, hearings before a

Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, House of

Representatives, 88th Congress, 2d Session, U.S. Government Printing

Office, 1964.

3 U.S. Statistical Abstract (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing

Office, 1970), p. 526.

4 Department of Defense Appropriations, Hearing, Armed Services

Committee, U.S. Senate, S201-18 13 (Washington, DC: U.S.

Government Printing Office, April 5, 1972), 3219-3349.

5 Much of the material about Project Agile gathered by the Students

for a Democratic Society is also contained in Michael T. Klare, War

Without End: American Planning for the Next Vietnams (New York:

Vintage Books, 1972).

299

References
Chapter 6

1 Lyons, p. 188.

2 Chester L. Cooper, e Lost Crusade: America in Vietnam (New York:

Dodd, Mead & Company, 1970), p. 255.

Chapter 7

1 Subcommittee on International Organizations and Movements,

Department of Defense Directive Number 5129.22, promulgating the

Defense Science Board Charter, p. 190, April 10, 1961.

2 N. Reingold (ed.), Science in the Nineteenth Century—A Documentary

History (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), p. 200.

Chapter 8

1 Jay W. Forrester, Urban Dynamics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,

1969).

Chapter 9

1 Subcommittee on International Organizations and Movements, p. 20.

Chapter 10

1 e New York Times, p. 1, April 14, 1966.

Chapter 11

1 “Science and the Citizen,” Scientific American Vol. 225, No. 5, p. 45,

May 1971.

2 Subcommittee on International Organizations and Movements, pp.

51-4.

3 Ibid., pp. 9R-10R.

4 John Walsh, “Social Sciences Cancellation of Project Camelot after

Row in Chile Brings Research under Scrutiny,” Science Vol. 150, p.

1211, September 10, 1965; and pp. 1429-31, December 10, 1965.

5 “Internal War Potential (Estimate),” Punch, p. 8, July 7, 1965.

6 e Washington Star, July 8, 1965.

300

The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy
7 For a discussion of the TAT, see, O. K. Buros (ed.), e Fifth Mental

Measurements Yearbook (Highland Park, NJ: e Gryphon Press, 1959),

pp. 301-13.

Chapter 12

1 Department of Defense Appropriations for FY 1966, report of the

Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, House of

Representatives, 89th Congress, 1st Session, U.S. Government Printing

Office, p. 50.

2 “e Behavioral Sciences and the Federal Government,” Advisory

Committee on Government Programs in the Behavioral Sciences,

National Research Council, National Academy of Sciences, Publication

No. 1680, Washington, DC, 1968.

3 “Behavioral and Social Science Research in the Department of

Defense—A Framework for Management,” Advisory Committee on

the Management of Behavioral Science Research in the Department of

Defense, National Research Council, National Academy of Sciences,

Washington, DC, 1971.

4 Lyons.

Chapter 13

1 Subcommittee on International Organizations and Movements,

p. 107.

2 Ibid.

Chapter 14

1 Subcommittee on International Organizations and Movements,

p. 1R.

2 Ibid., p. 5R.

3 Ibid., p. 17.

4 Ibid., p. 8R.

5 Ibid., pp. 79-80.

6 Ibid., pp. 92-4.

301

References
7 Defense Department Appropriations for FY 1966, p. 50.

8 Congressional Record, Senate, p. 27466ff, October 22, 1965.

9 Robert H. ouless, How to ink Straight (New York: Simon and

Schuster, 1947), p. 4.

10 See, for example, Congressional Record, Senate, pp. 23524-25, August

22, 1967; pp. 9980-85, April 18, 1968; pp. 10174-76, April 22, 1968;

and p. 18899, July 9, 1969.

11 Subcommittee on International Organizations and Movements,

p. 97.

12 “Federal Support of International Social Science and Behavioral

Research,” hearings before the Subcommittee on Government

Research of the Committee on Government Operations, United States

Senate, 89th Congress, 2d Session, June 27-28 and July 19-20, 1966,

U.S. Government Printing Office, p. 1, 1967.

13 Ibid., p. 14.

14 Ibid., p. 16.

15 See note 2, chapter 6.

16 e New York Times, p. 1, May 14, 1968.

17 e New York Times, p. 1, July 11, 1967; p. 42, July 12, 1967; Section

IV, p. 9, July 23, 1967; p. 2, August 3, 1967; and p. 3, August 4, 1967.

18 See, for example, Deborah Shapley, “Defense Research: e Names

Are Changed to Protect the Innocent,” Science Vol. 175, p. 866,

February 25, 1972.

19 Douglas Pike, Viet Cong: e Organization and Techniques of the

National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (Cambridge, MA: MIT

Press, 1966).

20 Congressional Record, Senate, p. 9985, April 18, 1968.

21 Ibid.

22 Congressional Record, Senate, p. 18903, July 9, 1969.

302

The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy
303

References

Chapter 15

1 Irving Louis Horowitz, “e Life and Death of Project Camelot,”

Transaction Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 3-7 and 44-7, November-December 1965.

2 Subcommittee on Government Research, p. 239ff.

3 Irving Louis Horowitz (ed.), e Rise and Fall of Project Camelot:

Studies in the Relationship between Social Science and Practical Politics

(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967). e revised edition from 1974

also contains the passages discussed in this book.

4 Kalman H. Silvert, “American Academic Ethics and Social Research

Abroad,” American Universities Field Staff, Reports Service, West

Coast/South America Series, Vol. XII, No. 3 (KHS-1-65), July 1965.

5 Subcommittee on Government Research, p. 225ff.

6 Ibid., p. 201.

7 Subcommittee on International Organizations and Movements, p. 9R.

8 Horowitz, Trans-action, p. 44.

9 Ibid., p. 47.

10 Robert A. Nisbet, “Project Camelot: an Autopsy,” e Public Interest,

p. 52, Fall 1966.

11 e Washington Star, September 12, 1965.

12 Michael T. Klare, “Counterinsurgency’s Proving Ground,” e

Nation, pp. 527-28, April 26, 1971.

13 Ralph L. Beals, Politics of Social Research—An Inquiry into the Ethics

and Responsibilities of Social Scientists (Chicago, IL: Aldine Publishing

Company, 1969), pp. 187-8 and 197-8.

14 Ibid., pp. 193-4.

15 e Washington Post, p. A-6, April 21, 1967.

16 See, for example, “e Politicization of the Professions,” The

Humanist, pp. 26-31, September-October 1971; Science Vol. 176, p. 496,

May 5, 1972; and Joseph Haberer, “Politicization in Science,” Science

Vol. 178, pp. 713-23, November 17, 1972.
17 Arnold ackray, “Reflections on the Decline of Science in America

and on Some of Its Causes,” Science Vol. 173, pp. 27-31, July 2, 1971.

18 Al DeGrazia, “Government and Science–An Editorial,” e

American Behavioral Scientist Vol. IX, No. I, p. 40, September 1965.

19 Congressional Record, Senate, pp. 1442-7, January 22, 1969.

Chapter 17

1 Department of Defense Appropriations for FY 1968, hearings before

Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, House of

Representatives, 90th Congress, 1st Session, Part 3, U.S. Government

Printing Office, p. 176.

2 Eric R. Wolf and Joseph G. Jorgensen, “Anthropology on the

Warpath in ailand,” New York Review of Books Vol. XV, No. 9, Part

III, pp. 26-35, November 19, 1970.

3 See, for example, Newsletter of the American Anthropological Association

Vol. 11, No. 7, p. 2, September 1970; Vol. 11, No. 8, p. 1, October 1970;

Vol. 12, No. 1, p. 2 and p. 9, January 1971; Vol. 12, No. 3, p. 1 and p. 11,

March 1971; Vol. 13, No. 1, pp. 1-4, January 1972; and Vol. 13, No. 2,

p. 1, February 1972.

4 Wolf and Jorgensen, Part II.

5 Ibid., Part III.

6 e Wall Street Journal, p. 1, November 18, 1971; The New York Times,

p. 79, November 21, 1971.

7 Congressional Record, Senate, p. 9984, April 18, 1968.

Chapter 18

1 Eugene J. Webb, Donald T. Campbell, Richard D. Schwartz, and Lee

Sechrest, Unobtrusive Measures: Non-reactive Research in the Social

Sciences (Chicago, IL: Rand McNally & Company, 1966).

2 President’s Task Force on International Development, “U.S. Foreign

Assistance in the 1970s: A New Approach,” March 4, 1970. Quoted in

U.S. Department of State Bulletin, pp. 447-67, April 6, 1970.

3 Informal communication from Eugene Webb, member of Program

Impact Assessment Scientific Advisory Panel, July 1973.

304

The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy
Chapter 19

1 Hadley Cantril, “A Study of Aspirations,” Scientific American Vol. 208,

No. 2, pp. 41-5, February 1963.

2 H. Wallace Sinaiko, “Foreign Language Training: An Investigation of

Research and Development for Vietnam,” Institute for Defense

Analyses Study S-232, March 1966.

3 Eugene J. Webb, “A Review of Social Science Research in Vietnam:

With Procedural Recommendations for Future Research in Insurgent

Settings,” Institute for Defense Analyses Research Paper P-450,

December 1968.

4 Charles Percy Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution

(Cambridge University Press, 1959).

Chapter 21

1 Department of Defense Appropriations for FY 1968, report of the

Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, 90th Congress,

1st Session, U.S. Government Printing Office, p. 57.

2 Department of Defense Appropriations for FY 1970, report of the

Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, 91st Congress,

1st Session, U.S. Government Printing Office, p. 81.

3 Irving Louis Horowitz, “Social Science Yogis and Military

Commissars,” Trans-action, pp. 29-35, May 1968.

4 The Behavioral Sciences and the Federal Government, Advisory

Committee on Government Programs in the Behavioral Sciences,

National Academy of Science, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968.

5 Department of Defense Appropriations for FY 1970, Senate

Appropriations Committee Report No. 91-607, 91st Congress, 1st

Session, U.S. Government Printing Office, p. 134.

6 Public Law 91-121, 91st Congress, S. 2546, p. 2, November 19, 1969.

7 Department of Defense Appropriations for FY 1970, report of the

Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, House of

Representatives, Report 91-522, U.S. Government Printing Office,

p. 46, September 1969.

305

References
8 Congressional Record, Senate, p. 13899, November 6, 1969.

9 Science and Technology Pocket Data Book, National Science Foundation,

NSF 73-3, January 1973.

10 Rodney W. Nichols, “Mission-Oriented R&D,” Science Vol. 172,

pp. 29-37, April 2, 1971.

11 Ibid., p. 29.

12 Congressional Record, Senate, p. 14971, November 25, 1969.

13 Quoted in the Congressional Record, Senate, p. 15207, December 1,

1969.

14 Congressional Record, Senate, p. 14971, November 25, 1969.

15 Ibid., p. 14969.

16 Nichols, p. 32.

17 Congressional Record, Senate, p. S-15929, December 6, 1969.

18 Congressional Record, House, p. H-12740, December 18, 1969.

19 Congressional Record, Senate, p. S-14568, August 28, 1970.

20 Ibid., pp. S-14569-70.

Chapter 22

1 Subcommittee on Organizations and Movements, p. 85.

2 Gunnar Myrdal, Objectivity in Social Research (New York: Pantheon

Books, 1969).

3 Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., A ousand Days (Boston, MA: Houghton

Mifflin Company, 1965), pp. 406-7.

4 Myrdal, pp. 16-17.

5 Robert Sommer, “Some Costs and Pitfalls in Field Research,” Social

Problems Vol. 19, pp. 162-66, 1971.

6 Donald T. Campbell, “Reforms as Experiments,” American

Psychologist Vol. 24, No. 4, p. 409, April 1969.

306

The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy
7 Daniel P. Moynihan, “Eliteland,” Psychology Today, pp. 35-37 and

pp. 66-70, September 1970.

8 “e Use of Social Research in Federal Domestic Programs,” staff

study for the Research and Technical Programs Subcommittee of the

Committee on Government Operations, House of Representatives,

90th Congress, 1st Session, four parts, U.S. Government Printing

Office, April 1967.

9 For summary, see Facts on File, p. 536, December 12 and 18, 1968.

10 Kenneth B. Clark, in collaboration with the staff of the MARC

Corporation, A Possible Reality (New York: Emerson Hall, 1972). See

especially p. 34 regarding differential compensation.

11 United States Commission on Obscenity and Pornography Report, U.S.

Government Printing Office, September 1970.

12 Commission on Population Growth and the American Future Report,

U.S. Government Printing Office, 1972.

13 Serrano vs. Priest, 96 California Reporter 601 (August 30, 1971 as

modified on denial of rehearing October 21, 1971).

14 Hobson vs. Hansen, 327 F. Supp. 844 (1971).

15 James S. Coleman, Equality of Educational Opportunity, U.S.

Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Office of Education,

U.S. Government Printing Office, 1966.

16 David N. Kershaw, “A Negative Income Tax Experiment,” Scientific

American Vol. 227, No. 4, pp. 19-25, October 1972.

17 Joseph S. Wholey, John W. Scanlon, Hugh G. Duffy, James S.

Fukumoto, and Leona M. Vogt, Federal Evaluation Policy (Washington,

DC: e Urban Institute, June 1970), p. 46.

18 Science Vol. 177, p. 973, September 15, 1972.

19 See, for example, Stanley D. Klein, “Psychologist at City Hall—A

Problem of Identity,” Proceedings, 77th Annual Convention, American

Psychological Association, pp. 853-54, 1969.

307

References
Index

A

Academic freedom, 51, 133, 137, 173-4, 206, 210

Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), xiv, 43, 45, 48, 51-2, 54-9, 61-2, 64-5, 72, 77,

86-8, 91-6, 99, 107-9, 112, 124-5, 129, 140, 149, 153, 159, 166, 190, 195, 197, 199, 201-3,

205-13, 220, 228-31, 235, 248, 258, 265, 268, 270

Advisors, American, 19-21, 40, 56, 74, 84, 86, 95, 97, 220-21, 224-25, 262

Africa, foreign policy, 13, 27, 58, 65, 68, 79, 86, 94, 169

Agency for International Development (AID), xiv, 16-7, 19, 27, 54, 64, 67, 69, 78, 95-6,

100, 146, 151-2, 168, 235, 243, 271

Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), xiv, 40, 51, 54, 56, 92, 137, 173

Allies, research among, 18, 39, 197, 199

Almond, Gabriel, 142, 179

Ambassadors, 19, 133, 137, 143, 152-3, 218-9

American Anthropological Association (AAA), 1, 182-3, 187, 201, 204-5, 304

American Behavioral Scientist, 186-7, 304

American Institutes for Research, 213, 234

Anthis, MajGen Rollen H. (U.S. Air Force), 74

Anthropologists, 1-3, 28, 138, 141, 165, 182-4, 201-5, 227-8, 238, 251, 289

Antiwar movement, 99

Approvals, system of, 46, 217-9

Area handbooks, 54

Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, 158

Army, United States, 15, 20, 25, 45, 52-9, 62, 64, 77, 86-7, 93-117, 121-30, 134, 136, 149,

157, 166, 169, 176-8, 186-7, 220, 271, 274, 285

Army Research Office (ARO), xiv, 48, 52, 101

Asia, and foreign policy, 27, 181, 235

Atomic Energy Commission, 71, 141

308
B

Baker, Lynn, 48, 52

Barmack, Joseph E., xiii, 76, 188

Battelle Memorial Institute, 100

Bavelas, Alex, 76, 142, 228

Bay of Pigs, 14

Beals, Ralph, xiii, 182, 303

Behavioral sciences, 23, 48, 55, 80, 93-4, 97, 152, 155-8, 166, 171, 199, 269-70, 272, 280

Behavioral Sciences Panel, 72

Berlin blockade, 13

Bias, 188, 191, 233, 240, 245-46

Boles Jr., John K., 73-4

Bolivia, projects in, 130

Brainwashing, 29, 37

Brazil, 124-5

Brown, Harold, x, 29-30, 43, 72, 104, 126, 134, 136, 145-6

Budgets, research, 45-7, 50, 55, 65, 68-9, 88, 91-5, 107, 112, 122, 138, 145-7, 165-6, 267-8,

272-9, 287

Budget Bureau, 69, 145, 148, 150, 152

Bundy, McGeorge, 17

Bureaucracy, and research, x, 4, 31, 43, 47-50, 61, 71, 96, 127-8, 132, 195, 288-91, 295

Bureau of Intelligence and Research, xiv, 50, 63-4, 66, 98, 147, 153, 158, 183

C

Campbell, Donald T., xiii, 292, 304, 306

Campus research, 55, 171

Cantril, Hadley, 237, 305

Carroll, George, 260

Carver, George, 38, 299

309
Caywood, omas, 72

Censorship, 178, 182-3

Center for Educational Cooperation, 272

Center for Research in Social Systems (CRESS), 169

Chile, Project Camelot in, 104-22, 145, 155

China, 13-4, 37-40, 54, 79, 81, 88, 129, 180, 207

Civic action, 17, 63, 81-2, 94-5, 130, 157, 198, 220-2

Clearance, for research projects, 137, 139, 147, 151-3, 183, 186, 205

Commander-in-Chief South (CINCSO), xiv

Communism, 33, 180

Computer simulation, of behavioral patterns, 93

Conflict, 3, 13, 18, 20, 51, 78, 100, 103, 177, 291

Congo, 66, 104, 169, 201

Congress, United States, 45, 71, 112, 117, 143, 145, 155-72

Armed Services Committee of, 41, 112, 170, 272, 277, 299

Consultants, 103, 106, 118, 122-3, 164, 188

Contracts, 69, 92, 118, 139, 152, 159, 183

Cooper, Chester L., xiii, 67, 255, 300

Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory (CAL), 206-7

Counterinsurgency (COIN), xiv, 31, 37, 40, 82-4, 98-9, 118, 130, 167, 177, 180

research on, 28, 40, 51-9, 64-6, 71, 74-6, 80-8, 93-5, 99, 124, 136

Counterinsurgency Information and Analysis Center (CINFAC) at SORO, xiv, 93, 99, 169

Cuba, 13-4, 27, 54, 99, 108, 126, 186

D

Defense Authorization Bill, 59, 272

Defense Department (DOD, or Department of Defense), xiv, 13, 16, 23, 133-43, 233

and anthropologists, 1, 28, 41

budget of, 24, 45, 49-50, 56-7, 77, 79, 122, 138, 166-8, 272-5

310

The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy
programs of, 45, 61, 92, 94, 109, 268, 285, 294

research of, 13, 49, 54, 63, 68, 71-89, 97-8, 152, 173-93, 195

Defense Research and Engineering (DR&E), xiv, 29, 43, 45, 274

Defense Science Board (DSB), xiv, 61, 67, 71-2, 76, 88, 109, 117, 158, 175, 199, 268

DeGrazia, Alfred, 187, 304

Department of Defense. See Defense Department

Design, of research, 105, 156, 221, 237-44, 250-1, 256

Deterrence, policy of, xi, 33, 126

Developing countries, research in, 13, 18, 30, 32, 39-40, 67, 77-80, 86-7, 130, 157, 222

Development assistance, 221

Dick Jr., LtGen William W., 102

Diem, Ngo Dinh, 18, 67, 260

Director of Defense Research and Engineering (DDR&E), xiv, 29, 45-8, 53, 55, 59, 61-2,

71-2, 88, 91-6, 99, 102, 107, 110, 129, 134, 136, 139-41, 166, 169, 209, 223, 275

Draper Report, 17

Dungan, Ralph A., 110, 112, 122, 145, 187

E

Echo Technique, 228, 237

Economics, research on, 2, 23, 57-8, 62, 75, 77, 82-3, 269

Eisenhower, President Dwight D., 13-4

Elites, in primitive populations, 20, 65, 135, 251

Engineering, human factors, 23, 25, 48, 94, 140, 199, 277, 279

Enthoven, Alain, 14

Ethics, 1, 37-42, 119, 173, 178, 182, 188, 192, 205, 209-10

Ethnic minorities, 182

311
F

Fascell Committee, 52, 102-3, 111, 123, 127, 135-6, 141, 145-7, 167-8, 176, 178, 285

Fascell, Congressman Dante, 23, 134, 141, 146, 155, 161

Feasibility study, ARPA and, 86, 100. See also Advanced Research Projects Agency

Federal Contract Research Center (FCRC), xiv, 52, 54, 272

Federal Council for Science and Technology, 63

Fidelismo, 14

Field work, 151, 250

Foreign Affairs Research Council, 147, 149, 183, 270

Foreign Affairs Subcommittee, House, 23

Foreign Relations Committee, Senate, 268, 278

Foreign service, and social science, 66-7, 78, 145, 189

Foster, Dr. John S., 209, 255, 274

Fraser, Donald, 157

Frelinghuysen, Congressman Peter, 162, 285

Fulbright, Senator William J., 37, 100, 117, 166-72, 197, 207, 268-9, 271-9

Funding, of Project Camelot, 101

of studies, 46, 61, 88, 95, 145, 190, 210, 268, 273, 275, 280, 293

G

“Gabriel” file, 219

Galtung, Johan, 111-2, 123

Gell-Mann, Murray, 204, 247

General Accounting Office (GAO), xiv, 212, 219, 249, 268

Goshko, John, 124-5

Grants, research supported by, 49, 51, 55, 133, 137, 139, 152, 169, 178, 207

Gross, H. R., 159-61, 163

Gude, Ted, 103, 106-7

312

The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy
H

Hamlet Evaluation System, 56, 86, 226, 246, 257, 261

Hamlets, 257, 261

Harriman, Governor Averell, 255

Harris, Senator Fred, 131, 159, 168, 173, 190-1

Harris Committee, 174, 190

Herzfeld, Charles M., x, 195, 207

Hickey, Gerald, 206, 226, 248

Himalayan region, research in, 207

Hitch, Charles, 14

Hopper, Rex, 103, 108, 111-2

Horowitz, Irving Louis, xiii, 174, 176-8, 184, 192, 303, 305

Huff, Lee, 48, 56

Hughes, omas L., 168, 183

Human Factors and Operations Division of Army Research Office, 52, 101. See also Army

Research Office

Human Resource Research Office (HumRRO), xiv, 52-4, 57, 78

I

Imperialism, 167, 178, 232

Implementation, problems of, 18, 40, 61, 97, 135, 139-40, 149, 158, 198, 233, 239, 253, 268,

275, 287, 292

Indoctrination, 29, 81

Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), xiv, 43, 48, 54, 75-6, 195, 204, 276, 298, 305

Jason Group, 204

Institute of Science and Technology, University of Michigan, 206-7

Intelligence, research and measurement, 1, 7, 39, 50, 64-6, 98, 106, 147, 153, 158, 176, 183,

186, 296

International Education Act, 272

International Security Affairs (ISA), xiv, 45, 51, 54-5, 59, 135-9, 146, 148-53, 161, 260, 277

Interviews, 74, 86, 162, 213, 221, 230, 237, 240-2, 245-6, 256, 262-4

313
J

Johnson, President Lyndon B., 101, 223

Johnstone, William C., 129

Joint U.S. Public Affairs Office ( JUSPAO), xiv, 65, 225

Journalists, 127-8. See also news media and press

K

Karcher, Kenneth, 48, 52

Kelvin, Lord, 199

Kennedy, President John F., 13-6, 29, 41, 43, 53, 101, 127, 167, 289, 297

Keyes, Charles, 201-3

Khrushchev, Nikita, 14-5, 27, 297

Kidder, Ambassador R. A., 129

Kissinger, Henry, 148, 262

Klare, Michael T., xiii, 181, 299, 303

Korean War, 13

Kunstadter, Peter, 203

Kurzman, Dan, 131

L

Language, barriers to, 93

knowledge of Vietnamese, 19, 161, 165, 208

jargon, 138

military, 101, 253

of research community, 102, 111, 115, 167, 233, 253

of social scientists, 101, 138, 165, 200, 254

teaching of, 8, 53, 85, 238, 305

translation of, 96, 101

314

The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy
Lanier, Lyle H., 72, 142

Laos, 14, 16, 18, 27, 66, 231, 298

Latin America, 86, 103, 108, 124, 166-7

foreign relations with, 14, 27, 99, 108-9, 118, 127, 134, 146

research in, 58, 79, 94, 103, 108-9, 112, 118, 122, 125, 127, 129, 174-5, 179, 180, 184,

187-8, 207

Licklider, J. C. R., 48, 55-6, 86

Limited-War Study Group, 30, 55

Lodge, Henry Cabot, 129

Lotz, Walter E., 102

Lyons, Gene M., xiii, 47, 66, 142, 299-301

M

MacArthur, Donald, 169

MacArthur, General, 235

Mann, omas, 126, 136

Manpower, management, 26, 181

research on, 31, 50, 57-8, 62, 75, 77, 277, 279-80

Mansfield, Senator Mike, 59, 117, 167-8, 171, 235, 271-5

Martin, Ambassador Graham, 202, 222-3

Marxist, 19

McCarthy, Senator Eugene, 117, 121, 155, 187-8

McIntyre, Senator omas J., 277-8

McLucas, John, x, 43

McNamara, Robert S., 46, 67, 91, 121, 125, 135, 139, 146, 158, 181, 259, 263-4, 297

McNaughton, John, 146, 148

Mead, Margaret, 205

Measurement methods, 24, 48, 58, 199, 213, 230, 235, 237, 243-5, 290

Memoranda, 123, 134-5, 137, 139

315
memoranda (continued)

final guidance, 94-6, 99, 102, 128, 260

interim guidance, 92

Meo tribes, 251

Mercenaries, 181-2

Methodology, 76, 170, 218, 242-3, 256, 265

interviews, 240

problems of, 226-7

of social science, 106, 237, 240, 254, 280, 292

in Vietnamese studies, 226

Michigan State University, 118

Military, involvement of, 28, 74, 84, 108, 150, 153, 156, 162, 222, 290, 296

research and, 56, 94, 209, 212

Military Assistance Advisory Groups, xiv, 19, 221-2

Military Assistance Command (MACV), xiv, 73-4, 162, 210-1, 225, 244, 262

Military assistance program, 30, 157, 169, 197, 268, 298

Military-industrial complex, 206, 213

Mintz, Jeanne, 256

Mississippi, University of, 274

Mobile Development Units, ai, 56

Moerman, Michael, 201, 203-5, 247

Montagnards, 20, 86, 182, 206, 263

Moos, Felix, 223

Morality, 192, 214, 232, 248

Motivation, 18, 28, 31, 40, 119, 242

research on, 47, 56-8, 62, 72-7, 83, 105, 150, 155-6, 161, 165, 170, 181, 226, 245, 248,

256, 262, 268, 286-7, 294

Moynihan, Daniel P., xiii, 292, 307

Murdock, George, 140-1

Myrdal, Gunnar, 288, 290, 306

316

The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy
N

Nagle, William, 64, 67, 109-10, 123, 153

National Academy of Sciences (NAS), xv, 71-2, 123, 140, 142, 149, 186, 269, 301, 305

National Bureau of Standards, 71

National Liberation Front (NLF), xv, 170, 241, 302

National liberation, wars of, 13-5, 27, 37, 40, 81, 88, 97, 101, 156

National Research Council Committee (NRC), xv, 140, 269, 301

National Science Foundation (NSF), 63, 71, 149, 175, 190, 269, 272-3, 275, 278, 306

National security, xi, 1, 3, 126, 136, 148, 150-1, 262, 280, 298

National Social Science Foundation, 131, 159, 168, 190

Naval Ordnance Test Station, 125

News media, and coverage, ix, 16, 42, 66, 69, 104, 110-2, 117-8, 122-35, 145, 155, 168, 173-

4, 179, 182, 191, 269, 275. See also journalists and press

Newsweek, 122

New York Review of Books, 203, 304

New York Times, 129, 131, 298, 300, 302, 304

Nichols, Rodney W., 169, 273, 275, 306

Nisbet, R. A., 178, 303

Nixon, President Richard M., 13

North Vietnamese, 38, 255-7, 263

Nutini, Hugo, 111-2

O

Objectivity, 125, 188, 191, 219, 239, 306

Offices of Behavioral Sciences Adviser to the President, 158

Office of Naval Research (ONR), xv, 48, 51, 54, 56, 88, 126, 137, 173, 190, 298

O’Meara, Gen Andrew, 129

Operant conditioning, 214

Operating Mission, U.S. (USOM), 233

317
Operations research, 57, 58, 62-3, 75, 80, 82, 85-6, 139, 247-8, 259

Orlansky, Jesse, x, 48, 298

P

Packard, David, 275

Paris peace negotiations, 255

Participant observers, 249

Peace Corps, 16, 271

Pearce, Michael, 56

Peasants, 131, 165, 204, 264

Pensacola Personnel Appraisal Systems, 26

Pentagon Papers, 126, 151, 199

Pershing missile system, 26

Personnel Research Office, U.S. Army (USAPRO), xv, 52

Persuasion, 28-9, 31, 40, 57-8, 62, 75, 77, 83

Peru, projects in, 129-30

Phillips, Herbert, 201, 203-5

Physics, research in, 149, 170, 204, 230, 247

Pigeons, 214, 274

Pike, Douglas, 170, 302

Pilots, training of, 24

Pincus, Walter, 121-5, 129, 140, 155, 167, 179

Politics, 2-3, 33, 43, 81, 129, 167, 191, 233, 239, 253

Pool, Ithiel de Sola, xiii, 31, 72, 142, 188, 208, 226, 298

Porter, Gen Robert W., 108-10

Portuguese Africa, 68

Press, 59, 119, 121-35, 141, 143, 187-9, 192, 199, 212, 238, 290, 292. See also journalists and

news media

Prisoners, issues of, 29, 161-2, 289

studies of, 55-6, 74, 241, 246, 255-6, 262

318

The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy
Program Impact Assessment, 232-3, 235, 243-4, 257-8, 294, 304

Project Agile, 55-6, 64, 86, 93-6, 182, 195, 198-9, 206-7, 212, 247, 249, 267, 272, 274, 299

Project Camelot, xiii, 14, 34, 41-2, 67, 86, 95-6, 100-7, 110-2, 118, 122-7, 131, 134, 141, 156-

7, 166, 172-9, 184-7, 190-5, 239, 269, 271, 273, 285, 291, 296, 300, 303

Project Colony, 129-30, 221

Project Michaelson, 135

Project Simpatico, 129-31

Protests, antiwar, 99

Proxmire, Senator William J., 275

Psychologists, 24-8, 41, 52-3, 138, 212, 299

Popular Forces, Vietnam, 224, 256

Public Affairs Office, OSD, xv, 41, 128-9, 139-40, 151, 153, 162

Punch, 124, 300

R

Radio Havana, 110-1, 121

Radio Moscow, 110

RAND Corporation, xv, 14, 52, 54-7, 78, 142, 151, 161-2, 170, 206, 213

Rechtin, Eberhardt, x, 207

Regional Forces, Vietnam, 256

Reporters, rules for, 125, 131, 211-2. See also journalists, news media, and press

Research, applied, 29, 45, 53, 80, 95-6, 129, 143, 175, 183, 208, 270, 273, 279

approval for, 46, 53, 71, 87, 100-1, 129, 131, 148, 150-3, 190, 197, 202, 209, 217-36

Army-supported, 52-3

basic, 26, 55, 62, 80, 86-7, 157, 170-1, 175-6, 229, 269, 272, 280

behavioral science, 23, 45, 48, 55, 80, 86-7, 93-4, 97, 139, 152, 155-8, 166, 168, 171, 199,

269-72, 280, 298, 301, 305

classified, 51, 55, 127, 136, 150-2, 171, 198, 206-7

costs of, 49-50, 65, 77, 79, 167, 210, 244-5, 250, 268, 272, 277-8, 299, 306

DDR&E concept of, 45-8, 55, 72, 88, 91-2

319
Researched (continued)

DOD, 71, 95, 117, 131, 145, 148, 170-1, 191, 235, 272-3

direction of, 53, 102, 107, 165, 210-1, 218, 242, 252, 260, 265

in friendly nations, 39

goals of, 67, 157, 184-5, 269, 273

government support of, 23, 47, 135, 175-6, 190, 272-3, 285, 288, 293, 296

Harvard, 14, 38, 142

impact of, 3-4, 7, 123, 136, 167-8, 178, 204, 206, 217, 222-6, 232-5, 239, 243-5, 249,

253, 255, 257-9, 264, 273, 291, 294

relevance of, 62, 76, 170, 235, 267

sensitivity of, 38, 42, 65, 69, 74, 99, 118, 134, 136, 141, 143, 156, 169, 175, 201, 212, 217,

222, 242, 265, 270, 279

social, 13, 48, 71, 88, 97-9, 101, 117, 121, 127, 133, 140, 159, 173, 180, 195, 197, 201,

219, 222, 224, 229, 232, 235, 239, 243, 246, 251-4, 259, 264, 267-8, 285, 288, 290-3,

303, 306-7

State Department review of, 16, 30, 38, 49-50, 54, 63-9, 77-8, 95, 98, 109-10, 115, 117-

26, 135-6, 139-42, 145-55, 158-9, 168, 178, 183, 186-9, 255, 270-1, 276-8, 296, 299, 304

Research and Development, DOD, xv, 46, 51, 71, 98, 108, 138, 149, 153, 166, 181, 217, 273-

4, 277. See also DR&E, DDR&E, and Defense Department

Revolution, study of, 31-4, 37, 40, 43, 49, 53-4, 64, 76, 81, 103, 108, 118, 124, 129, 131, 136,

161, 165, 167, 173, 177, 180, 186, 192, 230, 233, 251, 261, 285, 291. See also warfare

Rooney, Congressman John J., 122

Rosenthal, Congressman Benjamin S., 161, 163

Rostow, Walt, 15, 122, 297

Rowen, Henry, 14

Royball, Congressman Edward K., 178

Rural Security Systems Program, 202, 232

Rusk, Dean, 122, 135, 141, 146-8, 153, 158, 168

S

Scholars, DOD support of, 41, 51-5, 98, 101, 106, 118-9, 133, 137, 145, 158, 174-9, 182-3,

190, 201-15, 238. See also grants

320

The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy
Schwartz, Paul, 234, 304

Science, 41, 274, 300, 302-4, 306-7

Sciences, politicization of, 185, 239, 303

“pure,” 204-5

“soft,” 56, 85, 126, 199

Scientific American, 122, 300, 305, 307

Scientists, as experts, 7, 55, 61, 71, 76, 99, 103, 133, 210, 217

Secrecy, bureaucracy’s need for, 65, 288

Security, and social science research, 1, 58, 93-4, 183, 233, 277, 279-80

Seitz, Frederick, 72

Sharpe, Lauristan, 201

Silvert, Kalman H., xiii, 174-5, 178, 188, 303

Simulation studies, computer-based, 2, 25, 93, 280

Skinner, B. F., 214

Smithsonian group, reports of, 28-36, 38, 53, 55, 72, 76, 88, 100, 106, 130-1, 159, 178, 185,

200, 270

Smithsonian Institution, 28, 88, 298

Social change, 29, 31, 33, 40, 53, 102, 108, 111-2, 124, 127, 173, 203, 227, 230-1

Social Science Research Council, 174, 187

Social sciences, and DDR&E, 47-8, 136

and DOD, 2-4, 40, 48-9, 57, 97, 100, 117, 122-3, 140-2, 145, 165-6, 168, 173, 185,

195, 208, 268, 277-81

NAS/NRC Committee on, 140-2, 279

and national security, 1, 187

Social scientists, advice of, 9

on Camelot, 111, 117, 177-9. See also Project Camelot

on condemnation of, 117, 177-8

foreign, 150, 188-9

and government, 23, 41, 47-8, 57, 61-9, 142-3, 146-7

military establishment, 52-3, 57, 74, 84-9

321
Social scientists (continued)

and public, 138

reports of, 53, 76, 142-3, 169, 183, 189, 204, 212, 220-1, 246, 253-63

requirements of, 53, 140, 152, 209, 235, 241, 245

roles of, 8, 23-36, 40

ai, 202, 206

university, 133, 212. See also campus research and scholars

Social systems, studies of, 99, 103, 105-6, 112, 118, 121, 127, 136, 143, 161, 169, 191, 217-

8, 235, 245

Sociologists, 27-8, 138, 212

Sommer, Robert, 292, 306

Southeast Asia, 13, 16, 18, 56, 97, 149, 181, 220, 235, 251, 257, 259

research in, 67-8, 72, 76, 79-80, 96, 98, 108, 127, 133, 153, 201, 206, 267, 292

South Vietnam, xiv, xv, 16, 18-9, 73-5, 79, 99, 100, 128, 164, 182, 210, 214, 252, 261, 289,

299, 302

Souvanna, Phouma, 17

Special Forces, U.S. Army, 15, 20, 53-4, 95, 296

Special Group (CI), 17, 69

Special Operations Research Office (SORO), xv, 52-7, 62, 78, 86-7, 93, 99, 100, 102-15

118, 122-3, 129, 134, 166, 169, 178, 195, 256, 260. See also CINFAC

Sproull, Robert, 166, 195

Spying, 176, 292

Stanford Research Institute (SRI), xiii, xv, 54-5, 204, 206-7, 294

State Department, 16, 27, 30, 35, 45, 50, 65-6, 145-54, 187, 202

Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) and, xiv, 50, 63-6, 98, 122, 147, 153, 158,

168, 183

research of, 66, 98, 123, 156, 278

responsibilities of, 66-8, 77, 95, 109, 117-8, 145-54, 158, 178, 186, 189, 278

Stennis, Senator John, 171

Strategic Air Command (SAC), xv, 27

Strategic hamlet program, 56, 261

322

The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), 55, 206, 299

Studies, 23-5, 31, 34-5, 39, 43, 47, 50, 52-9, 62, 64-7, 71, 86-7, 93-4, 103, 105, 122, 126, 150,

224, 226, 228. See also research

average size of, 78

DSB study, 71-89, 106

influence of, 264

political, 77, 80-1

problems with, 136, 138, 167, 171, 237-50

Smithsonian, 72, 185

suggested, 83-4

Sullivan, Col William, 52, 101, 103, 105-7, 115, 145

Sylvester, Arthur, 124

Systems analysis, 52, 57-8, 62, 75, 77, 82, 91, 106, 139

Systems Analysis Group, 91

T

Teach-ins, 99, 117

Test batteries, 24

ackray, Arnold, xiii, 304

ailand, 58

ematic appreciation test, 130, 237

ouless, Robert H., xiii, 167, 302

reat, Communist, 13-21

Tonkin Gulf incident, 276

Trainfire I, 25

Training, DOD, 4, 7-8, 17, 19, 24-5, 48, 53

research on, 25-6, 57-8, 62, 75, 77, 95, 140, 150, 272, 277

of U.S. advisors, 84-9

323
U

U-2 affair, 14

Unger, Ambassador Leonard, 223, 232

United States, military presence of, 13. See also U.S. Army

United States Information Agency (USIA), xv, 16-7, 27, 63, 65, 78, 95-6, 146, 151-2, 271

United States Information Service, 19

Universities, and academic freedom, 51, 133, 137, 173-4, 206, 210

contracts with, 159, 183, 276, 294

See also grants and scholars

V

Vallance, eodore R., 102-3, 106-7, 123, 135, 157, 167

Values, academic, 188

clashes of, 192, 279, 288, 291, 293-4

study of, 29, 192, 227-9, 268, 289-90

See also academic freedom, scholars, and universities

Vance, Cyrus R., 139

“Viet Cong Manual,” 262

Viet Cong, study of, xv, 20, 37, 47, 55-6, 64, 73-5, 81-3, 161-4, 170, 213-4, 224-5, 245-9, 253,

255, 262, 264, 299, 302

Viet Minh, 20, 43, 64, 255

Vietnam, AID in, 19, 64, 100

research in, 54-8, 65, 73-5, 79-87, 93, 97-8, 127, 150, 153, 159-65, 180, 182, 206, 208-

14, 219, 222-7, 230, 235, 237-41, 244-5, 248, 253, 255-9, 263-4, 267, 289-92

Vietnam War, 1, 38, 51, 56, 73, 117, 155, 167, 173, 184, 192, 206, 235, 239, 245, 255, 260,

290

Villages, 18, 73, 225-6, 231, 240, 252

pacified, 261

studies in, 81, 165, 224, 240-1, 244, 249, 256-9, 262

Vogt, MajGen John W., 161-3

324

The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy
W

Wallace, S. Rains, x, 48, 72, 92, 104, 106, 112, 139, 165, 199, 268

Warfare, counterinsurgency, 31, 37, 58, 87, 233

guerrilla and counterguerrilla, 14-7, 30, 35, 37, 40, 95, 230, 262

internal, 18, 33

psychological, 16, 31, 40, 53, 224-5, 249

special, 29, 37, 87, 95

tactical, 45

unconventional, 37, 58, 167

War games, 160

Wars of liberation, 13-5, 27, 37, 40, 81, 88, 97, 101, 156

Washington Post, 124, 131, 296-7, 303

Washington Star, 115, 121, 124, 129, 187, 300, 303

Weapons systems, study of, 25, 30, 43, 45, 62, 71, 139

Webb, Eugene J., x, 230, 239, 304-5

Western Europe, 13

Westmoreland, Gen William C., 74, 224-6, 257, 262

“Whiz kids,” 91

Wolfe, Dael, 72

Worchel, Phillip, 237, 256, 258

Z

Zorthian, Barry, 225

325