Cult of the irrelevant: The waning influence of social science on National Security

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Notes

¹ Quoted in John Gray, ‘Diderot: Pedagogue to Power’, New Statesman, 6 March 2019, reviewing Robert Zaretsky, Catherine and Diderot: the Empress, the Philosopher and the Fate of the Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019).

² Desch, 23. He is drawing here on Mark C. Smith, Social Science in the Crucible: The American Debate over Objectivity and Purpose, 1918–1941 (Durham, ND: Duke University Press 1994).

³ J. David Singer, ‘The Making of a Peace Researcher’, in Joseph Kruzel and James N. Rosenau (eds.), Journeys Through World Politics: Autobiographical Reflections of Thirty-Four Academic Travellers (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books 1989), 225. Cited in Desch, 81.

⁴ Samuel Stouffer, ‘Studying the Attitudes of Soldiers’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 92/5 (November 1948), 339–340. Cited by Desch, 60.

⁵ Desch, 39–40.

⁶ Schelling described himself unsure about the ‘coercive aspects of the bombing of North Vietnam’, worrying about its relevance to the situation on the ground and the apparent lack of an accompanying diplomacy. Thomas C. Schelling, Arms and influence (New Haven: Yale University Press), 84, 85, 166, I deal with the relationship between McNaughton and Schelling in Lawrence Freedman, ‘Vietnam and the Disillusioned Strategist’, International Affairs 72/1 (January 1996), 133–151.

⁷ Thomas Schelling, ‘Meteors, Mischief, and War’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 16 (1960).

⁸ Desch, 205.

⁹ See for example Thomas Schelling, Causes and Consequences (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1984).

¹⁰ Roman Kolkowicz, ‘The Strange Career of the Defense Intellectuals’, Orbis 31/2 (Summer 1987), 190. Cited by Desch, 135.

¹¹ Robert Jervis, The Meaning of the Nuclear revolution: Statecraft and the Prospect of Armageddon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1989), 98. Cited by Desch, 151.

¹² Alain Enthoven and K. Wayne Smith, How Much Is Enough? Shaping the Defense Program, 1961–1969 (New York: Harper & Row 1971).

¹³ I develop this theme in my The Future of war: A History (London: Allen Lane 2017) although the advances followed rather than anticipated the policy mistakes.

¹⁴ He has a twitter account but apparently uses it only rarely.

¹⁵ Desch, 248.

¹⁶ Robert Mackey, ‘In a Ditch or Off a Cliff in Afghanistan?’ New York Times, 8 October 2009.