Chomsky’s choice: how the linguist’s early military work led to a life of campaigning against the military

MIT’s Jerome Wiesner, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and Vice-President Lyndon Johnson in the White House, 1961.JFK Library. All rights reserved.Whenever
I need to understand the latest turn in US foreign policy, the first person I
turn to is Noam Chomsky. His ability to cut through the fake news and highlight
the real issues is simply unparalleled.

Chomsky’s
political radicalism goes back to his early teenage years, but some later experience
must explain why he chose to devote so much of his adult life to anti-militarist
activism. I suspect an unusually intimate encounter with the US military during
the early part of his career. After all, it is no secret that Chomsky’s
linguistic work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was initially
funded by the Pentagon. As he himself explains: ‘I was in a military lab. If you take a look at my early
publications, they all say something about Air Force, Navy, and so on, because
I was in a military lab, the Research Lab for Electronics.’

Chomsky
has always been adamant that military funding had no effect on his work. Asked
in 2016 if the military hoped to make use of his research, he replied: ‘That’s actually a
widespread illusion. … It’s very widely believed but basically the military
didn’t care what you were doing.’ The
government, according to Chomsky, used the military ‘as a kind of a funnel by
which tax-payer money was being used to create the hi-tech economy of the
future.’ Chomsky cited the early development of the Internet, saying of the
scientists who worked for the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) during
the 1960s: ‘the military funded them but nobody had any military purpose.’

While
no one can deny that defence spending played a crucial role in the development
of today’s hi-tech economy, the Pentagon’s motives were always essentially
military. Stephen Lukasik, the director of ARPA, was
quite clear
that his agency funded the research that led to the Internet in order ‘to meet
the needs of military command and control against nuclear threats.’ Although
most of the scientists who invented the Internet had no interest in military
applications, Lukasik insists that ARPA’s sole purpose ‘was the command and
control of military forces.’

The military were no
less forthright in explaining why they funded Chomsky’s linguistics research. In
1971, having described how the Air Force needed to enhance its systems of
computerised command and control, Colonel Edmund Gaines explained:

 

Defense of
the continental United States against air and missile attack is possible in
part because of the use of such computer systems. And of course, such systems
support our forces in Vietnam. … Command and control systems would be easier to
use [if artificial computer languages] were not necessary. We sponsored
linguistic research in order to learn how to build command and control systems
that could understand English queries directly.

This explanation is confirmed by a 1965
article written by Air Force Lieutenant Jay Keyser. In it, he suggested that the control
languages then being used in the military’s command and control systems should
be replaced with an English control language based on Chomsky’s insights into
language structure. Keyser illustrated his article with words such as
‘aircraft’ and ‘missile’ as well as with sample sentences such as: ‘The bomber
the fighter attacked landed safely.’

Much of this military linguistics work
was done at an offshoot of MIT called the MITRE Corporation. As a 1968 article pointed out:

The most
ambitious effort to construct an operating grammar is being made by a group at
MITRE, concerned with English-like communication in command and control
computer systems. It is no accident that Noam Chomsky, the major theorist in
all of American linguistics, is located at MIT.  

As many as ten MIT
linguists worked on this MITRE project and a number of them have recently been
in contact with me. They recall that between
1963 and 1965, Chomsky actually worked as a consultant on this Air Force
sponsored project at MITRE. According to Chomsky’s students, the military
justification for funding this work was ‘that in the event of a nuclear war,
the generals would be underground with some computers trying to manage things,
and that it would probably be easier to teach computers to understand English
than to teach the generals to program.’ ‘it would probably be easier to
teach computers to understand English than to teach the generals to program.’

To
understand all this, it helps to know more about both the MITRE Corporation and
MIT. MITRE was set up jointly by MIT and the US Air Force in order to develop
air defence and ‘command and control’ technology for use in a nuclear war and
in more limited conflicts like that in Vietnam. In its section on the Vietnam War, the
Corporation’s official history states that, by 1967, ‘MITRE was devoting almost
one-quarter of its total resources to the command, control, and communications
systems necessary to the conduct of that conflict.’

This official history also refers to MITRE’s
key role in creating the so-called McNamara line – a huge barrier of
sensors, mines and cluster bombs along the border between North and South
Vietnam. It is interesting to note here
that it was ARPA who sponsored this project, a project that not only led to the
deaths of thousands of Vietnamese but also, as Lukasik confirms, to today’s hi-tech military systems based on ‘smart
weapons’ and ‘internetting’.

It was Jerome Wiesner
who helped
initiate
this ground-breaking project. Wiesner matters to
my story because he was the lab director who first recruited Chomsky to MIT in
1955, who co-founded
MIT’s linguistics program
in 1961 and who, as MIT’s Provost and then President, was in effect Chomsky’s
boss for over 20 years.

By the
early 1960s, Wiesner had become America’s most powerful military scientist, proud of the fact that
his Research Laboratory of Electronics had made ‘major scientific and technical
contributions to the continuing and growing military technology of the United
States.’  

The SAGE air defense system control room. In the 1960s, the Pentagon sponsored linguists in the hope of making such computer systems easier to use. Wikicommons/public domain.He was also proud that he had ‘helped get the United States ballistic missile program established
in the face of strong opposition from the civilian and military leaders of the
Air Force and Department of Defense.’ As President Kennedy’s chief science advisor,
Wiesner insisted that nuclear missile development and procurement ‘must all be accelerated’. As MIT’s Provost, he also oversaw research into
helicopters, radar, smart bombs and counter-insurgency for the ongoing war in
Vietnam.

The anarchy of science

Some of
MIT’s military research was done by people who were quite happy to manufacture
weaponry. But most academics prefer to think of themselves as free agents,
unrestrained by military discipline. Wiesner clearly understood this when he advocated
protecting ‘the anarchy of science’ in order to foster the emergence of novel insights. This approach was consistent with General Eisenhower’s 1946 directive that
military scientists ‘must be given the greatest possible freedom to carry out
their research.’ ‘[Wiesner]
advocated protecting ‘the anarchy of science’ in order to foster the emergence of novel insights.’

The illusion of freedom was strengthened by the fact
that, in order to secure funding from the Pentagon, MIT’s scientists would
themselves come up with reasons why their research had military applications.
Some scientists, no doubt, then convinced themselves that they were tricking
the Pentagon into investing in research of real value to humanity. Yet
precisely who was tricking who remains an open question. As long as a
reasonable percentage of the research sponsored by the Pentagon turned out to
be militarily useful, why should the Pentagon care what their scientists thought they were doing?

Professor Jonathan King revealed the level of
self-delusion of many MIT researchers in the 1980s when he said:

There were
hundreds and hundreds of physics and engineering graduate students working on
these weapons. [They’d say things like] they’re working on the hydrodynamics of
an elongated object passing through a deloop fluid at high speed. ‘Well, Isn’t
that a missile?’ – ‘No, I’m just working on the basic principle; nobody works
on weapons.’

The
linguistics students who worked at MITRE in the 1960s seem to have had similar
attitudes. One of them, Haj Ross, told me:

We were as
free as birds. … I never had any whiff of military work at MITRE. … What we
talked about had nothing at all to do with command and control or Air Force or
anything similar.

 Barbara
Partee, also emphasised how free they were, although she was rather clearer
about the Air Force’s requirements:

 

We had total
freedom. Everybody could choose their own topic, as long as it could be related
to the goal of eventually getting machines to process English sentences and do
some question-answering on topics of potential interest to the Air Force.

It was Partee who told me that the justification for
this research was that
it would ‘be easier to teach computers to understand English than to teach the
generals to program.’ When
I asked her again how she felt about working on what was evidently a military
project, she said that the ‘story of the generals being underground during the war and
the computers therefore needing to understand English, really I’m not sure that
anybody believed it.’ Partee
also recalled that
‘we all tried to convince ourselves that taking Air Force money for
such purposes was consistent with our consciences.’ She explained to me that ‘our standard rationalization was that it was better for defense
spending to be diverted to linguistic research than to be used for really
military purposes.’ ‘our
standard rationalization was that it was better for defense spending to be
diverted to linguistic research than to be used for really military purposes.’

Clearly,
Partee still has some doubts about this rationalization, perhaps rightly. After all, in 1971, the Pentagon’s representatives insisted that the Defense Department funds ‘only
research projects directly relevant to the military’s technological needs.’
And, when exhaustively checked at the time by a group of anti-militarist academics, this claim was found to be accurate.

The
authors of the MITRE papers that
name Chomsky as a ‘consultant’ are quite clear that their linguistics project was to develop ‘a program to establish natural language as an
operational language for command and control.’ As it happened, this project was a complete failure. In practice,
nothing worked. But what if it had succeeded? Wouldn’t that have led to a
situation in which whenever a US commander targeted a village in a
counter-insurgency operation – or targeted an entire city during a nuclear war
– they would be unleashing death and destruction thanks to linguistic theories
inspired, initially, by Chomsky himself?

Whenever
Chomsky talks about the relation of his linguistics to the military, he always insists that the
military never had any influence on his work and that they did not ‘involve themselves in any way in what was
going on.’ At MIT, according to his testimony, ‘you could do what you wanted … It must’ve been one of the most
free universities in the world.’

Based
on such comments, it is hard to know what Chomsky was really thinking during
his time at MITRE. But we can make inferences from what he did after his time
there. After 1965, he appears to have resolved never again to work on a
military project, instead committing himself to tireless anti-militarist
activism. Up until then, Chomsky had been relatively quiet about his political
views. Partee recalls: ‘I never heard him say a political word in any
linguistics class,’ while Ross told me: ‘At MITRE I had never had the slightest hint
about Noam’s radicalism.’ But, as is well known, from 1965 Chomsky threw
himself into passionate and effective resistance against the war in Vietnam.

It was around this
time, according
to Chomsky, that he gave considerable thought to
‘resigning from MIT, which is, more than any other university, associated with
activities of the Department of “Defense.”’
But resignation was a difficult
choice if only because MIT’s managers had been treating him particularly well,
appointing him associate professor at the age of 29 and named professor at 37. As Chomsky says, the named
professorship, ‘isolated me from the alumni and government pressures.’ This meant that instead of resigning, Chomsky’s choice was to launch
himself as an outspoken anti-militarist activist even while remaining
in one of the US’s most prestigious military labs.

From Daniel
Ellsberg to Edward Snowden, the US establishment has produced many courageous
whistleblowers. But unlike so many of these, Chomsky has managed to maintain
his career, remaining close to the US military and scientific elite while
consistently denouncing that very same elite. This has lent a unique insight
and authority to his denunciations of US military interventions. Unfortunately,
there have also been costs, most strikingly reflected in the ultimate failure
of Chomsky’s revolution in linguistics.

Chomsky’s linguistics

From the beginning of his
career at MIT, Chomsky always preferred concepts of language so abstract and
formal that linguistics came to resemble mathematics. Other linguists would
tinker with his latest theory to make it more realistic. That is what his
students were doing on that MITRE project. Chomsky went along with this for a
while, but then resolved to retreat back into pure abstraction. His preferred
choice was always to treat language as something so utterly abstract and
other-worldly – so completely removed from any practical application – that no
matter what insights he came up with, nothing could possibly be used to kill
anyone. ‘no matter what insights he came up with,
nothing could possibly be used to kill anyone.’

This
last suggestion is controversial. But I have come across no better way of
explaining the peculiar features of Chomsky’s linguistics. Chomsky insists, for example, that human
language is purely individual, not a system of social communication. He goes on
to argue the concepts used in sentences – for example ‘book’ or ‘carburettor’ –
are genetically determined, having been fixed in the genome since the emergence of Homo sapiens, millennia before real
books or carburettors had even been invented. As I show in my recent book, Decoding Chomsky, I am far from alone in
finding these ideas very strange.

For
anyone in my own position as a lifelong activist, it feels risky to say things
that can so easily be misunderstood. No part of my account can detract from
Chomsky’s record as a tireless anti-militarist campaigner. Neither can it
detract from his persistence in withstanding the institutional pressures that
he must have endured at MIT. Had he resigned in disgust in the mid-1960s, when
he was thinking of doing so, he might never have gained the platform he needed
to signal his dissidence across the world. There are times when all of us have
to make compromises, some more costly than others. My argument is that it was
Chomsky’s linguistics rather than his activism that bore the brunt of those
damaging pressures and costs.

The young Noam Chomsky at MIT.