Pentagon Seeks to Fund University Research in National Security

– The Defense Department is developing a proposal to finance university research on national security-related issues, Thomas Mahnken, deputy assistant secretary of defense for policy planningsaid yesterday. The Minerva Consortia, as it’s called, would have the academic and intellectual communities focus on certain physical and social sciences... [snip]

“We, as a Defense Department, don’t have the expertise that we really need,” Mahnken said. “We, as a nation, need to cultivate that expertise.”

Mahnken said that although the government already uses organizations such as the National Security Agency for social-science research, the goal in the DoD proposal is to bridge a fundamental gap between academia and the government in social sciences.

That gap, he explained, puts the government at a disadvantage in understanding some of the challenges the United States faces worldwide and as a nation, Mahnken said.

“We see this as being able to fund kind of a new generation of scholars,” he said. “I’ve gotten a lot of letters of support from the university community."

READ MORE