The Pentagon Minerva Research Initiative Procuring Academics for Empire

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8 April 2009


by James Petras*

THE Pentagon’s military strategists have recognized that they have suffered political losses, with strategic consequences in their recent military invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s time to adopt a "softer" and stealthier approach by employing academics to facilitate imperial conquest through cultural warfare and control of the opposition. Unmasking the role of the Pentagon’s Minerva Research Initiative, officially kicked off in June 2008, as an integral part of Obama’s military escalation is a challenge to all academics who are opposed to empire building and who support the reconstruction of an American republic supportive of international rights of self-determination.

US military support for the Israeli invasions of Lebanon and Gaza, the US-sponsored Ethiopian occupation of Somali, the coup attempts in Venezuela (2002) and Bolivia (2008), have also failed to defeat popular incumbent regimes. Worse still, civilian, family, community and national networks have reinforced the anti-colonial movements providing essential logistical support, intelligence, recruits and legitimacy.

Pentagon strategists, recognizing the socio-political bases of their failures, have turned to willing accomplices in the academic world to provide intelligence, in the form of ethnographic accounts of targeted peoples, tactics and strategies in order to divide and destroy local and national loyalties. The Pentagon is contracting social scientists to develop ‘social maps’ to identify leaders and groups, susceptible to recruitment in the service of the empire. For example, Pentagon-contracted academic ‘field research’ is designed to demonstrate ways in which traditional religious practices and rituals can be harnessed to facilitate imperial conquest through cultural warfare discouraging subjugated peoples from giving their support to national liberation movements. Rather than confront the imperial occupier with a goal of re-establishing national sovereignty, ‘cultural warfare’ strategies direct people to focus on ‘local concerns’. These are a few of the Pentagon funded “research projects” taken up by the ‘academics in uniform.’

The Pentagon is seriously engaged in this military-academic empire building strategy, allocating almost 100 million dollars to contracting academic collaborators and funding multiple ‘research’ projects throughout the world against targeted states, movements and communities.


read more: http://www.voltairenet.org/article159623.html

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1. There is good and bad in this...

it depends on the ethics of the people driving these studies. The bad is that there is more information gathered to stamp out movements addressing legitimate grievances. The good is that there is more information to help Americans be more culturally sensitive and make better decisions and understand local power structures.

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2. to the good

. . . we were caught flatfooted as we invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, short of knowledgeable folks who knew the language and lay of the land. Many academics complain that their profession should be separate from the military, but I tend to think that more info is always better.

The bad is, as you say, the risk of unethical practices and pernicious use of the info acquired. I don't like preparations for warfare, period, so I' tend to look at this effort with a great deal of suspicion and disbelief in the justifications.

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3. really, this project should not be done under the auspices of the miitary

it should be done under civilian auspices like the State Department where the information can guide diplomacy. Properly trained diplomats and State Department Employees should use this knowledge to set policies and procedures for the military, guide and monitor the military in these practices. Ethical use is a key consideration and needs to be institutionalized.

Unfortunately, the reality is that the military can get its budget funded whereas the State Department doesn't.