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This article.although from 2012, remains relevent.
Pentagon
Admits They Are Preparing For Mass Civil Breakdown
12
July, 2012
A
new US Department of Defense (DoD) research program admits
that the Pentagon has long been concerned about widespread social
break down. Even more striking of an admission is
the fact that they have been funding universities to create models of
the dynamics,
risks and tipping points that would all be part of large-scale civil
unrest in the United States.
The
DoD program was funded under the overarching authority of a number
of US military agencies.
This program,
costing millions of dollars, has been designed for the purposes of
immediate and long-term “warfighter-relevant insights”
development. The Pentagon explains that the purpose is for senior
officials and decision
makers in
“the defense policy community” to form a contingency plan in
the event of wide scale social unrest.
The
recently revealed documents add that the purpose is further to inform
policy implemented by “combatant commands.”
This
all started back in 2008 when
the global banking crisis formed the impetus for the DoD
“Minerva Research Initiative“.
The
DoD then decided to partner with universities in order “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.”
One
of the products of this was a Cornell University-led
study which was managed by the US Air Force Office of Scientific
Research. It aimed to develop a model “of the dynamics of
social movement mobilization and contagions.”
The Pentagon and Cornell hoped that this would determine “the critical mass (tipping point)” of social contagions by studying “digital traces” for instance “the 2011 Egyptian revolution, the 2011 Russian Duma elections, the 2012 Nigerian fuel subsidy crisis and the 2013 Gazi park protests in Turkey.”
The
study and program looks at Twitter and Facebook posts and
conversations in order “to identify individuals mobilized in a
social contagion and when they become mobilized.”
A
related project at University of Washington, formed this year, “seeks
to uncover the conditions under which political movements aimed at
large-scale political and economic change originate,” along with
their “characteristics and consequences.”
This
project is being managed by the US Army Research Office, and focuses
on “large-scale movements involving more than 1,000 participants in
enduring activity.” It will cover 58 countries in total.
The
DoD’s Minerva Initiative funded a project last year as well, in
order to determine “Who
Does Not Become a Terrorist, and Why?”
It’s
worth noting that this study conflates what seems to simply be
peaceful activists with “supporters of political violence”. We
read the following in the study:
“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 about supporters of political violence.”
Last
year, in 2013, Minerva funded a University of Maryland project that
was formed in collaboration with the US Department of Energy’s
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
It’s purpose too was to gauge the risk of civil unrest due
to climate change. This three-year
$1.9 million project was
formed to develop models to “anticipate what could happen to
societies under a range of potential climate change scenarios.”
According
to Professor David Price, a cultural anthropologist at St Martin’s
University in Washington DC and author of Weaponizing 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.”
Price
has previously
exposed the Pentagon’s Human Terrain Systems (HTS) program.
That program was designed for the purposes of embedding social
scientists within military field operations. Once embedded, though
would routinely conduct training scenarios
set in regions “within the United States” according to what Price
said.
Price
explained further that the HTS training scenarios “adapted
COIN [counterinsurgency] for Afghanistan/Iraq”
to fit within the context of 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.”
What
do you think the Pentagon is so worried about? Could it be all of the
incidences of police brutality and murder which are leading to mass
protest and unrest like we saw in Ferguson and Baltimore?
It is worthwhile reading this article by Nafeez Ahmed
Pentagon
preparing for mass civil breakdown
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