That time a racist tried to win Vietnam with pigeons

Are we being too harsh? No

That time a racist tried to win Vietnam with pigeons

Are we being too harsh? No

The dog is strapped to the bomb. Or, the bomb is strapped to the dog. No matter.

It sprints down the battlefield at 30 miles per hour, zigging and zagging. Bullets whizz by, sending squibs of dirt into the blinding blue sky. 

The dog finds its target: a massive tank. The dog crawls underneath. The tank gunner screams and scrambles out of the hatch – too late. The bomb was delivered to the most vulnerable area.

The tank explodes. The men inside are killed instantly. Unfortunately, so is the dog. 

But the tank, and the men inside with their specialized training, are worth millions to their military. The tank struck fear into the hearts of men. The dog was trained in a week. 

The dogs were effective, though as you can imagine, imperfect. World War II came to a close before significant usage of this method, with Russian “bomb dogs” a mere footnote. 

Pigeons, on the other hand, never seem to make it onto the battlefield.

***

Famously, at least amongst behaviorists (and Ig-Nobel prize enthusiasts), BF Skinner trained pigeons to be the guidance system in a bomb in 1943. Actually, he trained 3 pigeons per bomb, hoping they could semi-democratically decide where to guide the bomb. The military did not adopt the system, perhaps because they had nearly finished the atomic bomb.

Project Orcon was not entirely unsuccessful, as it is well-known that each congressperson is three pigeons in a shell.

Still, Skinner was lucky in many ways that this program didn’t tarnish his legacy. Most obviously, his pigeon bombs were never used to kill anyone. Beyond that, World War II is generally regarded as a moral war: we fought against the Nazis.

It wasn’t like we were trying to…uh…prop up the French colonialist government against a popular communist movement? Or something? Who would even want to be involved in the stupidest American war (at that point)?

***

Richard Herrnstein took over Skinner’s pigeon lab at Harvard, and in terms of science, he was a veritable smartypants. Most famously, he created the Matching Law, though this is actually less impressive in retrospect. 

His lab students found him to be a wonderful scientist, and a Nice Dude. In terms of his political opinions, he seemed to be…racist.

Someday we might explore this further, but you’re welcome to check out the controversy over his most famous co-authored book, The Bell Curve, or his less-famous co-authored book, Crime and Human Nature. If the title “Crime and Human Nature” doesn’t ring any alarm bells for you, then perhaps you’ve never been on the internet before today. Maybe you think we’re being uncharitable, calling a person a racist, just because they published racist books with racist policy prescriptions funded by literal racists. 

Noam Chomsky doesn’t think he’s a racist, anyway (though he does think he’s wrong):

Perhaps he’d be more fondly remembered if he ripped off Skinner and wrote Walden 3. Instead, he ripped off Skinner and tried to train pigeons for war.

***

In an incredibly interesting article from 1978, unsigned but perhaps a product of a cool-sounding “political psychology” department, the collectively pseudonymous author(s) identify a paper trail of Herrnstein’s own making. It seems that, by 1971, Herrnstein was lying about conducting military research.

Meanwhile, the author(s) note, in 1964 Herrnstein trained pigeons to peck on slides that contained people. And the funding source was reported in the following manner:

So, a research facility that engages a small amount of capital, designed to attack “underdeveloped or remote areas.” 

“Dr. Max Krauss” from the Limited War Laboratory is thanked, but his name doesn’t come up much in searches. There is this one document, where dogs were trained to identify enemy soldiers:

Dogs trained to identify enemy soldiers in Vietnam?

So: he did it, he wrote about it, and everyone he worked with was doing similar stuff. 

Why the lie?

***

This is only speculation, but get this: when Herrnstein wrote about his super-secret military pigeon experiments in 1965, the Vietnam war was a popular cause. By 1971, it was immensely unpopular, with the US throwing in the towel in 1973. 

Postscript: a modest proposal

Mr. Zelensky, your anti-tank drone program has been a great success. 

The Fixed Interval Limited Warfare Program has a cost-savings proposal…