The Minerva Research Initiative was a U.S. Department of War grant program that funded unclassified, university-based social science research on topics relevant to national security. Billed by the Pentagon as “Social science for a safer world,” it awarded 3- to 5-year grants for unclassified research by university researchers “to help DOD better understand and prepare for future challenges.”
The Initiative was well-funded, initially receiving $50 million over five years, with a later A 2020 National Academies review found the number later rose, with Minerva receiving between $20 and $22 million per year by the time of the review. While the Department of War never published its exact total budget, multiplying the National Academies finding across its years of activity suggests Minerva likely received more than $300 million in total from the U.S. taxpayer.
Minerva’s rationale grew out of the recognition in 2001 that the U.S. was unprepared for strategic surprises outside the scope of traditional armed conflict, and the subsequent understanding that social sciences research is not (yet) an off-the-shelf tool for defense contexts. In launching the program, then-Secretary Robert Gates claimed that “Too many mistakes have been made over the years because our government and military did not understand — or even seek to understand — the countries or cultures we were dealing with.” The goal was to correct a perceived cultural and political illiteracy about foreign nations like Iraq and Afghanistan, that was believed to have cost American lives.
The Disinformation Agenda
After 2016, the Minerva Initiative, like many other government projects tied to national security, developed a very different set of priorities — tackling online “disinformation.” Projects included a joint US-UK research project focused on countering disinfo, funded by $3 million from Minerva and roughly the same amount from the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), as well as a massive $3.9 million grant to Washington State University focused on disinformation and violent extremism in foreign nations.
The Minerva Initiative was scrapped by the Department of War early in the Trump Administration, with Secretary of War Pete Hegseth stating that the department “does not do climate change crap.” (Minerva had indeed been funding climate change research since its earliest years).
At the recent Cambridge Disinformation Summit in the UK, former Minerva-funded researcher Chad Briggs appeared to validate Hegseth’s implication that Minerva Initiative tended to funnel American taxpayer funds to thinly-veiled partisanship, with Briggs repeatedly comparing the techniques Donald Trump and his administration to the same Russian disinformation programs he studied during his time as a Minerva researcher.
Briggs, who was the Minerva Initiative chair and professor at the Air War College for the U.S. Air Force, began by complaining that Hegseth had “ruined his entire career.”
He went on to compare conservative critiques of transgender men in women’s sports and calls for more election integrity to cognitive warfare techniques he studied in the Philippines.
And there are some very shrewd operators and influencers in the Philippines who are doing this, but likewise, they’ve done it in the United States. They can take advantage of concepts of meritocracy and then turn it against trans people. They can take concepts of, well, we should have completely fair elections, so therefore we have to have police at all the election stations.
The point is, is that you take something that’s the strongest in society or a community and you turn it against that community. But then that means that community won’t be able to just defend itself in its normal ways, and it won’t even know necessarily that it’s being attacked until afterwards.
He went on to say that the Trump Administration was using the “fire hose model of Kremlin Propaganda.”
Now, white noise, you all know it’s a common term. You all know the fire hose model in terms of Kremlin propaganda, and the Kremlin isn’t the only one who does it. One could say that the current White House is also very good at it without even trying. They’ll do 16 things in a day and you can’t try even 12 of them.
White noise, is, let me say it’s a little bit different these days than the older model. The older model was personnel intensive, meaning if you had people in the GR, the SBR, who’s writing this and actually took some effort. Now it takes almost zero marginal effort when you have generative AI to do it.
He critiqued the takeover of CBS News by Bari Weiss as the removal of a “reliable signal,” which he argued was another common feature of Kremlin disinformation campaigns.
So the other thing that I was really struggling to get across to people, and especially my students, because I run them through a war game in the first term of their master’s program, and there’s some cells that I flood with information. There’s some that I starve with information. I didn’t really have a good way of explaining all this. So I came up with the concept of blackness, which is where you’re attenuating the signal.
And this can take any number of different forms, whether you’re firing scientists, whether you’re silencing critics, whether you’re erasing data from the Pentagon servers. It’s a way of getting rid of reliable signals. So what’s happened to CBS news that was a formula of reliable signal that no one’s going to listen to now.
And finally — Briggs argued that the Trump Administration was using Kremlin-style information tactics to “disorient” its opponents.
Boyd actually predicted in a lot of ways that orientation would be the key part. But he knew that if you could disorient another pilot to a dog fight, then you were going to win. Now, he didn’t understand how that would happen politically, but I think that’s what we’re seeing now is that we’re losing the orientation. We may even have the information in front of us, but if we can’t figure out what to make of it, if we can’t figure out, okay, well how do we put this in perspective? How do we explain this to other people? I then you’re disoriented and that later means then that you’re constantly reorienting and you never get around to act.
I think the US Congress is perhaps in this point right now, I mean, are they actually acting on anything serious? I mean, we see President Trump threatening to what obliterate Iran by later today, he’s also been moving money around that he’s not authorized. Right? In Congress just, okay, okay, we’ll just wait and see. That’s a form of paralysis. So it essentially means a catastrophic order loop failure that when people are disoriented, they will constantly just to reorient themselves and they’ll never get around to the decision or to the action.
Taken together, the clear ideological streak of Briggs’ comments will add to the weight of evidence in favor of the Department of War’s suspicion that the Minerva Initiative had become a gravy train for academics concealing partisan sympathies behind academic language — hence its shutdown.
