Fundable Knowledge: The Marketing of Defense Technology (review)

In this slim volume, A. D. Van Nostrand offers a sophisticated and well-documented account of how most new research and development has been generated in the United States since the early cold war. He describes how new technologies were conceived, codified, and institutionalized in a “vast knowledge factory” (p. xi) financed by the Department of Defense and extending across America’s R&D community. His overview of military “knowledge production” (p. xii) since the mid-1940s is most welcome, since this era is rarely synthesized within the growing historical literature on the military dimensions of America’s state-society relationship.

Van Nostrand focuses on the 1980s and 1990s. He uses the Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars) as a case study and outlines the current infrastructure for “knowledge production” and what it might look like if ever it became genuinely dislodged from its cold war moorings and converted to civilian purposes. “Reconversion” is an active concern of many critics of America’s “Gunbelt” and military-industrial complex. Their research often stresses mismanagement, waste, and corruption. Van Nostrand duly notes the convolutions, inertia, and cross-purposes, especially Congress’s role. He regards defense spending as a generally negative burden but is impressed by how innovative, resourceful, and effective defense R&D has been over the long term. This book also sets itself apart by its unique compositional clarity and lightness of prose, making a complex and important subject now much more widely accessible.

The Pentagon’s “presence is as continuous as the dial tone in a telephone” (p. xii). On behalf of national security, it has funded 60 percent of R&D since the late 1930s ($38 billion in fiscal year 1993 alone). Van Nostrand describes how this funding initiates new ideas, information, and technologies. He builds a “pattern analysis that reveals how visions are negotiated during the production of knowledge” (p. 10). Citing M. C. Escher’s drawings to underscore complexity, he provides sketches of how the knowledge factory’s institutional and political variables interact. At first the relationship is verbal and informal, then it acquires momentum in funded commitments and contracts. These are closely regulated by Congress, and thus “reflect layers of social legislation” (p. 109) as well as an unusual burden of accountability due to the traditional suspicion of defense contractors.

Van Nostrand deploys discourse theory on the conventions and “iterative processes” of communication inside the military R&D community. He explores how new knowledge is realized and codified and then pursued into unanticipated realms of “problem solving,” and, following Bruno Latour’s proposition, through “the contingencies and serendipitous discoveries along the way” (p. xii). The author is much impressed by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) established by President Eisenhower in 1958 and still strategizing defense technology and its ostensible reconversion in the 1990s. Van Nostrand also admires the customer/vendor relationship among and between several government and not-for-profit agencies and thousands of colleges, universities, and private firms. The business relationship “co-constructs” (p. 101) innovation and new knowledge simply by interacting.

Fundable Knowledge discusses marketing and promotion by defense R&D vendors. This is one of the book’s best sections if only because of how this dynamic aspect of the military-industrial relation has been neglected and misunderstood by scholars. Intimate “preliminary” relations between government planners and “proactive marketers” (p. 123) might sound like “collusion” to most, particularly when defense R&D vendors generally “determine the customer’s problems to be solved” (p. 126) in advance. But Van Nostrand shows that these relations actually streamline technological development. They save time and money, limit involvement to the truly competent, and help fulfill widely agreed-upon national-security mandates. He points out that marketing techniques—clarifying and projecting customer’s needs early on—have long been standard practice in the civilian economy, and he credits the Competition in Contracting Act of 1984 for opening up such early marketing...