[IP] Pentagon-funded Universities
WRESTLING THE MILITARY-ACADEMIC COMPLEX
Nicholas Turse, tomdispatch.com
The reach of the military-academic complex goes far beyond
schools like West Point and Annapolis; today almost 350
civilian universities conduct Pentagon-funded research.
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=18570
Wrestling the Military-Academic Complex
By Nicholas Turse, <http://www.tomdispatch.com>tomdispatch.com
May 2, 2004
Since 1961, thanks to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, we've all been
cognizant of the "unwarranted influence" of the military-industrial complex
in America. Later in that decade, Senator J. William Fulbright spoke out
against the militarization of academia, warning that, "in lending itself
too much to the purposes of government, a university fails its higher
purposes," and called attention to the existence of what he termed the
military-industrial-academic complex or what historian Stuart W. Leslie has
termed the "golden triangle" of "military agencies, the high technology
industry, and research universities."
While we might intuitively accept the existence of a military-academic
complex in America, defining and understanding it has never been simple ?
both because of its ambiguous nature and its dual character. In actuality,
the military-academic complex has two distinct arms. The first is the
official, out-and-proud, but oft ignored, melding of the military and
academia. Since 1802, when Thomas Jefferson signed legislation establishing
the United States Military Academy, America has been formally melding
higher education and the art of warfare. The second is the militarized
civilian university ? since World War II and the emergence of the national
security state, civilian educational institutions have increasingly become
engaged in the pursuit of enhanced war-making abilities.
In 1958, the Department of Defense spent an already impressive $91 million
in support of "academic research." By 1964, the sum had reached $258
million and by 1970, in the midst of the Vietnam War, $266 million. By
2003, however, any of these numbers, or even their $615 million total, was
dwarfed by the Pentagon's prime contract awards to just two schools, the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Johns Hopkins University that,
together, raked in a combined total of $842,437,294.
War-Making U or U Make War?
West Point, Annapolis, the Air Force Academy. The mere mention brings to
mind a vision of dashing, broad-shouldered, square-jawed, straight-laced
cadets in sharp uniforms (or perhaps the shadowy specter of rampant sexual
harassment and rape), but if, when it comes to military education, you're
only considering the big-3 service academies with the Merchant Marine
Academy, the Coast Guard Academy, and private schools like The Citadel
thrown in for good measure, think again!
As it turns out, the military and the Department of Defense (DoD) have an
entire system of education and training institutions and organizations of
their own, including the many schools of the National Defense University
system (NDU): the National War College, the Industrial College of the Armed
Forces, the School for National Security Executive Education, the Joint
Forces Staff College, and the Information Resources Management College as
well as the Defense Acquisition University, the Joint Military Intelligence
College ? open only to "U.S. citizens in the armed forces and in federal
civilian service who hold top secret/SCI (Sensitive Compartmented
Information) clearances" ? the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language
Center, the Naval Postgraduate School, the Naval War College, Air
University, the Air Force Institute of Technology, the Marine Corps
University and the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences,
among others. In fact, scholar Chalmers Johnson has noted in his new book
on American militarism, The Sorrows of Empire, that there are approximately
150 military-educational institutions in the U.S.
While the service academies train a youthful corps of tomorrow's military
officers, enrolled in the schools of the National Defense University are a
group of selected commissioned officers, with approximately 20 years of
service, and civilian officials from various agencies, including the
Department of Defense, who are schooled in a curriculum that emphasizes
"the development and implementation of national security strategy and
military strategy, mobilization, acquisition, management of resources,
information and information technology for national security, and planning
for joint and combined operations." Further, good old NDU sustains the
golden-triangle military agencies, the high technology industry and
research universities by "promot[ing] understanding and teamwork among the
Armed Forces and between those agencies of the Government and industry that
contribute to national security." To this end, the school also opens spots
to "industry fellows" from the private sector who, says NDU president and
Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael M. Dunn, "bring ideas from industry to the
Defense Department."
Joe College Gets Drafted
In 2002, NDU's budget topped out at $102.5 million ? about what MIT alone
received from the DoD... in 1969. While the formal military-academic
complex of service academies and DoD institutions is a massive educational
apparatus, its size, scope and cost pale in comparison to those in the
increasingly militarized civilian higher educational structure.
During World War II, as historian Roger Geiger has noted, educational
institutions carrying out weapons development not surprisingly received the
largest government research and development contracts. Six of them, in
particular, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the California
Institute of Technology, Harvard University, Columbia University, the
University of California at Berkeley and Johns Hopkins University, received
the then-massive sums of more than $10 million each. Following the war,
military entities such as the Office of Naval Research (ONR) sought to
establish, strengthen and cultivate relationships with university
researchers. By the time the ONR officially received legislative
authorization to begin its work in August 1946, it had already entered into
contracts for 602 academic projects employing over 4000 scientists and
graduate students. Academia has never looked back.
For example, at the close of World War II, the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology was the nation's largest academic defense contractor. By 1962,
physicist Alvin Weinberg sarcastically remarked that it was becoming
difficult to figure out if MIT was a university connected to a multitude of
government research laboratories or "a cluster of government research
laboratories with a very good educational institution attached to it." By
1968, a year after Fulbright coined the phrase
"military-industrial-academic complex," MIT already ranked 54th among all
U.S. defense contractors. In 1969, its prime military contracts topped $100
million for the first time. By 2003, that number had grown to $514,230,083,
good enough to make the Massachusetts Institute of Technology the 48th
largest defense contractor in the United States.
But MIT is far from alone. Today, the scale of interpenetration of military
projects and academia is as dizzying as it is sweeping. According to a 2002
report by the Association of American Universities (AAU), almost 350
colleges and universities conduct Pentagon-funded research; universities
receive more than 60% of defense basic research funding; and the DoD is the
third largest federal funder of university research (after the National
Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation).
The AAU further notes that the Department of Defense accounts for 60% of
federal funding for university-based electrical engineering research, 55%
for the computer sciences, 41% for metallurgy/materials engineering and 33%
for oceanography. With the DoD's budget for research and development
skyrocketing, so to speak, to $66 billion for 2004 ? an increase of $7.6
billion over 2003 ? it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that
the Pentagon can often dictate the sorts of research that get undertaken
and the sorts that don't.
The power of the Pentagon extends beyond an ability to frame or dictate
research goals to significant parts of our civilian education
establishment. Higher education's dependence on federal dollars empowers
the DoD to bend universities ever more easily to its will. For example, as
Chalmers Johnson notes, until August 2002, Harvard Law School "managed to
bar recruiters for the Judge Advocate General's Corps of the military
because qualified students who wish to serve are rejected if they are
openly gay, lesbian or bisexual." However, thanks to a quick
reinterpretation of federal law, the Pentagon found itself able to threaten
Harvard with a loss of all its federal university funding, some $300
million, if its law school denied access to military recruiters. Unable to
fathom life ripped from the federal teat, Harvard caved, ushering in a new
era of dwindling academic autonomy and growing military control of the
university.
But the Department of Defense isn't only about the stick. As noted above,
it spends most of its time directing research by bestowing plenty of
carrots, in the form of money and, sometimes indirectly, "credentials"
(that lead to money). Take the National Security Agency (NSA), the
DoD-allied intelligence organization that runs the National Cryptologic
School which "serves as a training resource for the entire Department of
Defense." In addition to listening in on the globe and running its own
school, the NSA doles out a seal of approval, in the form of a CAE
designation ("Centers of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance
Education") that puts other schools in the running for lucrative DoD
"Information Assurance Scholarship Program grant awards." For 2003-2004,
some 36 civilian schools and 4 military learning centers earned CAE honors.
These include long-time DoD stalwarts like Stanford University, big state
schools like the University of California at Davis and the University of
Nebraska at Omaha, and lesser-known institutions like New Mexico Tech, West
Virginia's James Madison University and Vermont's Norwich University (the
self-professed "oldest private military college in the United States").
The NSA, however, has to share the spotlight with a host of other military,
militarized, or intelligence agencies and subagencies when it comes to the
military-academic action. The credo of the Army Research Laboratory (ARL)
in Adelphi, Maryland, for instance, is "delivering science and technology
solutions to the warfighter" which it strives to do by "put[ting] the best
and brightest to work solving the [Army's] problems" by employing "a
variety of funding mechanisms to support and exploit programs at
universities and industry." The Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command
(SPAWAR) is also high on "University relationships" that provide it with
"an excellent recruitment resource for high-caliber graduate and
undergraduate students." Its SPAWAR Systems Center in Charleston, S.C,
alone, has cooperative agreements with Clemson University, the University
of South Carolina, The Citadel, the College of Charleston, Old Dominion
University, North Carolina State University, Virginia Tech, Georgia Tech,
the University of Central Florida and North Carolina A & T State University.
March (and April and May and June and...) Madness
With the NCAA's "March Madness" just behind us, perhaps it's a perfect
moment to reflect on college national champions. As always, the basketball
crown was decided by a simple elimination tournament that gave us a clear
winner (unlike the 2003 NCAA Division I Football season which ended in a
split decision). In keeping with the spirit of crowning college champs, Tom
Dispatch offers its own national championship series, the DoD Bowl!
The college hoops tourney is always replete with a Cinderella squad ? a
small-time five that shocks the field of sixty-five by knocking out a few
top teams. In a Tom Dispatch tournament, these might be schools from the
DoD's "Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Minority
Institutions Infrastructure Support Program." Such institutions don't get
the big dollars of a national powerhouse, but they get modest awards to
"enhance programs and capabilities at these minority institutions in
scientific disciplines critical to national security and the DoD." Under
this program, researchers at Oglala Lakota College, Si Tanka University
(chartered by the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe), Sitting Bull College and the
College of Menominee Nation, among others, were designated for grants
ranging from $76,000 to $400,000.
Of course, grants of this size are small potatoes when it comes to the DoD.
"Big time" schools get a whole lot more. As such, the DoD Bowl seems like a
perfect place to settle a matter that failed to be resolved on the gridiron
last season. Just who is the national champion ? LSU or USC? Late last year
three Louisiana State University units ? its Center for Advanced
Microstructures and Devices, the Advanced Materials Research Institute at
the University of New Orleans, and the Neuroscience Center of Excellence at
the LSU Health Sciences Center ? received the first installments of a $7.5
million, five-year project sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency. But even with a big chunk of DARPA-bucks, LSU can't touch
USC! If the football national championship could be decided by DoD cash,
the University of Southern California would win it hands down. Not only is
USC the site of the Institute for Creative Technologies, a $45 million
joint Army/USC venture begun in 1999 and designed to link the military ever
more tightly to academia and the entertainment and video game industries,
but last year USC received nearly $35 million in DoD Contract Awards for
Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation (RDT&E). And even with that,
USC ranked only 74th on the DoD's Top 100 list of RDT&E awardees, while
poor LSU didn't even make the list.
While almost $35 million in research dollars isn't chump change, it doesn't
come close to winning you the DoD bowl. And while USC beats its rival the
University of California system, which rakes in only $29.8 million in RDT&E
awards, it can't top Carnegie Mellon's $59.8 million and the University of
Texas system's $86.6 million. None of these schools can touch Penn State,
which, at number 27 on the list, handily trumps them all with a total of
$149 million in RDT&E awards. Still, even Penn State has a long way to go
to win it all.
Two schools are consistently tops in RDT&E money and have, in the past,
duked it out for numero uno. In 2002, Johns Hopkins University
($363,342,491) bested MIT ($354,932,746) by less than $900,000, the
equivalent of an inch in your basic fourth-quarter goal line stand in
football! In 2003, though, it wasn't even a contest. Last year MIT raked in
a whopping $512,112,618 in RDT&E dollars to Johns Hopkins' positively puny
$300,303,097, making it the clear-cut national champion! No polls needed!
MIT's numbers were good enough to rank it as 11th on the DoD's 2003 RDT&E
Top 100 list. But even that ranking doesn't convey the full dominance of
this champion. At 23 on the RDT&E Top 100 list is the MITRE Corporation, a
not-for-profit originally made up of several hundred MIT employees and
formed in 1958 to create new technologies for the Department of Defense.
Today, MITRE provides engineering and technical services to the federal
government through three Federally Funded Research and Development Centers
(FFRDCs) ? one of which, the DOD Command, Control, Communications and
Intelligence FFRDC, happens to serve the Department of Defense. Moreover,
MITRE, itself, is thoroughly wrapped up in the military-academic complex.
It provides support to a "broad base of customers within the DOD and
intelligence community," while "organizing and managing the
first-of-its-kind Northeast Regional Research Center (NRRC) for the
Advanced Research and Development Activity," which includes among others
Brandeis University, Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell
University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, Johns Hopkins
University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton
University, the State University of New York-Buffalo, the University of
Massachusetts, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Rochester
and Syracuse University. Talk about webs within cogs within wheels!
With all this work for the DoD, MITRE rakes in a cool $186,389,105 in RDT&E
awards. And if the funding dollars of MIT's offspring are added to MIT's
total, the resulting $698,501,723 would move MIT out of the college bowl
game entirely and into the charmed circle of top 10 defense contractors,
including the likes of defense industry giants General Dynamics and
Lockheed-Martin.
Academia's Unnoticed Identity Crisis
Even without MITRE's money added in, MIT's Pentagon-financed research
dollars make it look more like a military-industrial giant than an
educational institution ? a far more severe identity crisis than the one
Alvin Weinberg hinted at back in 1962. But, while MIT might be the champ,
it's only a small part of the story ? about 1/350th of it. Today, the
Pentagon not only runs a massive educational apparatus of its own, but with
its enormous budget and arm-twisting ability, it can increasingly bend
civilian higher education to its will. There is, however, little awareness
of this influence, let alone outcry over it. Instead, the militarization of
academia reaches new levels ? unnoticed and unabated.
The military-academic complex is merely one of many readily perceptible,
but largely ignored, examples of the increasing militarization of American
society. While the Pentagon has long sought to exploit and exert influence
over civilian cultural institutions, from academia to the entertainment
industry, today's massive budgets make its power increasingly irresistible.
The Pentagon now has both the money and the muscle to alter the landscape
of higher education, to manipulate research agendas, to change the course
of curricula and to force schools to play by its rules.
Moreover, the military research underway on college campuses across America
has very real and dangerous implications for the future. It will enable or
enhance imperial adventures in decades to come; it will lead to new lethal
technologies to be wielded against peoples across the globe; it will feed a
superpower arms race of one, only increasing the already vast military
asymmetry between the United States and everyone else; it will make
ever-more heavily armed, technologically-equipped, and "up-armored" U.S.
war-fighters ever less attractive adversaries and American and allied
civilians much more appealing soft targets for America's enemies. None of
this, however, enters the realm of debate. Instead, the Pentagon rolls
along, doling out money to colleges large and small, expanding and
strengthening the military-academic complex, and remaking civilian
institutions to suit military desires as if this were but the natural way
of the world.
Turse is a contributor to Tomdispatch.
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