Pentagon Admits Its Preparation for Widespread Social Unrest

[Shadowstar1922]

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?
link: http://countercurrentnews.com/2014/07/pentagon-is-preparing-for-mass-civil-breakdown/
Thoughts?

[Shadow00]

well if the pentagon admitted such a thing, then it is only certain that they consider to easily handle the situation.

If the happenings in baltimore etc were indeed that out of hand, we'd never hear of this.

I believe they aren't worried a bit, but i can't really find a good reason for them releasing this info. perhaps it got leaked and they just went through with saying it to avoid the hassle, who knows

[Foopzheart]

Referring to most of these instances as police brutality is a loud, loud overstatement. Otherwise, I see no source given, and even so I see no reason this is bad. Social unrest can happen quite easily, it's good to be prepared.

[Shadowstar1922]

well if the pentagon admitted such a thing, then it is only certain that they consider to easily handle the situation.

If the happenings in baltimore etc were indeed that out of hand, we'd never hear of this.

I believe they aren't worried a bit, but i can't really find a good reason for them releasing this info. perhaps it got leaked and they just went through with saying it to avoid the hassle, who knows

See, that's what I'm saying. I'm sure it got leaked and they're trying to cover it up.

@Fui. LOL whoops, I forgot to link the article I'll fix it.

[TheKingsHills]

Looking through, I don't see where or when the Pentagon, "admits" its preparation for "Widespread Social Unrest."

In all honesty all I see is people drawing conclusions for studies the government is investing in.
Like the first funded study, "New analytics for measuring and countering social influence and persuasion of extremist groups".

On the topic of your hts, "Whether or not HTS continues to exist as a program in the future is unclear" ~David Price
http://www.counterpunch.org/2009/12/01/ ... ghanistan/

Let's also keep in mind that the article appears to have been published back in 2014. Just something to note.

Also, the David Price quote on the Pentagon's hts, I can't seem to find it anywhere. If you can find that for me, I'd like to read the entire page, article, chapter, or book if possible. I won't put it past sites like The Guardian, or countercurrent news to cut out important pieces of information to make a statement.

Regardless, I don't quite see a problem with this?

A decent portion of the minerva projects are on focus towards a majority of the world. Some of the projects that stick out are the ones geared toward russia and the rise of china. As well as looking at "large scale disruption of civil society due to climate change." http://www.allvoices.com/article/17304656

And, I'd be more worried if the government wasn't prepared for widespread social unrest. That would set off alarms in my head, hearing they the government wasn't prepared for something as possible as, "Widespread Social Unrest"