Project Camelot was the code name of a counterinsurgency study begun by the United States Army in 1964. The full name of the project was Methods for Predicting and Influencing Social Change and Internal War Potential. The project was executed by the Special Operations Research Office (SORO) at American University, which assembled an eclectic team of psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, economists, and other intellectuals to analyze the society and culture of numerous target countries, especially in Latin America.
The goal of the project was to enhance the Army's ability to predict and influence social developments in foreign countries. The motive was described by an internal memo on December 5, 1964: "If the U.S. Army is to perform effectively its part in the U.S. mission of counterinsurgency it must recognize that insurgency represents a breakdown of social order and that the social processes involved must be understood."
Controversy arose around Project Camelot when professors in South America discovered its military funding and criticized its motives as imperialistic. The US Department of Defense ostensibly canceled Project Camelot on July 8, 1965 but continued the same research more discreetly.
Background
Military-funded social science
Government-funded social science projects, especially in the field of psychology, increased dramatically during and after World War II. By 1942 the federal government was the leading employer of psychologists, most of whom it coordinated through the Office of Scientific Research and Development.Cina, "Social Science For Whom?" (1981), pp. 186–187. "By 1942, the federal government was the largest single employer of psychologists in the country (Britt, 1942, p. 255). A single government agency coordinated all scientific research done more or less openly at universities, research institutes, corporate laboratories, and the like: although everything was to be kept secret from the enemy, not everything operated under deep cover. The agency was called the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), and was directed by Vannevar Bush." The military employed psychologists to study tactics in psychological warfare and propaganda as well as studying the United States troops themselves.Hunt, "Military Sponsorship" (2007), pp. 16–17. "The history of government sponsorship of, and utilization of social science research, as noted above, goes back to the 1920s and the New Deal (and in some cases even earlier), but the relationship really took off during World War II. Psychology in particular showed itself to be of immense importance to the U.S. military establishment in a variety of areas including intelligence testing and effective utilization of new enlistees (Gould, 1981; Herman, 1995); psychological warfare, propaganda, and domestic troop morale and cohesiveness (Herman, 1995; Lerner, 1971); and man-machine interfaces and ergonomics (Bray, 1948; Lanier, 1949). Psychologists even lent their expertise to the design, construction, and operating of the Japanese internment camps which would eventually house over 112,000 Japanese Americans living on the Pacific coast (Herman, 1995). Research in psychological warfare was widespread, and according to University of Michigan psychologist Dorwin Cartwright, "the last few months of the war saw a social psychologist become chiefly responsible for determining the week-by-week-propaganda policy for the United States government."Dorwin Cartwright, "Social Psychology in the United States During the Second World War", Human Relations 1.3, June 1948, p. 340; quoted in Cina, "Social Science For Whom?" (1981), p. 269.
The Office of Strategic Services also cultivated a Psychology Division, directed by Robert Tryon, to study the group behavior of humans for warfare purposes.Cina, "Social Science For Whom?" (1981), p. 166. "... the trail finally led into the lap of the Psychology Division of the Office of Strategic Services, headquarters of psychological warfare in World War II. It was there that I found the reason for social psychology's rosy future: the 'socio-psychological' study of population was the social scientific centerpiece of psychological warfare strategy." A memo from William J. Donovan in November 1941 called for collection of information about the personality and social relations of "potential enemies" and for the creation of an intelligence organization "to analyze and interpret such information by applying to it not only the experience of Army and Naval Officers, but also of specialized trained research officials in the relative scientific fields, including technological, economic, financial, and psychological scholars."Cina, "Social Science For Whom?" (1981), p. 195.
In Britain, an interdisciplinary study called Mass-Observation was used by the Ministry of Information to evaluate the effectiveness of war propaganda and other influences on public behavior.Cina, "Social Science For Whom?" (1981), p. 189. "By 1940, Mass Observation had given over its talents to the British Ministry of Information, cognate organization to the U.S.'s Office of Coordinator of Information (Mass Observation Archive). Anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski (1938) analyzed Mass Observation right away as a domestic intelligence service. Germany maintained a special cadre of military psychologists which assisted the Ministry of Propaganda, the Gestapo, and the Nazi party.Cina, "Social Science For Whom?" (1981), pp. 198–200. "Many features of the Nazi state's organizational forms for psywar were taken as models of the U.S.'s own version--for example, a special psychological staff under military command and the centralization of sociological, psychological, and other cultural information into a raw materials dump for psywar ordnance fabrication."
Military social science projects increased after the war, though under a reorganized structure under the Office of Naval Research and often contracted to private institutions.Cina, "Social Science For Whom?" (1981), pp. 166–167. "At the end of World War II, all the agencies put together to administer a vast war had to be reorganized both because enabling legislation had run out with the cease-fire and because the practical situation had changed. It was back to the more usual, lower level of U.S. armed involvement around the planet. The contracting-out system of research administration which had been developed during the war simply continued, with some administrative reorganization. For social psychologists, work became a practice definitively impregnated with the slant imparted to it by psychological warfare, enforced by the development funding supplied to it through the velvet-gloved fist of the Office of Naval Research." Project TROY at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—a study of "getting the truth behind the Iron Curtain"— exemplified the new model.Hunt, "Military Sponsorship" (2007), pp. 17–18. Project TROY lead to the creation of MIT's Center for International Studies (CENIS), which received funding from the Ford Foundation and the CIA to continue its mostly-classified research on "political warfare."Hunt, "Military Sponsorship" (2007), p. 21. CENIS was funded jointly by the Ford Foundation and the CIA (Herman, 1995) and served, as the original TROY team had hoped, as a model for similar programs at other universities, programs such as SORO at American University, which would come to oversee the development of Project Camelot." The armed forces and Central Intelligence Agency pursued these projects independently of civilian oversight, despite presidential directives such as Eisenhower's NSC-59 which called for coordination of research under the Department of State.Hunt, "Military Sponsorship" (2007), p. 19.
Counterinsurgency studies
By the late 1950s, military-funded social science research had expanded from group dynamics and psychological operations to interdisciplinary counterinsurgency studies, seeking to explicate a continuum of social situations from stability to revolution. Counterinsurgency studies built on wartime findings on crowd psychology, morale, and national identity, while incorporating interdisciplinary perspectives from economics, sociology, and developmental psychology.Herman, Romance of American Psychology (1995), pp. 136–148.
An instigator of this change, and progenitor of Project Camelot, was the Research Group in Psychology and the Social Sciences, or "Smithsonian Group", established by the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering and hosted by the Smithsonian Institution.Herman, Romance of American Psychology (1995), pp. 148–149. The Smithsonian Group comprised intellectuals from the RAND Corporation, the Psychological Corporation, General Electric, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Smithsonian itself, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, as well as top universities including University of Michigan, Vanderbilt, Princeton, Harvard, Yale, and Northwestern.Cina, "Social Science For Whom?" (1981), p. 294. "Soon called the Research Group in Psychology and the Social Sciences, it was chaired by Charles Bray, who had headed the Applied Psychology Panel of the World War II Office of Scientific Research and Development. Working from the assumption of 'a need for the products and guidance of psychology and the social sciences in the long-term world conflict in which the nation is engaged' (Fitts et al. p. 1), the ad hoc group began a seven-year-long effort which culminated in the infamous project Camelot of the mid-1960s. Sheltered behind the benign visage of Washington D.C.'s Smithsonian Institution and financed by the Office of Naval Research contract number Nonr 1354(08), the group's members worked out the systematic feed-in of social science work to the counterinsurgency strategy then being formulated by intellectuals of the corporate-military nexus. The new use for social science in this model was predicting the behavior of potential enemies.Cina, "Social Science For Whom?" (1981), pp. 301–302. "Prediction, and thereby prevention, of coming conflict within a society was the new element. Internal war was to be controlled from the outside. Which is where social science, including social psychology, came in. Therefore, as Princeton professor Harry Eckstein wrote in a report for the Smithsonian Group:
The recommendations of the Smithsonian Group led to a wave of research programs, explicit changes in the funding priorities of the Advanced Research Projects Agency, and a March 26–28, 1962 symposium at the Special Operations Research Office called "The U.S. Army's Limited-War Mission and Social Science Research".Cina, "Social Science For Whom?" (1981), p. 303–304. This symposium, attended by 300 academics, was the first public effort to recruit social scientists for counterinsurgency research.Cina, "Social Science For Whom?" (1981), p. 305.
Geopolitical context