The Department of Defense hopes to finance the earliest projects in the fledgling social-science program known as the Minerva Consortium by the end of 2008, a Pentagon official told a group of writers last week.

In a roundtable discussion with military-oriented bloggers, Thomas G. Mahnken, deputy assistant secretary for policy planning, offered only sketchy details about the program, which was announced last month in a speech by Robert M. Gates, the secretary of defense. The program will offer grants to groups of universities to investigate topics including “religious and ideological studies” and the Chinese military.

During last week’s roundtable, Mr. Mahnken said the program’s budget would be relatively modest: “millions of dollars,” but not tens of millions.

Asked why the Pentagon was turning to civilian universities for the projects, rather than working with its own research centers and think tanks, Mr. Mahnken said that the government ought to be able to draw on university expertise in the social sciences, just as it does in physics and engineering.

Mr. Mahnken acknowledged that some social scientists had greeted the program with skepticism, but said that the university presidents he had contacted were enthusiastic. “Many of these folks are people for whom this is uncontroversial,” he said. “I mean, they come from the physical sciences, they come from engineering, and government funding is part of the way they do business.”

Among the most visible skeptics are scholars in the informal group known as the Network of Concerned Anthropologists, which issued a statement last month criticizing the Minerva proposal. That statement is part of a broader debate about relations between anthropologists and the military, much of which has centered on the Pentagon’s Human Terrain System.

At last year’s annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, its members passed a resolution that supported a ban on secrecy in ethnographic research. The association’s president, Setha M. Low, said in an interview last week that the group’s ethics committee and executive board were crafting language for the ban. Depending on how it is worded, the new rule might effectively forbid the association’s members to take part in the Human Terrain program and certain other military projects. (In a separate controversy, the ban might also forbid much of the work that private-sector anthropologists do for corporate clients.)

Ms. Low, a professor of environmental psychology at the City University of New York, said that she hoped to release a draft rule by September 15 that would be debated at the association’s annual meeting two months later. The rule will be put before the group’s members in an e-mail ballot before it is made final. —David Glenn