Warfare by Witchcraft

Why, asked Senator J. William Fulbright, does the Pentagon need to spend American taxes to learn the black arts of Congolese witch doctors? Fulbright's query momentarily hexed Dr. John S. Foster Jr., the Defense Department's director of research, into an admission of ignorance. But in releasing Foster's testimony before a closed session of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, the Pentagon last week righted the record. Witchcraft, it contended, is part of modern warfare: the $522.50 study analyzed the key role of Congolese sorcerers in the 1964 Simba uprising, when U.S. aircraft dropped Belgian paratroopers to rescue foreign hostages in Stanleyville. Dawa (magic) concocted by tribal witch doctors induced Simba warriors to believe that enemy bullets turned to water; their morale crumpled after Mama Onema, a crotchety hag with one pendulous breast, threatened to turn her fetishes against the rebels.

As Fulbright was taking potshots at the Pentagon's $660 million military-science research program, the $80 billion defense budget was getting a discouraging reception from tribal magicians elsewhere in the Senate, notably Majority Leader Mike Mansfield. But the Fulbright spell was still the most potent. In his criticism, he singled out studies seemingly remote from conventional soldiering. Why, for example, was the Defense Department studying Latin American students? Foster stuck to his brief, explaining that offbeat information was required because the U.S. might have to become involved in the unlikeliest places.

Bats In Colombia. Some of the studies are indeed arcane. Foster did not say why the military is spending $6,462 to discover how Korean women divers adapt to cold, or $21,120 for an Israeli institute investigating how kibbutz life affects the leadership abilities of young men--although with a little imagination one can see how such subjects might be mildly pertinent to U.S. training. Nor did Foster volunteer information on a $10,500 study on nonviral microparasites in Colombian bats, or $2,500 given to a Japanese university to record the sun's eclipse in Peru.

Foster argued that the Pentagon needed research into politics, economics, anthropology and a plethora of other subjects apparently unconnected with war in order to spot future crises--and perhaps prevent them from degenerating into shooting. "Thinking about national security today," Foster insisted, "must include some explicit analysis of many factors that 50 years ago probably would have been neglected." Fulbright was unmollified, echoing his disquiet over the Pentagon's influence on U.S. foreign policy that expanded under former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. "What you are really saying," Fulbright retorted, "is that the civilian heads of the Department of Defense are assuming the responsibility for making political judgments all over the world."

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