Secret Innovation
Speaker(s): Joseph, M. (UC San Diego); Poznansky, M. (US Naval War College)
Date: 13 April 2022
Speaker Session Summary
SMA hosted a speaker session with Dr. Michael Joseph (Assistant Professor of Political Science, UC San Diego) and Dr. Michael Poznansky (Associate Professor, Strategic & Operational Research Department, US Naval War College) as part of its SMA GeneralSpeaker Series.
The US has historically been a leading global innovator because the US government gives a lot of freedom to its private sector. However, research agencies in the US’s government sector—which operate with a level of secrecy—are also highly capable of innovation. Dr. Joseph commented that while private companies, like Google, are successful at innovating with many people contributing ideas, a smaller hierarchical chain of command and more autonomy for individual researchers allows researchers for the government or DoD to innovate quickly and successfully. Giving a level of autonomy to individual researchers also allows for them to pursue research that they believe their managers would not approve of without initial results. It also takes some responsibility off the manager for strange, failed, or unconventional research.
This small amount of oversight and the level of secrecy needed for government research facilities can carry political, moral, and ethical costs. The political costs of failed or unethical research can be severe and is a natural part of the high risk/high reward research being done. Some managers will hire workers who are “unscrupulous patriots,” who believe that the end goal is worth sacrificing some ethical standards. It is not surprising that this low-level of oversight and the purposeful hiring of “unscrupulous patriots” leads to frequent waste and abuse of the system. A famous instance of waste and abuse is MK Ultra, in which Dr. Gottlieb performed research on mind control on unsuspecting US citizens. Dr. Gottlieb conducted his research because it was already believed the Soviets had mastered the art of mind control. While MK Ultra demonstrates how government programs sometimes break ethical codes of conduct, a certain level of secrecy does allow organizations within the DoD to pursue novel research while gross oversteps of people’s personal liberties are not tolerated by the DoD.
Speaker Session Recording
This event was not recorded, at the request of our speakers. Thank you for your understanding!
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