From Whirlwind to MITRE: The R and D Story of the SAGE Air Defense Computer

Abstract

Ron Robin's latest book makes an insightful addition to a growing body of literature assessing the intellectual history of Cold War America. Focusing on the behavioral sciences, Robin traces an expansive network linking universities, think tanks, and foundations to the psychological warfare strategies deployed on the battlefields of Korea and Vietnam. His fascinating narrative ranges from the world of scholarly monographs to the terrain of propaganda leaflets, prisoner-of-war camps, armistice negotiations, “brainwashing,” and coun-terinsurgency. Unlike some other critics of cooperation between social science and the state, Robin resists the temptation to describe a monolithic national security apparatus that abruptly wrenched academic disciplines out of far more productive and rigorous trajectories. Although the massive infusion of Defense Department funding and demands for “policy relevance” helped define the boundaries of research, Robin persuasively demonstrates that behavioral scientists themselves aimed to produce the same kind of knowledge that their government supporters desired. The consequence was a powerful convergence between external, state sponsorship and internal, social-scientific ambition. Certain that they could create a unified field theory of human motivation, behavioral scientists dispensed with the complexities of culture and history in favor of universal claims. Rejecting the possibility that ideology might play a profound role in shaping political behavior, they also promised to crack the human “operational code,” a great leap forward for both empirical knowledge and international social control. In analyzing that synergy between social inquiry and Cold War demands, Robin convincingly proves that behavioral scientists were not merely “compliant prisoners of institutional benefactors.”