Fergie's Tech Blog

Pentagon Forecast: Cloudy, 80% Chance of Riots

Noah Shachtman writes on Danger Room:

The Pentagon is paying Lockheed Martin to try to predict insurgencies and civil unrest like the weather. It's part of a larger military effort to blend forecasting software with social science that has some counterinsurgency experts cringing.

Lockheed recently won a $1.3 million, 15-month contract from the Defense Department to help develop the "Integrated Crises Early Warning System, or ICEWS. The program will "let military commanders anticipate and respond to worldwide political crises and predict events of interest and stability of countries of interest with greater than 80 percent accuracy," the company claims. "Rebellions, insurgencies, ethnic/religious violence, civil war, and major economic crises" will all be predictable. So will "combinations of strategies, tactics, and resources to mitigate [against those] instabilities."

More here.

Note: That's a pretty dubious claim... using some software algorithm to predict civil unrest? Right.

Oh, wait -- this one goes one step further into unbelievability. - ferg

posted by Fergie @ 11/08/2007 10:27:00 PM