In the mid-2000s, with social scientists “embedded” with U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) issued a statement opposing scholar involvement in a Pentagon counterinsurgency program based on the AAA’s commitment that anthropologists do no harm to their human subjects. As Joy Rohde documents in her book, Armed with Expertise, the connection between social scientists and the defense establishment in the United States that the AAA was reacting to has deep historical roots, and the varied relationships raise important questions about the nature of social research and the kinds of connections scholars should have with the state.

Rohde frames her book in terms of what she labels the “gray area” between the national security state and academia. Looking at specific programs during the Cold War, she explores how contract researchers justified what they did and analyzes how the research itself was shaped by the institutional connections these researchers had. Rohde contends that the “dilemma facing Cold War social scientists was the proper place of values in research” (p. 38), and she describes conflict over Cold War social research as “a battle over both the role of experts in American democracy and the acceptable limits of militarization” (p. 6).

The author devotes the first two substantive chapters of her book to the U.S. Army’s Special Operations Research Office (SORO). Opened in 1956, SORO had as its aim to support and clarify “the service’s psychological and unconventional warfare mission” (p. 20). According to Rohde, SORO “embodied the conviction shared fervently among a number of social scientists and soldiers that the Cold War necessitated seamless cooperation—not only between civilian and military experts but also between public and private institutions” (p. 21). In an effort to guarantee the objectivity of its research, the organization was legally autonomous (called a Federal Contract Research Center) but located at American University in Washington, DC.

The social scientists who worked for the organization did not think of themselves as propagandists for the national security state. Instead, according to Rohde, they “aspired to produce social systems models and generalizable theories of social change that would enhance both military strategy and social scientific knowledge” (p. 33). In seeking to understand attitude change among nonliterate populations, SORO researchers believed that they could aid in the fight against communism and that they were developing widely applicable and valuable research techniques.

SORO social scientists did not speak with a single voice in terms of the ways in which they understood and justified their connection to the national security state. To capture the variation, Rohde looks at how three rank-and-file members of SORO—Earl DeLong, Jeanne Mintz, and Robert Bogulslaw—characterized their work.

DeLong thought that “[s]ocial scientists best served the state by restricting themselves to advising policymakers on matters of fact” (p. 39). He was suspicious of participatory politics and believed in elite governance. Social scientists, he thought, should be technical advisors and service intellectuals to the state.

Jeanne Mintz took an intermediate position. According to Rohde, like DeLong, Mintz was committed to a state run by administrative elites, but, in contrast to DeLong, she “built her career on the argument that the social scientist best served the national security state by producing rigorous, empirical social knowledge that was directed only toward ends that the researcher deemed ethical” (p. 39).

Robert Bogulslaw took the most radical position of the three. Although like his colleagues he saw social science as a path to truth, Bogulslaw rejected the boundary between science and action. According to Rohde, “Boguslaw sought social-scientific engagement that could disrupt antidemocratic models of expertise.” He was “a scientific crusader for participatory democracy, or, as he termed it, a scholar of ‘radical social action’” (p. 39).

From her profiles of SORO researchers, Rohde turns her attention to Project Camelot. In 1965, this research program was developed in an effort to understand the causes of communist revolution and find antidotes to them. Like other work by contract social researchers, Camelot was premised on widely accepted faith among social scientists at the time that research can produce valid generalizations about complex social phenomena. Camelot’s grand aspirations came to naught because before data collection even began, a scandal erupted. Chilean officials learned that the project was not an independent academic effort but was funded by the U.S. Department of Defense. To Chileans and others in the global South, Camelot looked like a prelude to American intervention in sovereign countries. While raising obvious ethical issues about social scientist engagement in foreign policy, Camelot also highlighted a simmering conflict between the Defense and State Departments about how to conduct foreign policy and the place of social research as part of that effort.

As the Vietnam War raged on and U.S. student opposition to the war grew, contract researchers moved off campus, and members of Congress pushed military-funded research to have clear operational as opposed to scientific aims. Thus, social scientists, contracted to a successor agency to SORO, worked on such projects as PAMIS, “a computerized information storage and management system that systematized the dizzying variety of information required to plan, carry out, and evaluate psychological warfare programs” (p. 127).

Public opposition and congressional oversight notwithstanding, Rohde argues, by the end of the 1970s, the number of private-contract research agencies had grown significantly, and social scientists had come “to wield unprecedented influence over counterinsurgency strategy, both abroad and at home” (p. 117). The speed of the revolving door between the Pentagon and private contract organizations increased, and, the author suggests, privately contracted social scientists became more isolated from their academic colleagues and drew on outdated scholarship.

Recent years have witnessed a substantial body of historical scholarship on social science and the national security state. Project Camelot, in particular, has received significant attention. No doubt Rohde has added nuance and detail to this rich scholarly area. But more important perhaps are the ways in which she documents and conceptualizes the array of relationships between social science and the national security state. Can social scientists serve the state without being morally culpable? She would clearly say “no,” and this, I think, should lead us to a second, larger question: At a time of fiscal distress, economic challenge, and environmental crisis, what is the public role for intellectuals of all types? Rohde’s work asks us to revisit the age-old matter of the relationship between facts and values and how we move forward in our public roles in light of our answers.