Policy makers, says MIT's Union of Concerned Scientists, threaten the integrity of governmental science. To many scientists, the US government has been making too many important decisions without consulting scientists and think tanks at all. Politics are based mostly on intuition, and not on scientific fact.

Two years ago, the public received articles like “Does the President's Science Adviser Have an Audience?” (Bioscience Magazine), and “Science Wars II: Science and the Bush Administration” (The Skeptical Inquirer). The government completely disregarded the message. Recently, there has been a similar raising of awareness on the topic.

One would think that—in this age of specialization and the influence of scientific method in modern-day life—governments actually base their decisions on scientific and thought-out research. But it seems that politics attaches a surprising lack of importance to such subjects.

This is not only a problem in the current Bush administration, it has been happening for years. Whenever America decides to stumble in a country to save its people (Vietnam, El Salvador, North Korea) it results in an ironic backlash. Do American politicians disregard science (the study of reality), history (the study of the human race's past), and mathematics (the study of abstract space and numbers) completely? How many bombs must be dropped before sociologists can tell them it does not help in reconstructing a country? How many millions of dollars must be spent before they realize that money being poured into a corrupt governments' bank will not heal corruption? How many revolutionaries and mercenaries will be trained and supplied before the military is convinced that those men are not fighting the same ideological war as the media was claiming they were?

It seems that many of the world's troubles have occurred because of a lack of understanding on both sides of the argument.

“The model soldier should be less science-fiction Terminator and more intellectual for 'the graduate level of war', preferably a linguist, with a sense of history and anthropology.” says the Economist. This is true. Military science has been developing products that allow the standard US soldier to distance himself as far away from reality as possible. Modern bombers contain a simulation of the ground that they are bombing, rather than the actual ground. We can see that science has a tendency of making war as unemotional as possible. Soldiers should not be cyborgs hidden inside a personal simulation, they should be interactive and thoughtful individuals. The American government should start by selecting troops based on their intelligence and morals, not their willingness to fight for their country.

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* Brains, not Bullets. The Economist. October 25, 2007.