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 General Speaker 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!
Dr. Michael Poznansky and Dr. Michael Joseph Biographies
Dr. Michael Joseph is an Assistant Professor of political science at UC San Diego. His research has two strands. In one, he integrates the historical and cultural determinants of a state’s foreign policy into theories of great power politics. In empirical work, Dr. Joseph shows that conflict in these different settings is explained by how states exploit historical information to understand their rival’s motives using survey experiments with real-world intelligence analysts and archival research. In the other strand, he explores how modern technology and secrecy create opportunities and challenges for the intelligencecommunity. His research has interested policy-makers in Washington DC because it provides novelinsights about Sino-American relations and the use of digital technology in intelligence analysis.
Dr. Michael Poznansky (Ph.D., University of Virginia) is an Associate Professor in the Strategic andOperational Research Department and a core faculty member in the Cyber and Innovation Policy Instituteat the U.S. Naval War College. He previously taught in the Graduate School of Public and InternationalAffairs at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of In the Shadow of International Law: Secrecy andRegime Change in the Postwar World (Oxford University Press, 2020). Dr. Poznansky has held fellowshipswith the Dickey Center at Dartmouth College, the Belfer Center at Harvard Kennedy School, and theModern War Institute at West Point. His scholarship has been published in numerous peer-reviewedpolitical science journals and his commentary has appeared in outlets such as Lawfare, War on the Rocks,and the Washington Post.
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