As the situation in Vietnam deteriorated in the the 1960s, the Pentagon jump-started a series of research efforts aimed at using the social sciences to help the military. Even the JASONS, a group of elite scientists known for providing technical advice, considered bringing in social scientists. It's a complicated history, but it's safe to say that these programs did not have a happy ending.
But now, the social sciences are back, and DARPA, among other parts of the Pentagon, is saying that it's going to take advantages of large advances made in these disciplines to help predict, for example, who might join a terrorist or insurgent group.
Speaking today at DARPATech, Sean O'Brien, DARPA's program manager for "computational social science" gave an upbeat speech. He told the audience that such research, among other things, will help predict "what are the likely outcomes from executing different options."
He says the "increasing sophistication of agent based social simulations" combined with the "explosion of new data sources" means we are on the verge of breakthroughs in computational models for the social sciences. "We may revolutionize the social sciences along the way," he adds.
Here's how it works: Basically you collect a database of what everyone in the world believes (down to tribes and social groups), then you create mathematical models to determine how those beliefs translate into actions. Sound hard? It is. In defense of such work, those involved say they are talking about rigorous testing of the models, and likely everyone would agree that having more data about social groups in Iraq would benefit the military. Critics of this work, however, say that human interactions are way too complicated to predict and relying on models is delusional.
“They are smoking something they shouldn't be," retired Lieutenant General Paul Van Riper told Science Magazine recently about such work. "Only those who don’t know how the real world works will be suckers for this stuff.”
Ouch. This is the same Gen. Van Riper, by the way, who outsmarted the blue force in a a netcentric wargame by using motorcycle messengers. All theories, it turns out, have their limits.