>>11679761 pb notable

This is related:

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.[1] 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. This 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 Department of Defense ostensibly canceled Project Camelot on July 8, 1965, but continued the same research more discreetly.

Military-funded social science Edit

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.[2] The military employed psychologists to study tactics in psychological warfare and propaganda as well as studying the United States troops themselves.[3] The Office of Strategic Services also cultivated a Psychology Division, directed by Robert Tryon, to study the group behavior of humans for warfare purposes.[4] 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."[5] 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."[6]

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.[7] Germany maintained a special cadre of military psychologists which assisted the Ministry of Propaganda, the Gestapo, and the Nazi party.[8]

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.[9] Project TROY at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—a study of "getting the truth behind the Iron Curtain"— exemplified the new model.[10] 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."[11] 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.

>>11682846

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.[13]

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.[14] 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.[15] The new use for social science in this model was predicting the behavior of potential enemies.[16] Therefore, as Princeton professor Harry Eckstein wrote in a report for the Smithsonian Group:

There is practically no limit to the research that can be, and ought to be, undertaken on the subject of internal war. In a sense, the study of internal war is commensurate with the whole study of society, even peaceable society, for anything that increases our knowledge of social order can potentially increase our understanding of civil disorder.

— Harry Eckstein, "Internal War: The Problem of Anticipation", 1962.[17]

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".[18] This symposium, attended by 300 academics, was the first public effort to recruit social scientists for counterinsurgency research.[19]

Geopolitical context Edit

Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia were obvious targets for the new techniques of social and psychological warfare. Tensions were also escalating in Latin America as the United States followed its pro-business agenda known as the Mann Doctrine.[20] The populist president of Brazil, João Goulart, was forced from power in a United States-backed military coup on April 1, 1964, shortly after he promised the masses a program of land reform and industry nationalization. In the Andes Mountains (in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia), multinational companies interested in sugar, mining, and petroleum faced strong resistance from indigenous people whose land they sought to expropriate.[21] This indigenous bloc represented a formidable obstacle to corporate plans for resource extraction and thus was targeted from various directions, including population control programs and USAID assistance for national police and military forces. Military planners wanted an integrated team of social scientists to coordinate these different programs and enhance their effectiveness.

>>11682886

The Special Operations Research Office (SORO) was created at American University in 1956 by the Army's Psychological Warfare office. (In fact, it was at first called the Psychological and Guerrilla Warfare Research Office, PSYGRO, but this name was changed three days after American University and the Department of Defense signed a contract to create the agency.)[23] Initially focused on creating handbooks for United States personnel overseas, SORO soon expanded into studies of the social context for counterinsurgency.[24] Its researchers could pore through boxes of classified military and intelligence reports unavailable to most university researchers.[25] By the 1960s, the Army was paying SORO $2 million each year to study topics as the effectiveness of United States propaganda and including research into the social and psychological makeup of peoples around the world.[26]

SORO was directed by Theodore Vallance. Irwin Altman directed the division of psychological warfare research.[27]

SORO was publicly known to conduct research in other countries on the effectiveness of United States ideological warfare. Echoing United States Information Agency director Edward R. Murrow, Vallance testified in 1963: "Mr. Murrow, I am sure, will agree with the general tenor of what I have to say, and you might consider my remarks as an extension of his general assertion in early testimony before this committee, that there is indeed a need for more and more better research to help in the guidance of our various and complex problems which make up the U.S. ideological offensive."[28]

Vallance articulated his concept of counterinsurgency research more thoroughly with a 1964 article in American Psychologist, co-written with SORO colleague Dr. Charles Windle. "Psychological operations," they write, "include, of course, the relatively traditional use of mass media. In the cold war these operations are directed toward friendly and neutral as well as enemy countries. In addition, there is growing recognition of the possibility and desirability of using other means such as military movements, policy statements, economic transactions, and developmental assistance for psychological impact."[29] The article also promoted "civic action" operations: "military programs, usually by indigenous forces and often aided by United States materiel and advice, to promote economic and social development and civilian good will in order to achieve political stability or a more favorable environment for the military forces."

>>11682912

Project CAMELOT is a study whose objective is to determine the feasibility of developing a general social systems model which would make it possible to predict and influence politically significant aspects of social change in the developing nations in the world. Somewhat more specifically, its objectives are:

First, to devise procedures for assessing the potential for internal war within national societies;

Second, to identify with increased degrees of confidence those actions which a government might take to relieve conditions which are assessed as giving rise to a potential for internal war; and

Finally, to assess the feasibility of prescribing the characteristics of a system for obtaining and using the essential information for doing the above two things.

>>11682929

Scope

According to sociologist Irving Louis Horowitz, academics saw Project Camelot as a social science equivalent of the Manhattan Project.[44] " Social science already worked extensively with the military, and thus to insiders Project Camelot was considered unique because of its scale more so than its underlying ideology.[45] Its scale was unprecedented for a social science project,[46] though unspectacular for a military budget item.[44] The Department of Defense's annual spending on psychology research had risen from $17.2 million in 1961 to $31.1 million in 1964. Spending on other social sciences increased from $0.2 million to $5.7 million during the same period.

Name

According to the testimony of SORO director Theodore Vallance, the code name Camelot came from the premise of a peaceful and harmonious society of Arthurian legend, as envisioned by T.H. White.[30] (Some Spanish speakers may have been more likely to associate the name with the word camelo, meaning joke, or camello, meaning camel.)

>>11682975

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Camelot

Basically this laid the ground work for how they would continue to shape the outcomes in domestic politics as well. MkUltra, mockingbird are well known here, but I have not seen project Camelot dropped here before. Wondering if this ties into the Kennedy dynasty’s Camelot?