Word: dod
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Conceived in 1969 as a joint Harvard-MIT project to develop computer methodology for the social sciences, it became a political target because of its Department of Defense (DOD) funding. In the uneasy political atmosphere of that fall, the Faculty debated whether to join the Project on an institutional basis while radical pickets, petitions, and demonstrations attacked it as a tool of U.S. government hegemony at home and abroad. While radicals attacked it as counter-revolutionary in intent, liberals accepted it as "value-neutral" basic research but questioned the ethical implications of DOD funding...
This radical critique proved overly simplistic, for almost none of the specific research projects cited in the original proposal have materialized under the Cambridge Project. Some had ended by the time the Project was underway; some sponsors objected to the Project's DOD funding; some had never intended to participate in the project. And in fact the funding proposal, on careful rereading, only mentions them as examples of the type of research that might benefit by the project. A common argument in defense of the proposal is that writing a grant proposal to the government is a game. The object...
Whether the specific data and research projects in the funding proposal reflected the intention of the Project's framers or an attempt to coax funds from the DOD is comparatively insignificant. The importance of the Cambridge Project lies in the "abstract technology" dismissed as a front by radicals. The Defense Department may never use specific programs produced by the Project, but it will use the technical expertise developed in the process of writing them. The funding proposal explicitly states the conceptual tools the DOD needs for its behavioral science problems...
Even an offhand list of behavioral science topics of interest to DOD rapidly becomes long, including, for example, leadership, organizational communications, personnel, training, policy analysis, public attitudes, morale, the psychology of deterrence, the psychology of bargaining, adjustment to foreign cultures, selection, allocation and assignment, man-machine communication, combat effectiveness, area knowledge, economic resources, and manpower utilization...Most of them are problems in which our understanding has been inhibited partly by the inadequacy of present modes of data management, analysis, and modeling...
Thus, when six professors at the Business School developed "a large simulation model of a competitive market" so that "750 M.B.A. candidates" could play a run-the-economy game, the validity of the particular model would be less important to the DOD than the understanding of information gathering and exchange for crisis-decision-making. This understanding would not be tied to the particular situation but would have a broad usage at the DOD and other government agencies as well. The analysis of Professor Griffith's collection of documents on comparative communism would be valuable in itself but even more valuable...