"Manpower estimates depend on longitudinal models of mass behavior. Area knowledge depends on efficient storage indexing, and retrieval of diverse data. Accelerating the processes of teaching and learning depends on achieving better models of cognitive processes. Improvement is organizational communications is likely to follow from better models of the network of information flows. Intelligent personnel assessment requires progress in our methods of multi-dimensional psychometric scaling. Achievement of deterrence can be helped by better bargaining models and by documentation of cultural values through symbolic analysis."

The Defense Department could hire its own computer experts or contract the problems out to private "think-tanks" like RAND. But for social science techniques the DOD needs what universities--Harvard and MIT in particular--have to offer: a first-rate community of behavioral scientist. The DOD's own such scientist don't know what they are doing, two of the Project's leading participants say; and the behavioral scientists of think-tank staffs number fewer than those at a single leading university. Cambridge offers an unusually large and diverse social science community.

At best the Cambridge Project can be seen as a serendipitous harmony of interests: the DOD needs the methods, the academics need funds for research they find intrinsically interesting. Probably many of the professors involved are not concerned with the DOD's use of their techniques. They would justify their work as pure research for the advancement of science with openly available results for anyone to use. The Cambridge Project as go-between helps them ignore the implications of the DOD funding. "Money is cleansed when it changes hands," a common rationalization goes. As a member of the Project's Policy Advisory Committee said:

"The Defense Department puts money in the Cambridge Project bucket and the professors take it out and it all seems very clean. The Cambridge Project makes people comfortable. The Harvard professors don't have to come in contact with anyone in uniform."

Although most academics receiving grants from the Project could disclaim any knowledge of its direct usefulness to the military, the Project's prime movers can not. MIT Professor J.C.R. Licklider, the Project's Principal Investigator (i.e., the nominal recipient of the government grant) returned to MIT from ARPA--the Defense Department agency funding the Project--several years ago in time to help plan the Project. (Whether the initiative for the Project came from the universities or from the Defense Department is thus a technical quibble.)

Ithiel de Sola Pool, professor of Political Science at MIT, and a major proponent of the Project, has been noted for his opinions on the proper public role of social scientists. In a 1967 essay entitled "The Necessity for Social Scientists Doing Research for Governments" he wrote:

"The Department of Defense is certainly the largest consumer of the skills of the geographer. It also needs linguistics. It also needs knowledge of the culture, values, social and political structures of every country that is a potential enemy, ally, or scene of turmoil--and this is virtually all the world...If you think that Washington could act better if it had a deeper comprehension of the social processes at work around the world, then you should be demanding that the CIA hire and write contracts with our best social scientists. The research now done by the CIA is sometimes well done and sometimes not very well done. I can think of no greater contribution a social scientist could make to the intelligence of the U.S. government than to help improve this effort at knowledge of the outside world."

Pool still stands by that opinion but insists that it applies only to policy decisions rather than to methodological research like the Cambridge Project. More refined techniques, however, will enable government decision-makers to create computer models of potential crisis situations and test out policy alternatives beforehand--as Pool himself should know.

No one denies the Project's relevance to the military. But its results are not specifically military-oriented, its proponents argue; they are equally applicable to groups of every political belief. "No matter what scientists discover it may be badly used, with this or with any other project," Pool maintains. "But the value counteracts the possible misuse. You can't stop the advancement of science."

As Pool put it, the Project's methodology is like the simple statistical tool of averaging: student protester, social scientist, and government official alike can use averaging to draw a conclusion or prove a point. But computer methodology, even if available to everyone, is helpful only to those with the computers, the funds, and the technical competence to use it. The unequal distribution of technical and financial resources narrows down the potential users to the government and government-funded university research. (Large corporations may find the techniques useful but so far they have done little work in this area.) Project participants can thus predict who will use their results, and for what ends.

"A neighborhood association should be able to assemble information to support its arguments about a new highway," the Project's first Annual Report argues in good liberal fashion. To lend credibility to its philosophy of pure research with results open to all users--regardless of political beliefs--the Project is investigating how to make it easier for the non-expert to use a computer. If the non-user could learn in a few minutes enough to use a computer for typical basic problems, the monopoly on technical know-how by a small minority of experts would given way to a broad base of potential computer users.

But the monopoly on financial resources would remain. The new "naive users" (as they say in the trade) would remain within a circumscribed sphere--chiefly academics and military men who know nothing about computers--and protest groups would still be left out. Certain "neighborhood groups" could gain access to government or university computers, but only if they were moderate enough to get financial assistance from the government, and not to threaten the computer-owner. Pool, for example, is conducting a seminar on computerizing land-use data for Cambridge Model Cities. But a more militant group--such as a tenant organization protesting university expansion into their community--would be less palatable to university officials. Thus the military users of the computer tools will be counterbalanced at the opposite end of the political spectrum by a few moderate community groups (who gain at the expense of more radical groups.)

* * *

It is ironic that while the Project's methodological research is more useful to the DOD than specific counter-insurgency studies would have been, the "value-neutral" nature of this research protects the Project from becoming a political target again. There is not much danger of renewed political controversy arising around it, for it has quite effectively slipped from public view. But for those who remember the Project, "academic freedom" is a powerful justification for its existence. An increasing number of people here, it seems, find the abstract principle of academic freedom more important than the predictable misuse of "value-neutral" research