https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/jun/12/pentagon-mass-civil-breakdown
FROM JUNE 2014
According to Prof 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."
Prof Price has previously exposed
how the Pentagon's Human Terrain Systems (HTS) programme - designed to
embed social scientists in military field operations - routinely
conducted training scenarios set in regions "within the United States."
Citing a summary critique of the programme sent to HTS directors by a
former employee, Price reported that the HTS training scenarios
"adapted COIN [counterinsurgency] for Afghanistan/Iraq" to 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."
Minerva is a prime example of the deeply narrow-minded and
self-defeating nature of military ideology.
Worse still, the
unwillingness of DoD officials to answer the most basic questions is
symptomatic of a simple fact –
in their unswerving mission to defend an increasingly unpopular global system serving the interests of a tiny minority, security agencies have no qualms about painting the rest of us as potential terrorists.
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