Social Foundations of Conflict

The Pentagon, according to Danger Room, an on-line feature of Wired Magazine, is providing seed money for a new interdisciplinary academic field, the Social Foundations of Conflict. Scholars in the Social Foundations of Education should have much to contribute.

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 is intended to "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."

David Honey, who heads DARPA's Strategic Technology Office, says that "increasingly it’s social, cultural, political and economic information, foreign language capabilities and other clues – that are proving essential."

The design for the project proposes a three step process:

Step one: dump everything we know about a country like Iraq, and “create [software] agents that mirror the actual communities.”

Step two: make these agents even more realistic, by “leverag[ing] the hundreds of social, cultural, and behavioral theories” about why people act the way they do.

Step three: let commanders run mock battle plans against these modeled Iraqis, to see how they might react.

The project aims at high levels of predictability, and has certainly drawn its share of skeptics.

“Wait a minute, you can’t tell me who’s going to a win a football game. And now you’re going to replicate free will?” Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl, who helped write the Army's manual on defusing insurgencies, tells Danger Room.

“They are smoking something they shouldn't be," retired Lieutenant General Paul Van Riper recently quipped to Science Magazine.

Readers of Malcolm Gladwell's Blink may wonder whether commanders armed with ICEWS running mock battles against counterparts armed with nothing but years of relevant experience might not get their you-know-whats whipped very badly