Last month, Hugh Gusterson published an article in Foreign Policy entitled When Professors go to War that sparked a fair bit of commentary. This article just sparked a new exchange on the FP site. First, Peter D. Feaver at Duke, responded with a rebuttal called Pentagon Funding? Bring it on. In which he characterizes Gustersons’ argument as

Anthropologists are too politicized and wedded to an antimilitary, far-left ideology, he claims, to be reliable partners with the Defense Department. His colleagues, Gusterson informs us, tend to view the military narrowly as an organization that kills the people who are the subjects of anthropological studies, treating such people only as “collateral damage.” Given those views, working on a Pentagon-funded project is “unthinkable.”

Hugh’s response is limited to a tu quoque analogy (asking if Feaver would accept communist funding) and one good point: informants typically ask us who us funding us when we are in the field. While it is a good point, it is also less of one than Hugh thinks. After all, one has to wonder how many people in the areas under consideration for Project Minerva money don’t think that any US institutional funding is a front for their Department of Defense? Doesn’t everyone “know” what the “S” in NSF stands for?!?