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 will "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."
DARPA, the Pentagon's bleeding-edge research arm, laid out the case for ICEWS this summer at its conference, held outside of Disneyworld. "Commanders will always need to have an accurate picture of enemy positions, as well as friendly units and allies," David Honey, who heads the agency’s Strategic Technology Office, told confab-goers in Anaheim, California. "But increasingly it’s social, cultural, political and economic information, foreign language capabilities and other clues – that are proving essential."
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