The
Military-Academic Complex
By Nicholas Turse
29 April, 2004
TomDispatch.com
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 which, 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
like 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 billion, 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.
Nicholas Turse is
no stranger to the military-academic complex since he is a doctoral
candidate at Columbia University (where General Dwight D. Eisenhower
spent some of his days between being chief of staff of the U.S. Army
and president of the United States). He covers the military-industrial-entertainment-scientific-academic-[you
add your own tag here] for Tomdispatch.com.
Copyright C2004
Nicholas Turse