Pentagon's Academic Outreach: Big Talk, Little Cash

It's too soon to say what the Pentagon's proposed academic outreach project -- the "Minerva Consortium" -- will look like. But one thing is already clear: if universities are hoping for a big paycheck, they should think again.

Minerva, first proposed last month by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, proposes to have universities work together on a number of projects of interest to the Pentagon, ranging from China's military technology to religious studies.

On a "Blogger Roundtable" today, Thomas Mahnken, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Policy Planning, provided an intelligent, albeit broad overview, of the nascent Minerva Consortium. "From my perspective, Secretary Gates is really trying to build some bridges," Mahnken said, by way of explanation.

Just as the Pentagon has long funded the physical sciences at universities, the goal here is to now turn that attention to the social sciences. Mahnken correctly pointed out that the social sciences, in general, don't require the type of big-time money that the hard sciences do. But even then, the amount of money he was talking about seems quite small: He indicated it would be in the "millions" and not the "tens of millions" of dollars. Even academics who support the program had their enthusiasm deflated when they heard about the level of funding going toward this research.

Steven Corman, a professor at Arizona State University,writes:

My first reaction to the project is “Hooray! What took so long?” This seems to be part of a growing realization in the upper-reaches of the Department of Defense about the importance of soft power, which has been echoed by Gates, Joint Chiefs Chair Mullin, Deputy Under SecDef Michael Doran, and others.

But after hearing Mahnken describe the likely parameters of the program I’m less optimistic that it will produce significant breakthroughs any time soon. He cited likely funding in the range of $2 million to $3 million for multi-year projects involving multiple universities. Once you take off the indirect costs charged by all major universities on funded research, divide by x years times y universities, and hire translators to deal with foreign language documents, you’re not going to be left with much to spend on researchers and grad assistants to do the actual research. And this isn’t even considering projects that might do innovative things involving computers, which are even more expensive.

This is not to suggest that the Pentagon should start throwing tens or hundreds of millions of dollars at the social sciences. In fact, one of the issues that I think will eventually be raised about Minerva -- similar to the debate during the Vietnam War -- is why the Pentagon appears to be taking the lead in this area. If there is indeed a lack of needed, relevant research in the social sciences -- as Mahnken suggests -- then shouldn't it be the role of the National Science Foundation, State Department, or some other part of government, to fund this work?

Mahnken's answer is on its face logical: "I don’t see that as an argument against us funding it," he says. Meaning, if other agencies won't fund it, why not the Pentagon (the same logic is being applied to other areas where the Pentagon has stepped in, such as in development and reconstruction work)? Of course, that invites a larger question: Why aren't other parts of government effectively addressing these problems?

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