Pentagon Seeks to Fund Research In National Security

WASHINGTON: Defense Department officials here are developing a proposal to finance university research on national security-related issues, a senior Pentagon official said May 7. 
 
The Minerva Consortia, as it's called, would have the academic and intellectual communities focus on certain physical and social sciences, said Thomas Mahnken, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for policy planning. 
 
"We, as a Defense Department, don't have the expertise that we really need," Mr. Mahnken said. "We, as a nation, need to cultivate that expertise." 
 
While DOD officials already research both basic and applied physical sciences, research in social science needs beefing up, Mr. Mahnken said. Though some issues surround research of social sciences, funding should not be one of them. 
 
"One of the virtues of social science research, as opposed to the physical science research, is it's relatively inexpensive," he said. "This is an area where $2 or $3 million actually goes a long way." 
 
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, Mr. Mahnken said. 
 
That gap, he said, puts the government at a disadvantage in understanding some of the challenges the United States faces worldwide and as a nation, he said. 
 
Another motive is to help college students receive more funding for their education, Mr. 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." 
 
To get the Minerva Consortia project to move forward, solid funding is a must, Mr. Mahnken said. 
 
"This is the type of research that you don't just turn the crank and produce something overnight," he said. "So we want to provide a stable funding base."