Anya Palkowski

Research as a Check on Militarization: How Civilian Scientists Can Bridge the Civil-Military Gap

Armed Forces and Society | Professor Michael John Williams | Wesleyan University | 2012

A strong legacy of scientific curiosity and ever-greater technological achievements in the twenty-first century suggests that technology is the future currency of military transactions. Simultaneously, the United States is becoming an increasingly battle-ready nation whose military, rather than diplomatic, interests often characterize its foreign policy decisions. The permutations that technology research has undergone during the course of twentieth century armed conflict offer us insight into an increasingly militarized society, and can partially explain why the army has been so successful at penetrating the civilian sphere and affecting United States behavior on the international stage. Whereas Samuel Huntington in 1957 asked “what pattern of civil-military relations [could] best maintain the security of the American nation,”[1] a post-survival state of international relations suggests that we ask instead what pattern of civil-military relations facilitates multilateralism, reduces military control of foreign policy, and encourages cosmopolitan governance.

In order to make assertions about what balance of civilian and military interpenetration would best suit a cosmopolitan state, one must first qualify what effect, if any, a shift in the source of technological developments for military use would have on the nation’s foreign policy behavior. Military technology in the United States has already profoundly altered the character of interstate conflict by divorcing the direct experience of war from the traditional soldier and changed the meaning of overseas conflict. An increasing pattern of reliance on remote warfare has downsized the scale of conflict and increased military dependence on scientific advancements. Tools that reduce the human costs of war, including unmanned vehicles, stealth technology and non-lethal biological weaponry, are transferring the burden of state-sanctioned violence from the traditional standing army to methods produced either by dedicated military scientists or by civilians working in universities, societies, and private research institutions.

Although the ethics and effectiveness of technological evolutions in warfare are well researched, less so is the way in which the process of technology development alters the relationship between military and civilian bases of research. Given the propensity of civilian science to affect both “the technological sophistication of armies and the industrial power of lands,”[2] military interactions with civilian institutions in the twentieth century deeply affected modern arrangements of power and influence between the two spheres. Although the insular military research and development sectors of recent history have become standard since the end of World War II, many of the innovations put to use on battlefields abroad during the Cold War and both World Wars originated either from university research, research associations or science societies; throughout the twentieth century, both military outcomes and the interplay between scientists and army elites have played major roles in the alteration of civilian penetration of the military.

Two separate analyses are possible when examining the military’s relationship with civilian science throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Either the military is co-opting, rather than integrating with, the civilian sphere and moving U.S. foreign policy towards militarized goals more appropriate for a bygone era, or as a result of its past reliance on civilian-developed technologies, a peaceful integration between state and military is growing stronger and may lead to a less militarized, more diplomatic state. While the former may provide a more accurate view of current trends, the latter represents the ideal to which the United States government should aspire.

The justifications for a balanced approach to foreign policy, and thus civilian control of research and development, are manifold. Civilian scrutiny of technology meant for use in national security and defense – and, when necessary, offensive capabilities – is likely to result in a rigorous and implicitly more transparent process of peer review and ethical scrutiny than might be offered by secretive military control. Military funding for civilian scientists and engineers was prevalent in the early years of technological development during the United States’ major military conquests, and the few instances of truly equal cooperation between scientists and military officials – such as the involvement of private natural science research institutions in developing explosive, submarine and physics-based innovations during World War I[3] – remains a valuable paradigm in the modern pursuit of a smaller civil-military gap, and may yet play a vital role in civilianizing the military.

Perhaps the greatest need for a smaller civil-military gap arises from the liberal ideals that increasingly characterize the modern international community. While militarism and aggressive conduct constitutes an effective approach to foreign policy in an environment characterized by existential survival threats and other realist applications of game theory and zero-sum transactions, a changing view of the international stage requires an evolved view of how the internal makeup of the state affects its foreign policy conduct.

The evidence for a fluctuating global order is plentiful: the decline of military power as an agent of coercion can be considered the result of a feedback loop based on the ever more deadly effects of military technology – as war becomes more absolute in its potential destructive power, so too does soft power become an increasingly viable currency of state interaction. Rather than absolute military power, modern states have come to rely on social capital, “endearment,” and the cultivation of a “positive image in world affairs”[4] – ideals that undue military influence in foreign policy are likely to undermine rather than advance. As ideas of complex interdependence, cosmopolitanism and liberal institutionalism gain traction, the deployment of military forces for unilateral goals of dominance and self-aggrandizement becomes increasingly damaging to the social order. This pattern of decreased aggression, and the unanimous discouragement of unilateral military conduct, necessitates both firm separation and complete understanding between the military and civilian spheres of governance in order to create a state most fit to participate in a good international society.

It is reasonable to assume that the closing of the civil-military gap, and the distancing of U.S. international relations decisions from the hardline realist aspirations of the military sector, may hedge on increased civilian penetration of the military complex. Wresting any aspect of military dominance from direct military control provides potential for power struggle that is not easily averted, but channeling the expertise of civilian scientists and nonmilitary analysts rather than isolating research and development for national defense in the military sphere constitutes a reasonable check on military autonomy. Dependence on the civilian sphere for technology can keep United States defense standards afloat while allowing civilian government to exert influence over military decisions and capabilities.

Fears about the wasted potential of scientific enquiry when the attentions of researchers are split between projects with obvious military applications and those with civilian or “pure” scientific significance have been historically disproven. An independent civilian research base does not reduce the effectiveness of technology in wartime: the efficacy of interfacing with civilian researchers has elevated American military supremacy through the course of two world wars. Returning the reins of development to civilian scientists allows the development process of warfare technology to maintain terminal velocity while simultaneously checking the power and autonomy of the military.

It should be possible to divide the responsibility for scientific innovation without directly impacting the military’s professional integrity. The civilian government’s efforts to interface with the military elite need not undermine the professional qualifications of soldiers, their unique place in the social hierarchy, or their ability to serve an “important social need.”[5] Although the extensive funding that private corporations have received from the army has led to its absorption of numerous research industries, the ongoing narrative of the professional military suggests that military service is a specialized field in which private engineering corporations and other research organizations should not naturally be included. Having undergone extensive training and placement in a specialized hierarchy of power and advancement, military personnel from enlisted ranks to officers possess a legitimate claim to their profession, but certainly have little natural claim over the field of chemical, physical and warfare technology research. Outsourcing the means of waging war to universities, science societies and research associations preserves the established power and specialized role of the military while giving it targeted dependencies in the civilian sector. Ultimately, in a laundry list of political maneuvers likely to destabilize the relationship between the state and the military, the relinquishment of military technological development to civilian scientists is perhaps least harmful to the status quo – and the most grounded in historical precedent.

The modern history of military research foreshadows a complex civil-military relationship that, coming into the twenty-first century, is more estranged than integrated. The divergence of ambitions between civilian scientists and military interests has discouraged healthy codependence, instead causing the military sphere to co-opt civilian scientists for purely military ventures and, eventually, develop its own privately-funded and -directed vehicles for research and development. Coopted when it was convenient and made to pursue military-minded applications of the natural sciences, civilian scientists were “only supported when they were willing and able to follow research programs deemed valuable by government officials.”[6] Conditional support of the sciences allowed military funders to control the direction of research, shaping academic agendas to suit their martial needs at any given time.

Twentieth-century warfare effected a “radical change in attitudes toward science, toward national security, and toward the relationship between them on the part of both the military and the civilian leadership of the United States.”[7] Conduits of information, labor and knowledge fluidity that had previously been stagnant began to open with the advent of directed military funding of research and development. The track record of scientific achievement during the last millennium teaches us a simple lesson: war leads to research, and military interests often and easily exert terminal control over civilian science. This describes the harmful causal relationship that civil-military relations has adopted in favor of a bidirectional, codependent relationship: competition for technological dominance on the international scale has led to the military complex’s self-isolation in the interest of preserving its own autonomy. Multiple generations of military- and civilian-directed research institutions have bred a new standard in military technology: private corporations, owned by the military and geared towards technological development solely for martial application. The creation and continued profitability of military defense contractors like the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Trident Research reflects a historical mistrust of and frustration with the independent desires of civilian scientists when unfettered by the pressing demands of wartime to develop technology suitable for civilian, as well as military, use – or for “pure,” as opposed to “applied,” motives.[8]

It has been long accepted by the scientific community that “in order to acquire the venture capital for expansion, the control of science has been transferred from scientists themselves to people who want to use it.”[9] Military research in the twentieth century has largely been a story of the military complex’s perpetual need for ever more advanced technology in order to advance to the next generation of warfare; scientists equipped to meet their demands enjoyed brief periods of cooperation with the military elite under institutions such as the Naval Consulting Board, but blurred the lines between pure and applied research – for example, scientists in marine physics departments could easily be “simultaneously engaged in research for a weapon system and interested in accounting… for anomalies in undersea acoustics.”[10] The inefficacy of allowing scientists to decide their own interests led to criticisms on both sides of the military-academic relationship; driven by a need to pursue specific and directed martial applications of science research, the military gradually phased out its dependence on civilian researchers and established its own foundations for arms and technology research.

Military integration with civilian science is rooted in twentieth century warfare – specifically, in the military-scientific associations that arose in response to the need for competitive technological development during World War I, World War II, and the Cold War. So great were the benefits of penetration of civilian science initiatives by military interests to the war effort that military elites advised against disengaging from the scientific community in peacetime, instead continuing on a trajectory of “unparalleled involvement with civilian science.”[11] A majority of congressional committees and military branches active at the close of World War II determined that integration with the work of civilian scientists was vital to national defense,[12] but rather than allowing the civilian science agenda to remain independent, the military used its reliance on military funding to control the ends of its research. As late as 1962, the military had ingrained itself at large institutions like MIT, exerting a “significant, even predominant, influence in setting the agenda for big science.”[13]

World War II in particular is often considered a “watershed” that “altered the relationship between science and government… the military… and industry.”[14] Both military-funded research and unplanned cooperation between military and scientific elements played an important role in changing the direction of physics research from a self-directed, “pure-science” research paradigm to one with the raison d’etre of militaristic application for national defense. From 1940 onward, “American physics, accelerating its historic quantitative growth, underwent a qualitative change in its purposes and character, an enlistment and integration of the bulk of its practitioners and its practice in the nation’s pursuit of security through ever more advanced military technologies.”[15]

Although the need for directed research was greatest during times of conflict, military control of universities and scientific institutions was not limited to wartime. Even transient partnerships were prolonged in continuation of the military’s role in controlling the directions of academic research. After World War I, “the military’s wartime partnership with the civilian-dominated NRC broke down for reasons more profound than peacetime budgetary difficulties”[16] – driven apart by civilian scientists’ desire for freedom and the controlling tendencies of the armed forces, the dissolution of the military-NRC collaboration exemplifies the major obstacle to the longevity of military-academic partnerships. In post-World War II America, research and development became ever more specialized, isolating the military from civilians and reducing its dependence on independent research for the technological innovations that would carry it into each new generation of warfare. Military officials that had been placed in charge of scientists funded by the Office of Naval Research opted to pursue “remilitarization rather than… demilitarization in the [postwar period] that made services of scientists seem necessary,”[17] and the army and navy restricted their investments of scientific institutions to only “projects of martial practicality.”[18]

The present-day arrangement of military research and development providers reflects a history of mistrust and manipulation in the military-academic relationship – one need only look to DARPA, and institutions like it, for evidence that military research giants no longer interfaces with civilian institutions, and exist purely as vehicles for the development of warfare technology. However, despite the fact that military interests have more often permeated the civilian scientific community than vice versa, military reliance on civilian ingenuity has spearheaded many of the United States’ most prolific periods of technological innovation. Simultaneously, military funding is often considered the primary stimulus for a “rapidly rising truly scientific age,” and has resulted in soft funding for natural sciences that enabled many scientists to fund their own research design during peacetime.[19] These interactions showcase the ability of incentives, beneficial in different ways to different groups, to foster a productive relationship between civilian science and the military.

Evidence from both world wars holds that a plethora of independent civilian-funded technological ventures have collaborated effectively with military scientists and officials, and even completely independently developed highly effective tools for military use. It is widely held that “civilian science is… a world of experts that the military cannot easily create for itself;” as a result, the military was invariably required to seek counsel outside its own jurisdiction.[20] Only through a mutually respectful relationship was the American military machine able to emerge victorious from multiple wars despite being initially outmatched by European technological standards; that the work of civilian scientists provided both the impetus and the means for catapulting the United States into a competitive race for technological superiority showcases its ability to both integrate civilian and military rule and to develop new technologies at an equal pace with the militarization of the international system.

The World War I-era military complex had little precedent for consolidated arms research. Despite a growing appreciation for the role of science and technology in cementing United States supremacy in the international balance of power, a continually “poorly funded” technical establishment during the war caused the American military to continually “rely for new weapons upon the innovations of civilian inventors and industrial firms.”[21] At the onset of World War I, the military was already contemplating drawing upon the expertise of civilian chemical engineers to provide an edge against superior German chemical technology.[22] The war effort grew to be a powerful motivating factor in leading the military to develop a healthy dependence on scientists from the civilian sector: recognizing the need for the United States military to reach the “very forefront of engineering science” in order to be competitive as a great power, secretary of war Newton D. Baker proposed the use of a dedicated corps of civilian experts to keep the military afloat in relation to its more advanced European rivals.[23]

Despite consequences this newfound dependence incurred with post-war military elites intent on gaining control of the American research core after seeing its benefits in the theater of war, military funders of civilian research also saw the merit in allocating military funds to civilian institutions for both military and “pure” scientific needs. By allowing scientists accustomed to “working for the military in the wartime atmosphere” to focus their energies on “ideas and findings of scientific significance,” directors of military-scientific ventures were known to relax their hold on civilian science, encouraging them to develop “identities and a sense of purpose that [was] less closely tied to military interests” in order to win their continued participation.[24]

The civilian origins, uses, and demographic constitution of technology development are best illustrated by the interactions of the National Research Council (NRC) with its military benefactors and, occasionally, masters. The NRC’s original framework incorporated thinkers from a broad spectrum of civilian organizations like universities and established industrial corporations, but a brief foray into military control saw its demographics change – although it remained a primarily civilian-staffed institution, military officers were free to decide the direction and applications of its research. In its later years, academics in the civilian realm were known to mount criticisms against the NRC’s “centralization on American Research,” accusing it of deferring to military goals rather than emphasizing the pursuit of scientific advancement on its own merit, but the NRC consistently received the volunteer services of more “academic institutions, scientific societies and individual scientists than [it] had tasks to assign.”[25] In fact, through its tenure as the nation’s foremost scientific research giant, the NRC remained a privately funded civilian venture free from the control of both civilian and military government interests.

Today, the NRC, partnered with the National Academies of Science and Engineering, is engaged in research on health, energy, agricultural, foreign affairs, national security, and multifarious other aims significant to both civilian and military agendas. Heavily dependent on the services of individual scientists, volunteers, academic institutions and scientific societies, the NRC has both survived and remained dominated by civilian interests through the present day. Compounded by examples of numerous wartime institutions that thrived on the contributions of military funding but were not controlled by military interests – among them the Naval Consulting Board, founded by civilian scientist Thomas Edison, funded mainly by military endowments, administered by elite military officers and staffed by civilian physicists and chemists – the National Research Council remains a robust reminder that civilian and military integration is both possible and desirable.

With World War II came a slew of new technological challenges tackled by civilian scientists under military backing. Faced with the possibility that German scientists would develop the atomic bomb before the United States, physicists Leó Szilárd and Eugene Wigner drafted a letter urging the government to begin its own specialized research on atomic energy. Civilians came to form the intellectual core of World War II’s Manhattan Project, the government-funded response to the German threat, which employed established academic physicists on military funding and received additional backing from universities and research associations. The eventual outgrowth of the Manhattan Project in post-war years – the United States Atomic Energy Commission – acted as an arm of the government in its desire to return nuclear research to civilian hands. In addition to these civilian-directed initiatives, the Office of Scientific Research and Development let contracts to academic institutions for specialized research throughout World War II, all the while remaining an independent, “civilian-dominated agency with its own Congressional appropriation and direct authority from the President.”[26]

Promising though these historical threads may seem in laying the foundations for civilian scientists working in tandem with the military, each period of innovation in U.S. military history has ended in a more segregated, more secretive pattern of civil-military research habits. British chemist Humphry Davy posited that “the scientific community should ‘soften the asperity’ of armed conflict” rather than act as an extension of the interests of the military elite,[27] but the progression from military-academic-industrial to military-industrial complex has thus far subverted the ideal – stripped of its individual and uniquely civilian qualities, the scientific pursuit of national defense technology has become a purely military endeavor.

However, the trend is not irreversible: while military laboratories and secret research may give the military free reign over what technologies it chooses to pursue, research for military use has been described by many scholars on both sides of the issue as best conducted by the “non-governnmental sector of civilian science, the laboratories of both industry and of academia, the main locale of fresh thinking and activity on the frontiers of science.”[28] These innovators, rooted firmly in the civilian sphere, possess a capacity for transparency and ethical scrutiny that is capable of checking the power of an autonomous military and building an integrated yet mutually respectful relationship between civilian government and military interests.

Considering that the changing dynamics of state interactions are phasing out brute military force as a viable currency of interaction between members of a civil international society, fostering civilian involvement in military technology is a key component in retarding militarization and maintaining a close, healthy relationship between military leadership and civilian officials. Stressing the difference between the professional soldier and the civilian scientist while encouraging them to collaborate in the interest of national defense allows the academic sphere of research and development for “pure” scientific motives to be increasingly integrated with the shrinking, yet still very much relevant, military sphere. A codependent relationship between civil society and the military is beneficial to United States’ accountability, reputation and functional solidity; thus it stands to reason that warfare technology should be created and managed by a body of researchers with civilian and nonmilitary interests in mind.

Endnotes