Project Socrates

Project Socrates was a classified U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency program established in 1983 within the Reagan administration. It was founded and directed by physicist Michael C. Sekora to determine why the United States was unable to maintain economic competitiveness—and to rectify the situation.

According to Project Socrates:

[B]ird’s eye view of competition went far beyond, in terms of scope and completeness, the extremely narrow slices of data that were available to the professors, professional economists, and consultants that addressed the issue of competitiveness. The conclusions that the Socrates team derived about competitiveness in general and about the U.S. in particular were in almost all cases in direct opposition to what the professors, economists and consultants had been saying for years, and to what had been accepted as irrefutable underlying truths by decision-makers throughout the U.S.

When Reagan's presidential term ended and the Bush administration came to the White House, Project Socrates was labeled as "industrial policy", and began to fall from favor. As a result, in April 1990, the program was defunded.

In 1983 Sekora was an intelligence officer within the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), working on preventing the flow of western military technologies to the Soviet Union. At the time, the intelligence agencies of the Soviet Union like the KGB and GRU were very aggressive in their efforts to acquire technology from the United States as well as from various other western countries like France and Germany. They were using a multitude of covert and overt, legal and illegal means to acquire western military technologies. For example, DIA would block KGB's acquisition of a sensitive U.S. technology that the KGB had trans-shipped through an intricate maze of front companies throughout Africa (it turns out that the KGB was ultimately successful by trans-shipping it through European front companies).

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