Noam Chomsky has repeatedly claimed that at MIT 'there was zero military work on campus'. This claim is difficult to reconcile with the fact that his own workplace, the Research Laboratory of Electronics, has made many important contributions to US military technology.
In 1971, the US Army's office of Research and Development published an article that began with this sentence:
Quote:
Enumeration of the many RLE research contributions that have had military applications necessarily must be limited to a few examples.
It went on to mention the following examples, stating that they were only a 'few' of the many contributions made:
Quote:
A classic paper with a 'negative' result saved the military countless dollars by pointing out the limitations of 'super-gain' antennas.
Contributions to the theory of beam-shaping antennas and helical antennas have had important applications. Work on microwave filters examined the possibility of broadband impedance matching.
Pioneering work was done on such diverse topics as ionospheric communication, missile guidance, phased-array antennas, and atomic clocks.
Contributions to signal detection in the presence of noise have been acclaimed as exceedingly important in military and commercial applications.
Early work in communications included trans-Atlantic frequency-modulation tests. Results led to substantial improvements in FM receiver design, special-purpose analog and digital computers, work in tropospheric and ionospheric scatter techniques, and theory of sequential switching circuits.
Major contributions were reported in development of the statistical approach to communication theory, and in information and coding theory.
In [an] environment of active research on communications theory and advanced electronic instrumentation techniques, the stimulus provided by the late Norbert Wiener encouraged the initiation and growth of research related to living systems.
Work was done also on simple automata, possibilities of human sensor augmentation or replacement and measurement techniques were developed to study neuroelectric signals.
In each of these area, RLE made continuing contributions and has had a part in stimulating similar work in other laboratories.
(From: 'Tri-Services Honor MIT Achievements in Military Electronics R&D', Army Research and Development News Magazine, Vol. 12 no.4, July-August 1971, p68.)