Trump Killed Public War Research. Stargate Will Make It Secret—and Far More Dangerous

Days after a Pentagon spokesperson celebrated the work of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, the Minerva Initiative—a little-known but influential research program—was killed without fanfare. No mainstream outlet covered it. But the reasons behind its demise reveal the next frontier of American war planning: AI, surveillance, and full-spectrum social control.

On March 4, chief Department of Defence spokesperson Sean Parnell took to ‘X’ to announce that Elon Musk’s notorious Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was hard at work identifying tens of millions of dollars in savings to make the U.S. military “more lethal.” In addition to various DEI programs, several grants provided to universities to investigate climate change-related issues were listed for the chop. Unstated by Parnell, these efforts were funded by Minerva Initiative, a little-known Pentagon project founded in 2008.

Under its auspices, the Department of Defense gave grants to researchers at U.S. universities to investigate particular topics, emphasizing social and behavioral sciences. In addition to helping D.C. military apparatchiks better understand foreign cultures and societies in their crosshairs, recent topics of interest have included climate change and “disinformation.” Minerva Initiative was launched with much initial fanfare as a public mechanism for connecting academia and government, but despite operating in the open, its activities typically generated little mainstream interest.

Accordingly, no major news outlet reported when, mere days later, the Minerva Initiative was permanently axed in its entirety. It fell to the academic journal Science to break the news, its report quoting several academics—including recipients of Minerva grants—harshly condemning the move as “harmful to U.S. national security.” One warned, “Any savings will be outweighed by new gaps and blind spots in our knowledge about current and emerging threats.”

Minerva Initiative’s budget was modest by Pentagon standards – in August 2024, under its last funding round, $46.8 million was granted to 19 research projects. Yet, its impact was evidently seismic. “The initiative has helped build up a generation of social science researchers engaged with national security,” Science previously reported, with “many” academics in the field having “cut [their] teeth” with Minerva support. While beneficiaries may mourn its passing, Aaron Good, host of the political podcast “American Exception” and a critic of U.S. foreign policy, offers MintPress News a less glowing appraisal:

Minerva Initiative was yet another example of the U.S. national security state corrupting civil society and academia in order to maintain U.S. global dominance. It was a way to weaponize social science to evolve US battlefield tactics – all in service of the grand imperial strategy of ‘full-spectrum dominance.’ This strategy has created the wealthiest and most powerful set of oligarchs in human history, killing untold millions around the world in the process.”

‘Precarious Moments’

Good’s view is echoed by Patrick Henningsen, editor of 21st Century Wire and a longtime analyst of military and intelligence operations. Henningsen notes the Minera Initiative’s chilling parallels with Cold War-era U.S. military research and intelligence effort Project Camelot, the codename of a lavishly-financed clandestine academic connivance launched in 1964. It gathered a diverse mix of anthropologists, economists, geographers, psychologists and sociologists to enhance the Pentagon’s ability to predict and influence social developments in foreign countries, particularly regarding counterinsurgency and intelligence operations. Henningsen explains:

These types of programs are meant to provide an external academia-based, social sciences research arm for the Department of Defense, a kind of civilian bridge between government, military and academia. Minerva Initiative was just the latest attempt to outsource and steer specific types of granular research and intelligence gathering, along the lines of the type of anthropological, ethnographic and demography-based research, an approach pioneered by CIA forerunner the Office of Strategic Services, during World War II.”

Project Camelot’s public exposure elicited significant concerns its research yield may have assisted U.S. covert and overt actions, including coups and invasions, corrupting purportedly independent academics in the process. It was shut down in 1965 ahead of a formal Congressional inquiry into its operations. Evidently, the Pentagon’s appetite for harnessing academic expertise for nefarious purposes was undimmed. Minerva Initiative represented a fresh opportunity to recreate Project Camelot on a grander scale, with openness serving as protection from embarrassing disclosures of covert sponsorship.

Alongside benign-sounding grants for “understanding individual and team cognition in support of future space missions” and investigating “social impacts of climate change,” much of Minerva Initiative’s focused on counterinsurgency. This was both in terms of managing potential future military occupations of foreign countries in the manner of Afghanistan and Iraq, but also attempting to win the hearts and minds of target populations during and after conflicts or U.S.-fomented political upheaval.

Take, for instance, a 2021 Minerva Initiative grant provided to a team of academics at the Universities of Arizona, California, Florida and Pennsylvania, managed by the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research. It sought “to understand how to stabilize those precarious moments when the state needs to (re)establish itself as the accepted authority, particularly on the emergence of post-conflict security structures, state reforms, alternative security structures, and citizen buy-in.”

Eerily, one context in which the U.S. state itself urgently needed to “establish itself as the accepted authority” and secure “citizen buy-in” for “alternative security structures” was the COVID-19 pandemic. In March 2020, Graphika, a social media analytics firm that has reaped millions in grants from the Pentagon and Minerva Initiative, published a report on “The COVID-19 Infodemic”. It tracked online “disinformation” and dissent around lockdowns, mask mandates, and the virus’ origins.

The report noted that Graphika began collating data for the project on December 16, 2019, just four days after COVID-19 symptoms were first detected in patients at a Wuhan hospital. It was not until December 31 that year that the outbreak of this unknown and as yet unnamed ailment was first reported to the World Health Organization. This begs the obvious question of how and why the company began investigating public opposition to pandemic prevention measures widely implemented months later at such an early date.

‘Algorithmic Personalization’

A February 7 MintPress News investigation delved into the little-acknowledged profusion of individuals and organizations in intimate proximity to the President, including members of his cabinet, with extensive financial, ideological and political interests in artificial intelligence. The Trump administration’s AI fixation is manifested publicly in Stargate, a $500 billion initiative to construct 20 large AI data centers across the U.S. by 2029, managed by a consortium of major tech firms and financial institutions.

Oddly, the project dropped off the radar entirely after an initial surge of media and tech sector excitement about Stargate. Details on its progress are stubbornly unforthcoming, and the purposes for which the vast forecast investment will be put remain sketchy. Nonetheless, in a January press release hailing Stargate’s launch, consortium member OpenAI boasted the endeavor would “provide a strategic capability to protect the national security of America and its allies.”

Notably, the Minerva Initiative awarded sizable grants to study AI and its applications. On their surface, some of these efforts seem mundane. For example, the University of Wisconsin-Madison was given $2.1 million to develop AI tools to bolster the Pentagon’s “role as a science funder.” Meanwhile, Utah State received $1.49 million to assess the impact of AI surveillance technology on governance systems.

Other Minerva-financed AI research appears considerably more sinister. In July 2020, the University of Iowa’s Initiative for Artificial Intelligence was granted an undisclosed sum over three years to investigate “the relationship between algorithmic personalization and online radicalization” and “uncover the technological, psychological, and cultural factors” that can lead individuals to adopt “extremist ideologies.” If the effort concerned public safety, this would be all well and good – but its proposal document points to a far darker set of objectives.

Iowa researchers surveyed politically engaged U.S. adults for a year, tracking their views on social, cultural, and political topics—and their susceptibility to conspiracy theories. This was intended to determine “psychological factors that make an individual more or less vulnerable to radicalization” and whether “algorithmic personalization” could play a role either way. “Communities vulnerable to future exposure to extremist ideologies” would also be identified.

The proposal’s reference to “conspiracy theories” is ominous. The term is nebulous and highly contested – so too are “extremist” and “radical.” Critics reasonably charge that these phrases are routinely employed in the mainstream to delegitimize dissenting opinions, inconvenient truths, awkward questions, and those voicing them. The U.S. government has long sought to infiltrate and subvert online spaces in the name of battling “conspiracy theories” and “extremists,” replicating historic covert state attacks on civil society and independent activists such as COINTELPRO in the process.

“Minerva Initiative research projects studying the phenomenon of ‘extremism’ in and around conflict zones is ironic,” Patrick Hennigsen believes.

The source of that extremism is, in most cases, more than likely the result of covert operations conceived and managed by either the U.S., U.K. or Israel governments, through the CIA, MI6 and Mossad. You can be sure the ‘fat-trimmers’ from DOGE won’t be snooping around the clandestine offices of Langley, Virginia.”

‘Sock Puppets’

Even more troublingly, the Iowa researchers sought to “predict how people use social media” by “[seeding] online personas” – “[building] automated profiles that approximate actual user behavior.” The activities of these “sock puppets” would be informed by “algorithms [incorporating] public interactions of online communities on social media platforms” and “collecting browsing data from actual members of these communities.” In other words, industrial-scale spying on sensitive private user information to create realistic online personas.

It seems hardly coincidental that right around the time Iowa University’s Minerva Initiative grant was greenlit, the Pentagon began conducting wide-ranging “clandestine psychological operations” on social media, targeting the Arab and Muslim world. These efforts were highly sophisticated, employing expansive armies of bots and trolls with realistic AI-generated profile photos and accompanying ‘characters.’ In Iran, for instance, Pentagon sock puppets deployed varying narrative approaches to engender engagement and influence perceptions locally. Certain accounts accrued thousands of real-life followers.

Some Pentagon-run Iranian bots took hardline positions, accusing the government of being too soft on foreign policy and too liberal at home. Others posed as women opposed to compulsory hijab-wearing and promoted anti-government protests. These accounts dabbled in non-political content, including Iranian poetry and photos of Iranian food and memes, to boost their authenticity. They also regularly engaged with Iranian users in Farsi, joking and making cultural references.

It is an obvious question whether Iowa University’s Minerva efforts were ultimately concerned with assisting the Pentagon to identify ideal means of encouraging “extremist ideologies” and “radicalization” among individuals and groups in target countries to the detriment of their own governments. The researchers needn’t have been conscious confederates in this scheme. Under the CIA’s notorious MKULTRA program, unwitting academics routinely carried out seemingly innocuous research that would covertly be put to “psychological warfare purposes” – markedly, often “on cultures and countries of interest to the CIA.”

Reinforcing this interpretation, the online Pentagon operation, unceremoniously busted very publicly in August 2022, had all the makings of a classic “cognitive” counterinsurgency effort to win hearts and minds in target countries – precisely Minerva Initiative’s preponderant beat. For decades, U.S. officials have openly spoken of war with Tehran as an inevitability and engaged in full-spectrum meddling efforts to foment insurrectionary upheaval locally. Notably, in October 2020, there was an Anglo-American coup in Kyrgyzstan, another country in the bot and troll operation’s crosshairs.

The U.S. national security state’s obsessive interest in AI – specifically in counterinsurgency – has been clear for many years. In 2019, the Marine Corps School of Advanced Warfighting published an academic paper on “Artificial Intelligence enhanced systems to augment High Value Target (HVT) location” when conducting such operations. Israel’s deployment of artificial intelligence during the Gaza genocide gruesomely demonstrates the technology’s mass-killing potential, which experts believe marks the beginning of a new phase of warfare entirely.

Was the Minerva Initiative shut down to push Pentagon AI research further into secrecy—and profitability—via Stargate? That’s one theory. Another is that the administration wanted to remove external oversight completely. Jeffrey Kaye, an investigative journalist who has extensively documented U.S. psychological warfare operations, tells MintPress News the Initiative’s closure does not spell the end of the abuse of academia by the Department of Defense or other U.S. government agencies:

Last I heard, DARPA and RAND Corporation were not shuttered. And CIA and Fort Detrick certainly still engage U.S. universities and professors for a multitude of research projects for the war industry. Minerva’s closure may send a chill through the social science portion of the academic community that supports Washington’s war drive in China and elsewhere, but I expect long-term, there will be very little change in relations between the U.S. national security state and academic world.”

Feature photo | Illustration by MintPress News

Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist and MintPress News contributor exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions. His work has previously appeared in The Cradle, Declassified UK, and Grayzone. Follow him on Twitter @KitKlarenberg.