New HTS Job Posting

I recently found the following job posting for HTS. I really wish I had the qualifications and time to take part in this. I imagine it would be an outstanding opportunity to get as close as possible to the elements of COIN that I find most interesting, i.e. networked relationships and community development. However, as a developing scholar, I would also be worried about how this could affect the rest of my career. Given all the controversy, I really wonder how future search committees would look upon such work, even if the data is used as fieldwork for later scholarship.

The job description follows:

Human Terrain Team Social Scientist

These positions are in support of the U.S. Army’s Human Terrain System. The position is for approximately 4 months as a contractor working for CLI Solutions, Inc, a Service Disabled Veteran Owned Small Business. During this four month period, the successful candidate will be attending training at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas. At the end of the training period, candidates will transition to the government as a Temporary Government Civilian. In addition to salary, Hotel suites, rental cars, gas and per diem are provided during training. After training and transition to government employ, candidates will deploy to either Iraq or Afghanistan.

Salary while in training is equivalent to $95-$100K per year, plus per diem and a completion of training bonus. Salary upon completion of training, transition to Government service, and deployment is up to $250K with bonuses and differentials

Please send resume to: resume@clisolutions.com

Job Description: Advises the Brigade Combat Team (BCT) military commander and staff; develops, implements and manages the HTT ethnographic and social-science research plan; conducts ethnographic and social-science analysis; develops Socio-Cultural Effects Assessment Plan, reports and briefings that focus on the BCT's area of operation.

Prerequisites:
• MA/PhD, Cultural Anthropologist/Sociologist/Political Scientist/International Relations/ or related fields.
• US citizen
• Possess a SECRET clearance or ability to obtain a Secret clearance
• Qualified, recognized scholar with fieldwork in specialty field
• Willingness to work with the military
• Ability to undergo a 4-month training program at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas, including orientation to the military/deployment environment, in-depth country briefings, and multi-disciplinary social science concepts and methods
• Meet Department of Defense (DoD) health and fitness requirements for deploying civilians
• Deploy overseas for a minimum of 6 months and may extend their tour of duty if desired.

Desired:
• Have local-language (Arabic, Pashto, Farsi or Dari) ability sufficient to perform field research is a plus;
• Have direct experience studying and teaching about the Operational Environment (OE), including in-region research and travel time.

Please send resume to: resume@clisolutions.com

NSF, Coburn, Political Science

I just now received an alarmed email from a colleague, although if I had read my blogs today, I would have seen it earlier. Apparently Senator Coburn of Oklahoma wants to put an end to NSF funding of political "science" (his quotes, not mine).

Coburn's position statement can be found here (PDF), and it is an interesting read. He states, "NSF spent $91.3 million over the last 10 years on political 'science.'" Unlike Coburn, I am a little shocked, though not surprised, that the figure is so low. There are an awful lot of political scientists, and political science departments in every college and university nationwide. This is a relatively tiny sum to fund the research of many people.

If I studied American politics (disclaimer: I know very little about AP) I would wonder how often Congress attempts to cut funding to the scientific analysis of the political process. It seems counterintuitive to me, since projects like the ANES (which Coburn definitely does not like) produce scientifically valid descriptions of voter behavior with practical application for politicians of any party. Just today, I attended a talk at ISR where Adam Levine presented compelling evidence that reminding voters about their economic woes is not a good way to garner campaign donations. Why wouldn't Senator Coburn want to use this information?

I came to two conclusions from reading the Senator's position statement. First, if the purpose of the NSF is to advance science, then one would expect that the use of scientific methods as applied to any question about which the public is interested to be encouraged. This seems to be the direction that political science is heading, and the examples Coburn cites as problems, such as the data produced by ANES, are actually the best examples of useful political science "products."

Second, I still feel strongly that political science must be policy relevant (and encourage policy relevance through publication and hiring standards) in order to justify an expectation of substantial public support. I am heartened in this respect by the most recent issue of APSR: "Gay Rights in the States", "Myopic Voters and Natural Disaster Policy" and "Partisanship and Economic Behavior" are all rigorous, scientific and interesting articles that, with a little non-scientific political savvy, could be applied to improve the standards of American government. The discipline still needs to make the first move, however, and translate this important research into easy to use formats that poeple in government can actually utilize. Barring that, there are plenty of competing institutions eager to put less rigorous research into the hands of policymakers.

Senator Coburn refers repeatedly to the benefits that come from "real" science funded by the NSF, such as "robotics to help individuals with severe disabilities." If political scientists wish to continue to depend on funding which is under the control of representative politicians, we would be wise to listen to their complaints. I am not suggesting that the discipline produce the next generation of yes-men paid consultants, only that we listen and respond to public concerns. If we want to stay true to "pure" scientific inquiry without concern for (applied policy) outcomes and applications, we should expect to see a future with federal funding on the order of the NEH budget (approximately $144 million) instead of the NSF budget (approximately $6.5 billion.)

New RAND Monograph via JIOX: Social Science for Counterterrorism. Putting the Pieces Together

JIOX has posted the latest RAND monograph prepared for NDRI and edited by Paul K. Davis and Kim Cragin. I am currently in Germany preparing for a conference, so unfortunately I don't have time to read or summarize it, but Chapter 11 "Social Science for Counterterrorism: Putting the Pieces Together" looks particularly promising.

I look forward to reading reactions.

UNOSAT Spatial Analysis of Somali Pirate Activity in 2009

I have been trying my best to avoid the pirate topic, but cool graphics get me every time. Check out a short but very interesting time series of pirate attack graphics recently released by UNOSAT:

Academics v. Policymakers Part II

Joseph Nye, "Scholars on the Sidelines," Washington Post

Mark C. Taylor, "End the University as We Know It," New York Times

Recently, I had coffee with a former boss of mine, an Army Brigadier General, where we discussed one of my favorite topics: the gap between academia and policymaking. We discussed a professor's recent complaint about why the government does not use the excellent work produced by academics, and I shared a couple of really good academic articles on counterinsurgency. The day after that meeting, the Nye piece was published, sparking comment by a number of academic bloggers, including Stephen Walt, Peter Howard, and Henry Farrell, among others. Today, religion professor Mark C. Taylor added another log to the fire, focusing on the problems of graduate academia generally and providing concrete solutions.

Nye makes a compelling case for the academic discipline of political science, specifically international relations, to link its work to the real world needs of politicians and policymakers, stating that, "of the 25 scholars rated as producing the most interesting scholarship during the past five years, only three had ever held policy positions (two in the U.S. government and one in the United Nations)." Academics are insular. There may be a good reason for this, as in retaining the premise of scientific objectivity. This is the same justification for the severe market distortion that is the tenure institution. But, over the long run, most markets self-correct. Whether or not academic IR is preparing for this is a matter of debate.

I cannot fully agree with Nye's assessment that, "The fault for this growing gap lies not with the government but with the academics." Academics should be faulted not for producing complex, theoretical, high-level scholarship but rather with failing in the simple task of translation for a policy audience. As I commented on Drew Conway's blog in March, "academics would need to condense [their work] into 20 bulleted PowerPoint slides and shop it around in personal meetings with relevant organizations ... But it is fruitless to wish that policymakers would make the effort to find and use these self-evidently relevant articles on their own when academia purposefully keeps itself at such a distance from their needs."

At the same time, government has many organizations of varying quality that it is willing to pay to carry out its thinking and policy implementation functions. Consultants and think tanks have no problem presenting information in a format (read: not a densely-worded journal article) that time-pressed policymakers can quickly understand and, more importantly, use. By the time an academic's brilliant idea and thoroughly researched, well-written paper is actually published, government has often moved on to another issue. Government is not blame-free, although their choice to take the easier path should not surprise anyone, especially academics.

Does this explain why the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship pre-doctoral program recently granted over 300 awards to engineering students, but only four to political science students? Engineering produces tangible products that can be readily used by government and the military. I do not know firsthand, but I wonder if the discipline rewards students and faculty for producing such output. Clearly, the market rewards engineers who develop useful products, academia be damned. If the purpose of NSF funding, therefore, is to encourage the development of usable and socially relevant research, it seems academic IR is running itself into the ground.

As one of my professors pointed out, however, political science is not necessarily doomed because it does not produce commercially market ready products. His example was Michigan and Stanford's American National Election Studies (ANES), which receives NSF funding and has a ready market of politicians eager to decipher its scientifically rigorous results. Taylor suggests abolishing academic departments and creating interdisciplinary and temporally relevant "problem-focused programs," addressing the problems of water, or terrorism, or crystal meth. Why couldn't international relations, of all fields, take the lead on creating such a center across universities? Many of the leading academics in this subfield already know each other, and in fact are running journals, departments and conferences, refereeing articles, and making job placement and tenure decisions. This relatively small group seems to have the most potential leverage to make these kinds of changes.

At the end, it comes down to incentives and objectives. Academia gets the output it rationally expects from a system that rewards scholars, particularly graduate students and new faculty seeking tenure for producing unbiased, obscure, non-policy-relevant work. It should therefore expect the kind of public backlash and low levels of government funding that will eventually result in a market correction. To this end, I fully agree with Walt's comment:

"Scholars naturally respond to incentives, and the incentive structure today discourages . . .a concern with policy relevance. But the norms that establish these professional incentives are not divinely ordained; they are collectively determined by the members of the discipline itself. The scholarly community gets to decide what it values, and there is no reason why policy relevance cannot be elevated in our collective estimation, along with the traditional criteria of creativity, rigor, and empirical validity."

The BBDM Talk on Iran

Intro to game theory and how Bruce Bueno de Mesquita uses it to predict the future. Very non-technical, but TED Talks are always interesting as they bring scientific ideas to a broder audience.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/bruce_bueno_de_mesquita_predicts_iran_s_future.html

2009 NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Results

Some preliminary results and the full list of winners. Congratulations!