Pentagon preparing for mass civil breakdown

[Tony Gosling]

Pentagon preparing for mass civil breakdown

Social science is being militarised to develop 
'operational tools' to target peaceful activists and protest movements
    * 
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/jun/12/pentagon-mass-civil-breakdown 

    * http://www.911forum.org.uk/board/viewtopic.php?p=167412#167412
The Pentagon is funding social science research 
to model risks of "social contagions" that could 
damage US strategic interests. Photograph: Jason Reed/REUTERS

A US Department of Defense (DoD) 
<http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/jun/12/http://www.theguardian.com/education/research>research 
programme is funding universities to model the 
dynamics, risks and tipping points for 
large-scale civil unrest across the world, under 
the supervision of various 
<http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/jun/12/http://www.theguardian.com/world/us-military>US 
militaryagencies. The multi-million dollar 
<http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/jun/12/http://minerva.dtic.mil/cois.html>programme 
is designed to develop immediate and long-term 
"warfighter-relevant insights" for senior 
officials and decision makers in "the defense 
policy community," and to inform policy implemented by "combatant commands."

Launched 
<http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/jun/12/http://www.wired.com/2008/12/earlier-this-1/>in 
2008 – the year of the global banking crisis – 
the 
<http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/jun/12/http://minerva.dtic.mil/funded.html>DoD 
'Minerva Research Initiative' partners with 
universities "to improve DoD's basic 
understanding of the social, cultural, 
behavioral, and political forces that shape 
regions of the world of strategic importance to the US."

Among the projects awarded for the period 
2014-2017 is a Cornell University-led study 
managed by the US Air Force Office of Scientific 
Research which aims to develop an empirical model 
"of the dynamics of social movement mobilisation 
and contagions." The project will determine "the 
critical mass (tipping point)" of social 
contagians by studying their "digital traces" in 
the cases of "the 2011 Egyptian revolution, the 
2011 Russian Duma elections, the 2012 Nigerian 
fuel subsidy crisis and the 2013 Gazi park protests in Turkey."

Twitter posts and conversations will be examined 
"to identify individuals mobilised in a social 
contagion and when they become mobilised."

Another project awarded this year to the 
University of Washington "seeks to uncover the 
conditions under which political movements aimed 
at large-scale political and economic change 
originate," along with their "characteristics and 
consequences." The project, managed by the US 
Army Research Office, focuses on "large-scale 
movements involving more than 1,000 participants 
in enduring activity," and will cover 58 countries in total.

Last year, the DoD's Minerva Initiative funded a 
project to determine 
<http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/jun/12/http://minerva.dtic.mil/doc/abstracts/Rasmussen_WhoNotTerrorist_FY13.pdf>'Who 
Does Not Become a Terrorist, and Why?' which, 
however, conflates peaceful activists with 
"supporters of political violence" who are 
different from terrorists only in that they do 
not embark on "armed militancy" themselves. The 
project explicitly sets out to study non-violent activists:

"In every context we find many individuals who 
share the demographic, family, cultural, and/or 
socioeconomic background of those who decided to 
engage in terrorism, and yet refrained themselves 
from taking up armed militancy, even though they 
were sympathetic to the end goals of armed 
groups. The field of terrorism studies has not, 
until recently, attempted to look at this control 
group. This project is not about terrorists, but 
aboutsupporters of political violence."

The project's 14 case studies each "involve 
extensive interviews with ten or more activists 
and militants in parties and NGOs who, though 
sympathetic to radical causes, have chosen a path of non-violence."

I contacted the project's principal investigator, 
Prof Maria Rasmussen of the US Naval Postgraduate 
School, asking why non-violent activists working 
for NGOs should be equated to supporters of 
political violence – and which "parties and NGOs" 
were being investigated – but received no response.

Similarly, Minerva programme staff refused to 
answer a series of similar questions I put to 
them, including asking how "radical causes" 
promoted by peaceful NGOs constituted a potential 
national security threat of interest to the DoD.

Among my questions, I asked:

"Does the US Department of Defense see 
<http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/jun/12/http://www.theguardian.com/world/protest>protest 
movements and social 
<http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/jun/12/http://www.theguardian.com/environment/activism>activism 
in different parts of the world as a threat to US 
national security? If so, why? Does the US 
Department of Defense consider political 
movements aiming for large scale political and 
economic change as a national security matter? If 
so, why? Activism, protest, 'political movements' 
and of course NGOs are a vital element of a 
healthy civil society and democracy - why is it 
that the DoD is funding research to investigate such issues?"

Minerva's programme director Dr Erin Fitzgerald 
said "I appreciate your concerns and am glad that 
you reached out to give us the opportunity to 
clarify" before promising a more detailed 
response. Instead, I received the following bland 
statement from the DoD's press office:

"The Department of Defense takes seriously its 
role in the security of the 
<http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/jun/12/http://www.theguardian.com/world/usa>United 
States, its citizens, and US allies and partners. 
While every security challenge does not cause 
conflict, and every conflict does not involve the 
US military, Minerva helps fund basic social 
science research that helps increase the 
Department of Defense's understanding of what 
causes instability and insecurity around the 
world. By better understanding these conflicts 
and their causes beforehand, the Department of 
Defense can better prepare for the dynamic future security environment."

In 2013, Minerva funded a University of Maryland 
project in collaboration with the US Department 
of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory 
to gauge the risk of civil unrest due to 
<http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/jun/12/http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-change>climate 
change. 
The<http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/jun/12/http://www.livescience.com/38167-national-security-impact-of-warming-climate.html> 
three-year $1.9 million project is developing 
models to anticipate what could happen to 
societies under a range of potential climate change scenarios.

 From the outset, the Minerva programme was 
slated to provide over $75 million over five 
years for social and behavioural science 
research. This year alone it has been allocated a 
total budget of $17.8 million by US Congress.

An internal Minerva staff email communication 
referenced in 
<http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/jun/12/http://repository.asu.edu/attachments/93938/content/tmp/package-DBgi6R/Nair_asu_0010N_11963.pdf>a 
2012 Masters dissertation reveals that the 
programme is geared toward producing quick 
results that are directly applicable to field 
operations. The dissertation was part of a 
<http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/jun/12/http://cidse.engineering.asu.edu/minerva-initiative-project-recognized-by-dod/>Minerva-funded 
project on "counter-radical Muslim discourse" at Arizona State University.

The internal email from Prof Steve Corman, a 
principal investigator for the project, describes 
a meeting hosted by the DoD's Human Social 
Cultural and Behavioural Modeling (HSCB) 
programme in which senior Pentagon officials said 
their priority was "to develop capabilities that 
are deliverable quickly" in the form of "models 
and tools that can be integrated with operations."

Although Office of Naval Research supervisor Dr 
Harold Hawkins had assured the university 
researchers at the outset that the project was 
merely "a basic research effort, so we shouldn't 
be concerned about doing applied stuff", the 
meeting in fact showed that DoD is looking to 
"feed results" into "applications," Corman said 
in the email. He advised his researchers to 
"think about shaping results, reports, etc., so 
they [DoD] can clearly see their application for 
tools that can be taken to the field."

Many independent scholars are critical of what 
they see as the US government's efforts to 
militarise social science in the service of war. 
In May 2008, the American Anthropological 
Association (AAA) 
<http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/jun/12/http://www.aaanet.org/issues/policy-advocacy/upload/Minerva-Letter.pdf>wrote 
to the US government noting that the Pentagon 
lacks "the kind of infrastructure for evaluating 
anthropological [and other social science] 
research" in a way that involves "rigorous, 
balanced and objective peer review", calling for 
such research to be managed instead by civilian 
agencies like the National Science Foundation (NSF).

The following month, the DoD signed a memorandum 
of understanding (MoU) with the NSF to cooperate 
on the management of Minerva. In response, the 
AAA 
<http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/jun/12/http://www.aaanet.org/_cs_upload/issues/press/22649_1.pdf>cautioned 
that although research proposals would now be 
evaluated by NSF's merit-review panels. "Pentagon 
officials will have decision-making power in deciding who sits on the panels":

"
 there remain concerns within the discipline 
that research will only be funded when it 
supports the Pentagon's agenda. Other critics of 
the programme, including the Network of Concerned 
Anthropologists, have raised concerns that the 
programme would discourage research in other 
important areas and undermine the role of the 
university as a place for independent discussion and critique of the military."

According to Prof David Price, a cultural 
anthropologist at St Martin's University in 
Washington DC and author of Weaponizing 
<http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/jun/12/http://www.theguardian.com/science/anthropology>Anthropology: 
Social Science in Service of the Militarized 
State, "when you looked at the individual bits of 
many of these projects they sort of looked like 
normal social science, textual analysis, 
historical research, and so on, but when you 
added these bits up they all shared themes of 
legibility with all the distortions of 
over-simplification. Minerva is farming out the 
piece-work of empire in ways that can allow 
individuals to disassociate their individual 
contributions from the larger project."

Prof Price has 
<http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/jun/12/http://zeroanthropology.net/2010/02/16/david-price-human-terrain-systems-dissenter-resigns-tells-inside-story-of-trainings-heart-of-darkness/>previously 
exposed how the Pentagon's Human Terrain Systems 
(HTS) programme - designed to embed social 
scientists in military field operations - 
routinely conducted training scenarios set in 
regions "within the United States."

Citing a summary critique of the programme sent 
to HTS directors by a former employee, Price 
reported that the HTS training scenarios "adapted 
COIN [counterinsurgency] for Afghanistan/Iraq" to 
domestic situations "in the USA where the local 
population was seen from the military perspective 
as threatening the established balance of power 
and influence, and challenging law and order."

One war-game, said Price, involved environmental 
activists protesting pollution from a coal-fired 
plant near Missouri, some of whom were members of 
the well-known environmental NGO Sierra Club. 
Participants were tasked to "identify those who 
were 'problem-solvers' and those who were 
'problem-causers,' and the rest of the population 
whom would be the target of the information 
operations to move their Center of Gravity toward 
that set of viewpoints and values which was the 
'desired end-state' of the military's strategy."

Such war-games are consistent with a raft of 
Pentagon planning documents which suggest that 
National Security Agency 
(<http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/jun/12/http://www.theguardian.com/world/nsa>NSA) 
mass 
<http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/jun/12/http://www.theguardian.com/world/surveillance>surveillance 
is partially motivated to 
<http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/jun/12/http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2013/jun/14/climate-change-energy-shocks-nsa-prism>prepare 
for the destabilising impact of coming 
environmental, energy and economic shocks.

James Petras, Bartle Professor of Sociology at 
Binghamton University in New York, concurs with 
Price's concerns. Minerva-funded social 
scientists tied to Pentagon counterinsurgency 
operations are involved in the "study of emotions 
in stoking or quelling ideologically driven 
movements," he said, including how "to counteract grassroots movements."

Minerva is a prime example of the deeply 
narrow-minded and self-defeating nature of 
military ideology. Worse still, the unwillingness 
of DoD officials to answer the most basic 
questions is symptomatic of a simple fact – in 
their unswerving mission to defend 
<http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/jun/12/http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/may/28/inclusive-capitalism-trojan-horse-global-revolt-henry-jackson-society-pr-growth>an 
increasingly unpopular global system serving the 
interests of a tiny minority, security agencies 
have no qualms about painting the rest of us as potential terrorists.

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