The Minerva Initiative

On page 29 of the QDR, I learned that: “The Department will continue to adapt existing language programs and policies, and, through such programs as the Minerva Initiative, intellectual meet the challenges of operating in a changing and complex environment.”

The Minerva Initiative kind of sounds like a villainous plot from a Bond movie, but it turns out to be a DOD grant program that funds social science research on subjects that the Pentagon feels have some relevance to its mission. They emphasize that the focus is supposed to be on basic research rather than meeting some short-term operational need, and the idea is to fund work at American universities and go outside the DOD’s existing channels of intelligence and expertise.

They’ve got a list of the projects they’re funding over here. Some, like Mark Woodward’s “Finding Allies for the War of Words: Mapping the Diffusion and Influence of Counter-Radical Muslim Discourse” don’t quite seem to meet that basic research mandate but the bulk do. It’s everything from Barbara Geddes & Joseph Wright “How Politics Inside Dictatorships Affects Regime Stability and International Conflict” to Rachel Croson & Charles Holt “Behavioral Insights into National Security Issues.” I’m sure that under ordinary circumstances if someone like John McCain heard that the government was funding a professor at San Francisco State University to research “Emotion and Intergroup Relations” he’d throw a fit. But it’s the Pentagon, so the right-wing has to love it, right?