Technology / Weapons & Security

According to Rear Admiral Bill Landay, who heads the Office of Naval Research, the question for this new area of research is: “How do you pick out unusual activity out of a very long, broad view of things you see? We’re putting a lot of emphasis in decision tools that focus on patterns and pattern differentiation, anomalies in behavior of people, the behavior of crowds, the behavior of organizations.”

The Pentagon’s vision of the future harks back to the past. During the Vietnam War, the Defense Department tried to use social sciences—particularly anthropology—in the service of national security. Though the most infamous of these efforts, called Project Camelot, focused on preventing insurgency in Latin America, other projects looked more broadly at using social sciences to help guide military actions, and like current efforts, they included quantitative and predictive uses of social science models.

The current research has resurrected some of this social science work. DARPA’s Integrated Crisis Early Warning System is nearly identical—at least in name—to a DARPA project of some 30 years ago that sought to forecast political instability. The current work describes “state-of-the-art computational modeling capabilities that can monitor, assess, and forecast, in near real time, a variety of phenomena associated with country instability.” The Defense Threat Reduction Agency has also joined in this pursuit, with research focused on tracking WMD networks. The Army, Navy, and Air Force (as well as the Department of Homeland Security) have all launched programs aimed at predicting group behavior. The goal, which one early participant called the “widgetization of social science,” was perhaps best summed up in 2005 by Starnes Walker, then the Office of Naval Research’s chief scientist, who said he wanted a Star Trek–like detector that could scan for evil intent.

Is this kind of analysis and manipulation possible? A memoir by one Pentagon official closely linked to the Vietnam-era cultural research concluded that the military should avoid funding social science. His warning has been forgotten: Human terrain research is growing, with the Pentagon estimating that in the 2006 and 2007 financial years, $74 million was allocated in this area.

Longtime national security analyst William M. Arkin is skeptical of much of the human terrain work, calling it a “dream counterterrorism program” that seeks to create a silver bullet to solve the problem of terrorism. “Those technologies are interesting and worthy of pursuit, but my guess is that they are a poor replacement for examining why it is that terrorism exists in the first place,” Arkin says. He points to the billions of dollars being poured into developing a biometric database in Iraq that will be used to identify and track individuals. This sort of approach, he says, is based on “the belief that they can make a database of the entire planet, and thereby that will set us free.” But he cautions that “9/11 was successful because it was a diabolical plot using the most conventional of weapons. It was not successful because of some technology they acquired.”

Human terrain research goes to the heart of the question of whether defense research is grounded in good science, or good policy. Not everyone in the Pentagon is convinced. “I’m going to be very candid on this one,” says Lewis, while noting that the Air Force Office of Scientific Research is funding work in this area. “I think it’s something we should be looking at. I’m also maintaining a healthy skepticism.” Ironically, Lewis’s skepticism is inspired in part by the science fiction of Isaac Asimov, whose Foundation novels center on researchers who use advanced social science to predict the future, based on the behavior of large groups. “There’s two important lessons that I think Asimov got right,” Lewis says. First, the technology failed when a dictator arose, creating a “wild card that throws all the predictions off.” Second, “in the end it turns out [the forecasters] were cheating. They hadn’t actually predicted it all in the past, they were broadcasting it live and updating their predictions.”

Lewis shrugs. “We couldn’t figure out if Ohio was going to go Democratic or Republican, and that’s the society we’re supposed to understand?”

For Arkin, the Pentagon’s emphasis on futuristic science runs smack against the reality that no amount of science and technology can solve the problems of today. “Our future security is not going to be created by a force field,” he says.