Word: camelot
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TOUNDERSTAND the Cambridge Project. we have to go back a few years, to the Pentagon's first disastrous brush with the new social science. In 1964 a program under the quaint name of Camelot was launched by the Special Operations Research Office of the U.S. Army. Camelot's purpose. according to an official description...
Translated back into English, Camelot was intchded to enlist social science data-gathering and model-building techniques in the service of America's global efforts to prevent social revolutions ("internal war"). The project was to concentrate on the Latin American countries, where left-wing insurgencies were getting to be a pretty scrious problem in the early 1960's, and a major field office was to be established in the region to co-ordinate data-gathering operations. The initial Camelot project was to be a three-to-four year undertaking with a total cost of about five million dollars...
...what he felt to be the project's adverse effects on the U.S. position in the country. It was becoming apparent that if SORO itself was to be saved form the wrath of Defense Department officials who had doubted the value of social science research from the outset, then Camelot would have to be sacrificed, and in mid-1965, Secretary MacNamara announced the cancellation of the program. The episode concluded with a memorandum from President Johnson which gave the State Department the power to veto Government funding of any further social science research in foreign countries...
...lean ones for the scattering of bureaus within the Pentagon which concern themselves with social science research. The notion that the behavioral sciences could be of much use to the U.S. military has always been regarded with considerable skepticism by most ranking officials at the Pentagon, and after the Camelot disaster the job of selling the behavioral sciences was that much more difficult. This meant that such outfits as the Behavioral Science Program of the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) were increasingly hard put to justify their continued existence. What the Behavioral Science Program needed...
Pool's idea which was also pushed at M.I.T. by Professor J C. R. Licklider, was clearly just what the behavioral science people at ARPA needed to re-establish themselves with the Pentagon bureaucracy. It was not to be an information gathering project as Camelot had been, but would center instead on developing new ways of using and interpreting behavioral science data. Thus it entailed none of the diplomatic risks that had proved fatal to project Camelot (and almost fatal to the little social science bureaucracy within the Pentagon as well). At the same time the behavioral science officials...