[Infowarrior] - DARPA 'PRESAGE' crystal ball

[Richard Forno]

The military wants to know before it goes
Posted by Mark Rutherford
http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9807451-7.html?part=rss&subj=news&t
ag=2547-1_3-0-20

When it comes to international quagmires, it would be nice to know if the
natives are restless before you send in the cavalry.

Apparently, the U.S. military is not happy with the briefings it gets before
being dispatched to police deadly fiascos around the world. So it is
underwriting a program that will allow commanders not only to predict events
and gauge stability in the countries in which they operate, but also to
anticipate and respond to political crises worldwide.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded Lockheed
Martin a contract to develop PRESAGE (Predicting Stability through Analyzing
Germane Events), a system that will use diplomatic, military, and economic
intelligence to predict, for instance, if and when a population will turn
from basket-weaving to IED production.

PRESAGE will forecast rebellions, insurgencies, ethnic/religious violence,
civil war, and major economic crises," according to Lockheed Martin's
Advanced Technology Laboratories. Then, once a crisis has been identified,
the program generates a strategy or tactic to deal with it--sort of like a
virtual State Department, but without the Cadillacs.

The program is but one element in DARPA's Integrated Crises Early Warning
System (ICEWS). The vision is to produce a computational social science
model that can forecast instability and conflict in an area before it
becomes a major problem for the United States. Then, on the off-chance a
crisis should develop, the program will help commanders to efficiently
allocate resources in "mitigating" the "stability challenge."

Universities in Pennsylvania, Kansas, Washington, and Georgia are also
involved, as are Innovative Decisions, Evidence Based Research, Interactive
Data Visualization, and Argonne National Laboratory.

"PRESAGE will combine a portfolio of state-of-the-art and operationally
deployed social science models and technologies to predict events of
interest and general stability indicators," Lockheed's Mark Hoffman said in
a press release. "Being able to predict events with reasonable accuracy is
the first step in constructing a decision-support system to aid in region
stabilization."

What is "reasonable accuracy"? More than 80 percent, according to the
world's largest defense company. We need one of these in the Oval Office.