In the 1960s, it was not uncommon for US scientists to justify their research projects on military grounds, if only to get Pentagon funding. Some of these justifications may have been spurious, but as long as a reasonable percentage of the projects being funded turned out to be militarily useful, the Pentagon wouldn’t have cared too much.
As this article shows, some MIT/MITRE linguists were seriously attempting to enhance Air Force military systems.
‘Linguistic Theory and System Design’ by Samuel Jay Keyser, in Joseph Spiegel and Donald Walker, Information Systems Sciences, Washington DC: 1965
