Universities and the Military
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Technological war  

The war of economies bent toward productive destruction, the creation of the most effective, and horrifying weapons systems has flourished ever since. The DoD has managed to guide the disciplines of science and engineering into a militarized knowledge of control, force, application, and functionality. The military has transformed broad aspects of science, so much so that it is hard to draw the line between the civilian and military purposes of some technologies.

We have in many ways an economy based on warfare, but the interaction between war and science has not only been a one way street. Warfare - strategy and tactics have been profoundly influenced by the inclusion of science. MIT professor Carl Kaysen describes it as, "...a rapid evolution of military technologies [that] has led to a much broader and more rapid interplay between technology and strategy".

The exponential expansion of capabilities, the ability to strike targets anywhere on the planet, real-time network communications, data, radar, night vision, unmanned aircraft, logistics - every new technological revolution fueled by scientific research has changed the way war is fought. The most striking example is the DoD's gaming approach to war. In his description of modern industrial society's most apocalyptic tendencies, social theorist Herbret Marcuse described the process by which the Air Force's RAND think tank (a quasi academic institute of the military) would create US nuclear strategy.

The "thinkers" at RAND would divide into teams, red and blue. The red team would be put on the offensive, while the blue team's goal would be to maintain deterrence from nuclear attack. In such a way the forces of destruction are organized and readied8. Through gaming theory, the Gulf War of 1990-1 was fought out long before Hussein ever invaded Kuwait, two years to be exact. Prior to the war, the US military conducted countless games involving wildly different scenarios in the Middle East (as they still do for almost every conceivable conflict in ever last corner of the earth), several of which included the nearly exact scripting of Operation Desert Storm9. But the games have gone much further. RAND's theorists, and other military minds have experimented with "limited nuclear exchanges" in regions like Vietnam, and Korea, while helping to pioneer a style of "detached", "academic," and "rational" approaches to war:

"Many of RAND's brightest minds - and it had these in abundance were mathematicians... trained in the techniques of 'operations research' (mathematical analysis of complex strategic problems, such as the optimum number of ships in a protected convoy) during the war. RAND soon began to apply statistical analysis, systems analysis, game theory, and other formal and mathematical techniques to the burgeoning problems of nuclear strategy. Their results led to a series of shifts in the US military strategy."

Technoscience, the child of the Pentagon has changed it's creator as much as the military has changed the academic institutions which have carried out the research. The military entered academia, shaped it, and fostered a cooperation by asking for superior weapons What they got was the beginning of a revolution in warfare that continues to this day.

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